RedHanded - Episode 312 - Lucy Letby: “Trust me, I’m a nurse”

Episode Date: August 24, 2023

On 21 August 2023, 33-year-old nurse Lucy Letby was handed a whole-of-life order for the murder of seven babies, and the attempted murder of six more. She is only the fourth woman in British history to receive the sentence. And now this seemingly young, meek, slightly goofy, “vanilla” girl – whose bedroom was filled with stuffed animals – is now Britain’s most prolific child serial killer. So what really happened? How was she allowed to kill so many? Why did she do it? And how was she eventually caught?To vote for us at the British Podcast Awards, click here: https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/votingTo nominate a challenge, as well as a case for the bonus episode if we win gold, click here: https://forms.gle/BG7suAW7a4sUPZxr8See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Saruti. I'm Hannah.

And welcome to Red Handed, where we are tired. Yeah, once again, chosen to make our lives more difficult than it needs to be. Yeah, it was rough. Yesterday, Monday morning, we woke up and Hannah had some sort of horrible vomiting virus. I hope you don't mind me telling the people. I'm completely empty. I haven't eaten anything since Sunday afternoon. And I'm too scared to. Oh no. Well, let's get through this horrific case. And if Hannah is sick, then it's a multitude of reasons why. So I woke up yesterday morning and obviously we knew what was going on with Lucy Letby. We have previously covered it as a Patreon

bonus episode while the trial was done, but deliberations were still going on. And we wanted to sort of talk about it. So we did it over there. This is not that episode. This is a brand new episode that was written yesterday. It is now my personal best of my fastest ever written episode because I did it in a day. Good for you. And then I went and sat in the bath because I have stomach cramps. So lots of oversharing, lots of information here that you guys probably don't need to know. But know that we love you and we work very, very hard to hold on to that love. Like bringing you, as quickly as humanly possible, an episode on the case of Lucy Letby. Now, before we get into it, I am going to ask for something in exchange.

If you would please pause for 10 seconds. We'll wait. Head on over to britishpodcastawards.com slash vote and vote for us to win the listener's choice. It would mean the world to us. We would be ever so grateful. And then remember to go to your emails, verify that vote, and we will be so, so thankful. And then you can come back and listen to this. Ready? Okay. I'm trusting you that you did it. If you didn't, then shame on you. But but i believe you so let's get on with today's episode because it is basically the only thing everyone wants to talk about right now especially

when you have a true crime podcast all of my friends are like what's going on yeah and i'm like i'm trying to find out shut the fuck up yeah no right yeah even like business calls that we've had yeah yeah people have been like so did she do it i know like literally after i finished the episode yesterday i then went through all of the emails and replied to everybody being like sorry i can't get back to you on this until tomorrow because lucy leppy but we're here now and we're ready to record this episode so let's go so on the 10th of october 2022 the trial of 33 year old neonatal nurse lucy leppy began She was charged with seven counts of murder and 10 more of attempted murder at the Countess of Chester Hospital in England between June 2015

and June 2016. From the moment of her arrest, this was a case where the stakes could not have been higher. Not just because Lucy Letby was this pretty, softly spoken, demure young woman, the literal poster child for this hospital, but also because she was accused of killing vulnerable, premature babies, some just a day old. Letby denied everything, claiming that the unit was providing inadequate care

and that she was being scapegoated by the NHS. However, once she was found guilty on the 16th of August this year, so literally just a few days ago, Lucy Letby became Britain's most prolific child serial killer ever. That in and of itself is bonkers. Like, I don't know what Britain's most prolific child serial killer is meant to look like, but it's certainly not Lucy Letby. That's not the image that leaps into people's minds. And I think we can all agree that that title bestowed upon this woman completely and totally contradicts anyone's idea of a serial killer

not that i think enough places are calling her that no i actually just thought that you haven't you barely see that at all no i think um because she's a woman probably that everybody's sort of like well what happened here what could have happened and i'm like she's a fucking serial killer can we get that like front and foremost of everybody's minds. This woman is a convicted serial killer. So what really happened? How was Lucy Leppie allowed to kill so many babies? Because this seven counts of murder and six of attempted murder that she's been convicted of,

they're the convictions. I do not think, and nor does anybody, that that is the entire story. No, and she was charged with more, so they just couldn't get her for him. Exactly. And, of course, the all-important question that everybody wants to talk about. Why? Why did she do it? To try and answer these questions, we need to start at the beginning. The Countess of Chester is an NHS hospital in, surprise, Chester, a historic city in the North West. The hospital, known locally as the Countess, treats patients from across the city and North Wales. Its maternity wing delivers more than 2,000 babies every year, and the special care unit treats those babies that are especially

vulnerable due to being premature or otherwise not very well. These being particularly at-risk babies, it was understood, by everyone on the ward and parents as well, that not all of them would make it. But, thanks to their natural resilience and the marvels of modern medicine, and a dedicated team of doctors and nurses, most babies do pull through. However, in 2015, paediatric doctors in the SCU at the Countess of Chester started to grow concerned.

In case after case, babies that had seemed to be doing well were suddenly and inexplicably deteriorating, and no one could understand why. And this is an important point to make. Obviously, here we are talking about at-risk vulnerable babies. They are premature. But a lot of the ones that died were healthy. I think people sometimes think like, oh, well, premature means half of them are always going to die. That is not the case. These babies were healthy babies that were stable, that were doing well and on the right road to recovery, who suddenly started to deteriorate. Now for a bit of context on the unit's mortality rates, there had only been one infant death on the entire ward in 2010, three in 2011, three again in 2012, two in 2013, and three in 2014. But by the end of

2015, eight babies had died. And there had also been a huge jump in serious collapses. Now figures like these are of course hard to ignore but what's interesting is the fact that the alarm on Lucy Letby was raised in July 2015 after just three unusual and unexpected deaths that year. And I say this because there have been accusations of course that the hospital, the doctors and even the police were just trying to find someone to blame for the high number of sudden deaths. And they pinned it all on Lucy Lepi. And if they had waited until the end of the year

when eight babies had died to start pointing the finger, maybe you could sort of like have that be part of the conversation. But now we know that doctors didn't wait until eight babies had died that year to bring up their concerns about this nurse. On the 2nd of July 2015, Dr Stephen Breary, the head consultant on the neonatal unit, reported to senior hospital management that he had serious concerns about Lucy Letby, mainly because she was the only nurse on shift for each of the three unusual deaths so far that year. But despite this, Letby remained on the ward and absolutely

no action was taken. Over the next year, more babies died and more of the consultants working on the ward became suspicious of Lucy Letby. In October 2015, Dr. Breary made another report about his growing fears. And by February 2016, Dr. Ravi Jairam, another consultant, also alerted hospital management about Lucy Letby's behaviour. But Dr. Ravi said that when he had a meeting with the chief executive of the hospital, someone called Tony Chambers, he was simply told, I can see how that might be a very convenient explanation for things. Things being the huge spike in deaths and collapses on the ward. So they're basically just like, oh, how very convenient, doctor. Yeah.

