Lucy Letby, a British nurse, was found guilty last month of murdering seven infants and attempting to murder six others during her five-year tenure at the Countess of Chester Hospital’s neonatal unit in 2015 and 2016. According to Dr. Dewi Evans, the chief medical expert at her trial, Letby employed a variety of medical techniques to harm the infants, including displacing tubes and injecting air into her victims, making her actions difficult to detect.
Letby, 33, was arrested in 2018 in connection with the deaths of eight children at the Chester hospital. Evans was subsequently asked to review the medical records of 48 infants, none of whom were included in the trial. He identified 18 cases that raised concerns, many of which involved infants who had their breathing tubes removed or displaced in 2014, a method he believes Letby initially favored for harming the children.
Evans expressed his concern over the unusually high number of breathing tubes that were dislodged within a short period in what he considered a reputable neonatal department. He also mentioned a case involving an insulin poisoning death, suggesting that Letby may have committed more such acts where doctors failed to measure the insulin level post-mortem. Without such measurements, it’s impossible to determine if foul play was involved, leading Evans to believe there may be more cases of insulin poisoning.
The number of murders in Letby’s unit began to increase after she attended a training course that emphasized the dangers of air embolism, a serious or potentially fatal condition where air enters the blood vessels, causing conditions like stroke or heart attack. Evans noted that there were no recorded deaths from air embolism before Letby attended this course, but the deaths escalated after she learned about this method.
Prosecutors are expected to announce on Monday whether Letby, now known as Britain’s most notorious child killer, will face a new trial for six attempted murder charges on which the jury was unable to reach a verdict.