Lucy Letby ( To understand)

[PassingStranger]

What made her kill these babies. Been in the news again today.

It's hard to understand?
Presume as she is in prison and not a hospital, she is not mentally ill?

Will anyone try to find out, I guess if people don't admit they are guilty it's hard too.

Instead of people saying give me 5 mins in a cell with her, surely it's better to stop this happening or maybe it's not possible?
Why does she want to be one of the most hated women in the universe and not give a shit about the babies families and even her own parents?

So much better to be known for doing something nice and have people like you?
AIBU to wonder why she took this road in life?

The police man on the podcast also said in the year before arrest the whole team were given the evidence and they all came to the same conclusion separately.

@Sohardtoknow And am I right in thinking that even when people are diagnosed with a PD after conviction they normally stay in the prison system and not transferred to psychiatric facilities? That’s just an aside really, I vaguely remember something like this back when indeterminate (is that the right word?) sentences were brought in, supposedly for people who were neither treatable or rehabilitate-able. I don’t know, I’m wandering off down a rabbit hole now, Just trying to get my thoughts in order.

Some people probably prefer privacy until it's their baby that's killed...

I'm sorry that happened to you. It's natural you would sympathise with the falsely accused.

I think this is a very different case, though. Just thinking about the differences in your case:

• Were you investigated by the police for 2 years, and they independently reached the conclusion of your guilt?

• Were the doctors who were concerned about your behaviour repeatedly sanctioned for raising those concerns and forced to apologise to you, but persisted in those concerns anyway?

• Did the doctors involved in your case repeatedly push for independent investigations of their own workplace and practices?

• Was there a mountain of evidence all pointing to your guilt?

In your case, only one child's welfare was brought into question, there was no pattern of multiple injuries, events and deaths only corresponding to when you were around. The cases are very very different and the evidence pointing to LL guilt is convincing.

I don't believe it about every serial killer, no. Because sometimes people murder repeatedly for obvious personal gain, and so are arguably acting rationally, if equally abhorrently. Examples might be if LL had instead murdered a serise of elderly people after first getting them to name her as their beneficiary. Atrocious conscience less crimes, but coming from a place of rationality, to gain wealth. Or a person involved in organised crime who murders a serise of rivals to maximise profit. LL acted in the worst imaginable way, the only gain to her being (possibly) attention and a sense of power. There is no rationality in acting so disproportionately to achieve these things, so for that reason I believe her to be mentally unwell. Her physical appearance and sex is irrelevant to that.

I think making an attempt to understand helps us to better safeguard ourselves, children and vulnerable people.

Very much depends on the individual case , risk level etc. close family member works in the prison system and said majority of those in prison have a MH diagnosis. I don’t think the psychiatric units have the capacity

Lots of the deaths were also on significant anniversaries/bench marks/imminent discharges.....too many to be a coincidence.

You’re right it’s good to look at it objectively. I just feel I was always so naive and trusting thinking people don’t lie - not professionals anyway. If you’d asked me about this kind of case 10 years ago I’d have said that clearly she’s guilty look at all the evidence but now I think well, I’ve seen how things can spiral and how one false opinion can be repeated to the point it becomes fact.

It’s just a struggle to imagine anyone hurting premature / sick babies it’s an absolute nightmare scenario I think sometimes our minds want to see the good / not believe something that makes us see the very dark side of humanity.

She’s clearly a very messed up person - but hasn’t passed the test to be criminally insane.

She definitely killed those babies. People are so easily taken in by the nice-girl act. No one wants to believe it about women, but we can be just as vicious as men.

Yes but we can only understand THAT they fancy kids, not why or what it is they find attractive. And the same with LL. there isn’t going to be an explanation that makes sense to someone without her disposition.

And also having a PD does not make a person mentally ill per se and therefore would not warrant treatment in a facility. Generally (with the exception of trauma-caused PDs like BPDs), there’s not much that can be done to “cure” them. Someone who is grandiose coupled with a total lack of empathy isn’t going to be helped by being in a psychiatric facility.

@Feelsodrained I’m not sure about that, there seems to be quite a bit of research indicating that there are a cluster of co-morbidities around pedophilia that may be relevant to both cause and enactment.

Yes, the 'female, young and pretty' thing is a complete red herring as far as I am concerned. The oddities are the complete absence of obvious personal gain other than hypotheses about power and 'god complexes' and even more nebulous theories about a secret crush on a doctor, and also the fact that LL appears in all other respects to have been a deeply ordinary girl who grew into a deeply ordinary woman -- stable background, supportive parents and friends who are still supporting her, education, friends, responsible job.

I would agree that this leaves us with either (1) 'mentally unwell' or (2) that it's an unsafe conviction in the context of proven systemic failures and problematic statistical analysis.