You're blaming this nurse for why so many babies are dying. And it's like, okay, well, if you think that's what the doctor's doing, why are you still not interested in why there are so many collapses or why there is such a spike in deaths so he basically just accuses him of being like well your department's going down the pan and you're looking for a way out yeah whatever this tony chambers thinks is the reason he is aware of the fact that there is a spike in deaths and he has a consultant here coming to him and telling him i think there is something going on with this nurse and he's like no but no more curiosity as to why and chambers also took a very bizarre step of instead of listening to the concerns being raised by the

doctors demanded that doctors stop reporting on let be altogether and if they did they would face a possible referral to the general medical council but the consultants weren't having any of it. They refused to let it go. Can you imagine? No. That's them putting their licenses on the line. Yeah. Being like, if you continue to complain about this nurse

who you have serious concerns about, and we are also faced with the proof that there is a rise in death rates on the ward, I'm going to report you to the General Medical Council. There is a lot of conversation now about like how to treat whistleblowers within the nhs i even think the term whistleblower is the wrong word yeah they're not whistleblowers they're just being like what yeah whistleblower for me means like like a lower person calling out the higher ups and it's the

opposite of that yes and also i would say whistleblower and again maybe we're getting too much into the semantics of it i just think the word whistleblower rubs me the wrong way to label these consultants but it feels like somebody who's leaking information that the organization thinks they shouldn't be in order to raise awareness of what's going on they aren't even leaking it out externally they're telling the people in charge of this hospital you need to pay attention to what's going on here because something is not right and they were punished for it and like we can go on and talk about this later like with the reporting policies but this is exactly the same fucking shit that happened with stuff like the Rotherham child abuse cases when social workers raised concerns about what was going on

so again we're talking there not the health service but the social work arena here those people were sacked like we need a serious overhaul and reform in this country in the way in which people who are reporting concerns in our public services are treated and responded to. But we'll come back to it. Because after all this happened, like Hannah said, the consultants refused to let it go. And finally, after yet more deaths and more inexplicable collapses, the unit was in a state of total confusion and demoralisation. The staff had a meeting on the 24th of June 2016, during which Dr Breary actually sat next to Lucy Letby.

He asked her after the meeting how she was coping and if she was going to take it easy over the weekend after how horrible everything had been on the ward lately. But she just replied that she was going to be back at work the next day and that there was no problem. And basically during this meeting, people are offered time off. People are offered like reduced shift or move shifts around because of how horrible everything had been. Lucy Letby is the only nurse who was present for every single one of these deaths that have affected everybody so much and yet she's like no i'll see you tomorrow i'll be back at work and again that

on its own is not indicative of everything but dr briri has given his first interview with bbc panorama which you can watch obviously on the bbc and he is like something about the way she spoke there was no sadness in her face. There was no like stress. There was nothing to show that what was happening on the ward that was affecting everybody so much was affecting her at all.

She was so like, no, be back at work tomorrow. See you then. And Dr. Brewery goes on in this interview to say that he found it incredibly jarring to see how unheartbroken she was. So that night, he called the hospital's deputy executive, Karen Rees, to say that Letby had to be removed from the unit

immediately. But Rees insisted that Letby was safe to work. And when challenged by Dr. Breary, she even said that she was happy to take responsibility if anything happened to other babies when Letby was involved. The very next day, another baby that had been doing well collapsed. Three weeks later, Lucy Letby was finally removed from the ward and placed on administrative duties. But there was still no formal investigation. The consultants were demanding that the police be called, but records show that senior management just kept telling them, action is being taken, stop emailing. It seemed like the hospital's

bureaucrats were more concerned with avoiding any reputational damage than listening to their doctors, and we've all heard that one before. Yeah I think there is a huge cultural shift that has happened in the NHS over the past few decades where more and more of like patient care has been outsourced to management who are not medical professionals. They are bureaucrats who were just brought in to like make things more efficient or whatever but at what cost at this cost and so lucy's later claims at trial that she had been made a scapegoat for hospital failings makes no sense especially when you consider that the hospital managers went out of their way to protect her again information we did not have when we did the Patreon bonus on this, and this

is why it is a completely different episode. Hospital administrators even upheld a grievance that Lucy Letby made against the consultants who reported her for getting her taken off the ward. These doctors were made to apologise to Lucy Letby or face severe consequences. And so, this collection of doctors wrote, Dear Lucy, we would like to apologise for any inappropriate comments that may have been made during this difficult period. We are very sorry for the stress and upset that you have experienced in the last year. Please be reassured that patient safety has been our absolute priority during this difficult time.

And it's signed by all seven consultants. Two consultants, including Dr Ravi, even had to attend mediation sessions to make peace with Letby. With the hospital's medical director, Ian Harvey, telling the doctors via email that there was no smoking gun and that they were all to draw a line under this and move on. And then he put Lucy Letby back on the neonatal ward. I imagine Tony Chambers and Ian Harvey aren't sleeping particularly well these days. Well, yeah, I fucking hope not. Still, the doctors knew that they absolutely could not back down,

especially given the fact that while Lucy Letby had been off the ward, surprise, surprise, the strange deaths and the collapses had just stopped. And so, as the doctors dialed up the pressure, the hospital eventually asked for a review from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. Just to note, the consultants were not calling for this. They were like, call the fucking police. But this is as far as the hospital was willing to go at this point. Now, this review had no immediate explanation

for the increased deaths. What it did point to were failures in the hospital's investigations. Most of the babies underwent a post-mortem, but important tests were not carried out. Those included any tests that would have exposed traces of poisons or changes in things like blood sugar levels. Now, toxicology tests are not routine in infant deaths, but they are often run when the cause of death can't be established or perhaps when you're working on a neonatal ward and babies are dying left, right and centre and nobody has any idea why but this hospital had not done that the trust also expressed

its concerns in other areas significant gaps in medical and nursing rotas insufficient senior doctor cover poor decision making and a reluctance by some staff to seek advice from colleagues now again this is all just like, it's like pointing in one direction and missing the glaringly obvious. So in December, the hospital issued patients and staff electronic wristbands to track their whereabouts and monitor free beds. And then in July 2016, after the deaths just did not stop with Lucy Letby back on the ward, the Countess's neonatal unit stopped accepting premature infants born before 32 weeks gestation as a precaution. The report also crucially recommended

a thorough external independent review of each neonatal death between January 2015 and July 2016. Following this, eventually in May 2017, the police were finally called. And as a part of their investigation, Chester Police asked Dr Dewey Evans, a retired paediatrician, to carry out an independent review to determine whether or not he believed intentional harm had been done to these babies. I love Dr. Dewey Evans. I watched a very long interview with him where he talks about the entire process through which he led this review. And he is just the cutest, sweetest,

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Listen to The Rise and Fall of Diddy exclusively with Wondery Plus. So, Dr. Dewey Evans said that essentially, in his opinion, crime had been committed. So, Dr. Dewey Evans, before he starts the investigation, tells police, if you suspect someone or something specific, do not tell me who or what. I am not here to investigate a crime, merely to give my input on the deaths. So Dr Dewey was given the clinical reports and medical records of 30 babies who had died. And in that interview with him that I watched, he says that he understood why 15 of those babies had died. They had hemorrhaged, got infections, or succumbed to some congenital

abnormality. There were explanations for why those babies had passed away. But the other 15 deaths, Dr. Dewey said he could not explain as having a natural cause and also according to him their collapses were highly unexpected because they were doing well. So Dr Dewey goes through all of these records and is trying to figure out how these babies died and he sees that some of these babies had died from an air embolism resulting from an air bubble being injected into their blood circulation. And some of the babies are died as a result of having been injected with milk or milk and air directly into their stomachs. Premature babies are fed tiny amounts regularly rather than single large doses of milk because it swells their stomachs and stops their diaphragms from moving

properly, restricting breathing. Some of the babies in the 15 even had direct trauma. They were found with blood around their mouths or on the back of their throats. So it was clear to Dr Dewey, in his independent review, someone had meant to cause these babies harm. And then, in 2018, the police, working with a medical officer at the hospital, found two more cases. In these cases, two separate sets of twins, eight months apart, had suddenly presented with rapidly falling blood sugar. Now, according to Dr Dewey, this can happen in very young babies. So at first, it hadn't rung too many alarm bells until the

