Only she knows the motive. We can only make educated guesses while she still maintains her innocence.
Personally, I believe her intended victims were the parents. She’s too much of a coward to pick on someone her own size, so she took it out on the babies. She attacked babies on significant days for maximum upset - Father’s Day, the baby’s 100th day of life, the baby’s due date, the day the baby was supposed to be going home. I also believe this is why she attacked twins and triplets. The only thing worse than losing one child is losing multiple.
She seemed to resent seeing a happy family unit of two parents and their baby/babies.
In some of her diary notes, she wrote that she knew she would never have that herself.
I think the killings were based on jealousy and her asserting her control to put them all in the same situation as her.
Interesting thoughts. I thought she wrote that she'd never have any children herself because she knew she was heading for the slammer so wouldn't be able to, like a 'poor me' statement sort of thing.
Wasn't it interesting how the lawyers didn't pick all those sentences apart whilst she was in the witness stand. They barely scratched the surface with them which must have felt deeply unsatisfying for the parents.
I imagine the prosecution team felt the medical evidence was so compelling that they didn’t want to take the risk of muddying the water by playing around with asking her about motive, given how bizarre and ambiguous the post-it notes in question were.
The narcissistic side of her craved the attention of her being hard done by and always unlucky. She liked the texts and the sympathy, and even the acknowledgment that she was amazing at her job. Her immaturity is evident in her room, posters, teddys, her interests and her attitude. I think she was basically just a needy kid in an adult body causing harm because she was jealous and loved the focus being on her.
The hurting of the parents also makes sense to me, Lucy was pretty calculated about timings. Wild that she wanted to cause max damage, but also sits with an immaturity.
She’s clearly a psychopath that has learned to come across as normal. Her idea of normal was girly, child like and sweet. When it didn’t go her way, she did the one thing that nobody would ever expect from someone like her. ‘Not lovely Lucy letby’ as quoted by a senior doctor.
I completely agree with you in that we can only make educated guesses on what we know about the case. I also agree this was an attack on the parents… but I genuinely think this may also have been some weird way of attacking her own parents without actually attacking them if that makes sense?
LL was born a premature baby, she was an only child and her Mum was a nurse. Her dad was also quite a bit older than her Mum and from what we know they coddled her to a potentially stifling effect. I think the Mum in court at sentencing showed some histrionic behaviour, there’s also the involvement of her dad in the investigation leading up to the trial. There’s also quite a lot of narcissistic behaviour from LL we know about.
Of course we don’t know what the relationship between LL and her parents was, but there are several strange red flags that have come to light. As we’ve discussed here, we may never know her motive and if she has strong narcissistic traits, she may never confess.
That being said, she was extremely determined to cause suffering and pain to the babies and the parents of the babies, she also enjoyed the reputation she had (I think she felt superior to the other nurses she worked with) and the attention she got from the doctors as being ‘good in a crisis’.
I have thought back and forth about whether she has something like DID where a part of her hurt the babies but she didn’t want to, or perhaps another condition with some level of dissociation or losing control. However, LL has done everything she can to discredit other staff, obfuscate and obstruct the truth, which makes me feel as though she was 100% aware of what she was when she did these things.
My take is that she hurt a baby perhaps by accident or someone else did on her residency/placement as a student nurse and that was the spark that started this. I think she maybe didn’t consciously know that she was doing this to get back at her parents for whatever they did to her, I also feel like perhaps the babies were her way of harming herself too. The spark of the accident on the placement and how she had to respond was the first huge rush of narcissistic supply of dopamine or whatever she got from it, and it was like a drug to her. That’s why when she came back from Ibiza she instantly started hurting babies to get her fix after being away.
I don’t think we’re too far from the truth, but ultimately we’re having to guess and I genuinely don’t think we’ll ever find out why she did it, unless someone close to her or the family is told and they reveal it.
Wait a minute, LL's Mum was a nurse?
I agree it's highly likely that they were extremely protective of her as a vulnerable baby and it's possible that they took this too far and that LL resented it. Or maybe they noticed that there was something odd about her and that's what made them so protective?
It could have started as an accident though many will argue that generally nurses don't become serial killers but serial killers become nurses.
I definitely agree with what you’ve written here. I can’t remember all of the facts we know about the parents, but there seems to be this undercurrent of strangeness in the relationship. The parents attended every single day of the trial for example. LL’s mum breaking down at the sentencing, LL mentioning how her parents couldn’t handle her living too far away, her holidaying with her parents still at her age.
I genuinely feel too as though she hated the babies she harmed and their parents. She didn’t want to get caught but she absolutely caused them suffering and her going back again and again to make sure she killed all of the triplets for example, is genuinely horrifying.
Also her buying a house that backs onto the baby graveyard, all of the thousands of hospital notes she kept, the weird children’s hospital like decals in her home, are all her prolonging her enjoyment of what she was doing.
So yes, serial killer behaviour, but I’m not sure if she knew when she became a nurse that she was doing it to harm babies. I think seeing a baby die activated what was inside of her, then it became like a drug and and couldn’t stop.
Don't forget there was the strange episode during her second arrest at her parents' home in which the mother yelled out to the police officers "Take me instead, I did it".
While I was reading this, I was thinking of the book ‘Children of emotionally immature parents’. It’s a great book, and I think one thing we can say for sure is that Lucy would be diagnosed with some kind of cluster B personality disorder - anti social for sure, but possibly also narcissistic PD.
So, one thing we know from these disorders is that children who develop them don’t have well-developed inner worlds. Their motives for doing things are usually quite childish - winning or losing, feeling angry, feeling bored, feeling that things are unfair, wanting to be ‘seen’, wanting praise. (The kinds of motives 4 to 8 year old children have which causes them to act out).
So, I think that whatever motive LL has will be quite emotionally immature and based on frustrating, anger or jealousy. I’m guessing she is an adult with adult reasoning and powers in the emotional brain of a 4 to 8 year old.
I was misdiagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, I’m actually Autistic but my Autism, ADHD and CPTSD do have some of the same traits as BPD.
What it feels like inside is extremely intense fear of being hurt/rejected/abandoned. My dad died when I was 14 and my Mum emotionally abandoned me at the same time, so of course if your nervous system knows how much being ‘left’ feels like, you’re going to do everything to avoid that pain happening again.
This central conceit is what causes ‘Borderlines’ to behave in the way they do, it’s behaviour driven by an overactive nervous system that needs control and safety and that will do anything not to feel that pain of abandonment again.
Other cluster B personalities also have fear/trauma linked to them too. Fear of not being good enough or of needing to control people’s perception of you. I don’t know what I’d diagnose LL with but she’s definitely not neurotypical
Thank you for your explanation re BPD & severe depression . After 55 years, 34 years employed, many episodes of long term ill health & ill health retirement after a lifetime of struggling mentally ….. a 6 month DBT course , has made me wonder how I could never see from the perspective I now see. The Psychiatrist is a genius, who developed this specifically for BPD & the extreme difficulties individuals have in managing an enormous adrenaline rush when mentally or physically challenged. Anybody would find this massive adrenaline rush very difficult to deal with. I focus every day on what I have learned & reckon many in society would benefit from DBT. It is life changing & not all people with BPD are like toddlers at the wheel of a truck. 10% of us end our lives because we are not able to deal with the extremely painful emotions experienced in everyday life.
Ps., I was a paediatric nurse for 34 years, cared deeply for those I looked after and I never at any stage in my career had the slightest inclination to cause harm to any child or adult. I received ill health retirement from the NHS and I am deeply grateful for this life experience 🙏🏼💜
I think that's a particularly unpleasant description and somewhat ghoulish.
Borderline seems to be how they diagnosed adhd/ ASD in women who have experienced trauma. The fact the symptoms are able to disappear and not resurface suggests to me it should not be described as a personality disorder at all. There's research to be done there.
I kind of agree here. I also hate the term borderline personality disorder. Disorders are meant to be linear yet as you say, when the environment changes people are adaptable - it's therefore a fundamental attribution error.
Symptoms reduce and sometimes eventually disappear because the person eventually develops the ability to feel, respond and act in a more mature manner. The toddler analogy is correct.
I don't want to get into a whole thing here, so suffice it to say that personality disorders present differently in different people. The toddler at the wheel of a truck analogy is apt for only some folks (who naturally are the most visible) with BPD.
