Lucy Letby will spend rest of life in prison for ‘cruel, calculated’ baby murders

Lucy Letby will never be released from prison (Pictures: Cavendish Press/Reuters/Getty/PA)

Evil killer nurse Lucy Letby has been jailed for the rest of her life for her ‘cruel, calculated and cynical campaign’ of murdering ‘the smallest and most vulnerable of children’.

The worst serial child killer in modern British history refused to enter the courtroom to receive her sentence, a move described as a ‘final act of wickedness’ by the mother of two of her victims.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said it was ‘cowardly that people who commit such horrendous crimes’ do not return to the dock and vowed to change the law to force killers to ‘face their victims’.

Sentencing Letby, Mr Justice Goss said: ‘You acted in a way that was completely contrary to the normal human instincts of nurturing and caring for babies and in gross breach of the trust that all citizens place in those who work in the medical and caring professions.

‘The babies you harmed were born prematurely and some were at risk of not surviving but in each case you deliberately harmed them, intending to kill them.’

He said: ‘There was premeditation, calculation and cunning in your actions.’

The senior judge said Letby ‘relished being in the intensive care nursery’ and took a particular interest in babies with ‘uncommon medical conditions’.

He went on: ‘You specifically targeted twins, and latterly triplets. Some babies were healthy, others had medical issues of which you were aware.

‘The great majority of your victims suffered acute pain as a result of what you did to them. They all fought for survival. Some sadly struggled in vain and died.

‘You used a number of different ways to try to kill them, thereby misleading clinicians into believing collapses had, or may have had, a natural cause or were a consequence of the developing medical conditions.

‘You knew the last thing anyone working on the unit would or did think was that someone caring for the babies was deliberately harming them.’

Mr Justice Goss added: ‘The impact of your crimes has been immense.’

Letby was handed a whole life sentence, meaning she will never be eligible for parole (Picture: pixel8000)

She was convicted last week of the murders of seven babies and the attempted murders of six more (Picture: PA)

She refused to come back to court to face justice (Picture: PA)

The first two hours of the hearing were taken up by the parents of each of Letby’s victims, identified as Babies A to Q, setting out in harrowing detail to an empty dock how their lives have been ripped apart by her spree.

The mother of Letby’s first two victims said: ‘You thought it was your right to play God with our children’s lives.’

She described how, after the death of their first baby, they stayed by the second infant’s cot side but ‘made a mistake’ in believing what happened had been a ‘tragic event that couldn’t be stopped’.

She added: ‘Little did we know you were waiting for us to leave so you could attack the one thing that gave us a reason to carry on in life.’

The mother of Baby C choked back tears as she told Letby in her absence: ‘At least now there is no debate that, in your own words, you killed them on purpose. You are evil. You did this.’

She added: ‘To you, our son’s life was collateral damage in your persistent desire for drama, attention, praise and sympathy.

‘Knowing now that his murderer was watching us throughout these traumatic hours is like something out of a horror story.’

The mother of Baby D told the court: ‘Lucy Letby had a chance to say something to us all, parents of the victims, and she had only one word – “unimaginable”.

‘Her wicked sense of entitlement and abuse of her role as a trusted nurse is a scandal.’ 

The mother of Baby E, who died, and Baby F, who survived, told the court: ‘Even in these final days of the trial she has tried to control things, the disrespect she has shown the families and the court show what type of person she is.

‘We have attended court day in and day out, yet she decides she has had enough, and stays in her cell, just one final act of wickedness from a coward.’

She went on: ‘I would like to thank Lucy for taking the stand and showing the court what she is really like once the “nice Lucy” mask slips.

‘It was honestly the best thing she could have done to ensure our boys got the justice they deserve.’

In a statement, the father of Baby G, who Letby was found guilty of attempting to murder twice, said: ‘Every day I would sit there and pray. I would pray for God to save her. He did. He saved her, but the devil found her.’