medical officer at the hospital carried out some blood tests and found that the babies had very high levels of insulin in their bodies. Now like we told you before from the report done by the Royal College of Paediatrics these kind of tests weren't regularly being done on the babies that passed away. So this medical officer doesn't carry out these tests on the blood samples that they had for these babies for two years after. And so they're finding these high levels of insulin in the body. Now, when the body produces insulin, it also produces C-peptide. In these babies, their insulin levels were high, but not their C-peptide levels, indicating that their bodies hadn't naturally made the insulin. So it must have been synthetic insulin that they had been injected with. Like I said, this had been missed for two years. It

wasn't in those 30 deaths that had been given to Dr Dewey. And when he was presented with this, he was absolutely shocked. According to Dewey and the police, these insulin cases were as close to a smoking gun as they figured they were going to get. And according to the police, it was a real turning point in the case. The fact that it had happened twice, eight months apart, was confirmation of a criminal act. Now, like we said, this review wasn't to point to who had done it, but rather whether these babies had been harmed intentionally. And the verdict from Dr Dewey was a resounding yes, someone had intentionally harmed these babies.

So now there had been 17 babies dead under suspicious circumstances and 25 suspicious collapses. The police checked the duty rotors because Dr Dewey told them that whoever did this did what they did minutes, even seconds, before the babies died or collapsed. So the killer will have had to have been on shift when these deaths and collapses happened. And Lucy Letby was the only nurse on shift for every single one of these deaths and incidents. In the interview, Dr. Jew is like, I started to help them go through the duty rotas,

and he was like, we got to baby four and already there was only one name that was on every single shift. By the time you get to 17 deaths plus 25 collapses, there's only one name? Where else are you going to look? So the police subsequently searched Lucy Letby's home where they found some very bizarre things. But before

we get to that, I have to talk about her bedroom itself, because it's so fucking weird. And also just like very juvenile, which comes up again later. So this woman is 33, the exact same age as me. And her pink and white bedroom was filled with teddy bears and other sort of like stuffed animals, like on her bed, not just like on shelves or tucked away in a cupboard or something, like out in the open. Also, glittery photo frames everywhere. And this is the real kicker. She even had two framed pictures with the slogans, shine like a diamond and leave sparkles wherever you go, written on them. It's not great. It's not great stuff. I'm sorry, she's such a fucking basic bitch. A basic creepy bitch.

It's so weird. She's 33. There were even fairy lights all over her bed. Hey man, I'm pro fairy light. I know this is all like probably not that relevant, but it is very annoying. She had duvet covers that were embroidered with the words sweet dreams. What in the actual fuck? I don't know what's going on it's really bizarre and this one oh one last one i promise you and then i'm done talking about what's in her house that isn't actually relevant to the evidence they found a card in her kitchen stuck up on her fridge

that said dear mummy happy birthday we love you love tigger and Love, Tigger and Smudge. Tigger and Smudge are her fucking cats. And her mum wrote that card. Well, to be fair, I may or may not mouth kiss Mabel and tell her that one day she will be my wife. And just to be clear, this isn't like her family home and this is like her bedroom and she just hasn't like updated it since she was like 14 or whatever no no no this is a house that she bought after becoming a nurse and this is her room in there that she put together I don't know it's it's very very strange it's very juvenile and it's hard to get away from that theme when it comes to Lucy Letby especially when you consider some things we're

going to come on to tell you about later regarding her secret doctor boyfriend. Yeah, juvenile is certainly the word. And I think it probably played a pretty major role in how she managed to hide and play in sight for so long. Because you don't expect someone with sweet dreams bedsheets to be murdering babies, but she did. But other than my criticisms of her decor or whatever, the search turned up some crucial pieces of evidence. Firstly, they found a series of post-it notes and diary entries covered in this kind of feverish scrawl. You can easily Google images it and find them to have a look at.

And these notes were covered in phrases like, help me, I can't do this anymore, and how can life be this way? The words hate and evil were repeated in all caps and circled in red pen. And most damning of all, the following words were written. I killed them. I killed them on purpose because I'm not good enough to care for them. I am a horrible, evil person. But then there are also phrases where she's written things like, did I do this? Was this me? Could I have done this? Could I be responsible? And then right at the end, again, in all caps, I am evil. I did this.

Now, obviously, this feels like a smoking gun. And I think before the verdict was reached, a lot of people were sort of flip-flopping about whether this meant anything, whether it was relevant. Some people were arguing it's just the ramblings of a person who's under an immense amount of psychological pressure. And also, it was repeatedly stated that these notes were written after the accusations were made. So maybe she was just sort of projecting some perceived guilt into these notes because of the way she was being made to feel by her colleagues. And that is what Lucy Letby went on to say in court. But obviously, in hindsight, the fact that she has been convicted, the fact that I do definitely think she did this and she is guilty, What do these writings mean? Why would she write them?

Why would she keep them? What's going on? They look very chaotic. They look very disorganized. It doesn't really fit with her demeanor at work and the perception everybody had of her of being a very well put together, very organized, very level-headed kind of person. I don't know. I think the fact that she's questioning her guilt in this, did I do it? Did I not do it? I did it on purpose. I'm evil. I don't know. It's all over the place. Could it point to a person who some have gone as far as to say is in total denial of her own guilt? I don't know if I necessarily believe that. But could it point to a person who, yes, has a very disordered mental state, but also who's maybe confused as to the reasons why she herself did it? I don't know. It really doesn't make much sense. But I don't think that these

are the most interesting things that they found in her room. Because the police also found, under Lucy's bed, in plastic bags, some things that are harder to explain away. They discovered bags of confidential information, things like handover sheets, medical records and blood oxygen reports, all related to the babies that had died, or almost died. It was also at this point that investigators learned that Letby had carried out dozens of searches online and on Facebook for the parents of the babies who died.

Like she'd been watching them. Interestingly, these searches were sometimes done straight away, but sometimes they were carried out much later on. For example, on the anniversaries of the babies' deaths. That, to me, was the thing that really like yeah it's hard to ignore if she does them straight away part of you could just be like she just had this horrible experience when you're in that kind of environment on a neonatal ward a lot of these parents said you spend a lot of time with these nurses they're looking after your baby sometimes

for months and you do talk you get close of course if she went and looked at them after and that was it you could just say she was looking at how they were coping to do it on the anniversaries to hold on to those babies memories for that long as a nurse that's weird yeah completely and i think you know obviously a lot more information has come out now the trial is over and i think before we had that information it is a lot easier to not side with Lucy but like try and like play devil's advocate enough but even when we didn't have all of this information that's the thing that sort of pushed me towards she's doing it is because there's too many there's too many things to explain away there's too much there was like a great sentence

that somebody said in one of the many interviews I watched for this. There are hundreds of arrows, little arrows, pointing at Lucy Lepi. There is not one arrow that points away from her. On top of that, on Lucy's phone, police found pictures of cards that Lucy herself had sent to bereaved parents. So she'd given them sympathy cards, but also taken pictures of those cards and kept them on her phone sometimes for years why that is it's a trophy it's a trophy i'm sorry like sending the card is one thing again you develop a close relationship with these people there is no doubt about that

but she's got pictures at the front of the card and the inside of the card and what she wrote to the families on her phone. Why? And there was so much at the house. The police were baffled. Lucy knew that they were coming. Why would she keep it all? I don't know. Why is it even there? She just has like bags, like plastic bags filled with these medical records why it's so incriminating but in any case on the 3rd of july 2018 police after finding all of this finally arrested 27 year old lucy leppy at her family home in hereford and they have also um released the body cam footage of this arrest it's easy to find if you guys haven't already seen it. Go check it out. It's well worth watching. It's very, very short. It's like 10 seconds long. But in it, the face that she's making, I can't help but look at and just feel like it's so

uncanny. She looks like someone wearing a mask, like someone pulling a face she thinks looks appropriate for the situation. But to me, she just looks sad. It looks weird. It's not the right expression for me looking at it, given the situation. I don't know. Maybe people would disagree. Go watch it for yourself. She looks like she's sulking or like petulant or like, poor me.

