Tomorrow’s sentencing of Lucy Letby for the murders of seven babies and the attempted murder of six others at the Countess of Chester hospital will provide only one form of judicial ending to this harrowing case. In the process Letby, who has steadfastly maintained her innocence, has become our worst child serial killer since the days of Mary Ann Cotton, who was hanged in 1873, and Amelia Dyer, a “baby farmer”, who suffered the same fate in 1896.
Like Letby, Cotton and Dyer trained as nurses, but while these Victorian murderers were killing for money it’s unlikely that we will ever gain any definitive understanding of Letby’s motivation. So, in that sense, we only have a partial criminological ending to accompany the court’s legal conclusion.
