Lucy Letby was convicted of murdering seven babies following a 10-month trial (Picture: PA/SWNS)
Nurse Lucy Letby faces spending the rest of her life behind bars after being convicted of murdering seven babies and trying to kill six others during a horrific year-long poisoning spree.
Letby, 33, targeted the vulnerable infants while working on the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital between June 2015 and June 2016.
She harmed or sabotaged them in various ways, including by injecting them with air to cause a fatal embolism, overfeeding milk, interfering with breathing tubes, or physically assaulting them.
Jurors at Manchester Crown Court heard the seven babies who died would all have been well enough to go home had they not been attacked by Letby.
She was described as the ‘one common denominator’ discovered by consultants and police called in to investigate when the death rate on the ward doubled.
Prosecutor Nick Johnson KC told the jury she was ‘the constant malevolent presence when things took a turn for the worse for these children’.
Letby was described as the ‘constant malevolent presence’ when the babies collapsed (Picture: Rex/Shutterstock)
Court artist sketch of Letby in the dock at Manchester Crown Court (Picture: PA)
Letby, he said, was an ‘opportunist’ who became ‘persistent, calculated and cold-blooded’ in her determination to kill, sometimes attacking the tiny babies multiple times.
Jurors spent more than 100 hours deliberating over the course of 22 days before convicting her of seven counts of murder following a trial which lasted a mammoth 10 months.
The judge, Mr Justice Goss, will sentence her later.
Opening his case back in October last year, Mr Johnson said the Countess of Chester was a ‘busy general hospital’ with a neonatal unit caring for premature and sick babies ‘like so many others’.
But he told jurors: ‘Unlike many other hospitals in the UK and unlike many other neonatal units in the UK, within the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital a poisoner was at work.’
The attacks took place at the Countess of Chester Hospital (Picture: Getty)
Before January 2015 the special care unit’s mortality rate among babies was similar to other across the country.
But the court heard ‘there was a significant rise in the number of babies who were dying and in the number of serious catastrophic collapses’ over the following 18 months.
Mr Johnson said consultants were concerned at seeing babies ‘who had not been unstable at all’ suffer inexplicable catastrophic collapses and then not respond to appropriate and timely resuscitation.
‘Some of the babies who did not die collapsed dramatically but then – equally dramatically – recovered,’ he added: ‘Their collapse and recovery defied the normal experience of treating doctors.’
He continued: ‘Having searched for a cause, which they were unable to find, the consultants noticed that the inexplicable collapses and deaths did have one common denominator.
‘The presence of one of the neonatal nurses and that nurse was Lucy Letby.’
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She faces spending the rest of her life behind bars.