Accused killer nurse Lucy Letby was ‘playing God’ at hospital

Accused killer nurse Lucy Letby enjoyed “playing God” at the UK hospital where she allegedly killed seven babies and attempted to murder 10 more, prosecutors said.

Letby, 33, was said to be “completely out of control” at the Countess of Chester Hospital after allegedly carrying out a string of attacks in the neonatal unit between 2015 and 2016, prosecutor Nick Johnson told the court during closing statements on Tuesday.

Jurors heard that the nurse had “got away with so much” amid the alleged murder spree that she started to develop the “misplaced confidence she could pretty much do whatever she wanted.”

“She knew what was going to happen,” Johnson said. “She was enjoying what was going on and happily predicting what she knew was going to happen.”

“She, in effect, was playing God,” he added.

Letby, who has pleaded not guilty to 22 murder and attempted murder charges, allegedly killed two triplet boys — identified only as Child O and Child P — shortly after returning from a trip to Ibiza in June 2016, jurors heard.

The nurse is accused of injecting Child O with air via an nasogastric tube that left him with an “inflicted traumatic injury to the liver.”

The court had previously heard during Letby’s trial that Child O had been in a good condition before his “remarkable deterioration” and death.

The infant’s brother, Child P, died 24 hours later after allegedly being attacked by the nurse.

Prosecutors said Letby’s “objective, as always, was to kill.”

“In [Child O’s] case she combined all three methods she had used to such devastating effect on all the other children in the case. In order to try to cover up what she did, she falsified the notes,” Johnson said.

“We say, frankly, by this stage she was completely out of control and was determined to mete out the same treatment to [Child P] the very next day.”

In the week after Child O and Child P’s slayings, Letby was removed from the neonatal unit by hospital managers and given a clerical role, which is where she remained until her arrest in 2018.

During her own testimony during the trial, Letby sobbed about her “traumatizing” arrest — and claimed she “couldn’t believe” that she had been charged with the sickening crimes. 

“It was sickening. I just couldn’t believe it,” she said of the moment she learned she had been suspended from neonatal care following a string of unexplained infant deaths.

“My job was my life. I can’t put into words, it’s just — my whole world just stopped.”

Letby was also questioned about notes recovered from her home in which she berated herself with messages like “I hate myself” and “I’m an awful person.”

“I felt immense responsibility [for the babies’ deaths],” she told jurors. “I felt I had been incompetent or done something wrong that had harmed children.”