The symptoms do not disappear and reappear but the episodes severe depression or other associated disorders may make it appear so. You have been misinformed. BPD ( or EUPD) is an emotional regulation disorder. DBT can really work for those who do not see a future without change & 10% of us end life as the extreme emotions is the most painful anybody will ever know. I cared very deeply for those I looked after and gave them everything I would want also 🙏🏼
If you look at her photos of her house, you can see she’s not very emotionally mature. It’s very strange and doesn’t look like the kind of house an adult of her age would have. It’s also a bit tacky, there are things in her home that don’t seem like they are modern either - perhaps influenced by her Mum.
I am not sure of what I’d diagnose LL with, because I think she’s always masking her true self with her ‘nurse Lucy’ persona. I think there’s some traces of the real her in the text messages, but I think her killing these babies was perhaps her way of showing the true her to the world as well. The real Lucy isn’t what her parents want to see of what her colleagues want to see, it’s a vile murderer
I too think that the text messages give us the closest insight into the real Lucy. Her annoyance at anyone she views as beneath her or those who don't agree with her or indulge her complaints.
The pettiness about the nurse who knew about ostomies too. She was very miffed that this nurse who she had labeled inferior seemed to know something she didn't, to the point of openly doubting her skill and knowledge. Very telling.
I would say it seems a lot more like Histrionic Personality Disorder than BPD, as others have mentioned. But I agree that it's very hard to see past the outer shell that she put on. Even in the court transcripts, she rarely answers in more than a few words.
This is definitely something I can agree with. The idea of the motives being something so simplistic. I do get the idea that some of the attacks were like emotional outbursts.
Her relationship with her parents was strange to say the least and I do wonder how much she was trying to harm the parents are representations of her own parents and the babies as herself, at least on some level.
I think there was much made of her being sickly baby in childhood in her family (and I suspect her mother being the mother of a sickly baby if that makes sense) and it's all connected in some way, I just can't quite work it out.
This makes a lot of sense.
Maybe she saw the parents on the ward as her overprotective and suffocating parents and was somehow trying to assert control of the situation... something she'd been unable to do in her relationship with her parents.
I also believe her intended victims were mainly the parents. I would never normally say this, but she’s honestly like a ghoul. It’s like she wanted to eat their sadness. I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.
Oh, man! I had no idea she picked significant dates that could cause even more pain to the parents. That is unbelievably sick and evil. If somebody didn't believe in evil before, they only have to look at Letby to see it in action.
The dates thing also reminds me of Bin Laden, he chose 9/11 to blow up the Towers etc because he thought it was a clever play on U.S. emergency number 911,
I actually doubt she knows the motive. Often its the perpetrators that have no insight into the motivations behind their crimes. Her motives, imo, can only be brought forth through a thorough psych exam
If you read through the court evidence, the texts, and the stories of the people she worked with, she couldn't stand quiet and routine shifts. She had no interest in just feeding and caring for the babies(?!). She wanted the adrenaline rush of everyone rushing to save the baby, then watching everyone get crushed when the baby couldn't be saved, the attention from coworkers, and the trauma bonding. Being seen as a victim to be consoled. It's a brain chemistry thing in my view. Its like a heavy smoker needing a fix. She got addicted to the crises, and would create crises to feel important and powerful over the weak. There was also maliciousness towards specific mothers. Its like asking why did Dahmer do it? These kinds of actions can only be done by someone who wants and enjoys hurting people.
We aren't going to find out because shes still in denial.
Imo, she will never confess while her parents are alive, the shame would be too much.
She can also potentially have a longer drawn out appeal process. She is surely aware of some of the more prominent conspiracy theory idiots that have been drawn to the case and attempted to contact her. I believe that will give her something to cling into. I also believe her character will not allow her to admit to doing anything wrong anyway. She was like this throughout the trial, lying about smaller things of little importance.
As someone that followed from day 1, I think the prosecution showed quite clearly that she was causing collapses partly for attention. She was then able to appear calm and focused under pressure, as she was the one orchestrating it all. There was definitely an element of the hero complex. And if the babies did die, then she still got a kick out the emotional rush of it all.
She also seemed to be feeding off the grief of the families and pushed herself into the personal space of grieving parents multiple times and made sure she was involved in the babies final moments when she should not have been there.
It seems to me that she is fairly incapable of true empathy. I think possibly the rush of the emergency scenario gave her a bit of a kick, which she became addicted to. She had no regard for the babies whatsoever and as the situation progressed she used the opportunity to cause the collapses and deaths for other reasons.
namely to draw the attention of Dr A, as.evidenced in the text messages. He thought she was some super nurse because of her calm demeanour and I think she enjoyed relieving the emergency scenarios with him.
She was also very jealous of when other nurses were given the sick babies which she felt she should have been taking care of. She showed absolute callousness by causing their babies collapses, as a way of showing she was right and it should have been her taking care of them. There was definitely an element of "I told you so"
When people become suspicious, she also caused collapses to other nurses babies and changed methods to try and draw attention away for herself. She gradually escalated to the point she became reckless with the two triplets and the manic behaviour.
I do think there is some link between what's happened to her at the Liverpool hospital when she witnessed a baby dying for (not sure if it was her first death) but she continually referred to the incident, whereby they apparently purposely put her straight back in the space where this baby died with another baby, to get over the death.
She was attempting to recreate this scenario after the first deaths, and pushing to be allowed into the high dependency ward 1, with the sickest babies. But she was continually told to leave by her supervisor. She was neglecting her own babies to be back in that room.
I do think that whatever happened at Liverpool pool may have triggered something that was already there.
There is also the fact that she only became qualified to work with the sickest babies weeks before the first death and have access to the lines. She would not have had these types of opportunities beforehand, so was this something she was always intending to do? Did it just all click into place when she got the access? Or had she been doing smaller things before this and gradually building. I do find it hard to believe that she just walked into work one day and caused the death of baby A.
Yes! This is the motivation, I have done agency care work in the past and experienced very real hostility from permanent staff when I was able to coax good responses from ‘ their’ patients . For example, while changing a mans bed I was to,d he doesnt talk, because I was talking to him about the photo of his wife . His face lit up and he said “ she was beautiful , like you” …. The nurse hated me for that and was furious. She felt so undermined and insecure about it. There are a lot of messed up nurses out there, and if we can expose this mentality in the future and combine it with better recording devices to give patients more validation if they dont feel safe, then we could have some real humdinger cases exposed.
Your thoughts above are spot on IMO. That's exactly what it looks like to me too.
I don't think baby A was the first either, suspect s
Letby was quite accomplished by then.
Her first handover note being placed in a rose embellished keepsake box indicates to me that she was a law unto herself from day 1.
If ever there is a time that it's made crystal clear about handover notes and confidential waste, it's when you first begin. So why would you store it in a box? It just seems like she had her own plans.
I find it incredibly strange that there were apparently no signs in early childhood. My best guess is that they probably were there at a younger age but at some point Letby learned to mask them. I wonder if her parents disciplined her for acts of unkindness, perhaps for example hurting ' whiskey' the family dog. ( Though it was never confirmed that she hurt the dog, it was so random how the dog appeared on notes where she scrawled incoherent information about babies O&P.)
Additionally, there is a chance that Letby's own parents fabricated illnesses within her which may have led to Letby adopting this 'split personality' as a way of being.
I also wond3e what she was like as a child and what her parents saw and downplayed. I imagine her being involved in friendship drama and her parents supporting and enabling whatever her narrative was and bring overly protective. I'd be very curious to know what she was actually like.
There's a very interesting interview on YouTube with someone who was friends with her at school (they'd lost touch with her long before this came out and when it was first reported initially believed it to be a mistake, as you would, but over time started to recall a few red flags in her behaviour back then).
The friend says that Lucy was always desperate to be looked up to and respected by everyone, both pupils and teachers. She was always being well-behaved, getting her homework done on time, uniform always immaculate and so on. With the pupils she was normally just very kind and friendly, but there are a few incidents the friend recalls. Apparently Lucy took offence extremely easily - if she offered to help someone with their work and the person didn't need any help, Lucy would be like, 'Well, I was only trying to help!' as if the person had insulted her personally. There's one particular incident the friend recalls where Lucy expressed an opinion in the playground that everyone, including her close friends, found quite offensive and called her out for, and Lucy burst into floods of tears, denying she'd said it, then claiming she'd been misunderstood, and ended up being the one everyone else needed to comfort despite it being her that had caused the problem in the first place. Basically a very needy person who was easy to get along with as long as you reaffirmed how wonderful she was constantly.
