Lucy Letby - Baby Serial Killer (1 Viewer)

cwej said:
I find it interesting that no case of psychological illness/insanity was put forward to get a different verdict. Clearly her lawyers thought there was a good chance she would get cleared with the evidence they had. And it really does all seem to be circumstantial. Apart from those notes in her diary - which are… just extraordinary.
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I did, initially think the same when those diary notes first became public. However, I'm not sure it would be possible to claim mental ill health when she was - for all other intents and purposes - continuing to function in a job with very high demands. I can't see it being possible to be even make the argument of her being so unwell that she killed/attempt to kill so many children, but that she was well enough to maintain the façade of being a professional nurse for no-one to notice anything was awry.

As a nurse, the whole story has been very difficult to process. It's made me second-guess everything I thought I knew about the profession, and it's probably her age more than anything. She spends three years at university writing assignments, sitting exams, etc. and then four years later she starts doing this? Was the thought always there? Did something happen in that first four years? There are so many unanswered questions about the motivation.
 
Slave said:
I did, initially think the same when those diary notes first became public. However, I'm not sure it would be possible to claim mental ill health when she was - for all other intents and purposes - continuing to function in a job with very high demands. I can't see it being possible to be even make the argument of her being so unwell that she killed/attempt to kill so many children, but that she was well enough to maintain the façade of being a professional nurse for no-one to notice anything was awry.
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Sorry I didn't mean the notes were evidence of psychological illness. I meant they are evidence of guilt. (Though some experts are saying otherwise).
 
VoR said:
Would we think of Hitler and Stalin as mentally rational though?

I feel like it’s impossible to use ‘mental illness’ as a catch-all term in cases like this, because it both implies a reduced culpability and also risks stigmatising mentally ill people as a whole.

But I think I’m in a similar place to @Iguana where I have a really hard time with the idea that a totally normal, rationally-thinking person could do such hideous things. There has to be something - and concluding that ’some people are just evil’ feels like it abandons the possibility of ever finding an explanation.
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I think probably - like so many things - evil/good is a scale on which we all are (and probably shift around throughout our lives), like sexuality, gender and I'm sure many other things. And as a mathematician I can only assume we're probably all normally distributed around a basic level of goodness, with a couple of truly extreme cases, just born at one end or the other.
 
cwej said:
Sorry I didn't mean the notes were evidence of psychological illness. I meant they are evidence of guilt. (Though some experts are saying otherwise).
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Oh, that's interesting.

I can completely see why they would be regarded as evidence of guilt. But I also know many - if not all - nurses, including myself, who carry guilt or blame themselves when something goes wrong, particularly earlier on in their career. You replay situations over and over again thinking "If only I'd done this..." or "why didn't I notice that...".

If I saw those scrawled notes completely out of context of knowing everything else, my first thought would probably be that she was a relatively inexperienced nurse who was not coping in a difficult environment and needed time out of there. I wouldn't jump straight to it being an admission of culpability.
 
That's an interesting take - though with the context does it make you feel differently?
 
cwej said:
That's an interesting take - though with the context does it make you feel differently?
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Honestly...I'm still not sure. If we're talking about the context of the court case and all the evidence, then yes, I'd probably see be inclined to read them as an admission of culpability. If I was her manager at work and I didn't have the whole oversight (which took the police weeks to put together) but knew she'd been present at several deaths, I still don't think my first thought would be: "She must be a murderer".
 
How does someone like this get held in prison? Surely all the other inmates will kill her sooner rather than later or is she kept under 24 hour solitary confinement?
 
This whole story is absolutely horrendous and seriously upsetting. Makes me feel physically sick.
 
I also didn’t realise she got arrested in 2018. This has been going on for 5 years. She didn’t just kill those poor defenceless babies but also by pleading not guilty made the families go through the torture of a prolonged court case which in turn meant they couldn’t grieve the children they lost. I honestly have no words for such evil.
 
The methods were just so... benign on paper. I mean overfeeding doesn't sound like a murderous activity. But with all of the training and in context, so evil.

And that she targeted twins and triplets. Perverse.

She certainly became evil. Bear minimum, utterly wicked. She clearly got a thrill out of acting like God due to her own perceived failings. Surely a complex, if not a severe undefined condition. We are conditioned not to kill, despite it probably bring fairly instinctive. Her as nurse more than us.

All just so bloody unlikely.
 
I haven't delved too deep, but for all the 'She came from a happy, normal family', this doesn't really strike as very normal behaviour. Although who knows how you'd react if you found out your daughter was a mass-murderer?



Anyway, it's an obvious point but it's hard not to imagine how different the tone of the coverage would be if she wasn't white and/or a British national.
 
