A note in which Lucy Letby wrote ‘I am evil, I did this’ after being accused of killing premature babies should be read ‘literally’, a court heard yesterday.
The neo-natal nurse earlier told her trial that she wrote the message, found in her diary when police searched her home, when she was ‘panicking’ after being moved off her hospital’s neonatal unit.
She said she was ‘blaming myself but not because I’d done something, because of the way people were making me feel’.
However, prosecutor Nick Johnson KC told Manchester Crown Court yesterday that the note should be viewed as a ‘confession’.
He said it was not, as she claimed, ‘the anguished outpourings of a woman in fear and despair’ at having been moved away from the frontline nursing job she loved.
A note in which Lucy Letby (pictured) wrote ‘I am evil, I did this’ should be read ‘literally,’ a court heard
It should be taken ‘literally’, he told jurors.
Mr Johnson also told the court that Letby was ‘completely out of control’ when she murdered two identical triplets 23 hours apart after she returned from a holiday in Ibiza.
She had already ‘got away’ with murdering five children and attacking nine others ‘in plain sight’ when she killed the premature baby boys, it is alleged.
It had given her the ‘misplaced confidence’ to do ‘pretty much whatever she wanted’, jurors heard.
After the second triplet collapsed, Letby, 33, even ‘happily predicted’ to a doctor that he would die because she ‘knew the endgame’ and was enjoying ‘playing God’, it is claimed.
Addressing the jury on the second day of his closing speech, Mr Johnson said Letby killed the first triplet, known as Baby O, in a ‘cruel and violent’ way, in June 2016.
She assaulted his abdomen, causing his liver to rupture and bleed internally, before injecting air into his stomach and circulation, blocking blood flow to his heart, he claimed.
Within minutes of his death, the barrister said, she was sabotaging his brother, known as Baby P, by overfeeding him milk and injecting air into his feeding tube before she clocked off for the day.
Prosecutor Nick Johnson KC told Manchester Crown Court yesterday that the note should be viewed as a ‘confession’
She allegedely evaded detection because none of her trusting colleagues could initially contemplate the possibility that a member of their neonatal ‘family’ was working against them (File photo: A general view of the Countess of Chester Hospital, where Letby used to work)
On her way home, Mr Johnson said, Letby ‘lay the ground’ for his murder on her shift at the Countess of Chester Hospital in Chester the following day by ‘gas-lighting’ her colleagues in text messages, writing that she was ‘worried’ as the siblings were ‘identical’.
Mr Johnson told jurors: ‘We say simply that the murder of Baby O was cruel and violent.
‘She had got away with so much by the time she returned from Ibiza it gave Lucy Letby the misplaced confidence that she could pretty much do whatever she wanted.
‘We say, frankly, by this stage she was completely out of control and determined to meet out the same treatment to Baby P the very next day.’
Letby is accused of injecting air into Baby P’s feeding tube, causing his stomach to blow up and crush his lungs – less than 24 hours after Baby O died. She also allegedly dislodged his breathing tube before his fatal collapse.
Mr Johnson added: ‘We suggest Baby P’s case shows the malevolence of Lucy Letby at its height.’
By midday on June 24, as Baby P deteriorated, doctors decided he needed to be transferred to a more specialist centre.
Around the same time, the court heard, Letby told a senior female consultant: ‘He’s not leaving here alive, is he?’ And, the court heard, she was right.
The neo-natal nurse (pictured) earlier told her trial that she wrote the message while ‘panicking’ after being moved off her hospital’s neo-natal unit
Prosecutor Nick Johnson KC told Manchester Crown Court (pictured) the note should be taken ‘literally’
Baby P collapsed for a final time shortly after the transport team arrived to move him.
Mr Johnson asked the jury: ‘Why did she [Letby] say it? There is only one answer – because she knew the end game.
‘She knew what was going to happen, she was controlling things, she was enjoying what was going on and happily predicting what she knew was going to happen. She was in effect playing God.’
Earlier, Mr Johnson said doctors on the unit who suspected something ‘abnormal’ was going on after the two triplets died hadn’t gone to police because they simply hadn’t witnessed Letby doing anything ‘untoward’.
He questioned exactly what they would have told officers, adding Letby had been ‘operating in plain sight.’
The third triplet survived after his parents begged for him to be moved to another hospital. It is the prosecution case that Letby planned to murder him too.
Letby, of Hereford, denies the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of ten others between June 2015 and June 2016. The trial continues.