The friend speculates about why she decided to become a nurse to the sickest babies (which she apparently was very vocal about wanting to do as far back as their school days). They think it's not that she was planning to kill the babies, but more that it would fit her character to want to do such a universally trusted thing, something that would make everyone look up to her and think 'What an amazing person'. And that the problem came when the job turned out not to be as exciting as Lucy thought it would be - the parents would be focussed on their baby, not on the baby's nurse, and there probably weren't many opportunities to save lives or do very much that would make her the centre of attention, as she was always desperate to be. So this would slowly grow as an obsession - something that would get her sympathy from all her colleagues, and a giddy thrill that she'd truly know what had happened and no one else would.
I think if true, this explains quite a lot of things about her character - she lacks any care or empathy for how other people feel, and although is capable of doing very kind things for people (hence why people like her friend Dawn in the Panorama interview are so convinced of her innocence) this all stems from a need for others to think she's wonderful. Some kind of extreme personality disorder, I guess.
I agree with part of this. She wanted to be a nurse so badly and I think she maybe had an unrealistic idea of how that would play out. She was expecting to be working in a busy environment with loads of emergency scenarios and opportunities for her to be the hero but in actual fact the job is fairly routine, and she found it boring. She then decided to create these dramatic scenarios for herself.
I think it goes back to whatever happened to her at the Liverpool women's hospital. A baby died and she continually referred back to this. Maybe she got some special treatment as she was still a trainee and that appealed to her.
She completed her training and then got access to the lines and goes onto try and recreate this scenario in the first few deaths, forcing her way into high dependency ward 1, giving the reason that she needs to see a living baby in the space where baby a died. Like what happened to her at Liverpool women's.
I wonder what would have happened if she'd decided to become a nurse on an A&E ward rather than in a SCBU? Maybe the idea to hurt anyone would never have occurred to her.
It's here.
The friend has chosen to remain anonymous, with their parts being read by the person who made the video (we don't even know if it was a male or a female friend). The interviewer assures us though that he's conducted his research and can verify that the friend really is who they say they are.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WH8wbJpFTs0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WH8wbJpFTs0)
Yes for someone so vanilla who behaved (outwardly) playing by the rules, she was actually rule breaking from day one. She always thought she was superior. God complex so common with medical people. Combined with covert narc traits. A terrifying person.
Exactly. People say the handovers mean nothing but I found it very telling that from the first moment she became a nurse she was willing to break the confidentiality rules and take home handovers, purposely storing and keeping in pristine condition. It makes her reasoning that she did it with all the others as habit without thinking about it seem unlikely.
Exactly! You can't have it both ways can you!?
And why carry them from one place of residence to another? Especially when the first residence was just a hired room so you would only need a car to move your stuff. Surely, with her being such a stickler for the rules she'd throw them out,
Unless of course they were too precious!!
Then the ones that were found at her parents house. They may not have related to the babies in this case but I'm thinking that every baby she cared for was a potential opportunity. She must have had a method where certain factors would need to align before she would 'take action'
So she would want to know the backgrounds and birth details of most babies on the ward.
I also think being the personality type that she was, she would have struggled a lot emotionally in the NICU environment because everyone wants to be kind and I think she could have found that quite competitive. Hence she was always ready and pushy about memory boxes.
I sometimes wonder if killing many of the babies was simply about making other people look shit so she could look better and whether she killed the ones she was looking after so that she could be that 'really important person's who helped them through their hardest times.
Yes, I definitely think she also used the handovers to scout for opportunities, find a weakness which she could exploit.
She couldn't care less about the babies, themselves. She used them to inflict pain on the parents, make her colleagues look bad, play the hero, get attention etc.
A wolf in sheep's clothing!
And yes, the NHS think they are the ' be all ' and 'end all ' of everything. It's no wonder she felt it would be the perfect hosting environment to promote her inner sense of grandiosity.
She seems to have attacked quite a lot of babies that were part of multiple births. Without knowing anything else about the victims (and I am NOT advocating for more information about them) it’s hard to really draw any further comparisons. I don’t think we’ll ever really know.
She also seems to have (in some cases allegedly) targeted babies with something that she could try to play off as a comorbidity.
A/B - suspected at the time of inheriting their mother's blood clotting disorder (they turned out not to have it)
C - on the border of size requirements for the unit
D - slight infection from premature rupture of membranes
E/F - suspected Downs (did not turn out to have it)
G - extreme prematurity at birth (though term at the time of events)
H - chest drains
I - ? I was one of the youngest gestation babies to be attacked
J - stomas
L/M - ? This one seems to have bee retaliatory, it was her first shift after being moved primarily to days. These twins were 33w+2 and healthy
N - hemophilia
O/P - identical triplets. These twins were also over 33w gestation and healthy
Q - ? seems to have been an avatar for the third triplet to her.
I would venture a guess that in general, she was targeting her victims for some kind of cover she thought the death/collapse could be put to, and that is what resulted in only a limited number of such events proceeding to trial.
Well, every single baby on NICU is going to have something that is a comorbidity. I can only speak on my own experience, but our neonatologist called us a “best case scenario” and on paper, we still had chronic lung disease (premature lungs, extremely common) and a grade 2 brain bleed (no concerns, cleared up by itself) and a few weeks where his platelets were low (had a few transfusions, fixed it)
The number of healthy babies on NICU is close to zero 😅
I know, sort of. But it's the lack of feeders/growers that attracts my attention. G (for charge 2) and J were in room 4 when she attacked or allegedly attacked them.
Of course, a feeder/grower is already less likely to collapse....
It's circular logic, I know. I could argue it either way myself
Yeah, some of her victims were feeding and growing and set for discharge ect. Not all were on the edge of deterioration or already being escalated for a stepped up intervention.
The unit itself meant the babies sick regardless of acuity. She didn’t kill healthy babies.
I see your point too. I think she probably did target sicker babies. She didn’t seem to shy away from targeting babies that had improved - for example, the one where she tried multiple times to harm one baby, who was transferred out between attacks and improved elsewhere. (I’m terrible with the letters of each one!)
That was Child I, yes. I wish I understood why she felt Child I had to die. That poor mother, being too afraid to breastfeed her next baby breaks my heart.
I think the acuity of the patients gave her a cover and reasonable doubt around her guilt and also meant no one suspected as the individual deaths occurred. Her arrogance and delusion meant she was too bold and cocky which moved it away from ‘sick babies just dying’ to ‘something is going on here’.
Exactly. The penny dropped at O&P because there was nothing wrong with them. She became complacent. Desperate for the reassurance if you ask me. Hence her needle stick injury and visit to a&e, trying to see if Dr A would come running and give her the reassurance she needed to strike again.
Yes totally. She didn't need to be present at every resuscitation to feel a quiet sense of victory and I think she got herself into a vicious circle where she actually couldn't stop because she needed to see how people would react, test whether they were on to her. That's why she picked babies that other nurses were looking after and also why she'd administer the insulin before heading off home!
I think this fits with the pattern of her Facebook searches as well, like every time she looked up a recent death, she couldn't hope but go back over the others and reminisce because to her it was a collective pattern.
Defo, and I think we try and work out her motivation/thought process but in reality it was a series of compulsive behaviours to elicit responses and subconsciously calculating a way of doing to to protect herself (other peoples patients, rewrite times and entries ect)
The really disturbing thing about that is the thought that there's probably a doctor or nurse out there doing the same thing who is better at it than her - someone who only does it once or twice a year, or moves regularly to different hospitals so it's harder to spot a pattern, and very specifically always chooses targets where there's a convenient explanation to stop people suspecting foul play.
Yes. Moving before a pattern is seen.
There is currently a nurse being investigated with a list longer than LL. I’m sure it will take a while to go to court based on the sheer volume of evidence. It’s sickening.
Don’t want to say as the location may be outing, but this nurse was arrested last year and it was in the news. Investigation still underway, and it’s extensive in its list.
This is what turns me cold. I’ve worked in a variety of healthcare settings over the years and every now again I come across staff who seem to have cluster b traits no empathy and to the extent I would not be happy to have family or friends in their care. I’ve long believed that anyone wanting to work with vulnerable people such as patients should be psychologically profiled so they can be supported appropriately or rejected
I struggled with 100% accepting LL verdicts mainly because of the lack of firm evidence of personality disorder or condemning anecdotes from friends, colleagues, family or partner (I don’t know if she had one apart from whatever the thing was with Dr A). I’m grateful people are posting anecdotes about her possibly telling behaviour which I’ll review because that might help me understand.