It's weird. It's a weird face. I feel like somebody being arrested for child murder would not be looking sad they'd be looking shocked and like outraged and terrified that is not the expression on her face and then in this body cam footage it gets to the point that they put her in the police car and then she says says, in this like, such quiet, really meek, really innocent little voice, she says, please can you move the seat forward? I've just had knee surgery. And I'm like, what the fuck? It might sound like a small inconsequential thing, but I don't think

it is. I think it again shows you that in the middle of being arrested for murdering a bunch of babies, she's not in shock. She's making this request that, again, I think absolutely feels like she's trying to play the victim. And in that moment, she's still trying to look as innocent and vulnerable as possible, which is her whole MO. And Lucy continued this theme when she was taken into questioning. She sits there, emotionless and clinical in these interviews. Police say that she was cooperative, but they saw no empathy when she spoke.

And she also speaks incredibly quietly. It's infuriating. And again, it really does feel like she's doing all of this to preserve this timid, meek image of herself. An image that she had already successfully used to get away with what she had been doing in the hospital for years. And here's a clip. Did you have any concerns that there was a rise in mortality rate? Yes. Okay, so tell me about that. What concerns did you have?

I think we don't just notice as a team in general than this and stuff that this was a rise compared to previous years. They told me that there would be a lot more deaths and that I think that just sort of is there for a lot of them. And I just find that clip so weird. Like the whole interview, all of the interviews, the hours of interview they do with her, it all sounds the same. It's all very flat and calm and controlled. There's no like, why am

I here? I didn't do this. There's no rage. If I was accused of doing something I didn't do, and the person who was accusing me would not listen to the fact that I hadn't done it, I would be seething, especially when you're talking about having murdered multiple babies. But she's so calm. She cooperates throughout the interview. She answers the questions. And I find it all the more hard to believe, like when you look at this police interview and you look at the way in which she was arrested when she's, again, so calm, so measured. Remember, this is a woman who has never, ever, ever been involved with the police before. She's never been arrested. She's never been questioned. She's never been in trouble. Nothing. But she's so in

control. She's so calm. I can only imagine if I was arrested, I would be freaking out. Yet she is so in control of herself. I don't know know and I think it's also interesting to remember this because she later says in court that the arrest by the police gave her PTSD and I only mentioned this like I said because it comes up later in an important way and I don't know there's nothing in this arrest or in the interview that I can see that would have been particularly traumatic to her. It's strange. And the police say the same thing. They're like, when did that happen?

She cooperates. She talks to us the whole time. And in the Daily Mail podcast, actually, it's very interesting. They talk to an interviewer, like a police interviewer, and she says the reason she thinks that Lucy Letby cooperated so much in that police interview and doesn't just sort of know comment all the way through is because she wanted to find out how much the police knew. And if you just know comment, you might not get to the root of all of what they have on you. I also think it is because she has to maintain that facade, right? If she just sits there and says no comment,

she is undermining that facade of the good girl, the one that always does the right thing. And here, in that clip, as you just heard, she's just like, oh, so meek, so quiet. Yes, of course I'll cooperate. I think even in this moment, she can't let down that facade of being the good girl, being the one that everyone can rely on, being the one that is like an a-star person i think she can't let it go no um i don't know many straight a students who

have been able to let it go but yeah she keeps up the facade because it's what it's served her so well for so long and this is a good point a, a good point as any, to pause and rewind. Who is Lucy Letby? There really isn't that much out there about her, which you've probably heard if you've been following this at all. All we know is that she was pretty normal. She was born in Hereford on the 4th of January 1990 and lived there basically her whole life. She went to Aylston School and Hereford Sixth Form College, and then she went on to study nursing at the University of Chester. In January 2012, after graduating, she was given a full-time role on the neonatal ward at the Countess of Chester,

where she was highly regarded. And in terms of her home life, Lucy Letby seems to have had a very, very, very unremarkable one. There is absolutely no history of abuse, no history of anything from her childhood. It is beyond ordinary. There's just nothing, no red flags. And I think it's important to point this out because we say all the time when we do episodes, not everyone who abuses goes on to harm other people. But here is a perfect example of someone who couldn't have had a more vanilla upbringing, with no signs of abuse, who went on to kill. Who went on to become Britain's most prolific child serial killer, no less. So, I don't know.

What we could find is just that she did apparently have a difficult birth and a friend of hers has said that lucy has always been grateful to the nurses who saved her and that's actually what inspired her to become a NICU nurse interesting lucy according to her friends could be shy and reserved and a bit serious with outsiders. But in their group, she was the goofy, bubbly, fun one. So again, no red flags there. She's social, she's personable, she's got friends, she's not sort of isolated. She fits into society. She holds down a steady job, a high pressure job. So again, no red flags. She studies, she goes to university, the first one in her family to go to university, her family are incredibly proud of her. They even put a notice in their local paper when she

graduated. That is how proud and that is how adoring of their daughter her parents were. Then she becomes a nurse, she bought a house, she adopted some cats and spent her spare time going out with her mates drinking cocktails and salsa dancing again so ordinary if anything beige she is beige i enjoyed in the daily mail podcast they call her the vanilla killer and i was like that is very good now those who have stood by her like her closest friends her best friend who's in that interview even says, I will never believe that she did this unless she comes and tells me she did this. And I'm like, you are so manipulated.

And her parents also have completely stood by her. None of them can believe that Lucy Letby would ever harm anybody, let alone the babies that she cared for. But I think that's because lucy hasn't wrapped around her little finger people like lucy let be are highly manipulative the whole woe is me butter wouldn't melt that's her manipulation i think often we think of manipulation as being really like aggressive or forceful you can manipulate people like this and especially when you are this kind of or pretending to be this kind of meek woman, this like doe-eyed, like I look after babies for a

living woman. This is her version of manipulation and it fucking worked. She had them all fooled but just because there are no strangled pets or peeping tomory in her background means nothing in terms of her guilt or innocence. You absolutely cannot look at a case like Lucy Letby, look at the fact that there are no red flags in her background and come to a conclusion that therefore she is not guilty. That is not the case.

And we get it. We completely get why people are thrown by this case and fascinated by it as well. Lucy doesn't fit the profile of what we'd expect. She's social, she's got friends, she's got a personable nature to some. She's well put together and she looked as if she had her life in order. But again, that's all part of the game. It's the mask of normality that allowed her to do what she was doing for so long. She wanted to be good at what she did. She did not want to get

caught. She was enjoying herself. She was loving it. So she used this tactic of acting totally normal, beige even, to fly under the radar to continue to be successful at what she wanted to do. And, you know, her total anonymity by boredom, essentially, meant that nobody really looked at her. But nobody is really looking at anyone because it's such an unbelievable thing to have done. So let's get back to the timeline. It would be four years before Lucy Letby would stand trial, charged with seven counts of murder and ten more of attempted murder.

