Content warning: The subject matter in this article may be upsetting to some readers
The sickening moment Lucy Letby lied to police about hospital death rates has been revealed in a police interview tape.
The 33-year-old was found guilty at Manchester Crown Court today (18 August) of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill six others at the Countess of Chester Hospital.
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Prosecutors called Letby a ‘calculated opportunist’ who used the vulnerabilities to premature and sick infants to camouflage her acts.
Between 2015 and 2016, there was a significant rise in the number of babies who suffered serious and unexpected collapses in the hospital’s neonatal unit.
Letby had been the only member of the nursing and clinical staff on duty each time the collapses happened, which the Crown argued were not natural events.
And in released footage of her police interview after she was first arrested in July 2018, she claimed she had ‘concerns’ over the spike in death rates.
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Letby told officers: “They that told me there had been a lot more deaths and I’d been linked as someone who had been there for a lot of them."
And when they asked her if she had ‘any concerns that there was a rise in mortality rate’, the nurse just replied ‘yes’.
She continued to describe the ‘concerns’, saying: “I think we’d all just noticed as a team in general, the nursing staff, that this was a rise compared to previous years.”
Found guilty today, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) described Letby as ‘devious’ and ‘cold-blooded’.
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Pascale Jones of the CPS said she ‘bertayed the trust that people had in the NHS’ as well as the ‘faith the families had’.
“Behind that angelic smile was a much darker side to her personality,” Jones added.
Letby used various ways to harm the infants including injecting air into the bloodstream, injecting air into the stomach, overfeeding with milk, physical assaults and poisoning with insulin.
Concerns among some consultants about Letby increased and were voiced to hospital bosses when more unexplained and unusual collapses followed, the court heard.
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However, Letby was not removed from the unit until after the deaths of two triplet boys and the collapse of another baby boy on three successive days in June 2016.
She was arrested at her home in Chester at 6am on 3 July, 2018.
Cheshire Police say they are continuing to review the care of some 4,000 babies who were admitted to the Countess of Chester – and also at Liverpool Women’s Hospital when Letby had two work placements – during her employment from 2012.
Only those cases highlighted as concerning medically would be investigated further, police added.
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A court order prohibits reporting of the identities of the surviving and dead children who were the subject of the allegations.
Featured Image Credit: Cheshire ConstabularyTopics: Crime, News, UK News, Lucy Letby