Lucy Letby wept as she told a court her “whole world was stopped” when she was accused of the “sickening” murders of multiple babies in a hospital neo-natal unit.
The nurse said she was “devastated” by the allegations and had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder due to her “traumatising” arrest.
Giving evidence on Tuesday for the first time in her eight-month trial, Letby said she was arrested in her pyjamas and had been in prison awaiting trial for two and a half years.
The 33-year-old became tearful as she denied harming any child and added: “I only ever did my best to care for them. I’m here to help and to care, not to harm.”
Letby is accused of fatally injecting newborns with insulin, air or milk during a 12-month period on the neo-natal ward at the Countess of Chester hospital.
One of the babies was just 24 hours old when Letby allegedly injected him with air, killing him just 90 minutes after she came on shift. She tried to kill his twin sister the next day, it is alleged.
Letby denies murdering seven babies and attempting to murder 10 others at the hospital between June 2015 and June 2016.
The nurse was flanked by two female security officers as she gave evidence from a witness box several rows in front of her parents, John, 76, and Susan, 62. Relatives of the alleged victims listened to her evidence from the other side of the public gallery.
Letby said it was “sickening – I just couldn’t believe it” when asked about the moment she was told she was suspected of being involved in the deaths of babies. “It was devastating. I don’t think you could be accused of anything worse than that,” she said.
Letby said she was also “devastated” when she was removed from clinical duties in July 2016 and told her work “competencies” needed to be checked: “It was lifechanging, in that moment I was taken away from the support system I had on the unit. I was put in a role I did not enjoy and I had to pretend it was voluntary. It made me question everything about myself.”
Letby went on to say she considered killing herself “because of what was being inferred” when she was removed from the neonatal unit in 2016.
The jury has been told Letby was removed from the unit when consultants raised concerns about her “common link” with a number of baby deaths and near-deaths.
Letby, crying, told the jury: “My job was my life. I can’t put into words, it’s just – my whole world was stopped.”
She added: “I think it’s completely changed everything about me, about my life, about the hopes I had for the future. Everything is just gone.”
Letby told the court she had since been diagnosed with depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder and needed medication to help her sleep.
The nurse was asked about notes recovered from her house in which she had written “not good enough”, “I can’t breathe, I can’t focus” and “I hate myself”.
The University of Chester graduate said she wrote them as she tried to cope with being removed from the neonatal unit in 2016. “I felt immense responsibility,” she said. “I felt I had been incompetent or done something wrong that had harmed children.”
Asked why she wrote “I am evil. I did this,” Letby said: “Because I felt at the time I had done something wrong and I thought I’m such an awful, evil person … that I had made mistakes and not known.”
The nurse said she thought “that somehow I had been incompetent and I had done something wrong to affect these babies. I felt I must be responsible in some way.”
On one document recovered by police, Letby had written the names of two brothers from a set of triplets she allegedly murdered in June 2016, along with the words “we tried our best” and: “Today is your birthday and you aren’t here and I am so sorry for that.”
Becoming emotional, the nurse said she wrote it on the anniversary of their death because she was “thinking of them”.
Letby said she was “just distraught” because she and her colleagues had done their best for the brothers. “I only ever did my best,” she said, becoming tearful again.
On another note, she wrote “BASTARDS” about two of her colleagues, Dr Ravi Jayaram and Dr Stephen Brearey, who had raised concerns about her to hospital management, the court heard.
Letby explained that this was not “the language I would use” but that’s “how I felt about some people … because of the things they’d been saying about me”.
The defendant was asked about Facebook searches she had made for parents of babies she is alleged to have murdered. She told jurors it was “just out of curiosity” and “they were obviously on my mind at that point”.
The court was told that Letby made 2,381 Facebook searches between June 2015 and June 2016 – a small number of which were for the parents of babies she allegedly murdered.
The nurse said it was “normal” for her to satisfy her “curiosity” by searching for friends, colleagues and parents of children she had treated, adding that she was “always on my phone”.
Ending the day’s evidence, Letby was asked what she wanted to do with the babies she was looking after. “To care for them. To do my best for them. To help them,” she replied.
The case continues.