There were, as we said, actually 25 suspicious incidents with 17 deaths, but the prosecution obviously just went for the cases they felt were the strongest. And so the trial of Lucy Letby, after countless COVID delays, got started on the 10th of October 2022. Letby pleaded not guilty and her defence was essentially that the hospital had provided inadequate care for these babies and she was being used to cover it all up. Even though later on when she's questioned by the prosecutor and she again says the stuff about I'm just being made a scapegoat for the hospital providing inadequate care, he says what exactly do you mean by that? What holes could you see in the care that was being provided for those babies that was inadequate, that led to their deaths, that could

provide another explanation for how these babies died if it wasn't you that killed them. And she honestly can't answer. The prosecution's case, on the other hand, was built on piece after piece of circumstantial evidence and it all pointed to Lucy Letby being a serial killer. The trial was a long and painful one. It went on for nine months and it is actually now

the record for the longest trial. Is it really? In British history. And there are two main reasons why it went on for so long. Obviously the sheer number of charges and also the complex medical context around each one. At the start of the trial, the jury was even handed a 25-page glossary of medical terms that might come up. Letby stood accused of killing seven infants and attempting to kill ten more, sometimes several times. There were 22 charges in total, all of which Letby denied. Now, we don't have the time or inclination to detail every single one. There are plenty of places that have done this though if you want to seek them out. But we have been through all of them and here are just a few stories to give you an idea of what this jury

were faced with. Now it's worth explaining at this point that no names of any of the victims or their parents were used in the trial. If you watched the sentencing yesterday you'll also know that when the judge came to saying the victim's names or the family's names they blacked out the live feed because it's all been kept completely secret. And yes the parents of each infant were of course present in court and forced to relive the worst day of their lives in excruciating detail. And usually during a trial, everyone's identity is public information. Open justice is a fundamental principle in the UK courts,

meaning that if possible, everyone is named. It is unusual to grant adult witnesses anonymity, but the judge in this case decided that the parents' evidence would be better if they were anonymous. And since the baby's identities decided that the parents' evidence would be better if they were anonymous. And since the babies' identities might reveal their parents' identities, all of the babies were given a letter. Horrifyingly, those letters stretch all the way from child A to child Q. Child A and child B were premature twins, born a minute apart at 31 weeks.

They were born by caesarean section and both admitted to the neonatal ward. Despite being nine weeks early, both of them were in good health. At 7.30pm, when they were less than 12 hours old, Letby started her shift. After a 30-minute handover, she became the designated nurse for child A. Before another half hour had passed, a doctor and consultant were called to the baby's incubators. They noticed a blue tinge to the baby's skin and patches of pink appearing and disappearing. Baby A's condition got worse. Doctors tried to save him.

But before 9pm, Child A was dead. Lucy Letby stood accused of intentionally injecting air into his bloodstream. The prosecution says that skin discolouration is a hallmark of many of these cases. Four medical experts called by the prosecution agreed. And those medical experts have said that Child A's death was not a natural one. And that it could be consistent with the injection of air by someone who knew it would cause significant harm. And just before midnight the same day, the alarm was raised for Child B, Child A's twin sister.

Her skin had also turned blue, and it seemed as though her oxygen tube had been dislodged. She was resuscitated and thankfully made a full recovery. The prosecution called it sabotage and the defence said it exemplified the court's assumption of guilt. Let's talk about the dislodging of these tubes. Again, watching interviews with doctors, they make it very clear that that can happen. But it usually happens when you have tubes inserted into very active babies. Babies that are moving around, that are sort of like knocking their arms around, flailing things and could knock the tube out themselves. These babies were so young. They were not moving. They were not pulling out their own tubes. They were not

dislodging anything with their flailing hands. This is sabotage. So the next story we want to tell you guys about, Child G. Child G was born almost four months premature at 23 weeks and six days gestation. She weighed just over 500 grams, that's one pound two ounces, and her father remembered her being no bigger than his hand. Child G's early arrival was a massive surprise. Her mother was on the toilet when it happened. Staff worked around the clock to care for Child G, and she initially made great progress. She was stable, and she was being fed from her mother's expressed breast milk either through a nasal tube or a bottle. Staff at the

Countess even baked a cake to celebrate child G reaching 100 days of life. That day child G's heart rate, breathing rate and temperature were all normal and she had been feeding well. But in the early hours of the next day, the baby, who was still just equivalent to 38 weeks gestation, suddenly and inexplicably collapsed. The baby threw up so violently that the vomit flew across the room and landed several feet away from her. Her heart rate and oxygen levels dropped dramatically. Even after throwing up so much, more air and milk were drawn out of her stomach. She was transferred to a different hospital. There, doctors fought tirelessly to save her.

And she made a miraculously quick recovery. But a few weeks later, child G returned to the Countess of Chester. And once again, the baby was suddenly and violently sick. Just after a documented feed by Lucy Letby. Doctors have said that the severity of the vomiting was quite extraordinary for a child that still only weighed two kilos. Child G's health deteriorated rapidly, and she was hooked up to a monitor to save her life. By mid-afternoon, Letby had called for help.

She said that she discovered that the baby's monitor had been turned off. Child G survived, but the incidents at such a young age caused irreversible brain damage. Child G has been diagnosed with quadriplegia cerebral cerebral palsy and will require 24-hour care. Dr Dewey Evans testified in court that there was only one explanation for what had happened to baby G. That the baby had received far more milk than recommended in her feeding tube. And he also added that that cannot have happened accidentally. The evening of the 6th of September, the night of Child G's first serious bout of vomiting,

was the last in a block of four night shifts for Lucy Letby. It was also her first block of night shifts since the previous alleged attack, five weeks earlier. The prosecutor says that Letby purposefully overfed the baby with milk and then injected air into her stomach. Letby was accused of attempting to murder Child G on three separate occasions. And we also know that this happened because Child G wasn't actually Lucy Letby's baby to care for. She wasn't in charge of that baby's care.

Another one of her colleagues was. And one of these times that she tried to kill baby G, this colleague had fed baby G the 45 ml of milk that she's supposed to have and then went and took a break. It was during this time that Lucy Letby must have overfed this baby and then injected air into her stomach because it's immediately after that child G starts throwing up everywhere and when they express the milk that's left in her stomach afterwards to check there's still 45 ml of milk in that baby's stomach. How are you going to throw up all over a nursery and still have the same amount of milk in your stomach that that first nurse had fed you? Child G was the seventh baby allegedly killed or harmed by Lucy Letby and followed six incidents in just six weeks over the summer of 2015. And every incident from Child A to Child Q is a version of this same story.

The prosecution's case is a chronicle of babies said to be doing well and then collapsing with no clear cause, all either under Lucy Letby's care or when she was known to have entered the room. The prosecution's case charts only a few methods for alleged murders, injections of air, overfeeding, dislodge feeding tubes or unnecessary injections of other substances. Child F, for instance, had been injected with insulin when no other baby on the ward needed the drug at all, making a mistake much harder to believe. And producer Alex and I spoke to a nurse friend of ours,

but she was like, even despite that, to administer insulin to anyone, it has to be signed off by two different nurses. It's just, there is no way. There is no way. If that insulin was improperly labelled, they'd be fucking suing the shit out of the pharmaceutical company that had made it. There is no way. And the fact that it happened twice, with two separate babies eight months apart, like Dr Dewey found, inconceivable. Yeah. ChildE's mother came to visit and entered the room to find the baby distressed with his mouth bleeding.

