A British nurse tried for the murder of seven babies in 2015 and 2016, denied again this Friday, June 9, to have killed or harmed children, and denied on the last day of her interrogation to be "a calculating woman".
Lucy Letby, whose trial began in October in Manchester (northwest England), is accused of killing these babies while she was a nurse in the neonatal department of the Countess of Chester Hospital. According to the prosecution, she killed them by injecting them with air into their veins or insulin.
"You're lying"
Friday's exchange with prosecutor Nick Johnson was particularly tense. "You're a very calculating woman, aren't you?" he asked Lucy Letby, 33. "You're deliberately lying, aren't you?" he continued. "You're lying to try to get people's sympathy and attention, aren't you?" To these questions, the accused answered with a simple "no". "By killing these children, you attracted attention, didn't you?" the prosecutor asked. "I didn't kill the kids," Lucy Letby replied. "I never killed a child or harmed any of them," she later repeated.
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At the start of her interrogation in May, she said she found it "sickening" in 2016 to be suspected. "I didn't believe it," she explained, "I don't think you can be accused of anything worse than that." Lucy Letby told the court she "always wanted to work with children." She was the first in her family to go to university. She has repeatedly defended herself for harming infants. On Friday, the prosecutor retracted a note she had written in 2016, when she was informed of the suspicions against her. "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. "You knew you had killed or seriously injured these children. (...) Are you a murderer?" the prosecutor said. "No," the accused replied again.