The normal family thing is such a distraction. Yes she was a bizarrely basic bitch, but I bet Rose West loved a Maccies and Noel's House Party.

Detached human behaviour can come from all manner of triggers. She, for want of a better phrase, took shit too far. I'd guess addiction, self harm or therapy are the fairly well trodden path for her apparent self resentment. She went down the salsa classes and murdering babies route instead.
 
VoR said:
I haven't delved too deep, but for all the 'She came from a happy, normal family', this doesn't really strike as very normal behaviour. Although who knows how you'd react if you found out your daughter was a mass-murderer?
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It does seem a slightly unusual reaction (not that there's a "normal" one in situations like this). But then you look at the way Lucy Letby led an almost infantilised home life, sleeping with teddy bears; fairy lights around the bed rails; a print that said "Leave sparkles wherever you go" on the wall.

I would imagine despite her age and the job she does, there was a degree of her parents still seeing her as "their little girl". The instinctive response to try and take the blame seems very in keeping with that. To be confronted with the reality must be an absolute head-fuck because they're being made to see her as someone they maybe/probably didn't: an adult. Let alone a serial killer.
 
At the risk of turning this thread into SPECULATE WILDLY ABOUT LUCY I did read that the only time she showed any emotion in the trial was when some doctor she had been infatuated with turned up for a declaration.
 
To continue speculating they said she may have attacked some of the babies so that the doctor would be called to help.
 
Peekaboo said:
I'm not saying I would have murdered some babies for attention but I've done some pretty awful things under infatuation.
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You think she may have carried out these heinous crimes because she was infatuated with the doctor? I suppose we will never know.
 
jivafox said:
To continue speculating they said she may have attacked some of the babies so that the doctor would be called to help.
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I mean that's one way to get a straight man's attention, but couldn't she have saved herself a lifetime in prison and just posted a slightly booby Instagram story?
 
it reminds me of that psychopath test question

A woman turns up at her mother’s funeral. At the funeral she meets a man she’s never met before, but just through looking at him she knows that he’s ‘the one’, and they will marry and live a happy life together.

The next week the woman murders her sister. Why does she do this?

PM FOR ANSWER
 
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Suomi said:
it reminds me of that psychopath test question

A woman turns up at her mother’s funeral. At the funeral she meets a man she’s never met before, but just through looking at him she knows that he’s ‘the one’, and they will marry and live a happy life together.

The next week the woman murders her sister. Why does she do this?

PM FOR ANSWER
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Is it because

she needs there to be another family funeral in order to see him again??
 
quite an interesting Guardian article today which speaks to several medical professionals who have concerns about the "evidence" presented during the trial, and heavily implies that Letby may not have been responsible for all of, or even any of, the baby deaths

www.theguardian.com

Lucy Letby: killer or coincidence? Why some experts question the evidence

Exclusive: Doubts raised over safety of convictions of nurse found guilty of murdering babies
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

obviously it seems wildly implausible that she wouldn't be guilty. especially with the note and the shift chart. I just found it surprising that some of those quoted are saying there was no scientific evidence at all for murder in the cases of many of the deaths, and that some feel there's been a miscarriage of justice. how strange.
 
That was an interesting read. Now that the media ban has been lifted there’s been some interesting articles going into the trial in great detail.

The thing is, with these types of cases involving the deaths of children, especially babies, you’re seen as a child killer sympathiser if you question anything about the trial or Lucy’s guilt.

I don’t think this is the end of this though. Could we be in for some more revelations? Could Lucy actually be a victim of probably the biggest miscarriage of justice in recent history? Who knows.
 
I came across an article a while back from the New York Times suggesting she may not be guilty. It was compelling and definitely worth a read in addition to the one Jark has linked.

For me the whole case just makes me feel so sick I try to not think about it too much.

She did it. Surely she did?
 
Sorry the statistics thing really doesn't add up even if they did omit 6 baby deaths (which they really shouldn't have done - that's the sort of thing that is surely grounds for a mistrial) - but even if they'd included the fact that 6 more babies died that she wasn't there for she was present for 25 out of 31.

If we assume she works a 50 hours week, she's present on the ward 0.29 of the time so expected to be on shift 9 out of 31 deaths. She was on shift 25 out of 31.

Assuming that everyone is equally likely to be on shift when a baby dies, the chances of her being on shift for 25 of the deaths is: 0.00000000377272 (0%) or 1 in 265000000, if the people on shift were independent of the baby's deaths. Either she was a terrible terrible nurse or a murderer.
 
It makes me wonder about our basic practice of prove 'beyond reasonable doubt'... if the probability that it's a miscarriage of justice is 1/265000000 do you just imprison the person anyway? I don't know what the answer is. You could be risking the lives of other people, particularly in the case of a serial killer, if you wait til there is zero doubt.
 
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