The mother of Baby I, who jurors heard was murdered by Letby at the fourth attempt, said: ‘I don’t think we will ever get over the fact that our daughter was tortured till she had no fight left in her and everything she went through over her short life was deliberately done by someone who was supposed to protect her and help her come home where she belonged.’

She added: ‘When they handed her to us we never wanted to let her go, we held her so tight she was our gorgeous little princess and I cant even begin to explain the pain. When we lost her a part of us died with her.’

The father of Babies L and M, who Letby tried to kill, described having to move seats in court she kept glaring at him from the dock.

He said the image of his son collapsing was “forever etched” in his mind and the stress and strain had been unbearable at times.

The dad added: ‘Initially doctors told us that the whole events that took place in 2016 surrounding my children was normal for premature babies and we believed what the doctors were telling us at the time.

‘Little did we know that a year or so after their birth the police would come knocking on the door and break the news that this could be an attempted murder case.’

The mother of Baby N, who survived, said she always knew her son had been deliberately harmed, adding: ‘We just questioned why a healthy baby boy was fine one minute and bleeding from the mouth and needing CPR the next.’

She said that she felt ‘happy and relieved’ when the police got in contact to say they were investigating Letby because ‘we felt like we were being listened to’.

In a pre-recorded statement played to the court, the mum of triplet brothers Babies O and P, described being in a ‘state of shock’ after they were murdered by Letby.

She said she continued to be haunted by ‘vivid images’ from the time and lived in ‘constant fear’ of anything happening to her children. She told the court Letby had been the last person to hold Baby P and she had dressed him after he died.

The boys’ father could be seen wiping away tears in the recording, in which he described how Letby ‘has destroyed our lives’.

He said: ‘The anger and the hatred I have towards her will never go away. It has destroyed me as a man and as a father.’

Letby carried out the spree while working on the neonatal unit (Picture: Chester Chronicle)

It took place at the Countess of Chester Hospital between June 2015 and June 2016 (Picture: PA)

Letby, 33, was also found guilty of trying to kill six other babies at Manchester Crown Court last week at the end of what is believed to be the UK’s longest ever murder trial.

Detectives have since revealed they will be examining the ‘entire footprint’ of Letby’s career to see whether she could have harmed any more newborns.

It will involve reviewing the care of all 4,000 babies admitted to neonatal units at the Countess of Chester Hospital, where she worked between 2012 and 2016, and Liverpool Women’s Hospital, where she completed placements.

Police are thought to be focusing on the cases of 30 infants who may have survived attacks, according to The Times.

There have also been calls for an investigation into hospital bosses for potential corporate manslaughter.

Retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, the prosecution’s lead medical expert, vowed to write to Cheshire Constabulary asking them to investigate ‘grossly negligent’ bosses for not acting on fears about Letby while she was on a killing spree, the Observer reported.

Doctors who raised concerns about Letby as far back as 2015 have said babies could have been saved if hospital management had listened and acted sooner.

The Countess of Chester Hospital’s neonatal unit head consultant, Dr Stephen Brearey, first raised Letby’s association with an increase in baby collapses in June 2015.

He told the Guardian that deaths could arguably have been avoided from as early as February 2016 if executives had ‘responded appropriately’ to an urgent meeting request from concerned doctors.

Police were contacted only in 2017.

TV doctor Ravi Jayaram, another whistleblower who says he was ‘fobbed off’, told ITV: ‘I do genuinely believe that there are four of five babies who could be could be going to school now who aren’t.’

Letby was on duty during every catastrophic collapse (Picture: Getty Images)

Dr Stephen Brearey, lead consultant on the neonatal unit, raised concerns about Lucy Letby in October 2015 (Picture: BBC)

Dr Ravi Jayaram also tried to raise the alarm with bosses

Letby murdered her vulnerable victims ‘in plain sight’, grossly abusing the trust of parents, colleagues, and friends by using it as a cover to commit her crimes, detectives said.

