Lucy Letby - new thread

[anonymousamy]

No idea why the last one was taken down, but for anyone who wants to continue the discussion on Letby, I’m starting a new thread here.

I’m 100% sure she’s guilty, but I’m still massively struggling to comprehend why on earth she did it.

I'm a nurse and what she has done infuriates me. To be in such a position of trust for such vulnerable babies and to murder and harm so many, and more that we don't know of yet. I have tried to understand/ figure out why she has done it. But I have given up. At the end of the day, if you are a rational human being who cares, has empathy and a good moral compass you will never ever ever figure out why. And really it's not important now.

She's behind bars for the rest of her pathetic existence. Now let's prosecute those senior managers for corporate manslaughter. Ultimately they allowed this to happen, they need to stand trial.

Was she the one that was arrested and it was in the papers and then it was 'proved' she didnt do anything/charges dropped or something?

Or was there another case where a nurse was stealing drugs/stealing insulin or something, somewhere up north?

As if it isn’t abhorrent enough without introducing elements that don’t exist.

I don’t think we will ever Truley understand why she killed those babies. As a crime it really isn’t comparable to many other crimes. So the triggers and underlying factors are probably very different to more common crimes.

I think people would be surprised how seemingly normal a lot of stranger murderers are.

No statistical evidence.

There were 22 incidents of babies collapsing on the ward with no real explanation. Many were stable babies reaching important milestones, some were nearly due to come home. 7 died. Some who survived had life changing injuries.

Letby was the only person on duty for every single one. By a significant margin. She was on duty for every other death on the ward too. 13 in 12 months. The previous year there was 3.

A review of all of the medical evidence showed several of the babies had unexplained air embolism. A couple had serious internal injuries, some showed signs of overfeeding, two had synthetic insulin in their bloodstream. On the stand Letby admitted the insulin couldn't have happened accidentally and someone must have poisoned the babies. She hung the tpn bags.

When she was moved from nights to days, the collapses which had only occurred between midnight and 4am, suddenly started only happening during the day. When she was completely removed they stopped. Since then there's been one death on the ward in 7 years. Being caught standing over a desaturating baby doing nothing.

Lots of inappropriate behaviour, taking home and keeping hundreds of handover sheets, searching for parents on Facebook including on Christmas day, unsettling comments to bereaved parents, writing a deranged note saying "I killed them on purpose because I'm not good enough to care for them, I am evil I did this".

Of course, the judge is right. Trying to find a reason may as well be trying to open up her brain, look through it and also ask a mind reader to figure things out. In other words, no one may ever know.

There are rules around how long you can question someone before you either have to charge or release them.

I don’t know the details of the arrests, but it’s entirely possible that they brought her in for questioning but didn’t gain enough from that to bring charges, then they can continued to gather evidence, and on the last occasion they had enough evidence as well as the questioning to charge her with the crimes.

I think that might have been a different one, it would generally go quiet after her arrests if I remember rightly. And the narrative seemed to be this poor lady was being investigated with no proof as there were no charges, probably to cover up hospital failings. Obviously we now know the truth but I'm curious why there weren't charges during those first arrests.

Prior to her first arrest, did people know that she had taken home handover sheets and nursing notes?

Werent they stored somewhere, didnt people notice they were missing?

Also how/when was it established she was searching for the parents on facebook? Before or after her arrest?

Power, attention, excitement....
I hope people get bored of her quickly and she never gets any more headlines.
The families of the babies however deserve ongoing attention and support

But the collapses themselves were the unusual thing, not the fact that the babies then didn't survive them. It wasn't that babies who were in crisis for known and explained reasons died rather than recovered strangely often in her care - which might indeed suggest incompetence - it was that stable babies kept having crises. You can't be so incompetent that just being around causes crises to happen so if the common factor was her the only possible explanation is that she was directly causing them.

Could you recommend a resource for reading up? I feel like most newspaper articles are just repeating the same stories but not going any deeper.

I see what you’re saying. More than she looks “normal”, it’s the fact she apparently had such a normal-sounding life - by all accounts she had friends, a good career and a loving, supportive family and wasn’t someone who engaged in criminal acts or was known to the police prior to the murders. It just seemed to come completely out of the blue. It’s hard to get your head around I suppose. That’s what makes it all the more shocking.

I cant seem to find a decent paper that you dont need a subscription for, I get my news from here!

Are you thinking of this one?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3086189/amp/Nurse-Victorina-Chua-guilty-murdering-poisoning-patients-Stepping-Hill-hospital.html

It's taken years to gather the necessary medical evidence in order to bring a case against letby to the court. Anyone with any medical knowledge will recognise that the unexplained deaths of number children some of which were stable and the pattern in which these children fell ill would suspect foul play, as did several experienced doctors did at the time and raised their grieves and asked for an investigation. The trust and those higher up aswell as letby are accountable.

Someone mentioned incompetence, you could account for that if the wrong dosage of a drug was given or the wrong drug but this was deliberate, premeditated and happened to numberous babies.

I have spent a lot of time wondering about her motives as well. Supposedly she doesn't show the usual signs of being a psychopath.

It's clear from the texts that she relished the attention and made everything about her. Apparently she always wanted to work with the sickest babies and would be annoyed when put on the more "boring" wards.

I've heard it suggested that she wanted the attention and validation of being there for parents during the worst time of their lives, being the one to say the right things, being seen as someone really good at her job, being part of the memory of it all etc.

Surely a better way of being seen as really good at her job would be to engineer a terrifying near miss where she, being alone on the ward, gets to save the day. The consultants would be impressed. The parents would remember her and have immense gratitude etc.

But she didn't do that. And it's not even that she intended to do that but did it badly because she chose things like the insulin to ensure they died. It makes me think it must be more than just wanting attention - there must be something about the act or effect that give her pleasure.

I guess people like the rest of us just can't comprehend it but it's difficult to get your head around how somebody could do this or how someone's mind could be so wrong and so evil. I think it is human nature to want to search for an explanation.

No it was a woman.

Or was it someone who just stole some drugs or was accused of stealing drugs?

You don’t need a subscription for the Guardian!

Cheshire Police have put up some informative posts on their FB page about how they concluded the investigation. They said they once had 32,000 pages worth to go through with a fine tooth comb.

It just incomprehensible.

Yes I know we know that now,, but at the time without PM on every child ( were there PMs on every child?), how would that be established?

@TrippinEdBalls Thank you for explaining - that makes sense. So it's that even if the babies had been completely alone without anyone caring for them, the specific things that went wrong just wouldn't have happened. In that case I see then why the only explanation would have been her actually causing it.

Rebecca Leighton was originally arrested and charged.

Well thats not a decent paper

Can't remember which paper now, but I read earlier today it will be 6 months isolation on suicide watch then gradual integrated into the main prison population. There is massive risk but its too expensive to justify isolation/suicide watch for longer than 6 months. There's a different term for female prions but the equivalent of a Cat A.

So in potentially 6 months it wouldn't be surprising to see more headlines about her.