Lucy Letby told police she wanted to kill herself after being linked to several suspicious baby deaths but insisted she “didn’t kill them on purpose”, a court has heard.
The neonatal nurse told officers she had written a note saying “I am evil I did this” because she felt she may have caused the deaths “because I couldn’t do my job well enough”.
Asked why she had written “I killed them on purpose”, she told officers: “I didn’t kill them on purpose. I felt my practice hadn’t been right and I killed them and I wasn’t good enough.”
She said she felt she may have “missed something” or “hadn’t acted quickly enough” when the babies needed urgent treatment.
Letby, 33, denies murdering seven babies and attempting to murder another 10 between June 2015 and June 2016 at the Countess of Chester hospital.
Her trial at Manchester crown court has been told that Letby was removed from the neonatal unit in July 2016 after consultants raised concerns about her “common link” with a number of baby deaths.
The nurse, then 26, was moved to the hospital’s patient and risk safety office while managers investigated an increase in the mortality rate among premature babies.
On Thursday, jurors were read transcripts of Letby’s police interviews in which she was asked about a number of handwritten notes found at her home after her arrest on 3 July 2018.
The court has been told that in one note she wrote “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them”. She also wrote “I am a horrible evil person”, and in another in capital letters “I AM EVIL I DID THIS”.
The defendant appeared strained at times in the dock as she listened to the interviews being read out.
Asked about a Post-it note found inside a diary at her home in Chester after her arrest in 2018, she told detectives: “I just wrote it because everything had got on top of me. It was when I’d not long found out I’d been removed from the unit and they were telling me my practice might be wrong, that I needed to read all my competencies – my practice might not have been good enough.
“So I felt like people were blaming my practice, that I might have hurt them without knowing through my practice, and that made me feel guilty and I just felt really isolated. I was blaming myself but not because I’d done something [but] because of the way people were making me feel.
“But like I’d only ever done my best for those babies and then people were trying to say that my practice wasn’t good, that I’d done something. I just couldn’t cope and I just did not want to be here any more. I just felt it was … it was all just spiralling out of control, I just didn’t know how to feel about it or what was going to happen or what to do.”
Letby told officers she had written a note saying “hate myself so much” and “kill myself” because she had been made to feel she caused the babies’ deaths “through being not competent – done something that has led to these babies collapsing, dying”.
The nurse, originally from Hereford, said she was suicidal at the time because she felt “things had been directed towards me” and that she was going to “lose a job I loved” and the police might get involved.
Asked by an officer whether she had felt as if she wanted to kill herself, Letby replied: “Yes … cos I just felt so isolated and alone.” She added: “I was told I could only speak to two friends and I didn’t want them to know much about it. The same with Mum and Dad.”
The detective asked: “In your own mind, had you done anything wrong at all?”
Letby said: “No, not intentionally, but I was worried that they would find that my practice hadn’t been good …”
In another note found inside her diary, Letby wrote “kill me” in bold block capitals. Asked why she had written this, she told officers: “Because I wished sometimes that I was dead and that someone would kill me. I was removed from the unit and I didn’t know what was going on. I had lost everything and I hated working in the office”.
The University of Chester graduate said she later came to the view that she was not to blame for their deaths because she had redone her training and completed a grievance procedure “and nothing was raised to suggest I hadn’t been competent”.
The trial continues.
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 988 and you can text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