Weeks before her spree started, she underwent training in what was to become her favourite method, the injection of air into their bloodstreams or feeding tubes.

Jurors heard she also poisoned them with insulin, overfed them milk or shoved hard plastic medical tubes down their throats.

Consultants on the ward, alarmed by the surging mortality rate and Letby’s presence at each catastrophic collapse, described repeatedly trying to raise their concerns with higher-ups but were told to ‘stop making a fuss’.

It was only following the deaths of two babies on consecutive days in June 2016 that she was finally removed from the ward and the unexplained collapses stopped.

Dr Brearey told the BBC hospital management had initially refused to do so and later ordered them to write a letter of apology to Letby and stop making allegations against her.

Ironically, she was assigned to the risk and patient safety office, where she remained until her arrest in 2018.

Speaking after the verdicts last week, Dr Nigel Scawn, medical director at the Countess of Chester Hospital, said: ‘I speak for the whole trust when I say how deeply saddened and appalled we are at Lucy Letby’s crimes.

‘We are extremely sorry that these crimes were committed at our hospital and our thoughts continue to be with all the families and loved ones of the babies who came to harm or who died.

‘We can’t begin to understand what they have been through.’

A cot where a baby referred to as Child G in the Lucy Letby court case was being treated when she projectile vomited (Picture: PA)

There has still been no light shed on what drove a woman described as ‘beige’ and ‘vanilla’, and playfully dubbed ‘The Innocent One’, to become a ‘cold, calculated, cruel and relentless’ killer.

Detective Nichola Evans said: ‘I would describe Lucy Letby from my own experience of this investigation as beige. There isn’t anything outstanding or outrageous that we found about her as a person.

‘And I think that has come across during the trial in that she was an average nurse, a normal 20-something.

‘She had a healthy social life. She had a circle of friends. She had her parents and holidays. And there isn’t anything unusual in any of that and there isn’t anything that we have found that has been unusual.

‘But clearly there was another side that nobody saw – a massive deceit – and that we have unravelled during this investigation and during the trial.’

It was variously suggested Letby was ‘excited’ by the drama of the emergencies and revelled in ‘playing God’, and that she may have been seeking the attention of a married registrar referred to as her ‘boyfriend’ by the prosecutor.

She betrayed no flicker of emotion during the trial until she heard the doctor’s voice after he stepped into the witness box to give evidence.

The prosecution accused Letby of having ‘a crush’ on him, and that she had attacked some of the infants knowing he would be ‘crash-bleeped’ to help deal with them.

During searches of her home following her arrest, a number of closely written notes were discovered.

A note found in the house of Lucy Letby shown at her trial at Manchester Crown Court (Picture: PA)

The sympathy card Letby wrote to the grieving parents of a baby girl she murdered (Picture: PA)

On one note she wrote ‘I don’t deserve to live. I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them’, ‘I am a horrible evil person’ and in capital letters ‘I am evil I did this’.

Prosecutor Nick Johnson KC invited the jurors to read the note ‘literally’ as a confession.

Detective Sergeant Paul Hughes, who led Chester Police’s investigation, told the Mail: ‘If we are looking for why she has done this, then to reuse her own words, “she is evil and she did this”.

‘Without her telling us why, if we’re looking for why, then she wrote it down in that note.’

Police also found a ‘treasure trove’ of souvenirs from her killing spree.

Hundreds of nursing handover sheets, handwritten resuscitation notes and other medical documents were discovered.

They also recovered a photograph of a condolence card Letby sent the parents of a baby girl on the day of her funeral on her phone.

Another photo showed a thank you card sent to nurses on the ward from the parents of twin babies Letby had attacked.

They were oblivious to the horrific truth that Letby had murdered on of their sons and poisoned his brother with insulin.

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Letby refused to come to court, a move described as a ‘final act of wickedness’ by the mother of two of her victims.