“I am a horrible evil person… I AM EVIL I DID THIS.” These were nurse Lucy Letby’s own words, written on a piece of notepaper found by police investigating the deaths of babies on her unit. “I don’t deserve to live. I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them.”
Lucy Letby is a serial killer, the most prolific child murderer of modern times in the UK; her name now forever associated with the likes of other medical monsters such as GP Harold Shipman and nurse Beverley Allitt. She is also one of the most prolific female serial killers in British history, alongside the likes of Rose West and Moors murderer Myra Hindley.
In pictures taken at work and socially, Letby, 33, is smiling, carefree-looking, apparently happy. You might describe her as someone who looks “nice” or “kind” or “friendly” or like a million other young women, about as far-removed as you could get from the image of a serial killer that would spring to mind for most.
The motivation behind such an horrific killing spree, taking the lives of tiny babies who didn’t stand a chance, is unfathomable – even to some experts who have spent years profiling murderers.
Dr Sohom Das, a consultant forensic psychiatrist whose work takes him into prisons and secure hospitals such as Broadmoor, says Letby doesn’t fit any “typical” killer profiles. Having assessed several women who have killed babies – usually mothers – he also says most are usually driven by psychotic beliefs.
“I’ve seen at least two or three patients who have had delusional beliefs related to schizophrenia, for example, where they believe children are marked by the devil, that they’re somehow saving them from hell or damnation,” he tells Sky News. “Lucy Letby doesn’t fit into that category. I’ve also met serial killers and they tend to be antisocial, angry, they tend to have a long criminal history of violence. Again, Lucy Letby doesn’t fit that kind of motivation.”
Beverley Allitt: ‘Angel of Death’
Dr Das describes the case of Beverley Allitt – the nurse known as the “Angel of Death” who murdered four babies and attempted to kill others in Grantham, Lincolnshire, in 1991 – as “eerily similar” in terms of how the children were attacked. Letby injected air into babies’ bloodstreams and overdosed them with insulin, as did Allitt.
However, he does not believe the motivation to be the same. Allitt drew attention to the babies being ill, he says, and wanted attention herself, while Letby did the opposite.
“[Allitt] had Munchausen by proxy – when someone fakes illnesses in other people, usually their own kids, because they like to be connected to the process of ‘being victims’, they like the empathy and sympathy,” he says. “I don’t think Lucy Letby fits that pattern because she wasn’t trying to seek attention.”
One theory put forward by the prosecution during her trial was that Letby “sabotaged” the care of one baby boy – one of two triplets she murdered – to get the attention of a doctor she had a crush on.
But Beatrice Yorker, a professor emerita of nursing and criminal justice and criminalistics at California State University in Los Angeles, agrees it does not appear as if the nurse was seeking attention.
She highlights the case of Richard Angelo, a nurse who was convicted of killing four patients and suspected of causing more deaths in New York in 1987. “When they arrested him… he admitted it. He said, ‘I do it for the respect that I get from my nursing and doctor colleagues because I perform very well in a code’ (cardiac arrest)…
“I haven’t read anything about Lucy Letby that indicates she wanted to be the centre of attention, that she enjoyed resuscitation of the infants. She seemed much more clandestine and deceitful. Kind of sadistic, maybe.”
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7:12
‘They could have stopped her’
Professor Yorker, who has studied more than 130 cases globally of health professionals who kill, says one motive, if not attention, “seemed to be… an act of covert violence or sadism” as the perpetrators found themselves in a position of power.
“They realise that you don’t have to bludgeon somebody, you don’t have to shoot somebody. It is a very powerful way to kill somebody, just to give them a few extra drops of a substance that can make their heart stop. And you don’t even have to prick them with a needle, you inject it into their IV line. That’s a lot of power for people who might have a propensity to kill people or injure people or be violent in a very, very covert way.”
‘Dr Death’ Harold Shipman
Harold Shipman is one of the UK’s most notorious serial killers. A GP in Hyde, Greater Manchester, he was convicted in 2000 of murdering 15 people between 1995 and 1998, but is suspected to have potentially killed as many as 250 between 1975 and 1998.
He had a “God complex”, says Dr Das. “It was like he was deciding whether to let people live or die, almost like mercy killings.” But rather than having a God complex, he believes Letby suffers from low self-esteem and self-confidence, related to depression and anxiety.
“This kind of offence is so rare anyway, but of the times that it has occurred there are so many typical pigeonholes and criteria and oddly to me, Lucy Letby doesn’t fit into any of them,” Dr Das continued. “So to answer the question, what is the motivation? It’s really hard to actually know. When people do things like this and don’t fit into those categories, it’s usually out of some sort of jealousy or some sort of anger.”