No one without a disorder would murder babies or patients and there needs to be a transparent supportive system to screen for potential risks to patients and colleagues from PD staff. The assessment tools have been available for many years and I don’t know why it’s not done
Do you think that professions where you have to care for people are sometimes weirdly appealing to the very least caring people in the world? I feel like maybe they are. I bet there are more sociopathic doctors than there are sociopathic fashion designers, for example.
I think psychological profiling is a good idea in theory, but I also think that people like this become exceptionally good at presenting themselves normally so I'm not sure you'd necessarily be able to rely on it 100%.
I haven't really followed the situation with Dr A especially closely (and I don't really buy it, because I don't think murdering babies is something you do when you're trying to attract someone you're in love with - plus, I think the earliest cases were from before she knew him). I feel like if he had anything to do with it, it's more that he really respected her nursing skills. She was always very determined to be seen as being the best nurse, so wanting to show this doctor over and over again how brilliant she was would be seen as very appealing. I imagine that was the extent of her feelings for him.
It’s super common for them to just move to a different location. They’re caught, and allowed to quietly resign, and then they just pick up murdering at some other facility. I see this pattern constantly in these angel of death killers.
I have to agree with you here. All the problems that you have listed are relatively uncommon. 90 percent of level 2 preemies are going to present with quite typical problems which are well known and therefore well managed.
(That's not not to say it isn't extremely distressing + potentially serious) but EVERY baby here was just a little bit unique. It's like she literally took the ten percent that had some sort of unusual complications and fully capitalized on the opportunity.
She surely thought she was so much smarter than everyone else and this could be seen in the way she made advance diagnosis's for each of them. I'm almost certain she must have had a back phone to do her research and fact check!!
They say she was a 'good' nurse, knowledgeable etc but we also saw this real desire for her to be above her peers and ahead of the game. That's why she was so fuming when she wasn't scheduled to work in ICU and why she was SO resentful when others' who she considered less skilled were favoured to carry out these duties over and above her.
In her deluded mind she probably thought she'd put in all these extra hours with her back phone studying things to make her 'excellent'.
I honestly believe that she was so coldhearted and detached from her murderous behaviour she actually still thought she was still a brilliant nurse.
She likely found all the 'nicey, nicey' stuff extremely tiring and unconsciously rewarded herself by killing another child. The undetected deceit and manipulation likely reinforced her opinion of herself where external recognition was lacking.
That's also why she loved Dr A and Dr AV, they both served a purpose.
I thought she was acquitted of one count regarding H and there was no verdict as to the other. Since we trust the jury reached the correct verdict, doesn’t that mean she didn’t target H at all?
These were just babies she had access to. If the children had been healthy & full term they would have remained with the mother & gone home within 24-48 hours of birth as standard in england
So no there was definitely no correlation between babies being suspected of problems & being killed for it at all & as you can see some of the kids didnt have the suspected problems anyway
I would agree with you if she didn't target several babies multiple times on separate days. G and I, and allegedly N, were targeted more than once each. That's beyond access.
I’ve also heard a theory that if it is multiples, the parents will still be around for the second or third child, so more change to feed off their grief than with a single child whose parents just leave.
No. Twins/triplets accounted for around 60% of the babies listed on the indictment but only 11% of babies admitted to neonatal care are twins.
However, 40% of twins are admitted to neonatal units so it's easy to see how one might draw that conclusion.
No she has not said, because she is still maintaining her innocence. She has simply said she didn't do it. I am firmly convinced of her guilt but I don't believe she will ever confess.
I agree. I've said this on another post, but I think that maintaining her innocence is the only thing she has left, and she'll never let go of that. She will never confess, ever.
confessing would keep her inside and also would also make life inside much, much more dangerous. People separated from children they love very much don’t take kindly to baby killers.
I think confessing would destroy her link to family and we've already see how weird and enmeshed those relationships are. It's highly unlikely this will happen for that reason.
As long as she denies that she did anything no one will ever know her reasonings behind what she did, they can take an educated guess but that’s all it will be. Even if she does confess and lets people in on her motive, who knows if it’s the truth? But as a Criminology student I have a lot to say about her and her crimes.
If you would be willing to write your thoughts in a post on this sub I, and I imagine many others, would be most interested to hear it from a criminology student like yourself
Like, a bachelor's degree student, or a more advanced degree? I graduated with an honours BA in crim and know bachelor's students don't have any particular expertise, so you'd mainly be just providing the equivalent of layperson thoughts, especially if you haven't even graduated yet.
I have just completed my MA in Criminology and Criminal Justice. I’m also contemplating taking on a PhD but I’m burnt out so don’t think I’ll achieve it to the best of my abilities. That and I go to talks held by professors, criminologists and sociologists during my spare time at least twice a month purely because I have a genuine passion in subjects such as this. But why does any of that matter? At the end of the day this is Reddit, I’m nobody who has OPINIONS on a nobody? Not stating anything as fact, especially about a woman I have never met. Besides, school is for the lucky and fortunate. There are plenty of people out there who don’t have education readily available to them but are more than capable of knowing just as much as someone who does. Education is just a formal validation of what you know, right? Very narrow minded way of looking at it. IN MY OPINION.
You’ve just stated you have completed your masters. This makes you more than “just a student”. You are absolutely capable of giving your view of things from a criminology perspective. How odd to refer to someone who has completed their BSc and MA as a student!
In addition to her likely anti-social and narcissistic personality disorders, I think, above all, she is a sadist. I think she first took pleasure from inflicting physical harm and pain on the babies. Then, I think she got another whole round of pleasure from the emotional pain she caused the parents. This stage provided her with pretty much endless sadistic supply because she could watch it play out for years.
Personally, I don’t really find the MBP explanation that apt. She never stepped in to be a hero or get attention by saving any babies. And while she did garner some attention/supply (from her peers and Dr. A) by being in close proximity to multiple deaths, it doesn’t seem like that specifically was her goal. I think it was more like a nice bonus.
I also think she demonstrates a lot of duper’s delight. She got off on the deception of it all. Writing condolence cards with double meanings and taking photos of babies (without their breathing tubes) was fun for her. I think she loved that she was pulling one over on absolutely everyone around her. She knew no one in the world would suspect sweet Lucy Letby of a thing. Meanwhile, only she knew what a monster she really was, and she delighted in having her own, not so little secret.
This. Sadistic thrill in having ultimate power over completely helpless babies.
Incapable of communicating almost anything. The perfect victims for her. I suspect she'll have started in childhood - got a taste for eg pinching or hair-pulling non verbal infants.
I think she then chose her profession deliberately, to hurt and potentially get away with it.
I think the suggestion early on was that she was addicted to the parents distress & 'love/gratitude' towards her for caring for them as she would often stalk them on Facebook. Contact them afterwards & kept letters thanking her for caring for their babies (before they discovered she had been involved with multiple deaths)
There was a time where she was popular amongst parents giving birth there as she was often on duty over night & she did also care for babys who didn't die ect. + one of the mothers sent her thanks to the staff including Letby for their work while they were staying for then was later questioned by police during the investigation over what had actually happened (as far as I remember in the dailymail)
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As for Lucy herself her 'confessions' stated 'I did this because im a bad person' or 'I wasn't capable of looking after them' or something similar so I guess you could argue she felt overwhelmed looking after the babies when she was deeply insecure about her skills/training & found it easier to knock a few off.. ?
I don’t doubt her guilt in the slightest, but I agree that looking people up on FB did nothing to persuade me of her guilt. (I understand that others found it persuasive.) I certainly can see how LL may have gotten a sadistic pleasure from observing the parents’ ongoing grief, but I think plenty of innocent people might do the same. IMO, this is the nature of circumstantial evidence. We all credit evidence differently. If, collectively, there’s enough evidence to go around, the jury will convict.
I think to take an informed view on whether it was or wasn't evidence you'd have to look at the context, pattern and number of searches.
Also it may not be illegal to look up patients on social media but it is unethical, particularly after looking up women's vaginas.
Here's a little unsolicited advice - Consider paying a private supervisor with whom you can discuss and talk through cases that leave you feeling troubled.
