Lucy Letby trial: nurse ‘devastated’ to hear she was accused of murdering babies

The nurse denied harming any children and said she was “devastated” at being accused of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill 10 others.

Giving evidence on Tuesday for the first time in her eight-month trial at Manchester crown court, Letby, 33, said she “only ever did my best to care for them”.

Several rows behind Letby, her parents, John, 76, and Susan, 62, looked on, as did family members of the alleged victims on the other side of the public gallery.

Asked by her defence barrister, Benjamin Myers KC, whether she had ever harmed a child in her care, she replied: “No, that’s completely against everything that being a nurse is about.”

Letby was flanked by two female security officers as she gave evidence.

She was asked about the moment she was told she was suspected of murdering babies on the neo-natal unit at the Countess of Chester hospital, where she had worked since January 2012.

“It was sickening. I just couldn’t believe it,” Letby said.

Asked how it had made her feel, she paused and become emotional, then said: “It was devastating. I don’t think you can be accused of anything worse than that. It was just … yeah – devastating.”

Myers then asked what impact the allegations had on her mental health. She replied: “I just changed as a person. My mental health deteriorated. I felt very isolated from my friends and family on the unit.”

Letby went on to say she considered killing herself “because of what was being inferred” when she was removed from the neo-natal unit in 2016.

The jury has been told Letby was removed from the unit when consultants raised concerns about her “common link” with a number of baby deaths and near-deaths between June 2015 and June 2016.

Letby, crying, told the jury: “My job was my life. I can’t put into words, it’s just – my whole world just stopped.”

Letby was asked about notes recovered from her house in which she had written “not good enough”, “I can’t breathe, I can’t focus”, “I hate myself” and “I’m an awful person. I pay every day”.

The University of Chester graduate, who became emotional when the notes were shown in court last week, said she wrote them after being removed from the neo-natal unit in 2016 but before her first arrest, when she felt she was being accused of harming babies through incompetence.

“I felt immense responsibility,” she said. “I felt I had been incompetent or done something wrong that had harmed children.”

Asked why she wrote a note saying “I haven’t done anything wrong,” Letby replied: “Because I haven’t done anything wrong.”

She said she knew that “in the worst case scenario” the police could be involved and that she felt she was the subject of “slander and discrimination”.

“Everything’s taken over my life … I felt very alone and scared,” she said.

Asked why she wrote that she was an “awful person,” she added: “Because at that time I did feel I must be an awful person to have made any mistakes that might have harmed anyone and that I was paying the price … that I had been taken away from the job that I loved and I’m being accused of things I just hadn’t done.”

On another note recovered by police, Letby had written “no hope”. The defendant told jurors that at the time “I didn’t have hope. My whole situation felt hopeless at times.”

“At that time I did hate myself … because I was made to feel I had done something wrong so potentially I had been incompetent in some way”.

Letby denies murdering seven babies and attempting to murder 10 others at the Countess of Chester hospital between June 2015 and June 2016.

She said she had been remanded in four different prisons since her third and final arrest in 2020.

She described her arrests as “traumatising”, saying she was led to a police station in her pyjamas after her first arrest at her home in Chester in July 2018.

“It was just the most, the scariest thing I’ve ever been through,” the nurse said. “It not only happened once, it happened twice and then a third time. It’s just traumatising.”

The nurse, originally from Hereford, said she had been diagnosed with depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder and needed medication to help her sleep.

Letby said she had become “very sensitive to any noise” and “any unexpected change in people” since her arrests, adding: “I’m easily startled, easily frightened of new things.”