Lucy Letby, a British nurse, was sentenced on Monday to spend the rest of her life in jail after what appeared to be the United Kingdom’s deadliest child killer in recent history.
Letby was sentenced by a judge in Manchester, northwest England, to a rare whole-life order, the most severe penalty, typically reserved for the gravest offences.
This means she will spend the rest of her life in prison for the murder of seven newborn babies and the attempted murder of six others under her care.
“The order of the court is a whole-life order on each and every offence, and you will spend the rest of your life in prison,” said judge James Goss.
However, Letby, aged 33, had drawn the anger of the families of her young victims by choosing not to appear at the sentencing hearing. This decision led politicians to make commitments to address this legal loophole.
Goss said she had acted with “pre-meditation, calculation, and cunning” with “malevolence bordering on sadism”, “coldly” denying responsibility for her actions throughout the trial.
According to Agence France-Presse (AFP), most of her young victims suffered acute pain, but she deceived colleagues at the Countess of Chester Hospital about what she had done.
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Letby kept medical notes as “morbid records” about what she had done, which were found during police searches of her home after she was arrested.
“You have no remorse,” the judge said. “There are no mitigating factors.”
“You acted in a way that was completely contrary to the normal human instincts of nurturing and caring for babies, and in gross breach of the trust that all citizens place in those who work in the medical and caring professions,” he added.
“Lifelong harm” had been caused to her victims’ families by cutting short young lives
“almost as soon as they began”, the judge said.
“Loving parents have been robbed of their cherished children. You have caused deep psychological trauma,” he added.
No motives have emerged for the killings, which took place between June 2015 and June 2016 and have made Letby one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers.
Some 70 criminals are currently serving a whole-life order in the UK.
Before Lucy Letby, only three women had received this sentence: Myra Hindley, infamous for the “Moors Murders” alongside her boyfriend Ian Brady, where they killed five children in the 1960s; Rose West, a serial killer; and Joanna Dennehy.
Hindley passed away in 2002. Additionally, Harold Shipman, a medical doctor who murdered 15 of his patients with suspicions of up to 250 victims, was sentenced to a whole-life term in 2000.
He took his own life in his cell in 2004.
