A British nurse convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder another six was sentenced on Monday to the most severe, rarely used punishment possible under local laws—life without parole.
The verdicts against Lucy Letby, 33, were made public last Friday at the end of what is believed to have been the longest murder trial in U.K. history. The appalling scale of her crimes over a 12-month killing spree beginning in June 2015 at a hospital where she worked makes her the most prolific serial child killer in modern British history.
In recognition of the exceptional nature of her case, a judge at a court in Manchester on Monday sentenced Letby to a “whole life order,” meaning she will never be released from prison. Letby is now only the third woman alive in Britain to be given the sentence, with the other two being Joanna Dennehy—who stabbed three men to death 10 years ago in what became known as the “Peterborough ditch murders”—and Rose West, who infamously helped her husband torture and kill at least nine young women throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
ADVERTISEMENT
During the sentencing, Mr. Justice Goss called Letby’s crimes a “cruel, calculated, and cynical campaign of child murder involving the smallest and most vulnerable of children.” “There was a deep malevolence bordering on sadism in your actions,” he added.
At trial, prosecutors said Letby would often target her infant victims at the Countess of Chester Hospital in northwest England at night when their parents were less likely to be visiting. The court heard that she fatally injected seven babies with air, attempted to kill another two using insulin, and tried to murder one by pushing a nasogastric tube down his throat.
Judge Goss said Letby had “acted in a way that was completely contrary to the normal human instincts of nurturing and caring for babies” and that while she was outwardly “a very conscientious, hardworking, knowledgeable nurse,” those traits allowed Letby “to harm babies for some time.”
He said Letby had a “detached enthusiasm” for attempting to revive critically ill infants and that she had “callously” made inappropriate comments to co-workers and worried parents before and after her killings. Goss added that Letby had retained hundreds of medical documents as “morbid records of the dreadful events surrounding your victims and what you had done to them” but said it was not his place to “reach conclusions about the underlying reasons” for Letby’s crimes.
“Loving parents have been robbed of their cherished children and others have to live with the physical and mental consequences of your actions,” Goss said. “Siblings have been deprived of brothers and sisters. You have caused deep psychological trauma, brought enduring grief and feelings of guilt, caused strains in relationships and disruption to the lives of all the families of all your victims.”
Although his comments were addressed to Letby, she refused to appear in court during the sentencing hearing. The judge instead ordered that she be given a copy of his sentencing remarks, as well as the harrowing victim impact statements made by her victims’ grieving relatives.
“Lucy Letby has destroyed our lives,” said the father of triplets, two of whom were killed by Letby, according to the BBC. “The anger and the hatred I have towards her will never go away. It has destroyed me as a man and as a father.”
The mother of another baby killed by Letby said she wore sunglasses for a year after her daughter’s death to “hide the pain and tears from my kids as I didn’t want to upset them as they were also struggling.” The mom added that she remembers her “whole body shaking” when she was informed of Letby’s arrest. “I don’t think we will ever get over the fact that our daughter was tortured till she had no fight left in her,” she said.
Letby is now just the fourth woman in British history sentenced to a whole-life order. In addition to the three living women, child killer Myra Hindley was serving the sentence at the time of her death in 2002.