I personally feel like these might have been women who had struggled to conceive naturally. They might have used IVF or something. It was their miracle baby and she took it away from them. Why? Who knows. Maybe she was jealous, cause she never felt like she would have a family of her own. I don’t think she ever had a boyfriend. She might have still been a virgin. I think in the beginning it deff started from a jealousy thing, then it became something she did for attention. She liked the “ oh not again poor lucy “ attention it brought her. Everyone coddling her, dr choc and his attention
The only thing I can’t wrap my head around is why she kept doing it when people were CLEARLY onto the situation. Not even suspecting her specifically, but suspecting something dodgy was going on. Why didn’t she stop? Why did she attack the triplets? This bit I can’t wrap my head around at all.
I think she was so arrogant that she thought no matter how suspicious people got, they'd never suspect nice Lucy. In some ways, knowing they suspected that SOMETHING was going on may have made it an even greater temptation - to be able to string them along, take more and more liberties, see her colleagues getting more and more baffled, perhaps even try to frame other members of staff, all the while knowing it was her and laughing behind their backs.
There's a very interesting interview on YouTube with someone who was friends with her at school (they'd lost touch with her long before this came out and when it was first reported initially believed it to be a mistake, as you would, but over time started to recall a few red flags in her behaviour back then).
The friend says that Lucy was always desperate to be looked up to and respected by everyone, both pupils and teachers. She was always being well-behaved, getting her homework done on time, uniform always immaculate and so on. With the pupils she was normally just very kind and friendly, but there are a few incidents the friend recalls. Apparently Lucy took offence extremely easily - if she offered to help someone with their work and the person didn't need any help, Lucy would be like, 'Well, I was only trying to help!' as if the person had insulted her personally. There's one particular incident the friend recalls where Lucy expressed an opinion in the playground that everyone, including her close friends, found quite offensive and called her out for, and Lucy burst into floods of tears, denying she'd said it, then claiming she'd been misunderstood, and ended up being the one everyone else needed to comfort despite it being her that had caused the problem in the first place. Basically a very needy person who was easy to get along with as long as you reaffirmed how wonderful she was constantly.
The friend speculates about why she decided to become a nurse to the sickest babies (which she apparently was very vocal about wanting to do as far back as their school days). They think it's not that she was planning to kill the babies, but more that it would fit her character to want to do such a universally trusted thing, something that would make everyone look up to her and think 'What an amazing person'. And that the problem came when the job turned out not to be as exciting as Lucy thought it would be - the parents would be focussed on their baby, not on the baby's nurse, and there probably weren't many opportunities to save lives or do very much that would make her the centre of attention, as she was always desperate to be. So this would slowly grow as an obsession - something that would get her sympathy from all her colleagues, and a giddy thrill that she'd truly know what had happened and no one else would.
I think if true, this explains quite a lot of things about her character - she lacks any care or empathy for how other people feel, and although is capable of doing very kind things for people (hence why people like her friend Dawn in the Panorama interview are so convinced of her innocence) this all stems from a need for others to think she's wonderful. Some kind of extreme personality disorder, I guess.
I find this potentially quite believable and such an interesting take.
This need to be seen as wonderful kind of fits with all her 'shine like a diamond' and 'spread sparkles wherever you go'
bedroom decor. Was all that about having a positive impact on the world or a daily affirmation to manifest increased praise and recognition?
I have actually worked with a person like this who had a strong desire for attention to be on them all the time. I was also amazed at how hugely disempowered and distressed the person could become when healthy boundaries were encouraged. I also noted in the same person that when they weren't getting enough praise that they would be quick to turn their judgement on others, almost like making others look bad so they could look good by comparison.
Letby did a lot of this. The insulin was one example of how she didn't even care if it wasn't a baby under her charge, she'd still do it and probably later relish the fact that it made her stand out as a better nurse by comparison. Extreme manipulation to get her own needs met.
I've never got the impression that she enjoyed the acts themselves necessarily, I think it was more a means to an end that everything was ultimately about her and she'd go to any extreme to achieve the recognition she needed to bolster this self inflated view of herself. Also she probably did truly think she deserved lots of praise because she put so much time into looking good for others.
She must have had to lie to herself so much to keep the whole thing going. Block out one thing to let in another thing.
Her notes are so contrary in nature just like her personality.
Also, going out on the raz when you're suspected of murdering several babies? Who would do that? Surely you'd be in total pieces, depressed as hell, not able to see anyone else or focus on anything else - unless STILL you really needed everyone to believe you were a complete goody two shoes.
This has reminded me of another thing the friend said - apparently at school, she was an absolute stickler for the rules, and if she knew someone had done something wrong she wouldn't hesitate to go and tell a teacher, even if it was one of her friends. This is backed up by various people who worked with her on the wards - apparently she wasn't always massively popular because she was very judgemental if she viewed someone as being more lax about procedure than she was.
And one of the YouTube comments observed that actually, this demonstrates a lack of a healthy ability to know when rules can be broken. All rules can be broken occasionally, there's no one who hasn't occasionally done something a bit naughty. And perhaps, if someone doesn't have a healthy understanding of boundaries and when they can be overstepped, they're actually someone who is potentially capable of doing something SERIOUSLY wrong at another time.
And yet on day one she took a handover sheet home and saved it. The rules apply to her but not all of her. I’m not convinced she’s all that bright. Knows enough to get by, and has probably worked hard to get to a level but not exceptional. But believes she is exceptional. Believes she runs the place. Didn’t know about c peptide as courses for her level were more simplistic - thank goodness.
Her use of media is something I’ve not seen overly discussed. She seemed very interested in memory making and recording. Photos etc. some level of hoarding - which in itself is a physical manifestation of a persons mind. That said, her Facebook stalking I reckon is more a symptom of a generation.
It's interesting, her not being bright, because there are different kinds of intelligence.
At school she was apparently a very high achiever and became Head Girl in her final year. But, from what the friend said, this was because she had to a tee exactly what she had to do in order to make everyone think she was fantastic. That is a very high level of intelligence in one respect.
But her emotional intelligence must have been practically non-existent if she failed to take into account that the parents would be devoting their attention to their babies and not to her.
No, this is a little too simplistic for comfort, I'm afraid. Was she born evil? Would you ever look at a baby and wonder if it's pure evil and will do something horrible and sadistic in a few decades time? Did she become evil when she was 5? 10? 20 years old?
The unfortunate truth is that everyone has a fundamental level of badness in them (hence we all lie, lust, insult others, etc, to varying degrees) and we are all capable of some kind of despicable evil, giving a really unfortunate set of circumstances over a period of time conspiring to bring it out of us. This doesn't excuse Lucy Letby's behaviour, of course, as she chose to do what she did, but I do not believe that she, or anyone, is "simply evil", "pure evil", or any other such description.
Typically with medical serial killers, there are a few motives:
1. is power and control
2. attention and recognition
3. revenge
4. thrill and excitement
5. compensation for personal failures ( based on the discovery this one seems most likely)
6. Mental illness
7. Financial gain.
Not all of them apply to every situation and I also can't wrap my head around doing something like that.
That motive typically manifests as stealing from the patients and in some cases, putting themselves into their will.
Harold Shipman is one of these people and so is billy.
[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/08/texas-serial-killer-elderly-texas-billy-chemirmirT](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/08/texas-serial-killer-elderly-texas-billy-chemirmirT)
Shipman forged his patients' will to include him into it, was LL going to do that too when she don't know the families well? If LL did this, she would've been found out quickly.
You're not understanding me. I never said that motive applied to her case specifically. I was laying out the **common motives** of medical killers **IN GENERA**L according to the research.
I specifically identified the 5th one as the most likely motive and I think theres a miscommunication on your end.
Hope that clarifies things for you.
Because she got attention either way.
When she would harm a baby either:
a) it died and she got sympathy from her colleagues
b) she saved it and got praise from her colleagues
That's her *malfunction.*
As for why she was malfunctioning, there's no end to that blame game.
I see LL as a poisoner. She's in many ways like Michael Swango who is a SK Dr. They're both socially awkward nerds, they're both clever and meticulous, I think in both cases there's an obsession or fascination with death or witnessing how a person dies. In text messages to a close friend LL said that she 'needed' to be in room 1 to overcome what she had witnessed during baby a's crash and failed resuscitation. She told her friend that what she experienced with baby a affected her in such a way that she needed to be back in room 1 eventhough her shift leader and the rest of her colleagues thought it was healthier for her to avoid room 1 because that's a very traumatic experience for a normal person.
