Lucifer Letby

By AM Sunday, September 3, 2023

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Anthony McIntyre ☠ Most people, I imagine, remember vividly the births of their children. 

It concentrates the mind in a way little else does. The infusion of hi-octane nervous energy in constant tension with anxiety and apprehension, while desperately trying to read the inscrutable faces of the midwives, helps create a pulsating delivery suite. 

In most cases childbirth goes right, ending in joyous exultation. I have always felt for those who have experienced a stillbirth or some other fatal complication, wondering how they manage to cope with the roller coaster that does not have to advertise to get passengers on board.

The Lucy Letby baby-murder trial was a horror story with zilch entertainment value. Vampires like Count Dracula don’t exist so the fear they induce can be swatted away. But monsters do, and the shiver that the mere mention of their names causes to traverse the spine has its own unnerving chill that does not go into banishment on demand: names like Myra Hindley, Ted Bundy or Dave Cleary.

If nurse Lucy Letby did murder seven children – and at this stage here is no reason to think she didn’t – then this is a monster without parallel in modern British legal history. A bloody queen who now wears the crown of Beverly Allitt.

Letby was convicted by a jury of seven baby murders and six attempted murders in the neonatal care unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital where she worked as a nurse. She was never caught on camera; she made no confession to the police and there were no forensics linking her to any of the babies she was accused of attacking. There appeared to be no psychiatric history which would have indicated that she was a sociopath. Some of her colleagues and friends still protest her innocence. All the evidence was circumstantial. Yet there seem no grounds to suspect that the deaths of the babies or the catastrophic collapses which some of them survived were the result of mere chance or bad hospital practices and procedures. In the circumstances it is hard to establish a reasonable doubt that would allow for someone or something other than Letby to have been responsible for their deaths and injuries.

Even the layperson observing the law of limited probabilities rather than endless possibilities is ineluctably drawn to one conclusion - Letby murdered the children in her neonatal care. The sceptic, aware of the numerous miscarriages of justice perpetrated by the British judiciary and legal system, will be hard pressed to find evidence that a repeat performance is being played out.

The evidence presented to the jury over the course of a seven-month trial in Manchester Crown Court was harrowing. The Daily Mail ran an excellent podcase from the start of the trial called The Trial Of Lucy Letby. Hosted by Liz Hull and Caroline Cheetham, it was everything a listener would not expect to hear from or see in The Sun. Measured, factual, acutely aware of the need for a fair trial, it presented nothing that was not made available to the jury. Even today while doing a charity collection, I could hear myself muttering ‘evil bastard’ as the podcast took me through another week in the trial. I hope no one thought I was commenting about the amount they were generously dropping in the bucket.

Babies were attacked mercilessly and ruthlessly, some on numerous occasions as Letby sought to finish them off after earlier botched assaults. Poisoned by insulin, smothered, over-fed or had air injected into their stomach, the helpless babies were faced by a determined killer. The trial judge on receiving the jury’s verdict referred to “malevolence bordering on sadism . . . cruel, calculated and cynical campaign of child murder.”

What haunts the entire murder spree is that consultants who became deeply suspicious of Letby and urged hospital management to ensure that she was not to work on the neonatal ward, were rebuffed, on occasion forced to apologise to the nurse. While Management bobbed and weaved, dithered and denied, babies were being remorselessly targeted by Letby. A number of them could have been saved had those in charge intervened early rather than adopt a steady as she goes attitude more consistent with protecting the hospital’s reputation than the babies in its care.

Why did Letby jet off on her murderous course? Was she always a psychopath waiting an opportunity or did a mishap occur in the ward that took her off in a totally unforeseen direction, a venture into the dark side where acquiring an acumen in the dark arts was its own reward, and once the V1 point was reached there was no way to turn back?  James Marriot of The Times thought about answering this type of question but concluded:

Why did she do it? I must have read every op-ed and long read written on the subject and I’m none the wiser. Letby’s blandness deflects interpretation. The parade of banalities that constituted her existence — the nights out with girls, the cuddly toys, the inspirational wall art — leaves nothing to grip on to. No wounded childhood, no weird behaviour, no bizarre hobbies. Her personality (or rather her absence of personality) is a blank surface upon which all can project their theories. Every imaginable explanation for her crimes seems both plausible and implausible.

Other than the Hannah Arendt observation that evil is banal, we might never know. 

 

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