“I don’t know if I killed them. Maybe I did. In the end it might all come down to me…” Nurse Lucy Letby, accused of killing seven babies in the Countess of Chester hospital maternity ward, wrote the closest thing to a confession in her own diary, along with the initials of her victims (in different colors) and the dates she planned to commit their crimes.
The chilling document was exhibited by the prosecution before the members of the jury that will have to decide if the malevolent nurse (as she is popularly known in the United Kingdom) is guilty of the seven deaths and 10 other attempts that occurred between June 2015 and June 2015. 2016, when an abnormal mortality rate in maternity was detected and the alarms went off.
A police investigation determined that the victims, almost all of them premature babies, had been poisoned with insulin or air injected into their lungs. All the deaths coincided with the wards of Lucy Letby, 33, and had in common the “rapid and unexpected deterioration” of the babies’ health.
The nurse, who had been transferred to administrative duties while the investigation lasted, had the nerve to occasionally send condolence notes to the parents. She was finally arrested in 2018 and charged with 21 counts; among them, seven murders and 10 attempted murders.
The entry in her diary with the babies’ initials is the strongest evidence presented against the nurse in the trial that has been held for six months in Manchester and that is approaching the final phase. Letby, who continues to plead “not guilty” despite all the evidence against her, faces a life sentence for her crimes.
Since the trial began, prosecutor Nick Johnson has provided numerous handwritings from the nurse, found in her bedroom and implicitly acknowledging responsibility for the crimes. “I don’t deserve to live; I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to take care of them,” he wrote on a post-it note. “I AM EVIL; I DID THIS,” he came to write in all caps as well.
Several parents of the murdered babies have attended the trial and have had to suppress their emotions at the attitude displayed by the nurse, who broke down in tears this week when the prosecutor showed the jury photos of her bedroom, decorated with large letters that read: “Wherever you go, add sparkle.”
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