British nurse Lucy Letby, already sentenced to life in prison for the murder of seven newborn babies, was found guilty Tuesday by a British court of another attempted murder of a little girl in the hospital where she worked.
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After a month-long trial, jurors at Manchester Crown Court quickly concluded that Lucy Letby, 34, had tried to kill “Baby K”, a premature baby in the intensive care unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital in northwest England, in February 2016.
His new sentence in the “Baby K” case will be announced on Friday.
In August 2023, the 34-year-old nurse was already convicted of murdering seven premature babies and six attempted murders at the hospital in 2015 and 2016, making her the biggest child killer in modern UK history.
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However, at the end of this first trial, the jury failed to reach a verdict on six other attempted murders of which she was accused – including that of “Baby K”.
Prosecutor Nicola Wyn Williams said a doctor found the newborn “desaturating on oxygen with Letby by his side, who was doing nothing to help him or call for help” less than two hours after he was born.
“She had deliberately moved the breathing tube in an attempt to kill her” and no alarm was sounding to alert her colleagues, he summed up in a statement on Tuesday.
The little girl, transferred the next day to another hospital because of her extreme prematurity, died three days later. However, the prosecutor did not file a murder charge against Lucy Letby.
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The latter, who maintains her innocence and whose motives have never been clarified, was sentenced in August to life imprisonment without parole, a very rare sentence in English law.
She has no possibility of appealing this judgment, the British courts ruled at the end of May.
Between June 2015 and June 2016, the nurse injected air intravenously into premature babies and used their nasogastric tubes to inject air or an overdose of milk into their stomachs.
Lucy Letby preyed on newborns after their parents had left, when the nurse in charge was away, or at night when she was alone. She would then sometimes join in the collective efforts to save these infants, and even assist the desperate parents.