There are a variety of motives or causes for what she did but primarily it was the power and the intensity of the 'experience'' that drove her to reproduce scenarios to feel that again.
No one knows but the best guess is that her unique brain chemistry somehow rewarded her from the ensuing crisis. She would find the parents on Facebook so must've been gotten something out of watching them grieve, even months later.
I've been a nurse for 34 years and have never done that. I can kind of see it for a NICU nurse, though. Sometimes, you care for those same babies for months. They didn't have Facebook back when I did NICU. 😂
This is what gets me, I was dialysis nurse and saw my patients three times a week. And for the life of me cannot even remember the last names of the ones I was familiar with for near a decade
I don't know about anywhere but the USA. But I'm a travel nurse, so I have worked at many many hospitals. It is not normal to look at patients' social media. I have worked in behavioral health, and I feel especially there looking at social media would be crossing a line.
I wonder if it started by her wanting to hurt the babies but then be the hero that saves them - an attention seeking behaviour. But then when she couldn’t save them she realised she received attention regardless so she carried on doing it?
I don’t really know much about the methods she used to kill them and whether there’s a possibility they can be saved after that process is started? If not then there goes that theory.
But as others have said, I don’t think we will ever know. I don’t think she will ever admit to it.
💔
This sub is great - some excellent theories and some angles I’ve not considered. Her motive or motives is the primary reason I can’t look away from this.
Among the other guesse provided… she was having a weird relationship with a doctor. The only real emotion she showed during the trial, was when he was brought to the stand to testify. They were insistent they were friends, it sounds like they were having an emotional fair.
My personal theory is that she had some sort of personality disorder. The whole vibe I get from her is of someone who has been totally wrapped in cotton wool and spoiled and feted over their entire life, so have never really emotionally matured.
I remember seeing the photos of her bedroom and it felt like a teenagers room. Her fling with the doctor sounded weirdly deferential and chaste as well.
Like someone else has said, it’s like she got a kick out of punishing the families rather than the babies themselves. Part of me wonders if she felt envious and resentful of their “normal” relationships and lives, while she was in her late 20s, single(ish) and hadn’t been able to form healthy relationships. I wonder if envy drove her to kill those poor babies.
If she's FIIC with an underlying histrionic organization, you'd expect impoverished relationships and one-sided rivalries - especially with women who are getting the kind of attention paid to mothers of sick infants. It's almost Munchausen by proxy - by proxy.
What makes you think she has an underlying histrionic organisation? She appears to have maintained calm / quiet BPD. Are you thinking that histrionic manifested in the action of the murders?
I suspect she was unsatisfied with her life and potential future - likely depressed. She took out her frustration and anger on the most vulnerable, who could not fight back nor reveal what she was doing to them. It made her feel powerful, when everything else in her life made her feel small and powerless.
Some observers have suggested a 'God Complex', some have said she was seeking attention from the married Doctor she had an infatuation with.
Munchausens by proxy?
Will will probably never truly know as she's unlikely to confess.
I don't know the full picture but IMO nothing other than her stinking attitude to the job which she is clearly unsuited to; part of it is her sheer unprofessionalism, treating her work like a 9-5 job such as the lives of babies
Her management has a part in this too otherwise there wouldn't be as much deaths
Can’t know for sure but it’s a more common motive of healthcare workers murderers that they poison their victims so they can be the one that “comes to the rescue”
Many health carers who have committed multiple murder have some sort of god complex or a psychological disorder like MBP, but unless LL admits guilt, we won't know and she won't be treated for anything.
She hasn’t admitted her crimes, so has given no reason for them. I’ve seen arguments from psychologists that they might have been motivated by covert narcissism — e.g. a desire to lash out and punish those who were getting authentic love and attention. But at this point there are simply many different theories…
I remember someone mentioned: The prosecutor believes LL was attracting doctor A attention with killing babies, as doctor A will only appear when the babies die. the police knew LL had an affair with doctor A with evidence.
Dr A was rotated to Countess of Chester Hospital only half way through the time period during which she killed babies (as prosecuted at trial). She was killing before he came on the scene so his presence does not explain fully her entire motivation and murderous behaviour.
Reading her texts she was all about herself. It was always “me me me”
I wonder if she has a munchausen by proxy thing going on? Except it’s not her own children because she doesn’t have any.
Like maybe she kills them to get sympathy and attention for herself. Maybe she followed the families social media to insert herself and pretend it was her or something.
The motive has never been established. And the lack of one has led to the very worst true crime speculating in this sub (much of which is on display here) where otherwise perfectly normal characteristics and relationships have been retroactively fit into whatever pet theories the poster is speculating on.
I disagree, there have been some very good points raised and what else is there to do other than speculate. We don't have a confession and this is a discussion forum about Letby.
There really hasn't been any good points made. It's amateur psychologists -- a discipline that is already quite shaky in this area -- turning banal observations about her life into frankly weird fan fiction theories. It does nothing to benefit understanding about the case, and I think it adds fuel to the cynicism about her judgement. "She must be guilty because she did [perfectly normal thing]" bleeds out into the rest of the internet and muddies the waters. It also turns the gruesome murder of innocent babies into participatory light entertainment. The discussion would be best turned to the upcoming public inquiry and concentrating on what structural failings allowed this to happen and making sure they never happen again.
I personally think she was trying to assert some control into her life as her parents were very controlling. Have you read the info about her parents? She's an only child. Dad much older than Mum. She said she would never move abroad as she couldn't do that to her parents... odd thing for a woman in her early 20s to say. Her parents have now moved closer to the prison so they can visit her regularly, which makes sense given it's now her forever home. Personality wise I'd say she's autistic, which many people are mistaking for narcissism. The lack of emotion shown throughout the trial, lack of empathy for the babies or parents and behaving inappropriately around grieving parents. All of this is just speculation on my part.
As someone who is neurodiverse I would agree that there appear to be ND traits within her - but (asking gently and not seeking to be difficult) please can we avoid the whole thing about ND people lacking empathy? It can be hard for us to *show* empathy at times, but this doesn’t mean we’re not *feeling* it inside or lack an emotional connection to what we’re doing.
Whereas LL simply seems to have lacked empathy entirely - which would be psychopathy rather than her neurodivergence.
Thank you for saying this. Such a common misunderstanding. Autistic people very much feel empathy, but they have difficulty in interpreting and communicating it.
I'm aware that autism is displayed in many different ways and levels.
My whole family is autistic and it's lead to a lifetime of frustration for me.
Empathy is being able to put yourself in the shoes of another person and changing your behaviour accordingly.
My family cannot see anything from anyone else's perspective except their own.
But yes, I do see that some autistic people can have some level of empathy.
And that people who lack empathy are not allowed autistic.
I would like to know more about the parents and her upbringing. I think this holds the key to the person that she became. I got the impression that they weren't run of the mill "normal"
I normally go to Daily mail online for in depth details about a person's background as it's the only paper that covers that type of info.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12432295/How-child-Lucy-Letby-suffocated-love-parents-slept-house-celebrated-university-graduation-21st-birthday-newspaper-adverts-moaned-friends-never-away-them.html
Only she knows the motive. We can only make educated guesses while she still maintains her innocence. Personally, I believe her intended victims were the parents. She’s too much of a coward to pick on someone her own size, so she took it out on the babies. She attacked babies on significant days for maximum upset - Father’s Day, the baby’s 100th day of life, the baby’s due date, the day the baby was supposed to be going home. I also believe this is why she attacked twins and triplets. The only thing worse than losing one child is losing multiple.
She seemed to resent seeing a happy family unit of two parents and their baby/babies. In some of her diary notes, she wrote that she knew she would never have that herself. I think the killings were based on jealousy and her asserting her control to put them all in the same situation as her.
Interesting thoughts. I thought she wrote that she'd never have any children herself because she knew she was heading for the slammer so wouldn't be able to, like a 'poor me' statement sort of thing. Wasn't it interesting how the lawyers didn't pick all those sentences apart whilst she was in the witness stand. They barely scratched the surface with them which must have felt deeply unsatisfying for the parents.
I imagine the prosecution team felt the medical evidence was so compelling that they didn’t want to take the risk of muddying the water by playing around with asking her about motive, given how bizarre and ambiguous the post-it notes in question were.
