Lucy Letby And The Angels Of Death (1)

On Friday, the trial of Lucy Letby ended at Manchester Crown Court. It was one of the longest and one of the most horrendous trials in British criminal history resulting in the conviction of the former nurse for the murders of seven babies at the Countess Of Chester Hospital. It is believed to be the longest murder trial here.

This was not the only sensational murder trial to end this week. Earlier, Lauren Dickason was found guilty in a New Zealand courtroom of smothering to death her two year old twin girls and their six year old sister. That case was covered briefly here.

The Dickason case has echoes of the Yates case. Andrea Yates was the mother of four young boys and a daughter. In June 2001, this Texas housewife drowned them all in the bathtub. The prosecution sought the death penalty, but although the jury convicted her, they refused the death sentence. Yates was subsequently retried, found not guilty by reason of insanity, and sent to a booby hatch.

Dickason likewise played the chimera of mental illness; it is truly amazing how many people who commit unspeakable crimes refuse to take responsibility for their actions. Dickason is facing a mandatory life sentence. Some commenters on the Daily Mail website were sympathetic, but one commenter summed it up in a nutshell: 

“If this had been a man there would be no question that the mental health route would not even be looked at by the jury”.

Returning to Letby, she was first arrested July 3, 2018. Cheshire Constabulary have released bodycam footage of her actual arrest, and this has been uploaded to YouTube by several media outlets. (Readers who use NewsBank may find entries predating this; I found one dated December 31, 2012 and another dated January 1, 2013 – not the first time this has happened. I have reported the anomaly, for all the good it will do).

Lucy Letby was accused initially of murdering eight babies and was bailed after being questioned. People unfamiliar with police procedure may think it strange for someone accused of serial murder to be released on bail, but this is how the police work, in the UK at least. Without a confession they had no hard evidence against her at that time. It was possible that someone else had committed these crimes or indeed that there had been no crimes at all. One of the murder charges was dropped in due course. In a case like this, the victim isn’t found with a knife in his back. Many murder cases that rely on expert medical evidence turn out not to be murders at all; the case of Dr Bodkin Adams back in the 1950s was one such case.

Here too it should be remembered that these were not ordinary but premature babies. Babies born very prematurely can have serious medical problems and there can also be ethical issues relating to their treatment or non-treatment. The 1981 case of Dr Leonard Arthur illustrates this to a tee. Much of the initial suspicion of foul play in the Letby case resulted from an analysis of statistics; the death rate for premature babies at this hospital was said to be higher than for similar units elsewhere. Which begs the question, how many premature babies should have died there?

Letby had qualified as a nurse in 2011 and had worked at this hospital since. Her first murder was committed in 2015 and the last the following year by which time the neonatal unit had stopped accepting very premature babies. That being said, the police left no stone unturned in this investigation, literally; at one point they were seen digging in her front garden.

Letby was arrested for a second time then a third time before she was charged. It was not until November 2020 that she appeared in court – from a video-link at Chester Police Station. (This was the Covid-19 era for future readers). She was accused of murdering five boys and three girls; two of the boys were brothers from a set of triplets. She was charged also with the attempted murders of  four girls and five boys including a set of twins. Initially, the dead babies were named, but the High Court Judge Karen Steyn ordered a ban on naming all the victims and a number of Letby’s former colleagues who would appear as witnesses.

Letby’s trial opened on October 10 last year before Mr Justice Goss. Her local newspaper the Chester Standard covered every single day of the trial. The closing prosecution speech took a full week, so did the defence closing speech, and the judge took four days to sum up.

Harold Shipman was and remains legally, Britain’s most prolific serial killer. He was tried for murdering fifteen of his patients, but a subsequent inquiry by Dame Janet Smith found he had probably murdered over two hundred. He hanged himself in his cell in January 2004. The jury in the Shipman trial deliberated for six days before finding him guilty of all fifteen murders; the jury in the Letby trial deliberated for a staggering 22 days, and even then they could not agree on all the verdicts. Letby was found guilty of all the murders; the first two guilty verdicts, of attempted murder, were returned on August 8, but the judge ordered there to be no reporting on them until the trial was finished. 

To Part 2.