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.

In America recently there has been a series of cold case crimes solved using commercial DNA databases and many of the perpetrators have been middle-class professional men.

As for Letby, in the Panorama documentary her friend said that one of her reasons for becoming a neo-natal nurse was because her own birth had been difficult and she had been saved by the hospital staff. I wondered if that was true or if she is one of those people who enjoys creating a sense of drama and tragedy about her own life.

Which doesn't exist anymore as a diagnosis and hasn't since 2013. The DSM-V equivalent would be fictitious disorder imposed upon another.

So true. Often we have the idea "that you can tell" and the truth is that you can't. This is why we have safeguarding procedures in schools and hospitals. The documentary really makes me question how effective safeguarding is though.

My big question about the whole thing is, who was protecting her and why? With the evidence that they had there was more than enough for dismissal, at the very least. The psychologist didn't seem convinced by her guilt and the police were unable to figure out a motive. It all seems bizarre.

I'm not saying she didn't do it but I think there's so much more to this story than we'll ever know.

Doubtful, I think they've all moved on. That's what these incompetent management people do when they're tryng to avoid responsibility and blame.

Yes, I thought that too…

I am reading the timeline on DM as I confess to having basically no knowledge of the case before now.

Im up to baby D so baby number 4 and this is the point consultants raised alarms and honestly I can’t blame them.

I've just watched the Panorama thing now on i - player.

That poor consultant. He was genuinely distraught.

I did have my concerns she might be being framed before the verdict, but now I've seen more evidence, I'm convinced it's the right verdict. Plus, if that were me being wrongly accused I'd have been screaming my innocence from the rooftops not looking impassive in court.

I hope all the people badly affected by this get the support they need. LL's friend needs to get a bloody big reality check and realise she's been groomed too.

So little evidence that the trial started in October and finished yesterday after she was first arrested in 2016 (seven years ago).

Now I'm not an expert but I didn't think it's typical for a trial to last nine months. What were they doing the whole time if there was that little evidence????

What you really mean is you haven't seen all the details plastered all over the media yet to your satisfaction. But that's got fuck all to do with a lack of evidence which supports your gut feeling that she is innocent.

The problem for her friend is that if she allows herself to accept that Letby was capable, what does that say about herself and whether she could have done something to stop it. It's almost as if she'd have to take on some of the responsibility (which she isn't responsible for but psychologically you take on anyway).

This is exactly the problem and why no one wants to speak up. My mother was a whistleblower in the 90s, she worked for social services in children’s homes, the amount of physical and sexual abuse going on was horrendous, but she was shut down and lost her job when she tried reporting it. A couple of years later it was all over the papers.

I was in a situation where I considered whistleblowing.

By chance I met someone from CQC at the time and discussed it - they made me realise that I had basically zilch protection as a whistleblower and my life would be made completely miserable, and there was no guarantee any of my concerns would be taken seriously.

So I just left and moved on.

I wonder if that lead paediatrician still works there and if so is he in trouble for the panorama interview? Because I can’t believe the trust authorised him doing it and normally talking to the press like that would mean you have broken the trusts media policy.

They dented my daughter’s cheekbones getting her out. She knows that the horror of her birth is one of the reasons she is an only. She knows it’s the reason I can’t ride a bike due to the damage done to me. She knows it’s the reason we couldn’t establish breastfeeding and I expressed milk for her instead. Having her impacted on and changed me. I’m
assuming that being open about it won’t produce a serial killer. 😬

I know people who work in teaching who get really angry and upset about students being abused by their parents and nothing being done about it. The procedure is to report suspected abuse to the head of safeguarding who then reports it to social services who then do bugger all. A teacher going straight to the police would be in massive trouble but that is really what needs to be done. Cut out all the middlemen.

Why tell her all that ? Sorry I think that’s awful. I don’t think a child needs to know. Could be psychologically damaging. As a parent your job is to protect a child not rub their nose in how damaging their own birth was.

Did you tell her they dented her cheekbones? Sorry but that’s shocking - how old was she when given that information?

I know that some of the parents complained that she seemed almost excited after that child had died. However, at least once a doctor went into the room while she was in the process of killing a baby and also parents did the same and she seemed very calm and collected. That is incredibly worrying. For a normal person caught in the middle of doing something wrong, their faces would flush and their hearts would race. To have no reaction is very scary.

Depends whether their investigation was flawed or not.