One of the lines in the note by Letby found by police, which was shown to the court during her trial, said she had an “overwhelming fear… I’ll never have children or marry… I will never know what it’s like to have a family… despair”.
“I think at a stretch you could say she was jealous of these happy families,” says Dr Das. “I think maybe [an explanation could be] that she is somehow connected potentially to the emotional process of grieving. She was present when a lot of these babies died, sometimes when they weren’t even her patients, it’s almost like she went out of her way to be part of that. And that’s something I’ve never heard of or seen in my clinical experience, but it’s the only logical answer I can come to.”
Murders by medics not as rare as you might think
Image: Elizabeth Wettlaufer confessed to murders in Canada
In the UK, Shipman is the most well known medical killer, but in recent years there has also been Allitt and others – such as the case of ‘Devil Nurse’ Victorino Chua, who was jailed for life with a minimum of 35 years in 2015, for the murder and poisoning of patients at Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport, Greater Manchester.
After the Letby verdicts were made public, Cheshire police confirmed they are now investigating whether the nurse could have attacked other children in her care before June 2015.
Professor Yorker says that while killers in the medical profession are rare, her research suggests there may be more than those we know about.
She highlights the “sobering” case of Canadian care home nurse Elizabeth Wettlaufer, whose crimes were only uncovered when she told someone she had been murdering and attempting to murder her elderly patients over a period of nine years.
“She would not have been caught,” Professor Yorker says. “She never did it long enough or enough to raise an index of suspicion where you go, okay, we had five deaths a year and now we’ve got 20. She would just do enough to keep it below the radar of the statisticians and risk managers who look at records and incidents of critical patient incidents and deaths.”
One question raised by Letby’s conviction is about her motivations for becoming a nurse – did she enter healthcare in order to kill? Or did this “dark side” develop only once she had started?
Dr Katherine Ramsland, an expert in serial killers who teaches forensic psychology at DeSales University in Pennsylvania, has seen both cases. “It’s a mix,” she says. “Some view healthcare agencies as places of trust where predators have advantages, others are worn down by the demands and decide to ‘reduce’ the workload or set someone up to make them look bad.”
Some can also develop “a delusional belief that they’re helping a patient”, while others see “easy prey for things like theft or self-empowerment, or even thrill,” she adds.
Is Letby a psychopath?
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Letby’s police interview and arrest
A psychopath is someone with an antisocial personality disorder, according to the NHS. This means they are manipulative, lack empathy, and often have a total disregard for the consequences of their actions.
Dr Jane Carter Woodrow, a screenwriter and member of the British Society of Criminology who has written several books about murderers and serial killers, says it would be hard to argue against this in Letby’s case. “How could she not be to be able to do those things,” she says. “It’s the most cowardly act of all killers, [to kill] a child or an elderly person.”
Dr Carter Woodrow says that “once you’ve crossed that line” and “murdered for the first time, I think it gets easier. And you see she feels emboldened as time goes on and the cases kind of escalate, particularly towards the end”.
The fact Letby pleaded not guilty also shows psychopathic traits, she says. “She could have pleaded guilty and not put the parents through this terrible trauma again. She could have spared them all these details they’ve had to sit through.”
During the trial, the jury heard how Letby told one mother, “Trust me, I’m a nurse”, as she killed one baby. She also sent a sympathy card to the parents of another she had murdered.
“I think this was about power,” says Dr Carter Woodrow. “Saying, ‘trust me, I’m a nurse’, all the time knowing what she was going to go and do… it’s like somebody with a card up their sleeve that they’re almost laughing about.”
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0:43
CPS on Letby’s ‘darker side’ behind ‘angelic smile’
But Dr Das says Letby should not necessarily be classed as a psychopath. “Psychopaths are impulsive, they lack empathy, they don’t care about the rights of other people, they’re very self-serving, self-centred. You could argue she’s all of those things but crucially, a psychopath is really manipulative and deceitful.
“A psychopath does almost everything for a reason, to benefit themselves. So if somehow killing these babies furthered her career, I suppose you could argue at a push that she was a psychopath. But it doesn’t seem like there’s any logical motivation. She’d have some psychopathic traits but I don’t think she’d be a clinical psychopath.
“Psychopaths are also criminally versatile, so a good psychopath can be violent, they lie and they manipulate. They’re often quite fraudulent and they commit other types of offences like robbery, speeding. She never did any of that, she didn’t have any kind of criminal history, there’s no history of aggression. So she just wouldn’t fit into the pattern of what a true psychopath is.”
Dr Das adds that he does not believe Letby is suffering from psychosis and that she knew what she was doing. Dr Ramsland agrees: “She doesn’t seem psychotic, so she would likely have some sense of her behaviour and the way society evaluates it. Whether she would feel remorse is a different question.”
