Countess of Chester Hospital baby deaths

Lucy Letby (born 4 January 1990) is a British former neonatal nurse who murdered seven infants and attempted the murder of six others between June 2015 and June 2016.

Letby was the focus of suspicion following a high number of infant deaths at the neonatal unit of the Countess of Chester Hospital, shortly after she was qualified to work with children in the hospital's intensive care unit, and owing to her being on duty whenever suspicious incidents took place.

Lucy Letby was born on 4 January 1990 in Hereford, Herefordshire, the only child of a finance manager and an accounts clerk.

She was educated at Aylestone School and Hereford Sixth Form College.

She had had a very difficult birth herself and was, according to a friend who knew her since secondary school, "very grateful for being alive to the nurses who would have helped save her life".

This, the friend states, had led her to want to be a nurse all her life and that "everything that she did was geared towards that ultimate goal of becoming a nurse".

Letby pursued her education in nursing at the University of Chester, where she also worked as a student nurse during her three years of training, carrying out placements at Liverpool Women's Hospital and the Countess of Chester Hospital.

Letby was the first member of her family to study at university and graduated in September 2011.

Letby began working as a registered nurse at the neonatal unit of the Countess of Chester Hospital in 2012.

Letby had two training placements at Liverpool Women's Hospital, in late 2012 and early 2015, which came under investigation after her conviction.

In a 2013 staff profile, she said that she was responsible for "caring for a wide range of babies requiring various levels of support" and that she enjoyed "seeing them progress and supporting their families."

Letby also took part in a campaign to raise funds for a new neonatal unit at the hospital.

Letby qualified to work with the infants who needed intensive care in 2015, the same year the suspicious incidents began.

Letby had told others that she found non-intensive care work "boring".

When she was moved to day shifts the suspicious incidents notably moved from occurring overnight to happening in the daytime when Letby was working.

An informal review conducted in June 2015 by a consultant and lead neonatologist at the Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust revealed troubling details regarding four unexplained collapses that occurred in the same unit.

Three of these cases resulted in deaths in the same month.

It was observed that Letby had been on shift on each occasion.

The unit's consultants promptly reported these deaths to the trust's committee responsible for addressing serious incidents.

The committee classified the deaths as "medication errors".

Had they been classified as "serious incident[s] involving unexpected deaths", an immediate investigation could have taken place if they were grouped together.

The numbers of unexplained collapses were particularly abnormal: there had previously been only two or three deaths a year in the neonatal unit.

What was also particularly unusual was that the babies did not respond to resuscitation attempts as they would be expected to.

Usually babies that had got a heartbeat back would see an improvement in their breathing, but that did not happen in these cases.

Detective Superintendent Paul Hughes, who later led the investigation, was told by two medical consultants that baby collapses which occurred during the spike had been unexpected and could not be explained, both of which were not usual with infant collapses in general.

In October 2015, a ward manager conducted her own review, noting that Letby was the only staff member consistently present throughout these incidents of unexplained collapses and deaths.

In June 2016, consultants asked management to remove her from clinical duties pending an investigation into her conduct.

She had previously been moved from night to day shifts in April 2016 by the unit's ward manager.

Letby was transferred to the patient experience team in July 2016 and later to the risk and patient safety office, working there until her arrest in 2018.

Letby was charged in November 2020 with eight counts of murder and ten counts of attempted murder.

During her trial, which lasted from October 2022 to August 2023, it was revealed that Letby's methods included injecting the infants with air or insulin, overfeeding them, and physically abusing them with medical tools.

She also removed over 250 confidential nursing handover sheets from her workplace which should never have left the hospital, and she falsified patient records to avert suspicion.

Several parents and colleagues of Letby had also entered the room during, or soon after, an attack.

On 21 August 2023, Letby was sentenced to life imprisonment with a whole life order.

Letby pleaded not guilty at her trial and told a subsequent Nursing and Midwifery Council disciplinary panel that she is innocent.

An application to appeal her conviction was renewed in February 2024.

Unrelated to any appeal, she faces a retrial in June 2024 on the one charge that the jury were unable to reach a verdict on in the original trial.

Letby is the most prolific serial killer of children in modern British history; the Cheshire Constabulary now suspects that she may have claimed more victims, including at Liverpool Women's Hospital, where two infants died during her training.

Management at the Countess of Chester Hospital were criticised for ignoring warnings about Letby that could have prevented some of the killings.

The British government has commissioned an independent statutory inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the murders.