Lucy Letby’s reasons for killing and attempting to kill babies at the hospital where she worked may never be fully explained. But jurors were given a number of possible motives by the prosecution during the nurse’s 10-month trial at Manchester crown court.
Letby enjoyed ‘playing God’
The prosecutor Nick Johnson KC suggested Letby, a neonatal nurse, enjoyed “playing God” by harming babies and then being the first to alert her colleagues to their decline.
She also made remarks described by the prosecution as “portents of doom” as some of her victims deteriorated. After her final murder in June 2016, she said to doctors: “He’s not making it out of here alive, is he?” The days-old triplet boy died soon after. Letby, who was then in her mid-20s, had made similar comments in two previous murders.
Johnson told jurors: “She knew what was going to happen. She was controlling things. She was enjoying what was going on. She was predicting things that she knew was going to happen. She, in effect, was playing God.”
She ‘got a thrill’ from baby deaths
Parents and nurses described Letby on more than one occasion acting unusually when babies suddenly declined. When the baby known as Child I died after repeated attacks by Letby, the little girl’s parents told police they remembered the nurse “smiling and going on about how she was present at [Child I’s] first bath and how much she had loved it”.
Johnson suggested to Letby that she was “getting a thrill out of what you were watching, the grief and despair, in that room”. She replied when giving evidence: “Absolutely not, no.”
Letby also searched Facebook for the families of her victims. She would often search for a number of them within minutes of each other, seemingly going one by one hunting for grief, the prosecution said. She looked them up on the anniversaries of their babies’ deaths and even carried out searches on Christmas Day. In evidence, the nurse said she would search for all sorts of people, not just the parents of babies on the unit.
Letby wanted the attention of an anonymous doctor
The prosecution claimed Letby was having a secret relationship with a married doctor, who worked at the Countess of Chester hospital and cannot be named for legal reasons, though the nurse repeatedly denied this.
Texts shown to the court revealed the pair messaged regularly, swapping love heart emojis, and met up several times outside work – including on a day trip to London – even after Letby was removed from the neonatal unit in July 2016.
The nature of their relationship was said to be significant: he was one of the doctors who would be called when babies suddenly deteriorated. She harmed them, it was suggested, to get his “personal attention”. Letby denied this.
Boredom
As a band 5 nurse, Letby was qualified to care for the sickest babies on the neonatal unit. This meant she often wanted to be in nursery one, the intensive care suite. Giving evidence at trial, she agreed that she found work less stimulating when she was assigned to babies who did not need as much medical attention.
She was ‘not good enough to care for them’
The closest the prosecution had to a confession came in the form of handwritten Post-it notes found in Letby’s handbag after her arrest in July 2018. On one she had written: “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them,” and “I AM EVIL I DID THIS”. She also wrote: “I will never have children or marry. I will never know what it’s like to have a family.”
Letby told jurors the notes were the ramblings of someone in mental anguish – she wrote them after being suspended from work pending an investigation into the unusual deaths – and that the papers also contained many protestations of innocence.
What is clear is that the documents gave police officers the first real insight into the mind of the serial killer nurse. Yet even these were never held up in court as definitive proof of her motive.