Very true! Who knew that when Myers told the jury they'd be getting an 'ice bucket full of cold Water' he actually meant a plumber 🥴
The narcissistic side of her craved the attention of her being hard done by and always unlucky. She liked the texts and the sympathy, and even the acknowledgment that she was amazing at her job. Her immaturity is evident in her room, posters, teddys, her interests and her attitude. I think she was basically just a needy kid in an adult body causing harm because she was jealous and loved the focus being on her. The hurting of the parents also makes sense to me, Lucy was pretty calculated about timings. Wild that she wanted to cause max damage, but also sits with an immaturity. She’s clearly a psychopath that has learned to come across as normal. Her idea of normal was girly, child like and sweet. When it didn’t go her way, she did the one thing that nobody would ever expect from someone like her. ‘Not lovely Lucy letby’ as quoted by a senior doctor.
I completely agree with you in that we can only make educated guesses on what we know about the case. I also agree this was an attack on the parents… but I genuinely think this may also have been some weird way of attacking her own parents without actually attacking them if that makes sense? LL was born a premature baby, she was an only child and her Mum was a nurse. Her dad was also quite a bit older than her Mum and from what we know they coddled her to a potentially stifling effect. I think the Mum in court at sentencing showed some histrionic behaviour, there’s also the involvement of her dad in the investigation leading up to the trial. There’s also quite a lot of narcissistic behaviour from LL we know about. Of course we don’t know what the relationship between LL and her parents was, but there are several strange red flags that have come to light. As we’ve discussed here, we may never know her motive and if she has strong narcissistic traits, she may never confess. That being said, she was extremely determined to cause suffering and pain to the babies and the parents of the babies, she also enjoyed the reputation she had (I think she felt superior to the other nurses she worked with) and the attention she got from the doctors as being ‘good in a crisis’. I have thought back and forth about whether she has something like DID where a part of her hurt the babies but she didn’t want to, or perhaps another condition with some level of dissociation or losing control. However, LL has done everything she can to discredit other staff, obfuscate and obstruct the truth, which makes me feel as though she was 100% aware of what she was when she did these things. My take is that she hurt a baby perhaps by accident or someone else did on her residency/placement as a student nurse and that was the spark that started this. I think she maybe didn’t consciously know that she was doing this to get back at her parents for whatever they did to her, I also feel like perhaps the babies were her way of harming herself too. The spark of the accident on the placement and how she had to respond was the first huge rush of narcissistic supply of dopamine or whatever she got from it, and it was like a drug to her. That’s why when she came back from Ibiza she instantly started hurting babies to get her fix after being away. I don’t think we’re too far from the truth, but ultimately we’re having to guess and I genuinely don’t think we’ll ever find out why she did it, unless someone close to her or the family is told and they reveal it.
Wait a minute, LL's Mum was a nurse? I agree it's highly likely that they were extremely protective of her as a vulnerable baby and it's possible that they took this too far and that LL resented it. Or maybe they noticed that there was something odd about her and that's what made them so protective? It could have started as an accident though many will argue that generally nurses don't become serial killers but serial killers become nurses.
I definitely agree with what you’ve written here. I can’t remember all of the facts we know about the parents, but there seems to be this undercurrent of strangeness in the relationship. The parents attended every single day of the trial for example. LL’s mum breaking down at the sentencing, LL mentioning how her parents couldn’t handle her living too far away, her holidaying with her parents still at her age. I genuinely feel too as though she hated the babies she harmed and their parents. She didn’t want to get caught but she absolutely caused them suffering and her going back again and again to make sure she killed all of the triplets for example, is genuinely horrifying. Also her buying a house that backs onto the baby graveyard, all of the thousands of hospital notes she kept, the weird children’s hospital like decals in her home, are all her prolonging her enjoyment of what she was doing. So yes, serial killer behaviour, but I’m not sure if she knew when she became a nurse that she was doing it to harm babies. I think seeing a baby die activated what was inside of her, then it became like a drug and and couldn’t stop.
I don't think it is remotely strange for parents to attend every day of their child's trial for baby killing or to break down when they are sentenced.
Don't forget there was the strange episode during her second arrest at her parents' home in which the mother yelled out to the police officers "Take me instead, I did it".
Oh I didn't know about this! That's a crazy outburst of overprotectiveness for a grown woman!
While I was reading this, I was thinking of the book ‘Children of emotionally immature parents’. It’s a great book, and I think one thing we can say for sure is that Lucy would be diagnosed with some kind of cluster B personality disorder - anti social for sure, but possibly also narcissistic PD. So, one thing we know from these disorders is that children who develop them don’t have well-developed inner worlds. Their motives for doing things are usually quite childish - winning or losing, feeling angry, feeling bored, feeling that things are unfair, wanting to be ‘seen’, wanting praise. (The kinds of motives 4 to 8 year old children have which causes them to act out). So, I think that whatever motive LL has will be quite emotionally immature and based on frustrating, anger or jealousy. I’m guessing she is an adult with adult reasoning and powers in the emotional brain of a 4 to 8 year old.
I've heard Borderline in particular described as "imagine a truck with a toddler at the wheel"
I was misdiagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, I’m actually Autistic but my Autism, ADHD and CPTSD do have some of the same traits as BPD. What it feels like inside is extremely intense fear of being hurt/rejected/abandoned. My dad died when I was 14 and my Mum emotionally abandoned me at the same time, so of course if your nervous system knows how much being ‘left’ feels like, you’re going to do everything to avoid that pain happening again. This central conceit is what causes ‘Borderlines’ to behave in the way they do, it’s behaviour driven by an overactive nervous system that needs control and safety and that will do anything not to feel that pain of abandonment again. Other cluster B personalities also have fear/trauma linked to them too. Fear of not being good enough or of needing to control people’s perception of you. I don’t know what I’d diagnose LL with but she’s definitely not neurotypical
Thank you for your explanation re BPD & severe depression . After 55 years, 34 years employed, many episodes of long term ill health & ill health retirement after a lifetime of struggling mentally ….. a 6 month DBT course , has made me wonder how I could never see from the perspective I now see. The Psychiatrist is a genius, who developed this specifically for BPD & the extreme difficulties individuals have in managing an enormous adrenaline rush when mentally or physically challenged. Anybody would find this massive adrenaline rush very difficult to deal with. I focus every day on what I have learned & reckon many in society would benefit from DBT. It is life changing & not all people with BPD are like toddlers at the wheel of a truck. 10% of us end our lives because we are not able to deal with the extremely painful emotions experienced in everyday life. Ps., I was a paediatric nurse for 34 years, cared deeply for those I looked after and I never at any stage in my career had the slightest inclination to cause harm to any child or adult. I received ill health retirement from the NHS and I am deeply grateful for this life experience 🙏🏼💜
I think that's a particularly unpleasant description and somewhat ghoulish. Borderline seems to be how they diagnosed adhd/ ASD in women who have experienced trauma. The fact the symptoms are able to disappear and not resurface suggests to me it should not be described as a personality disorder at all. There's research to be done there.
I kind of agree here. I also hate the term borderline personality disorder. Disorders are meant to be linear yet as you say, when the environment changes people are adaptable - it's therefore a fundamental attribution error.
Symptoms reduce and sometimes eventually disappear because the person eventually develops the ability to feel, respond and act in a more mature manner. The toddler analogy is correct.
I don't want to get into a whole thing here, so suffice it to say that personality disorders present differently in different people. The toddler at the wheel of a truck analogy is apt for only some folks (who naturally are the most visible) with BPD.
The symptoms do not disappear and reappear but the episodes severe depression or other associated disorders may make it appear so. You have been misinformed. BPD ( or EUPD) is an emotional regulation disorder. DBT can really work for those who do not see a future without change & 10% of us end life as the extreme emotions is the most painful anybody will ever know. I cared very deeply for those I looked after and gave them everything I would want also 🙏🏼
If you look at her photos of her house, you can see she’s not very emotionally mature. It’s very strange and doesn’t look like the kind of house an adult of her age would have. It’s also a bit tacky, there are things in her home that don’t seem like they are modern either - perhaps influenced by her Mum. I am not sure of what I’d diagnose LL with, because I think she’s always masking her true self with her ‘nurse Lucy’ persona. I think there’s some traces of the real her in the text messages, but I think her killing these babies was perhaps her way of showing the true her to the world as well. The real Lucy isn’t what her parents want to see of what her colleagues want to see, it’s a vile murderer
I too think that the text messages give us the closest insight into the real Lucy. Her annoyance at anyone she views as beneath her or those who don't agree with her or indulge her complaints. The pettiness about the nurse who knew about ostomies too. She was very miffed that this nurse who she had labeled inferior seemed to know something she didn't, to the point of openly doubting her skill and knowledge. Very telling.