Letby had just assured her that it was all normal, saying, Trust me, I'm a nurse. That night, that baby suffered massive blood loss, more than the attending doctor had ever seen. Letby's nursing notes from the evening don't mention the bleeding at all. They refer to a meeting between the mother and a doctor that both say it never happened. Many of the deaths were ruled at the time to be from natural causes. But the prosecution argued it would never have occurred to a doctor or a parent that a a running joke when a baby died well oh was lucy on because nobody could possibly conceive that that's what she was actually doing because it is so horrific it is and she absolutely uses this idea right one is that she is so innocent looking that nobody could suspect her but also this idea that it is completely inconceivable to a normal

minded person that anybody could be doing this on purpose. Nobody even goes for that except these consultants and they do it after three babies had already died and serious collapses had already happened. It was so hard a point for people to get to in their thinking but I am in no ways excusing the hospital senior management for not listening to the consultants. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either, until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life.

I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness, and inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest

to find the woman who saved my mom's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now, exclusively on Wondery Plus. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, Three years ago today

that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me, and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health.

This is season two of Finding, and this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. So back to the trial, where Dr Ravi even testified that he had interrupted Lucy Lepi mid-attack one day. He told the court that in February 2016,

he walked in on her, standing at the bedside of baby Kay. The baby's oxygen saturation level was dangerously low and her feeding tube had been dislodged. And he says as he walked in, Lucy Letby was just standing there doing nothing. When he confronted her,

she says that she was feeding and changing the nappy of a different baby in a different room. And she also, in court, denied ever talking to Dr. Ravi that night at all. So one thing's for sure. Either Letby or Dr. Ravi deliberately lied to the jury. And my question is, what the fuck would Dr. Ravi have to gain from telling that lie? What would these doctors have to gain from convicting Lucy Letby of these murders, other than the fact that she did it? Letby herself was in the dock for 14 days, and cross-examined by prosecuting barrister Nicholas Johnson Casey for nine of those days. The rest of the time, she sat in court looking passive and expressionless.

All while Nick Johnson identified 12 common themes Including skin discolouration And the fact that all of the collapses tended to happen Just after parents' visits And they also match up with Lucy Letby's shift patterns we already know The jury was shown a graph of when every nurse was on duty And all the alleged deaths and collapses. And Lucy Letby was the only one on duty every single time.

And then we've got the insulin. It seems clear that child F and child L were deliberately poisoned. Both sides agree that they couldn't have been given insulin accidentally. No medical professional could have made that mistake. So if it wasn't Lucy Letby, who was it? And Lucy Letby even agrees with this. She says in court there's no way that insulin could have been given accidentally, obviously when she's pushed to by the prosecutor.

She admits that. So then he's like, well, it was only you and one other nurse who were on shift when this happened. So if it wasn't you, then who was it? And she's like, well, I can only speak for myself and I didn't do it. So I think that's it. I think at trial, what the prosecution need to show is somebody intentionally harmed these babies. And they do that successfully by talking about the overfeeding, the air embolisms and the insulin. And then they need to show that

it couldn't have been anyone else except Lucy Letby. And they clearly do that by the fact that she's the only one on shift every single time. And like Dr. Dewey said, whoever did it had to do it minutes or seconds before the baby collapsed. So it couldn't just be like somebody who does it and then goes off shift and then the baby collapses when they it couldn't just be like somebody who does it and then goes off shift and then the baby collapses when they're not there. She has to be there. But anyway, look, I could just keep talking about all of this forever. We have to move on.

So in his own closing statement, the judge reminded the jury to consider each of the 22 charges and make up their own minds about what evidence they deemed to be relevant. And there is just no way. Again, high stakes, high stakes, high stakes, as high as they get. This was such a big case, such a big decision for the jury to make. Was it, as Lucy Leppie was claiming, just an institutional cover-up for inadequate care and she's being scapegoated? Or was it the fact that this serial killer of babies had been allowed to roam the wards of the NHS unstopped for years?

The trial ended on Monday 10th July 2023. Jurors, after this gigantuan undertaking, then spent 22 days deliberating. And finally, on the 13th of August 2023, they returned a verdict of guilty. The jury found Lucy Lett be guilty on seven counts of murder and six counts of attempted murder. They cleared her on two counts of attempted murder and said they were unsure and unable to reach a verdict on another six counts of attempted murder. Then, on the 21st of August 2023, so the day before we're recording this,

Lucy Lapie was sentenced to 14 whole life sentences and given a whole of life order. In the UK, we don't hand these out too often. We've talked about it before. In the UK, typically, we give out sentences and then people serve them concurrently rather than consecutively like you do in the US. And Lucy Letby is actually only the fourth woman in Britain to ever be given this sentence. And the company she's in are the likes of Myra Hindley and Rose West. And so obviously that means that 33- old lucy let be will never be released from prison she has no chance of parole she will die in jail and i think it's going to be pretty

soon i mean this is the thing the fucking prison service has got a hell of a job on their hands because they now need to keep lucy let be safe And also they need to not allow her to kill herself. Because what our public services can't stand is one scandal in the NHS of a serial killer murdering babies and then our prison service allowing that woman to take her own life or be beaten to death by somebody else. So that's going to be an incredibly difficult job. I think it's an impossible job.

And the decision to give Lucy Letby this whole of life order absolutely came down to the impact of what she did, as well as the severity and the sheer sadism of all of it. Lucy Letby killed at least seven babies and tried to kill at least six more. Those babies she killed were the most vulnerable you can imagine. Some of them were just a day or two old, already born prematurely and fighting to live. She hid in plain sight, taking advantage of the fact that no one could even have contemplated that someone in her position

would hurt these tiny babies. Like we've said so many times on this show before, it's very, very difficult to put yourself into the minds of these people that do these kind of things. It's beyond imagination for most of us. A normal person to think that someone would or could do something like this is just too much of a leap. And she relied on that to get away with what she did, along with, like we've said multiple times, her appearance and that faux-timid nature. Evidently, it was all calculated and premeditated. Lucy Letby was proven to have falsified medical records to make it look like healthy babies were in fact already deteriorating when they weren't.

She attacked babies that she wasn't looking after whilst her colleagues went on breaks, and she methodically and carefully changed up the methodology that she used to avoid detection. And as for the impact on the families, of course, it's completely horrific. Many of these families have been through eight years of torture, and while Lucy Letby's conviction and sentencing may be of some relief, for the families, this will never be over. As the family said in their devastating victim impact statements,

they will never ever get over the death of their babies. Some of these families had been trying to conceive for years. One woman had been through multiple rounds of IVF and she had finally had a baby. Another woman had been told that she would never get pregnant, only to discover she was carrying twins. Lucy Letby killed one of her babies and the other twin will never fully recover from the attack. I mean, I listened to the victim impact statements

that were being read out yesterday and honestly, this is the thing. It's not just the babies that she killed. What she did to the ones that survived, they're never ever going to be okay. It's things like blindness, cerebral palsy, paralysis. She's completely destroyed these families. And so yeah, it cannot be overstated how much damage this woman has done. Not just the deep psychological harm to these parents, the physical harm she did to their children,

the enduring grief, the lives that she robbed from these children who parents, the physical harm she did to their children, the enduring grief, the lives that she robbed from these children who died, the surviving children that she robbed of their siblings and the loving parents that she robbed of their children. Marriages were also destroyed as parents struggled to cope with the immense grief of losing their babies and multiple parents in their victim impact statements said that they actually consider taking their own lives. Letby refused to appear in court to hear the verdict, the family's impact statements, or her own sentencing, which, if you've seen the papers, you'll already know,

has just increased the public outrage towards her. Families are now branding her a coward as well as a killer. And all of this has actually sparked MPs to say that they will look at changing the law to compel people to appear for sentencing and it certainly is cowardly but I don't know how I feel about mandatory attendance at sentencings I mean I think the practical implications are difficult I think if you've been convicted of a crime I think you should be there to hit the verdict because the victims deserve to see you react to the sentence that you

