Police have conducted a lengthy investigation into Lucy Letby.
Police have conducted a lengthy investigation into Lucy Letby.
Convicted child killer Lucy Letby was told by a judge “she will be in court” for her sentencing after she previously refused to attend.
The 34-year-old was found guilty of attempting to kill a premature baby girl by dislodging her breathing tube while she worked a night shift at the Countess of Chester Hospital’s neonatal unit in February 2016.
However the jury was unable to reach a verdict on a single allegation of attempted murder related to Baby K, a baby born 15 weeks prematurely.
At Manchester Crown Court on Tuesday, following a three-week retrial, Letby was found guilty of attempting to kill another child. Jurors took two hours and 20 minutes to decide that she had tried to claim another victim.
At her previous trial Letby refused to attend court to hear her sentence.
Following her latest conviction, trial Judge Justice Goss, who sentenced her previously, told the former neonatal nurse: “Having been convicted of this offence of attempted murder you will be sentenced for it.
“That sentencing hearing is on Friday morning and you will be here for that.
“Obviously you are serving a whole life sentence in any event.”
Sentencing hearings
The Government announced last year it planned to introduce legislation to force criminals to attend sentencing hearings.
Under the plans, if someone refuses to attend they will be committing contempt of court and will face having a further two years added on to their sentence.
Letby is one of only a handful of prisoners currently serving a whole life order, meaning she will never be released.
In his closing speech to the jury, Nick Johnson KC, prosecuting, said: “Lucy Letby is an extraordinary person, not in a good way. She has murdered seven children and also tried to murder six. Thirteen separate children.
“And you now have to consider whether she also tried to murder [Baby K]. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the shocking and dreadful context of this case.”
‘Very uncomfortable’
The case centred around the allegations of a consultant paediatrician whose evidence was also crucial during Letby’s first trial.
Dr Ravi Jayaram claimed he caught Letby “virtually red handed” standing beside Baby K’s incubator as the child’s oxygen levels dropped rapidly. He said he had gone into the intensive care unit, where the baby was being looked after, because he felt “very uncomfortable” knowing that she was alone with the child.
Jayaram said he was concerned as by this point that there had been a number of incidents on the ward, which he believed were linked to Letby. He claimed he entered nursery one, where the most poorly babies were cared for, and found Letby standing next to the incubator “doing nothing” as the baby deteriorated in front of her.
The court heard an alarm that should have been sounding was not, and Dr Jayaram said it appeared to have been silenced.
He told the court that he decided to remove the breathing tube from Baby K’s mouth and ventilated her again through a face mask, saying: “She picked up extremely quickly. Her colour improved, her saturations improved, I could see her chest was moving normally. That was a relief.”
‘Didn’t want to believe’
In cross-examination, Ben Myers KC accused Jayaram of fabricating the silent alarm and the fact that Letby was standing beside the incubator to “create suspicion where it did not exist”.
He said: “If you had seen anything like you are suggesting, you would have gone to police or raised it with managers.”
Myers also noted that rather than removing Letby from the ward, he was content for her to finish her shift after he went home, adding: “How could you just walk off the unit if there is a nurse who may have been killing babies?”
Jayaram replied: “I knew other people were in there with her.” He added that he “didn’t want to believe” Letby could have been responsible.
He claimed the Countess of Chester Hospital had told him it would “absolutely be the wrong thing to go to the police” because there would be “blue and white tape everywhere”.
In his closing speech, Myers launched a scathing attack on Jayaram, saying: “Dr Jayaram’s evidence is, we say, an insult to the collective intelligence of everyone in this courtroom. We say it’s ridiculous and it’s unbelievable.
“You are a senior consultant and one of the leads for the unit, and you believe someone is killing babies and trying to hurt them. What would you do? You would tell the management and, if they dragged your heels, you would tell the police. It’s not rocket science. A child would know what to do.”
Letby gives evidence
Giving evidence, Letby, who was speaking for the first time since being convicted at the same court of the murders of seven babies, protested her innocence on all counts. She said she had never deliberately harmed a child, adding: “I am not guilty of what I have been found guilty of.”
The court heard that Baby K was born extremely prematurely at 2.12am on February 17, 2016, weighing 692g.
Letby said she remembered the child because it was unusual for such a premature baby to be cared for at the hospital rather than being immediately transferred to a specialist unit.
In a defence statement made before her previous trial, Letby said: “I do not believe anyone on the unit had sufficient experience to look after a 25-week baby. Certainly none of the nursing staff did.”
She maintained that Baby K was “capable of dislodging the tube”, and did not accept that the “post-delivery care” was of “optimal standard”.
In his closing speech, Johnson said the accusations of sub-optimal care and questions over whether Baby K should have been born there rather than a specialist hospital amounted to “throwing the mud of incompetence at the doctors and hoping some would stick”.
He added: “The truth is, ladies and gentlemen, is that Lucy Letby had a fascination with the babies she had murdered and attempted to murder, and with their families. She took pleasure in her murderous handiwork.”
Police have conducted a lengthy investigation into Lucy Letby.
‘Staff had to think the unthinkable’
Nicola Wyn Williams, a senior crown prosecutor with CPS Mersey-Cheshire’s complex casework unit, said: “Lucy Letby has continually denied that she tried to kill this baby or any of the babies that she has been convicted of murdering or attempting to murder.
“The jury has heard all of the detailed evidence, including from her in her own defence, and formed its own view.
“Our case included direct evidence from a doctor who walked into the nursery to find a very premature baby desaturating with Letby standing by, taking no action to help or to raise the alarm. She had deliberately dislodged the breathing tube in an attempt to kill her.
“Staff at the unit had to think the unthinkable – that one of their own was deliberately harming and killing babies in their care.
“Letby dislodged the tube a further two times over the following few hours in an attempt to cover her tracks and suggest that the first dislodgement was accidental. These were the actions of a cold-blooded, calculated killer.
“The grief that the family of Baby K have felt is unimaginable. Our thoughts remain with them, and all those affected by this case at this time.”
In a statement issued by Cheshire Police, the parents of Baby K said: “Justice has been served, and a nurse who should have been caring for our daughter has been found guilty of harming her.
“But this justice will not take away the extreme hurt, anger and distress that we have all had to experience.
“It also doesn’t provide us with an explanation as to why these crimes have taken place. We are heartbroken, devastated, angry … and we may never truly know what happened.”
