LONDON — A jury in northwestern England has convicted a former neonatal nurse of murdering seven babies, ending a 10-month trial that fascinated and outraged the country.
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The verdicts make Letby the most prolific child serial killer in the United Kingdom’s modern history, according to Nazir Afzal, a former chief prosecutor in Northwest England.
The judge reportedly described the case as “most distressing and upsetting.” The trial, which began in October, is said to be the longest-running murder trial in U.K. history.
“Today is not a time for celebration. There are no winners in this case,” Nicola Evans, detective chief inspector for the Cheshire Constabulary, said in a statement. “Our focus right now is very much on the families of the babies. The compassion and strength shown by the parents — and wider family members — has been overwhelming.”
After the verdict was announced, the government ordered an independent inquiry into the circumstances around the murders at the Countess of Chester Hospital, in Chester, England, where Letby worked.
Letby cried as the verdicts were issued, according to media reports. They were handed down beginning last week but could not be announced until the jury was dismissed.
During the trial, prosecutors alleged that Letby killed five boys and two girls and attempted to kill another five boys and five girls in the hospital’s neonatal unit by poisoning them with insulin, injecting air into their veins or overfeeding them with milk.
They accused Letby of being a “constant malevolent presence” at the Countess of Chester Hospital. The incidents happened between 2015 and 2016, when the unit experienced an unusual increase in neonatal deaths and collapses.
The thought that a nurse assigned to care for the most vulnerable babies could instead have killed them horrified the British public, and the details emerging from Letby’s trial attracted widespread attention.
Letby insisted throughout the trial that she was innocent of the charges. She claimed that she was being scapegoated by certain doctors at the neonatal unit who did not want to acknowledge the hospital’s own “failings” in caring for the newborns.
Judge James Goss asked the jury on Aug. 8 to come to a unanimous agreement on the charges, but he said that if they could not, agreement among 10 of the jurors — also known as a majority verdict — would be sufficient.
“The time has now come when it is possible for me to accept verdicts upon which you are not all agreed,” Goss said in court on Aug. 8, according to the Independent newspaper. The jury was initially made up of 12 jurors, but one was discharged for “good personal reasons,” the judge said earlier this month, the outlet reported.
During the trial, prosecutors made the case that Letby, a nurse from Hereford, about 94 miles south of Chester, took advantage of her position as a nurse in charge of vulnerable, premature babies to harm and kill — and alleged that when she did not succeed in killing a baby, she tried again.
“Lucy Letby sought to deceive her colleagues and pass off the harm she caused as nothing more than a worsening of each baby’s existing vulnerability,” prosecutor Pascale Jones said in a statement after the verdict. “In her hands, innocuous substances like air, milk, fluids — or medication like insulin — would become lethal. She perverted her learning and weaponised her craft to inflict harm, grief and death.”
In court, Letby testified that she did not intentionally hurt any of the babies in her care. She said the charges against her “completely changed” her life and “made me question everything about myself,” according to the Daily Mirror.
The case was “extremely complex” for prosecutors and law enforcement because they “didn’t even know if there had been a murder in the first place,” said Afzal, the former chief prosecutor. Even once they concluded that the babies were harmed, trying to identify a possible culprit inside a hospital, where staff, patients and their loved ones work and visit daily, is “a bit like ‘Murder on the Orient Express,’” but with thousands of suspects,” he said.
At the start of the trial, prosecutor Nick Johnson told the court that a premature baby who was killed in June 2015, one day after he was born, is believed to be Letby’s first victim, The Washington Post reported last fall. Doctors noticed that Child A, as he was identified in court for privacy reasons, had an “odd discoloration” on his skin, Johnson reportedly said. An autopsy could not determine the infant’s cause of death.
An expert who looked into the case said the most likely cause was air injected into the bloodstream “by someone who knew it would cause significant harm,” the prosecutor said.
The baby’s twin sister, Child B, also suffered from dangerously low oxygen levels some 28 hours after her brother died. Employees resuscitated her, and she survived, but Johnson told the courtroom that the back-to-back cases showed that “these were no accidents,” the Times of London reported.
Other incidents were initially chalked up to natural causes before hospital workers became alarmed, Johnson said.
Prosecutors told the jury that some of Letby’s colleagues expressed concerns about her work before she was transferred to an office role in the summer of 2016, according to the BBC. Police were called to investigate the babies’ unexpected deaths and collapses in 2017, and their review of the evidence suggested that two children were poisoned with insulin by someone at the neonatal unit, Johnson said.
The children — identified as Child F and Child L — survived after doctors treated them for a sudden and dangerous drop in blood sugar levels, Johnson said.
Letby was on duty when the newborns were allegedly poisoned — and was present every time “things took a turn for the worse for these 17 children,” Johnson said. The prosecution said the rise in deaths or serious deterioration of babies at Countess of Chester Hospital coincided with Letby’s shift schedule: When she worked nights, those incidents increased, and when she was moved to day shifts, they also increased, Johnson said.
Letby’s lawyers said in court that the babies’ deaths could have been due to other causes. They argued that the number of neonatal babies being admitted to the unit where Letby worked rose between 2015 and 2016. They said Letby was a “hard-working, dedicated and caring” nurse, according to Nursing Times.
Letby was detained for questioning three times by Chester police in connection with their investigation into the incidents, and she was formally charged in November 2020.
The government’s inquiry will now try to untangle what happened and how Letby could have harmed babies for so long without being stopped. Investigators will notably look at “how concerns raised by clinicians were dealt with” by the hospital, the Department of Health and Social Care said.
But the format chosen — a nonstatutory public inquiry — means that investigators will not have the power to issue subpoenas compelling witnesses to testify, or to collect evidence under oath. The government in its statement said this “was found to be the most appropriate option, building on the approach taken in other cases,” and “will focus on lessons that can be learned quickly.”
But it also means investigators will have to rely “on the goodwill of people” to come forward and tell the truth about what happened, said Afzal.
Other health-care professionals have been convicted of killing patients. In 2022, Netflix released “The Good Nurse,” a movie based on the true story of Charles Cullen, a New Jersey nurse who admitted to murdering 29 patients and trying to kill six others. Cullen, who was sentenced to 11 consecutive life sentences and is at the New Jersey State Prison, was suspected of killing hundreds of people over a period of years in hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Adam Taylor in Washington contributed to this report.
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