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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
World
Josh Salisbury

Lucy Letby: Moment evil baby killer nurse finally caught by police

This is the moment evil baby killer Lucy Letby was arrested before being found guilty of murdering seven babies while a nurse in Chester.

Letby was convicted on Friday of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill six others while working at the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital.

It makes her one of the UK’s most prolific killer of babies in modern times.

Prosecutors told Manchester Crown Court that Letby, 33, was a “calculated opportunist" who used the vulnerabilities of premature and sick infants to camouflage her murders.

New footage released by Cheshire Police showed the moment officers investigating the significant rise in the numbers of babies who suffered serious collapse arrested Letby at her semi-detached home in Westbourne Road, Chester, at 6am on July 3m 2018.

Lucy Letby (PA)

The video shows Letby being escorted out the door with her hands handcuffed behind her back before then put in the back of an unmarked police car.

Police then searched her three-bedroom home just over a mile from the hospital. The court heard searches uncovered a number of closely written notes.

On one green Post-it 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".

Prosecutors said these were tantamount to confessions, but Letby, from Hereford, had denied the killings and attempted murders.

Jurors heard how Letby was the only member of the nursing and clinical staff who was on duty each time the collapses happened in 2015 and 2016

She used various ways to harm the babies including injecting air into the bloodstream, injecting air into the stomach, overfeeding with milk, physical assaults and poisoning with insulin.

Lucy Letby’s bedroom during police search (PA)

Some of the children were subjected to repeated attempts to kill them by the “cold, cruel and relentless" band 5 staff nurse, the trial heard.

However, Letby had insisted the children should have been receiving specialist treatment elsewhere and claimed she had tried to care for them as best she could.

In total, jurors found Letby guilty of seven counts of murder and seven counts of attempted murder in relation to six babies.

Prosecutors asked for 28 days to consider their position over whether to seek a retrial on the six outstanding counts.

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