We can see in the evidence she is seeking attention and other rewards through her behaviours.

I don’t think we ever have a neat ‘why’ answer for this level of criminality, it’s so far outside the range of decent human behaviour we can’t relate to it.

I hope she will admit her crimes and we might get more insight, but nothing can explain it. I can’t see her admitting her crimes unfortunately. I hope to be proved wrong on that.

I used to do voluntary work in a women's prison for a few years, and I know that Lucy Letby will have a pretty bad time of it - at least socially if not physically because of guards etc - at the hands of her fellow inmates. There are very few women prisoners, most of whom have not committed crimes that involve harming people, who would be OK with murdering babies.

I'm not saying she didn't do it but I think there's so much more to this story than we'll ever know.

I think there’s a lot more to come out.

To start killing several years into her nursing career seemingly randomly is just bizarre.

The senior policewoman talking about the ongoing investigation sounded to me quite nervous about what they are going to find.

Once they know when she actually started harming babies for sure they may be able to to find a bit more insight into why. Though that level of cruelty will never be completely explainable no matter what they find.

Delighted to hear it. She preyed on THE most vulnerable in society. She deserves a lifetime of pain for it no matter what guise it comes under. Cold, calculated bitch.

Yup.

Forensic genealogy based on genealogy websites is a hugely controversial issue in terms of ethics and consent but is solving many, many cases. DNA evidence isn't indisputable proof however but it usually good enough to prove beyond reasonable doubt.

The Golden Gate killer, Joseph DeAngelo in the US was identified using DNA forensic genealogy.

He is an ex-Police officer who had ceased his raping and murders for many years before he was arrested as an elderly man. Proving, along with Dennis Rader and others, that the previous psychological and criminal profiling statements of 'fact' that serial offenders would not stop unless forced to by prison or death, to be bollocks.

With Joseph DeAngolo, the Golden State killer, in the years when he wax raping and murdering and not thinking for a second that DNA would be a 'thing' he left DNA at numerical crime scenes.And the police didn't even know about DNA till it became a 'thing'.

But DNA only means something if you have a match. For years after the advent of DNA evidence, the Police were using the DNA profile to match against any profiles in the criminal justice system of individuals arrested or incarcerated. No match.

So some forensic genealogists put his DNA profile into genealogy sites who include that data and don't have a policy to restrict law enforcement from using that data (a lot of sites won't assist law enforcement).

So they found a DNA match to however many × cousin to other people on the genealogy site so they could say "the person who raped/killed this victim shares this % of DNA with this person on this site so they are related

Then you work on the family trees to find the most likely person and in DeAngolos case,a Judge felt the genetic evidence was compelling enough for the Police to monitor him and covertly gain a DNA sample. Which they did from a tissue and his car door handle.

That DNA sample giving an extremely low liklihood when compared to DNA from the original crimes, that any other person in the world could have committed them.

After arrest aged 73, he made some kind of confession that he committed the rapes and murders while under the influence of an 'alter personality'. With no evidence being assessed by psychiatrists that assessed him that he was suffering from a disassociate personality disorder.

His defence team also suggested he may be suffering from Alzheimers and he looked confused being wheeled into court in a wheelchair.

In-cell CCTV recording documented him working out on his cell lifting water bottles as weights and doing press-ups and pull-ups unusual for a man of his age.

I haven't followed the evidence presented but if we don't trust our jury system to make the right call, who do we trust? I don't know how people on the jury for a case like this even cope with the responsibility and the distressing evidence they see and hear.

That said, assuming she is guilty as convicted, I think a lot of what is being said about her on this thread and in the media is effectively people looking for evidence with which to other her, because it makes them feel better. She had to have had a bad childhood, it must be the parents, she looks evil, she looks this or that. She clearly looked normal enough to evade suspicion for a long time. We don't know why she did it and we never will unless she tells us and even then she might be lying. We can't know how much was nature and how much nurture and we aren't qualified to diagnose her, though presumably there will be a psych report for sentencing.

On the death penalty, I don't agree we should bring it back. One person wrongly executed is one person too many and it doesn't seem much of a deterrent in the countries that have it. But it should be a whole life tariff for sure.

I can well believe that the trust actively encouraged him to do it. The old management team is long gone and he’s a real media asset to get across the message that clinicians there have patient safety at the heart of their practice. They need to convince local people that their services are safe. If I’d written the media plan (30 years in NHS comms) for this that interview would have formed a key part of it.