‘High shame, high denial’
The note written by Letby is an example of “high shame, high denial”, says Professor Yorker, something which applies to “child abusers, paedophiles who act out on their interests, and healthcare killers – and it applies to addiction”.
The 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous include a step to take each day at a time, she says, because “you can’t cure these high compulsive addictive disorders – you can only deter them or get into recovery where you take it a day at a time. You just say, for this day, I’m not going to act on my urge to drink, or my urge to binge and purge – or my urge to kill.”
While Letby’s note suggested she was admitting the crimes, her denials in court showed otherwise. But Dr Das says it shows “that on some level a part of her does actually feel remorse”. He continues: “People can commit horrible crimes and still feel guilty. In fact, serial killers, especially disorganised serial killers, often battle with this internal kind of conflict, so they feel compelled to go out and kill but they also feel at times guilty of their actions as well. But whatever that part is, it obviously wasn’t present enough for her to tell the truth during a criminal trial.”
Is there any chance someone like this could be rehabilitated?
Dr Ramsland says this would depend on their motivation and psychological state at the time. “Sometimes, healthcare workers are depressed or stressed, so they harm patients as a way to relieve stress or feel empowered. In that case, medication and therapy could assist to improve their behaviour. If they’re highly predatory, however, they’re unlikely to respond well to treatment.”
The difficulties detecting healthcare killers
Image: Serial killer and former nurse Charles Cullen murdered patients over 16 years
In 2022, the story of US serial killer Charles Cullen was dramatised in the Netflix film The Good Nurse, starring Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain.
He killed patients over a 16-year period and eventually admitted to 30 to 40 murders, but the true number is thought to be closer to 400 – which would make him the most prolific serial killer in US history.
Letby started working at the Chester hospital’s neonatal unit just before her 22nd birthday – around four years before the start of the allegations in the trial – and colleagues raised suspicions more than a year before bosses contacted the police.
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Professor Yorker says such crimes by healthcare workers may take longer to uncover than say, those by serial killers who stab their victims, as they are usually not as obvious until numbers start stacking up. “We can’t predict, we can’t know why somebody that has antisocial tendencies would cross the line to do this. It makes it really hard to detect.”
Another reason for delays in catching healthcare killers is that society is conditioned to believe certain groups of people are “good”, she says. “For example, the Catholic priesthood, the Boy Scouts. We as a society have been in denial for years where we think really good, upstanding citizens like a Catholic priest or a Boy Scout leader could possibly be molesting children.”
This conditioning can be even higher for women, as women make up such a small percentage of killers, she adds. “This is a feminine form of abuse, even though there are quite a few male doctors and male nurses who engage in healthcare serial killing. We as a society recognise masculine forms of violence – bludgeoning, shooting, stabbing, strangling, raping, those kinds of acts are overtly aggressive. What we as a society do not recognise are the covert or the feminine forms of violence – smothering, injecting, poisoning.”
And while people may think serial killers or psychopaths might stand out, Dr Carter Woodrow says it is often the opposite. “It is not really a question of looking different. It’s looking the same as everyone else – and that’s how you fool people.”
Counter-terrorism police are investigating after an incident involving a crossbow and a firearm left two women injured in Leeds.
Police were called to Otley Road at 2.47pm on Saturday to reports of a “serious incident involving a man seen with weapons”, West Yorkshire Police said.
Officers arrived at the scene to find two women injured – and a 38-year-old man with a self-inflicted injury. All three were taken to hospital, with the man held under arrest, but their injuries are not believed to be life-threatening.
“Two weapons have been recovered from the scene, which were a crossbow and a firearm,” Counter Terrorism Policing North East said in a statement.
The incident happened on the ‘Otley Run’ pub crawl, with one venue saying it was closed for the evening due to “unforeseen circumstances”.
Image: Officers guard one of the crime scenes
Image: Officers inside the cordon in Leeds
Counter Terrorism Policing’s statement added: “Due to the circumstances surrounding the incident, Counter Terrorism Policing North East have taken responsibility for leading the investigation with the support of West Yorkshire Police.
“Extensive enquiries continue to establish the full circumstances and explore any potential motivation.”
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper described it as a “serious violent incident” and said she was being kept updated by police.
“Thank you to the police and emergency services for their swift response,” she said. “My thoughts are with the victims and all those affected by this attack.”
This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly.
Wrexham AFC have been promoted for the third season in a row.
The North Wales-based side has gone from the National League to the Championship in just three seasons, under its Hollywood owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney.
Wrexham were second in the table and had a run of eight games unbeaten ahead of their match against Charlton Athletic on Saturday, which they won 3-0.
Image: Wrexham’s James McClean lifts the League One trophy. Pic: PA
Image: Wrexham’s Dan Scarr celebrates with the fans on the pitch after Wrexham won promotion to the Championship. Pic: PA
It is the first time any club has been promoted for three consecutive seasons within the top five tiers of English football.