The hospital wasn't allowed to take very early preemies due to the deaths, so it's not a "smoking gun" to say the deaths stopped when LL left.

They could have stopped because suddenly the hospital was looking after much older and more robust babies.

I've also read evidence which confirms babies died while she was off shift but weren't included in the spreadsheet everyone has seen.

Sadly, I think it's all too possible for herd mentality and doctors with big egos making her a scapegoat for NHS feelings and a ward that wasn't coping.

With regards the insulin, the body can make a certain type of insulin and there have been cases where this has been detected in blood samples of babies where there was no foul play.

If you haven't, read the NYT article looking into the possibility she didn't do it. I found the link on reddit

I'm not saying she's innocent. I don't know if she is. Just that her behaviour is also consistent with someone who is deeply traumatised.

You are right, actually. My comment was written somewhat in haste.
That's why the intelligent ones are perceived so dangerous to the rest of us.
Letby might have not even enjoyed the "power and control", it might have simply been a case of her being angry with these children (so much attention and care towards them) ... and they were so frail...
Psychopaths, intelligent or less, are almost always borne from parental emotional/psychological terror.

Who knows when it is real and when it's not??

You are omitting the possibility of psychopathy and other personality disorders. These are not mental illnesses and people can be high functioning with them. But they may be linked very strongly to criminal behaviour.

There are facets to her childhood, upbringing etc that we will never know and can't know really, as the only witnesses are her and her parents. You assume her childhood was normal but you don't actually know that it was. There are countless people who can give accounts of their very abnormal childhoods and dysfunctional family dynamics that are known only to themselves and would appear normal or even idyllic from the outside.

There is convincing evidence of her guilt and no reasonable alternative explanation for the events that happened. Should serial killers be left to go on killing if they seem too "normal" or until we've figured out exactly what's going on in their head (impossible if they're not willing)? That's not how justice does or should work. More babies would be dead now if that was the approach of the police. They've stopped dying since LL was removed from looking after them.

Surely, if the deaths were cause by malpractice, neglect or incompetence, they could be expected to continue at the same rate whether she was at work or not?

They also wouldn't have occured consistently on significant occasions/bench marks.

I think some people have a bit missing. Through the way their brains developed physically or early experiences (and those two are connected), something did not turn out right.

We all have the potential for doing terrible things but genetics, upbringing, education, experience, morals and personality etc steer us.

I wonder if there were terrible things in her childhood, that might have broken her. Both Wests apparently came from abusive incestuous families, Fred West had several head traumas as a child and their children have suffered from their upbringing. Things can crawl down the generations.

Being mentally unwell, even severely so is not a free pass to not being criminally responsible for your acts, even if it was a contributing factor.

And that's actually parallel to physical illness. If I am depressed and that makes me irritable and lowers my threshold for murdering my husband I can still be responsible for that crime. Just as if I was irritable because I was in pain from my broken ankle. Neither would be my fault and both might have contributed to my crime but I still made the decision to do the crime, knowing that it was wrong and a crime.

The threshold for not being criminally responsible is really at the level of psychosis. Eg you kill a baby because you believe it is a demon and if you don't it will eat the real baby. You're detached from reality and your delusions have caused you to view wrong/criminal actions as right and non-criminal.

Again that's a parallel to physical illness - like that poor woman who was not criminally responsible for crashing her car because she was having a seizure.

Killing a baby because you don't care about the suffering caused and may even enjoy it, knowing it is a real baby, knowing that killing it is viewed as wrong and is a crime, knowing it will cause suffering - and LL undoubtedly did know these things, easily meets the bar for criminal responsibility, even if it is far removed from what we consider "normal" thinking and behaviour.

Lacking empathy and normal boundaries for your behaviour isn't considered to be an illness.

Thank you for laying that out.

I couldn't be bothered to.

These posters are like conspiracy theories, at some point the bat shittery and reversing of cause and effect starts to make you give up even trying, I appreciate your resilience

@JFDIYOLO thats a good phrase ‘these things can crawl down through generations’. Chilling. And I think likely to be true, although in most cases not in this way.

Pumping their stomachs full of air and shoving instruments violently down their throats doesn't really help though, does it?

The fact that most of them died on significant bench mark anniversaries rather than random dates is a wee bit coincidental too.

I think there is some naivety here as well.

Nearly all violent crime is perverse and doesn't directly benefit the perpetrator (and in fact massively harms their life prospects) but they do it because of their own f*cked up psychological reasons. Agathie Christie type murder-as-a-means-to-get-something is the minority of murder.

Eg what do domestic abusers get out of murdering their girlfriends / wives? Yet we can all accept that's a crime that happens regularly, and we can all accept their criminal responsibility even though presumably something went very wrong in their emotional development. Being abusive and then killing your partner is a recognised pattern of behaviour. And so is being a nurse and killing your vulnerable patients - albeit far rarer.