get. And it's also respect for the court. How do you get to decide that you're not going to be there? They put these families through nine months of a trial that they had to attend every single day and relive the horrors of what happened to them. Lucy Letby is not the first to do this. It's actually become quite an increasing trend, apparently, in the justice system for people that are convicted to just say, I'm not going up there. I'm not going up for the verdict. I'm not going to go listen to the impact statements. Again, those families have poured their heart and soul into writing this impact statement so the court can understand how these crimes affected them and therefore what is a justified sentence. Again, for the killer or whoever has been convicted, just be like, no, I'm not going up there. It is, if it happened to me,

and I can't speak for everybody, I would want to look that person in the face while I told the world what they did to me and how it impacted me. And for Lucy Letby, again, to take that power and control and decide I'm not coming, whatever. Again, I totally understand the practicalities of like dragging somebody out there who doesn't want to is going to be impossible. I think MPs will probably change the law because there's a lot of public outrage and they'll be seen to be doing something. How you enforce that in reality without putting not just the prisoners in risk, but also the people that would have to drag them out there at risk, is obviously going to be a huge human rights issue if we even go near it.

So I understand the practicalities are very difficult. I just think it is just so outrageous that they can do it. Because it's not just the emotional side it's the power and control right and this is the thing with Lucy Letby she decided not to come up like you said didn't listen to her verdict didn't listen to the victim impact statements which oh my god if you go and read them yeah are devastating and she didn't even come up for her sentencing. This is just another power play by Lucy Letby, another way for her to control the situation. And unfortunately, she was allowed to.

Again, take your point, how do we enforce anything else? But this wasn't the only thing she did in court. There were all sorts of courtroom antics going on during the nine-month trial of Lucy Letby, in which she managed to control the situation. For example, she denied during prosecution questioning, remembering basic things that she had already admitted to in her police interviews. And, and this is the real, what the fuck, because honestly, I've never heard of anything

like this. Normally, in a court in this country, normally what happens, obviously, is that the defendant is sat in the dock. And then when they are to be questioned, they have to walk from the dock to the witness stand. That is normal procedure. Lucy Letby told the judge that she had been left with PTSD following her arrest. Her very ordinary arrest, in which she looks absolutely fine again we talked about it earlier with the body cam footage it's all recorded you can go watch it she said she'd been left with ptsd because of that which has left her with the symptoms of hyper vigilance and hypersensitivity

and so therefore she said she didn't want to walk from the doctor the witness box in front of everybody and the judge agreed and said that the days where she was going to be questioned, everybody else had to wait outside the courtroom while she got herself into the witness box and sat down. And then everyone was allowed in. So she didn't have to do that walk from the dock to the witness box. And again, it might sound like a small thing. It might sound like, look, if she's going to cooperate, who cares? Like, just get her where she needs to be so that the trial that's already gone on for so long can get on with it I get that but again it's about her controlling the situation and that just drives me mad yeah I think it's a tricky situation

for the judge because if someone is claiming to have PTSD and you ignore that then that's difficult and that could be an appeal case perhaps or you know it could have more negative impact on the carriage of justice than just sort of accepting it but I totally understand what you mean like she is trying her absolute hardest to stay on top anyway so now we've been through all that, let's at last come to the question on everybody's lips right now. Why? Why did she do it? What was Lucy Letby's motive? Now obviously at trial they kind of touch upon this in various aspects but as we know the prosecution do not have to prove or even point out a motive. But it's hard to argue that this isn't a vital part of the case. So let's take a look.

Now, I think there are a few potential reasons that we can sort of theorize about. Firstly, the hero complex. It's like when we see firefighters who are arsonists. They start the blaze, and then they get the glory of putting it out and saving everybody's life. Dr Ravi, the consultant, even testified that when the spate of unusual deaths first started, he and the other doctors used to feel relief that Lucy Letby was on shift, because she was good in a crisis.

So I can just imagine, as panic and confusion swept through the ward when a seemingly healthy baby that was doing well started to collapse Lucy Letby would be there this picture of calmness she was even described as having an enthusiasm for resuscitation it's clear I think that she wanted admiration she loved that the other nurses and doctors regarded her so highly and thought of her as being the one they turned to when there was a crisis. She may also have been motivated by boredom, as we know psychopaths can be. Maybe working on the neonatal ward was just a bit boring, and so she created these crises so that something exciting was happening every day.

I think she absolutely loved and fed off the drama. Now Munchausen by proxy is of course the psychological disorder in which caregivers, almost always women, harm or kill people, almost always children, in their care for attention and sympathy. And we're definitely going to do a shorthand on Munchausen by proxy because over the last few months I have had quite an obsession with it as Hannah well knows and that's why she's laughing at me but the thing about Munchausen by proxy is that it's really really interesting because it isn't a condition that exists in isolation it isn't just something like oh that person's got Munchausen by proxy but they haven't done anything yet like you only get it when you are doing the abuse like it's only diagnosed when the person is actually in the act

of the abuse. That's what defines it. So it's not some mitigating mental disorder. I've seen some people being like, oh, she's got Munchausen by proxy. I'm like, that's not a mitigating disorder. It's not like saying she has psychosis and that's why she stabbed that baby. That's horrendous, of course it is, but that could be a mitigating factor if somebody is delusional hallucinating and psychotic having munchausen by proxy labels the behavior i should say it doesn't explain away the behavior so yeah you you can't be like oh she did abuse those kids but that's because she has munchausen by proxy that doesn't make any sense it's like saying he did kill all those people that but that's because he's got a touch of like the murderophilia like it's not a condition that exists without the

abuse happening and before everyone tweets me because i know you're getting ready to you probably already have but listen i know that they have changed the name of munchausen syndrome by proxy to factitious disorder imposed on another or fdia or fabricated or induced illness by carers fii but i don't like those names i think they make it sound less bad than what i think when i hear munchausen yeah i completely agree so it like legitimizes it a bit it does it kind of makes it seem like oh it sounds very clinical and i i just i i don't like it and yeah i'm just like why are you trying to defend them no do you know what i mean yeah i don't i don't like it I don't like it. Yeah, I'm just like, why are you trying to defend them? No. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, I don't like it. I don't like it. And again, like people say it's a mental disorder, but I'm like, but is it? Because it's the form of abuse. It's not the mental disorder. Maybe you're like, yes, you're getting a thrill from that specific type of abuse,

but why? It really sounds like a mitigating factor and I don't like it. Yeah, I agree. So finally, the moment you have all been waiting for. It has been revealed in the past couple of days, week maybe, that Lucy Letby allegedly had a secret doctor boyfriend. And some people, including prosecutor Nick Johnson Casey,

said that this secret doctor boyfriend could have been a motive for the killings. Letby formed a very close relationship with a registrar who worked with the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester. Just to explain in case people don't know what a registrar is, it's like an in-between stage. It's when you go from being like a junior doctor, but before you get to be a consultant. So pre-consultant. Yeah, but senior. Senior, yes. This doctor is 17 years older than Letby and he's married with two children. Letby always maintained at trial that the pair of them were just friends,

but looking at their texts and what they got up to and the things she wrote in her diaries, we're not so sure. The pair of them, so this 27-year-old nurse and the 40-year-old registrar, who we've only been told is Dr A, would go on long walks together. He visited her at her house, alone, and they took day trips to London together. Just the two of them, even staying overnight.

That's more than a work friend. Mm-hmm. They also stayed up regularly for hours, messaging each other late into the night. Please. Yeah. You're a 40-year-old registrar with a wife and two kids. How have you got the time to be staying up? They will stay up till like 1.30, 2 in the morning messaging each other on Facebook.

