Lucy Letby is on trial in Manchester for the murder of seven babies in 2015-2016. The British nurse rejected on Tuesday in block the "worst" accusations that can exist and explained herself on notes in which she seemed to incriminate herself. Seven months after the start of her trial, which began in October, the 33-year-old defendant was brought to speak in court for the first time.
Then a nurse in the neonatal department of the Countess of Chester Hospital (northwest England), Lucy Letby contests the seven murders and ten attempts of which she is accused between 2015 and 2016. According to the prosecution, she killed the babies by injecting them with air into their veins or insulin. Informed in 2016 of the suspicions that weighed on her, Lucy Letby, dressed in black, said Tuesday to have found it "disgusting" to be so accused.
"My work was my life"
"I didn't believe it," she explained, "I don't think you can be accused of anything worse than that." Lucy Letby "always wanted to work with children," she told the court. She was the first in her family to go to university. Questioned by her lawyer Ben Myers, she defended herself from having ever harmed infants: "It goes completely against what it is to be a nurse".
"My job was my life," she continued, explaining that "[her] whole world stopped" when she was removed from the neonatal ward. It was in this context that she explained the content of notes found during the investigation.
"I am evil. I did it"
"I don't deserve to live. I killed them on purpose because I'm not good enough to take care of them. I'm a horrible bad person," she wrote. "I am evil. I did it. »
She had written these words because she "felt like she had done something wrong." "I thought, I'm such a horrible person... I made mistakes without knowing it," she said. She assured that, far from being a confession, these writings had been written while she was plunged into deep psychological distress.
- Justice
- United Kingdom
- Homicide
- Infant