The murder of premature babies in their first few weeks of life by a medical professional is impossible to make sense of. But this is the crime of which Lucy Letby, a nurse in the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester hospital, was last week convicted in relation to a number of vulnerable infants entrusted to her care. They were utterly dependent on the clinical staff in that unit. But Letby murdered seven babies, attacking some multiple times before she succeeded in killing them. She has also been convicted of the attempted murder of another six, two of whom have been left with brain damage as a result.
This makes Letby Britain’s worst child killer of modern times. She used a variety of means on her victims, including administering fatal injections of air, poisoning with insulin, overfeeding with milk and tampering with feeding tubes. The police have now begun the task of investigating the records of more than 4,000 babies across two hospitals whose care may have been tampered with by Letby. The critical question that needs answering now the criminal trial is concluded is how she was able to get away with these crimes over the course of more than a year and why some of these murders were not prevented after senior clinicians repeatedly raised red flags about their suspicions. A full assessment of how their babies were fatally let down by the system is the very least the families are owed.