How? And why if it's your friend? Yeah. You don't stay up with a friend talking till 2am regularly. Also in Letby's diaries, she writes this doctor's name over and over and over again, surrounded by hearts like she's in year nine. She also writes notes like, my best friend, love, capital letters. I loved you and I think you knew that. I wanted you to stand by me, but you didn't. Now, I don't know what she means when she writes that. I don't know what she means by him not standing by her at that point anyway, when she's still, you know,

able to write in her diaries. Because as far as their text exchange shows, Dr. A did stand by her all the way up until she was basically arrested. Dr A, unlike the other consultants, did not suspect Letby. In fact, he was constantly reassuring her. He sent her texts like, If you're in any doubt about how good you are at your job, stop now.

And you've done your job perfectly. You are one of the few nurses across the region, and I've worked pretty much everywhere, that I would trust with my own children. He even offered to write her a statement if anyone suggested that the care she had provided was not good enough. So when all the accusations are coming out of the hospital, when it becomes very clear that there is like a hostile feeling from the consultants towards let be he reassures her constantly and after the deaths of baby o and baby p dr a even told let be that he was proud of the care that she had given them both and assured her there is absolutely nothing for you to worry about and this is the bit that really fucking gets me because dr a even told lucy let

be the details of an internal review carried out into the triplets deaths so that's baby o and baby p were two of a set of triplets and when they died there was an internal review and an internal discussion between senior members of staff in that unit and him not knowing that uh that conversation was going to be read aloud in court years later told her what had been said in that meeting starting the message with you need to keep this to yourself and then he goes on to say they monitor everything they check everything and like i don't know some people could read that if you're very suspicious minded that he's like warning her not to like, you know, continue taking ceiling out of the fridge or do this. But I just think he means like they have to check these things.

But I'm telling you this. I don't think he thought she was killing anybody. But again, it's the manipulation. She successfully managed to manipulate this intelligent man into thinking how fucking innocent she was. But how could secret doctor boyfriend turn into a motive? Well, firstly, every time a baby died or collapsed, let B would message Dr A about how hard it all was, how upset she was, blah, blah, blah. And Dr A would reply, showering her with affection and attention,

buying her chocolate, asking if she wanted to borrow his car to drive home because she'd had such a tough day. And it's this kind of attention we think would have been addictive for someone like Lucy Letby. On top of that, often when a baby collapsed, Dr A would be beat to come down to the unit. In fact, he and Lucy Letby worked together to try and resuscitate some of the babies that died. And the prosecutor at trial suggested the horrific idea that Letby carried out some of her later attacks specifically to bring Dr A onto the unit

just so she could work alongside him. So they would have some sort of joint drama, something to bond over, something to talk about. And when Dr A appeared in court to testify... Because that is when he does turn on her. It was one of the few times that Lettbury broke down into tears. Yep, she's pretty expressionless the rest of the time. But when he appears behind the screen and she knows who it is, she is inconsolable.

Right. And don't tell me he's just your friend. So yeah, there are a lot of possible scenarios. But ultimately what we need to know about Letby's motive in as much as we can know anything. Because she is the only one that really knows why she did what she did. We can only speculate.

But I think it really comes down to power and control. She got to play God. She decided who lived and died. And got to play God, she decided, who lived and died. And in lots of her texts, she talks of fate all the time. And I think she enjoyed taking that position of playing fate, of playing God. And I think there's definitely a large element of sadism to it. The fact that she monitored these families afterwards,

watching their grief from afar, no doubt absolutely relishing it. So how did she get to this point? I think there is one obvious answer. Lucy Letby is a psychopath. She shows absolutely no remorse for what she did. And when she was doing what she was doing, she showed no fear. She never seemed worried,

even when consultants were constantly reporting her and even when she's arrested it's just that weird look of sadness on her face almost sulky it's like that riddle that like i don't know if you've seen it but it's like this woman goes to her mother's funeral and there's a man there that she like fancies and then the next week the woman goes to her sister's funeral. And the answer is why. And if you're a psychopath, you say, because she wants to see the man again. She doesn't know who he is.

Oh, yeah. And it's like that kind of vibe. Yeah, I mean, that sums it up. That sums up this case perfectly. Now, look, I think Lucy Letby was also drawn to nursing because, believe it or not, a lot of psychopaths and sadists are drawn to the caring profession it's hiding in plain sight yeah there is study after study after study on this this is not new

information and they they're drawn to it because of the power and control that they can exert over the lives of the more vulnerable on a daily basis it's also a place where you are going to be constantly surrounded by drama action and other people's grief. And one day, like if we're talking about how did this manifest, like how did we get to the point that she is, she's figured out what she wants to do? Because like we said, there's no red flags in her background. I think probably what happened is one day something happened. Maybe a baby died or collapsed because of something she did or she didn't do.

And then she felt a rush. The excitement of the ward going into emergency mode when that baby collapsed, the grief of the parents, the inner joy for her of knowing that it was her that had done it, the attention she got from Dr. A, and the attention she got from all of her colleagues, her family, her friends,

everyone who kept messaging her being like, Lucy, I don't know how you do what you do, you're such a strong, brave person. I think she became addicted. And the hospital didn't stop her. So right now, Lucy Letby is sat in prison and she will stay there for the rest of her life. But this is still an ongoing investigation. Those who worked on this case are now going back through the entire footprint of Letby's career as a nurse and a student to see if there are any further charges to bring to her.

Letby attended to 4,000 babies in her time as a nurse. And the police say that the parents of more babies suspected to have been murdered have been contacted. Can you imagine getting that call? No. Can you imagine seeing this woman's face and being like, wait a fucking minute? So the Countess of Chester Hospital is now, unsurprisingly, under new management. And they will no longer take such young or sick babies into the unit.

But it calls into question how this happened in the first place. Now, this is not the first scandal in the unit. But it calls into question how this happened in the first place. Now, this is not the first scandal in the UK. A nurse named Beverly Allitt murdered four babies in her care back in the 90s. And then there was, of course, Harold Shipman, who was convicted of killing 15 patients, but could have killed an unbelievable 250 people before he was arrested in 1998 and look i think obviously we've had these scandals before and you can't safeguard from the start for these type of people no you can't it is impossible to imagine a world in which you could prevent any such death like this happening of course it's tragic but it's it's unavoidable if those people are there. But the hospital's response to fears raised by doctors is shocking.

And there is no doubt that this case will have huge and far-reaching changes to reporting policy within the NHS. But tragically, the question will always be, how many babies could have been saved from death or serious life-changing harm if those doctors had been listened to in the first place? And that is it, guys. That is the long fucking sad tale of Lucy Lampie. But you asked for it. You did ask for it. When will you learn?

Oh, Mabel's woken up. I think she knows. She knows. When the end of an episode is coming. Longest trial in British history. And Lucy Letby, at 33 years old, the same age as us, is now the UK's most prolific child serial killer. And she was operating in plain sight in the fucking NHS. So there you go. Yep.

Try have a nice afternoon. Go do something else that isn't about babies being murdered. And I know, Mabel, I need to go and have several showers before I stop thinking about those victim impact statements that I listened to yesterday. We'll see you next time, hopefully for not dead babies. Yeah, we'll be back. Well, actually, one dead baby.

Yeah, this was a slotted-in case because we've really been hitting these reactive cases hard. I don't know why we're doing it because we love you. But next week we will be here for part one of a two-parter on the Gilgo Beach case. So we'll see you then. Bye, guys. Bye. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American Scandal.

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