EX TV GH People Matter
By Lauren Hirst
It was the spring of 2017 when an alarming letter arrived at Cheshire Police’s headquarters, addressed to the chief constable.
It was from the chief executive of the Countess of Chester Hospital, which had seen an unexplained surge in deaths and near-fatal collapses of premature babies in its neonatal unit.
Doctors were baffled – the deaths defied explanation and fears were mounting that something sinister could be at play.
The events that followed culminated in one of Britain’s darkest criminal trials and the conviction of Lucy Letby, the country’s most prolific child killer in modern times.
“The overwhelming weight of evidence leads us to know she is a killer and, using her words, she is evil,” said senior investigating officer Det Supt Paul Hughes.
Shortly after the letter arrived, Det Supt Hughes met three senior medics at the hospital to discuss their mounting concerns.
“What they explained to me were two words – unexplained and unexpected,” he said.
“It was those two words the doctors had been trying to work out.”
Operation Hummingbird was launched and Letby was first arrested at her home in Chester in July 2018.
At its height, the investigation involved nearly 70 officers and civilian staff, with detectives gathering some 32,000 pages of evidence and sifting through reams of medical records and data.
Ahead of Letby’s trial in October, about 2,000 people were spoken to and nearly 250 people were identified as potential witnesses.
Time and again, the evidence all led to the softly spoken young nurse from Hereford who was often found working overtime as she made early strides in her career.
“Nice Lucy”, as one doctor called her.
- Lucy Letby guilty of murdering seven babies on neonatal unit
- Doctors’ warnings ignored as Letby killed more babies
- Profile: Who is Lucy Letby?
- What did Letby do to babies in her care?
- Watch the moment Letby is arrested and led away
Letby was interviewed for about 30 hours over the course of her three arrests in 2018, 2019 and 2020.
While Det Supt Hughes found her to be “co-operative”, he recalled how she failed to show any overt signs of either empathy or sympathy. Her answers were often clinical.
“She’s a difficult one to work out because she is emotionless,” he said. “She doesn’t respond [in a way] I would have expected.
“For example, we didn’t see any sadness or any passion or anything more like an innocent person banging on the table demanding that we should go and find the proper killer.”
This was the same for Det Ch Insp Nicola Evans, who found Letby to be “nothing out of the ordinary”, describing her as “calm and quiet”.
“Lucy Letby, for me, is ‘beige’ in that she was a normal woman in her 20s with a normal life,” she said.
“She had a social life, a circle of friends, a family, and she was embarking on her career. She used that normality to form trust and then abused that trust.
“There was clearly something very deceptive about that. That normality gave her a cover to commit the crimes she did.”
As the net closed around Letby, one thing remained unclear – why would a nurse who had dedicated her career to caring for the sickest of babies now want to kill them?
“I don’t think we know why Lucy Letby did this and we may never know why and that’s really difficult,” said Det Ch Insp Evans.
“I can’t imagine how a parent must feel accepting that.”
In the autumn of 2017, Pascale Jones from the Crown Prosecution Service first became involved in the case.
She believes Letby was able to get away with her appalling crimes by varying the subtle ways in which she harmed babies in her care.
“If she’d stuck to one modus operandi, she would have probably been found out sooner,” she said.
“But because she diversified the ways in which she was attacking babies she was preying on their vulnerabilities.
“And she was always ready to rationalise [and say] ‘look, this can be explained’.”
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