Not only did Lucy Letby kill and badly hurt babies…

[determinedtomakethiswork]

She also prepared the memory boxes for parents of the dead children. Can you imagine having a memory box with photos and footprints of your dead child which had been taken by his or her merger?

That goes way beyond the murder. I just don't know how the families are coping.

The unit manager and deputy director of nursing need reporting to the NMC. Anything other than a strike off for this pair is unacceptable.

I’m finding interesting the fact of her knowing about her difficult birth. That information can only have come from her mother (father? Both parents?). I knew someone who talked endlessly about the birth of her daughter IN FRONT OF THE DAUGHTER stating over and over how she’d had a bad tear during delivery and I always cringed and thought it was inappropriate and wondered how having knowledge of this would affect/harm the child (now a teenager) going forward. I don’t think children need to know how the mother ‘suffered’ giving birth to them. It feels to me slightly ‘off’

So sad for the families, those poor little babies.

Our first born was in NICU for a week as he was born early due to stopping growing. He was so tiny and defenceless. Leaving your baby there when you went home was heartbreaking. What made it easier was knowing how amazing and the nurses were. Cannot imagine what those families went through.

Letby is a murderous psychopath who makes me wish we had the death penalty.

But why the HELL did the doctors who were convinced that she was murdering babies not tell the police? So they kept telling their bosses and the answer was ‘no’ - that doesn’t mean ‘ok then, well you’re responsible for the murders boss’ it means you phone the police yourself.

The NHS is in desperate need of a culture change. Far too much harm is ignored. This is the worst example but it could never have happened without a widespread ‘cover up and tell no one’ culture that also applies to many other victims eg the number of female patients sexually assaulted in hospital every week.

My mum told me a lot about how my shoulders got stuck and how she'd needed an episiotomy. Idon't think it's that unusual to talk to your kids about how they came into the world. It just meant that when I was giving birth to my first, I was just adamant I wouldn't have an episiotomy. The midwife was quite bemused when I kept going on about it.

Letby will probably appeal. Alas there is a mini truther movement growing that believes this is a miscarriage of justice. Quite surprised journalist John Sweeney (currently in Ukraine) is likening this to the Sally Clarke case (seemingly damned on statistics and by Sir Roy Meadow for suffering repeated SIDS).
One of the comments at the foot of his tweet said it was "the biggest miscarriage of justice since Jeremy Bamber" 🤐

Yeh I get what you’re saying but this was relentless. Everyone at work knew all about it. It was talked about more than the kid was

And the police reach out to hospital management and are then told that this is an issue of doctors bullying a nurse, they’ve already apologised and looking at referring them to the GMC. The management have looked into it and haven’t found any evidence. What overworked and underfunded police force is going to have the time or justification to take it any further? That’s before you consider that management would almost certainly then pull the GMC referral trigger.

People were posting on the previous thread about how it's drummed into us from childhood that physical attractiveness is synonymous with goodness. Coincidentally, I read Beauty & the Beast to my youngest last night. The author banged on about how good-hearted the main character was, and how she was called "the Little Beauty" as a child, and how she remained so gorgeous that she was still called Beauty as an adult, and her spoilt sisters were so jealous of her because they were much plainer...

Same with Cinderella, who is a much nicer person than her ugly stepsisters. We really are taught from a young age that bad people look bad.

It’s not just the ones she murdered. It’s the survivors,parents,doctors, colleagues. And the survivors that need 24/7 care solely due to her. The ones that escaped.

Behavioural genetics is an entire scientific field. It's just taking a while to filter out to the general public.

I came from a religious, “decent” family. My parents were teachers. They beat me and my brother black and blue and were abusive towards us emotionally and physically. Coming from a decent, religious family does not mean there was no violence or abuse growing up.

Does anyone know if corporate manslaughter law covers NHS senior management?

Saying that I’m not saying I agree that all murderers come from an abusive background. I’m sure there are plenty of people who are either evil or mentally ill enough to do th8s without having had an abusive childhood.

and of course the majority of abused kids don’t grow up to murder people.

It would certainly cover the nhs management if it was felt there was a case to answer.

How can you think this is nonsense? Our genes determine who we are. All behaviour and personality is a combination of genetics and experience.

For example, it's perfectly possible that I could be accused of manslaughter, becasue I'm one of those red mist type of people. I've always been like that, I go from calm to angry very quickly. That's hormonally and therefore genetically mediated in my body. Whether or not it actually happened/happens depends on circumstances. I've never been burgled for example, but I expect I would go fight rather then flight if confronted by one on the stairs in the middle of the night.

But I know other people who are much more 'mild mannered' than me who would almost certainly react in a completely different way. I know people who never get angry. They have completely different genetic makeup to me.

Not that that excuses anything of course, everyone knows murder is wrong and she murdered babies calmly and deliberately.

Whistleblowering is hard and these consultants have my up most sympathy, and are least to blame out of the whole sorry situation, but agreed they didn’t need their employers permission to go to the police. If they suspected that murders were being committed they should have gone to the police.

@Lalgarh She can apply to appeal a conviction certainly - it is not given this would be granted - several experienced barristers/retired judges think it wouldn't be successful.

I agree..how on earth have they not had criminal charges against them too?!

No. But she was a very experienced teacher, forty years in the same area, most in the same school. There was a lot more continuity in schools then, and class sizes were smaller :25 - 20 in many cases. And teachers were closer to the children, it wasn’t frowned on/ forbidden to have them on your knee if they were upset, for example.

I know we won’t agree on this, I can only tell your my experience. It has stayed with me all these years, because DM was so distressed .

I actually disagree when people say that most criminals who do monsterous things look just like everybody else. Obviously sometimes that’s the case. But loads of these offenders look dead in their eyes - they don’t look “normal” imh.

Thats because the photos used by the media have been selected to illustrate a certain narrative.

I say that as someone who’s worked with a few high profile offenders who have been on TV reports and look nothing like the photos that have been selected.

I thought that too. Like there was an immaturity about her.

It can be both. And studies are ongoing to investigate how biological predisposition to personality disorder interacts with adverse childhood experiences. The paragraph below is part of a conclusion from a recent study:

Among the environmental factors, early life stressful events, in particular childhood trauma, have been proposed to negatively impact brain development through epigenetic mechanisms. Although a complex interplay between BPD, early-life stressful adversities and epigenetic signatures has been suggested, further investigations are needed in order to better understand the role of genetic background and traumatic events during childhood in the onset of BPD. A better comprehension of these interactions could allow to identify at risk subjects, who could be treated with preventive therapies, such as psychotherapy, and to prevent or minimize the development of the disease later in life.

MIL is the same. I've heard that story a few times! To be fair i don't think its affected dh.

Anyway, what an awful case, those poor families 💐.