Former nurse Lucy Letby has been found guilty of the attempted murder of another newborn baby, following further convictions last year that make her the UK’s most prolific serial killer of children in the modern world.
Letby, 34, was found guilty last August of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill six more between June 2015 and June 2016 while working as a nurse in the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital in Chester, northern England.
She was sentenced to life in prison and told she would never be released.
Letby denied harming a baby in her care.
Last month, she went on trial for the second time for the attempted murder of another little girl, known as Child K. However, the jury was unable to reach a verdict in the first round of the trial.
Prosecutor Nick Johnson told Manchester Crown Court that child K was born prematurely in hospital in February 2016 at 25 weeks and was connected to a ventilator and other machines monitoring her heart rate and oxygen levels.
A little more than an hour after the birth, while other staff were away, Johnson said, attending physician Ravi Jayaram came into the room where she was being examined and found that the baby’s breathing tube had come loose, alarms that should have been sounding had been disabled, and Letby was just standing there “doing nothing.”
Johnson added that Letby tampered with the breathing tube twice more that night to create the impression that there was a special problem with the baby.
“Justice has been served and a nurse who was supposed to be caring for our daughter has been found guilty of causing her harm,” Child K’s family said in a statement read by police outside the courtroom.
“But this justice will not alleviate the extreme pain, anger and suffering we have all experienced.”
“These were the actions of a cold-blooded, calculated killer,” senior prosecutor Nicola Wyn Williams said in a statement after the verdict on Tuesday.
Child K died three days later in another hospital, although prosecutors said it had nothing to do with the accusation against Letby.
In her testimony, Letby again denied ever harming a baby in her care and said she could not remember the night in question.
Her defense attorney said there was no evidence to prove her guilt.
Letby was originally found guilty of killing the five little boys and two little girls by injecting the infants with insulin or air or force-feeding them milk.
The case shocked the UK and prompted the government to launch an investigation into why hospital management had ignored concerns about their conduct.
Police also said further investigations were being conducted to determine whether there were any other victims at the hospitals where Letby had previously worked.
Letby has become a cause célèbre for some on social media, even though she herself was the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice. In the run-up to the recent trial, the New Yorker magazine published an article questioning the evidence against her.
However, in May the English Court of Appeal rejected her application to set aside the verdict, based mainly on the claim that the prosecution’s expert witness’ evidence was flawed.
Letby had also argued that jurors were falsely told they did not need to be aware of how she killed or attempted to kill her victims.
But Judge Victoria Sharp said in a ruling released on Tuesday that it was “not necessary for the prosecution to prove the exact nature of its actions.”