The third oldest association football club in the world, Wrexham AFC was bought by Reynolds and McElhenney in 2020, and has since been the subject of a Disney+ documentary, Welcome To Wrexham.
Reynolds, wearing a Wrexham sweatshirt, and McElhenney were pictured celebrating each goal, and after the game, as the fans came onto the pitch at the SToK Cae Ras (Racecourse Ground) to celebrate the victory with the players.
Image: Wrexham co-owners Rob McElhenney (L) and Ryan Reynolds and Ryan’s wife Blake Lively, before the match. Pic: PA
Both stars came onto the pitch after the supporters returned to the stands.
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Speaking to Sky Sports, McElhenney praised those behind the scenes, referring to “so many that don’t get the credit they deserve, people who aren’t talked about”.
Reynolds said bringing success back to the club “seemed like an impossible dream” when they arrived in North Wales in 2020.
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Image: Wrexham’s Sam Smith celebrates in front of the fans after Wrexham won promotion to the Championship. Pic: PA
He put the three promotions down to “the coaching staff, the greatest dressing room” and an “all for one, one for all” attitude throughout the club, adding he was “speechless with their commitment and their emotion”.
As for the mouth-watering prospect of another promotion to the promised land of the Premier League, the pair agreed it was “for tomorrow”, before ending the interview with a joint mic-drop.
Veteran striker Steven Fletcher said, “as soon as I came to this club, I knew it was something special. We want to go again. We’ll reset in the summer, take a break and go again”.
Just Stop Oil (JSO) insists it’s been “successful” – as its members ceremoniously hang up their orange high-vis vests during a march in central London.
Since the group formed three years ago, it’s drawn attention and criticism for its colourful, controversial protests, which ranged from disrupting sporting events to throwing soup on Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and climbing on gantries over the M25. It sprayed orange paint over Stonehenge, and cost police forces tens of millions of pounds.
Those days are now behind it; to the relief of many.
As a few hundred activists marched through London on Saturday, blocking roads as they went; taxi drivers blared their horns and football fans shouted abuse from the pavement.
The PA News Agency filmed the moment a white minivan seemed to drive towards a group of protesters blocking the road.
Protesters shouted “I’m being pushed back!” to police, while the driver could be heard shouting “What about my right to get home?” to the officers gathered.
But JSO never set out to be popular. And it believes its tactics – though hated – have been successful; thanks to the new Labour government’s commitment to not issue new oil or gas exploration licences.
That’s why, it says, its ceasing direct action.
Image: JSO hangs up its high-vis jackets in central London on Saturday
Image: A washing line of high-vis jackets signifies JSO’s disbanding
“This moment marks the success of the JSO campaign – our demand was to end new oil and gas licences and that is now government policy.
“As a result of which four billion barrels of oil are being kept under the North Sea. The campaign has reached a natural end.”
Dr Oscar Berglund, senior lecturer in international public and social policy, disagrees that JSO is disappearing because it’s been “successful”.
He told Sky News policing strength and public perception might have more to do with it.
“They have very low levels of popularity. About 17% of the British population are kind of broadly supportive of what Just Stop Oil do. And that’s too low to recruit.
“It’s difficult to recruit members to something that is that unpopular, and then that a lot of people for good reason I think have kind of stopped believing in that kind of disruption as a means to achieve meaningful change.”
Group triggers specific new protest laws
One thing it did change is the law.
Policing commentator Graham Wettone tells us: “Obstruction of the highway, obstruction of rail networks for example, these are specific offences now.
“It’s given the police more tactics, more methods, more offences they can consider, even stopping and searching somebody who may have something to either lock themselves on or glue themselves to something.”
Image: A JSO activist holds a picture of an imprisoned colleague
Emma Smart was held in prison for her activism with both Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil.
“The high-vis might be going away,” she tells me, “but we aren’t.”
“These people aren’t going anywhere, we are still committed, dedicated, terrified by the failings of this government and governments around the world.”
Image: JSO activists throw orange paint at van Gogh’s sunflowers
Image: Orange smoke set off by JSO protesters at Stonehenge
She hopes for a time of reflection before it returns in a new form but says the need for climate activism is stronger than ever.
She also believes that while most people dislike JSO tactics, it still raises awareness of the cause and might even push people to more moderate campaign groups.
Just Stop Oil came behind other, similarly controversial climate campaign groups like Insulate Britain and Extinction Rebellion, and as it says goodbye, its disruptive methods have been seized upon by other organisations like the Pro-Palestinian Youth Justice.
The infamous Just Stop Oil orange vests might be going away, but the individual activists, their cause and campaign tactics feel here to stay.