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A 32-year-old British nurse allegedly murdered seven babies and attempted to kill 10 more while working at a hospital’s neonatal ward, a court heard.
Lucy Letby has been charged with seven murders and 15 attempted murders related to the 17 children, The Times of London reported.
What prosecutors said was a “significant rise” in baby fatalities and the number of serious collapses at the Countess of Chester Hospital’s neonatal ward between 2015 and 2016 has been linked to the nurse.
Among the alleged victims was a child whom Letby cared for when he died.
A postmortem concluded that the baby’s cause of death could not be determined, but a review by pediatric consultant Dr. Devi Ewans suggested that the child’s collapse was consistent with a deliberate injection of air or something else.
Another expert agreed that the cause of the collapse was unnatural and that the most likely cause was an air embolus deliberately administered by someone who knew it would cause harm.
Only Letby was present when the child’s condition deteriorated, prosecutors told the court.
Other alleged victims included two boys who were poisoned days after they were born.
Prosecutor Nick Johnson claimed that the poisoner was Letby, who, along with a few others, had access to the children’s restricted unit.
The child deaths at the Countess of Chester Hospital’s neonatal unit were initially attributed to natural causes as “nobody thought that there was someone trying to kill babies” in the unit, Johnson told the court.
However, a “painstaking review” from police later revealed that someone in the unit had poisoned two children with insulin during the period the hospital saw a rise in deaths, the court heard.
Rather than “naturally occurring tragedies,” the deaths were instead the work of a “constant malevolent presence” who was “sabotaging” the children’s treatments, Johnson said.
Jurors were reportedly shown records that placed Letby on duty during each death and occasion when a baby fell seriously ill.
A shift chart confirmed that the Chester University graduate was on duty at all relevant times when babies were allegedly attacked, making it “self-evidently obvious” who was behind the incidents, according to Johnson.
“Many of the events in this case occurred on the night shifts. When Lucy Letby was moved on to day shifts, the collapses and deaths moved to the day shifts,” the prosecutor said.
“We allege that by a simple process of elimination, only one person can have been responsible,” he told the court.
Letby has been accused of using various methods to attack children, including injecting them with air intravenously or through a nasogastric tube as well as feeding them milk or some other fluid poisoned with insulin.
She also “tried to kill the same baby more than once and sometimes a baby that she succeeded in killing was not killed the first or even second time that she tried. In one case, there was even a third time,” Johnson alleged.
Letby, who admitted to police in 2020 to tracking some of the deceased children’s families on Facebook, has denied all the charges against her.
The trial continues. It is expected to last six months.
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