A nurse accused of murdering seven babies had sent a card to the parents of one of the victims

A shocking move. British nurse on trial for murders of seven newborn babies sent a card to express sympathy to the family of a little girl she is believed to have killed on the fourth attempt, the prosecution said on Wednesday. On the third day of the trial of Lucy Letby, 32, which is being held in Manchester, prosecutor Nick Johnson raised the case of “child I”, so designated for legal reasons.

At the end of September 2015, this little girl, born very premature two months earlier, had started having difficulty breathing half an hour after the nurse, who disputes the seven murders and ten attempts of which she is accused between 2015 and 2016 , fed her. Then during a second incident, on October 13, one of her colleagues had seen the “pale” child who was “not breathing”, according to the prosecutor. The little girl then escaped, but was placed in the custody of the accused.

Then in the early hours of October 23, new malaise of the child, revived once again in extremis. Less than an hour later, the alarm sounded. This time, the child cannot be brought back to life. Her mother is allowed to give her dead daughter a last bath. “Lucy Letby came into the room” and in the mother’s words, “smiled”, talked about the baby’s “first bath” and how much the little girl enjoyed it, the prosecutor said. The examinations concluded that the deterioration in the child’s state of health corresponded to the deliberate administration of a large quantity of air into his stomach with a nasogastric tube.

Operating mode

The police had questioned the nurse about a card she had sent to the parents, of which she admitted having kept a photo in her phone. “She said it was not normal for a nurse to send a card, that it was the only time she had done that, but that it was not often that a nurse knew so well a family,” explained the prosecutor. The baby girl “had survived the first two months of her life and was doing fine until Lucy Letby laid hands on her,” he continued.

“What happened to him follows the pattern of what happened to others before, and what happened to others afterwards,” added the representative of the prosecution, describing a “persistent” modus operandi, “ calculated” and “cold-blooded”. He then went on to recount, for each baby, including twins and two triplets, the details of the murders and attempted murders. The trial is scheduled to last six months.