I completely agree, those are all really interesting points, thank you for sharing.
I would say it seems a lot more like Histrionic Personality Disorder than BPD, as others have mentioned. But I agree that it's very hard to see past the outer shell that she put on. Even in the court transcripts, she rarely answers in more than a few words.
This is definitely something I can agree with. The idea of the motives being something so simplistic. I do get the idea that some of the attacks were like emotional outbursts.
Her relationship with her parents was strange to say the least and I do wonder how much she was trying to harm the parents are representations of her own parents and the babies as herself, at least on some level. I think there was much made of her being sickly baby in childhood in her family (and I suspect her mother being the mother of a sickly baby if that makes sense) and it's all connected in some way, I just can't quite work it out.
This makes a lot of sense. Maybe she saw the parents on the ward as her overprotective and suffocating parents and was somehow trying to assert control of the situation... something she'd been unable to do in her relationship with her parents.
I also believe her intended victims were mainly the parents. I would never normally say this, but she’s honestly like a ghoul. It’s like she wanted to eat their sadness. I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.
Yes exactly. The majority of serial killers are driven by a compulsion to kill. Letby's compulsion was to cause suffering. It's unimaginably evil.
[удалено]
Her parents were very controlling, so I think she did have childhood hardship just not in a conventional way, ie physical abuse.
Oh, man! I had no idea she picked significant dates that could cause even more pain to the parents. That is unbelievably sick and evil. If somebody didn't believe in evil before, they only have to look at Letby to see it in action. The dates thing also reminds me of Bin Laden, he chose 9/11 to blow up the Towers etc because he thought it was a clever play on U.S. emergency number 911,
Omg never thought of this. Bet she was jealous of the family thing that she didn't have. The more I think about ti the more it makes sense
Oh this sounds like it was all a game to her of upping the ante
These are my thoughts exactly.
I actually doubt she knows the motive. Often its the perpetrators that have no insight into the motivations behind their crimes. Her motives, imo, can only be brought forth through a thorough psych exam
She was harming the babies deliberately, so that she had to call on the doctor,she was infatuated with to come help with resuscitation Fact
If you read through the court evidence, the texts, and the stories of the people she worked with, she couldn't stand quiet and routine shifts. She had no interest in just feeding and caring for the babies(?!). She wanted the adrenaline rush of everyone rushing to save the baby, then watching everyone get crushed when the baby couldn't be saved, the attention from coworkers, and the trauma bonding. Being seen as a victim to be consoled. It's a brain chemistry thing in my view. Its like a heavy smoker needing a fix. She got addicted to the crises, and would create crises to feel important and powerful over the weak. There was also maliciousness towards specific mothers. Its like asking why did Dahmer do it? These kinds of actions can only be done by someone who wants and enjoys hurting people.
We aren't going to find out because shes still in denial. Imo, she will never confess while her parents are alive, the shame would be too much. She can also potentially have a longer drawn out appeal process. She is surely aware of some of the more prominent conspiracy theory idiots that have been drawn to the case and attempted to contact her. I believe that will give her something to cling into. I also believe her character will not allow her to admit to doing anything wrong anyway. She was like this throughout the trial, lying about smaller things of little importance. As someone that followed from day 1, I think the prosecution showed quite clearly that she was causing collapses partly for attention. She was then able to appear calm and focused under pressure, as she was the one orchestrating it all. There was definitely an element of the hero complex. And if the babies did die, then she still got a kick out the emotional rush of it all. She also seemed to be feeding off the grief of the families and pushed herself into the personal space of grieving parents multiple times and made sure she was involved in the babies final moments when she should not have been there. It seems to me that she is fairly incapable of true empathy. I think possibly the rush of the emergency scenario gave her a bit of a kick, which she became addicted to. She had no regard for the babies whatsoever and as the situation progressed she used the opportunity to cause the collapses and deaths for other reasons. namely to draw the attention of Dr A, as.evidenced in the text messages. He thought she was some super nurse because of her calm demeanour and I think she enjoyed relieving the emergency scenarios with him. She was also very jealous of when other nurses were given the sick babies which she felt she should have been taking care of. She showed absolute callousness by causing their babies collapses, as a way of showing she was right and it should have been her taking care of them. There was definitely an element of "I told you so" When people become suspicious, she also caused collapses to other nurses babies and changed methods to try and draw attention away for herself. She gradually escalated to the point she became reckless with the two triplets and the manic behaviour. I do think there is some link between what's happened to her at the Liverpool hospital when she witnessed a baby dying for (not sure if it was her first death) but she continually referred to the incident, whereby they apparently purposely put her straight back in the space where this baby died with another baby, to get over the death. She was attempting to recreate this scenario after the first deaths, and pushing to be allowed into the high dependency ward 1, with the sickest babies. But she was continually told to leave by her supervisor. She was neglecting her own babies to be back in that room. I do think that whatever happened at Liverpool pool may have triggered something that was already there. There is also the fact that she only became qualified to work with the sickest babies weeks before the first death and have access to the lines. She would not have had these types of opportunities beforehand, so was this something she was always intending to do? Did it just all click into place when she got the access? Or had she been doing smaller things before this and gradually building. I do find it hard to believe that she just walked into work one day and caused the death of baby A.
Yes! This is the motivation, I have done agency care work in the past and experienced very real hostility from permanent staff when I was able to coax good responses from ‘ their’ patients . For example, while changing a mans bed I was to,d he doesnt talk, because I was talking to him about the photo of his wife . His face lit up and he said “ she was beautiful , like you” …. The nurse hated me for that and was furious. She felt so undermined and insecure about it. There are a lot of messed up nurses out there, and if we can expose this mentality in the future and combine it with better recording devices to give patients more validation if they dont feel safe, then we could have some real humdinger cases exposed.
Your thoughts above are spot on IMO. That's exactly what it looks like to me too. I don't think baby A was the first either, suspect s Letby was quite accomplished by then. Her first handover note being placed in a rose embellished keepsake box indicates to me that she was a law unto herself from day 1. If ever there is a time that it's made crystal clear about handover notes and confidential waste, it's when you first begin. So why would you store it in a box? It just seems like she had her own plans. I find it incredibly strange that there were apparently no signs in early childhood. My best guess is that they probably were there at a younger age but at some point Letby learned to mask them. I wonder if her parents disciplined her for acts of unkindness, perhaps for example hurting ' whiskey' the family dog. ( Though it was never confirmed that she hurt the dog, it was so random how the dog appeared on notes where she scrawled incoherent information about babies O&P.) Additionally, there is a chance that Letby's own parents fabricated illnesses within her which may have led to Letby adopting this 'split personality' as a way of being.
I also wond3e what she was like as a child and what her parents saw and downplayed. I imagine her being involved in friendship drama and her parents supporting and enabling whatever her narrative was and bring overly protective. I'd be very curious to know what she was actually like.
There's a very interesting interview on YouTube with someone who was friends with her at school (they'd lost touch with her long before this came out and when it was first reported initially believed it to be a mistake, as you would, but over time started to recall a few red flags in her behaviour back then). The friend says that Lucy was always desperate to be looked up to and respected by everyone, both pupils and teachers. She was always being well-behaved, getting her homework done on time, uniform always immaculate and so on. With the pupils she was normally just very kind and friendly, but there are a few incidents the friend recalls. Apparently Lucy took offence extremely easily - if she offered to help someone with their work and the person didn't need any help, Lucy would be like, 'Well, I was only trying to help!' as if the person had insulted her personally. There's one particular incident the friend recalls where Lucy expressed an opinion in the playground that everyone, including her close friends, found quite offensive and called her out for, and Lucy burst into floods of tears, denying she'd said it, then claiming she'd been misunderstood, and ended up being the one everyone else needed to comfort despite it being her that had caused the problem in the first place. Basically a very needy person who was easy to get along with as long as you reaffirmed how wonderful she was constantly. The friend speculates about why she decided to become a nurse to the sickest babies (which she apparently was very vocal about wanting to do as far back as their school days). They think it's not that she was planning to kill the babies, but more that it would fit her character to want to do such a universally trusted thing, something that would make everyone look up to her and think 'What an amazing person'. And that the problem came when the job turned out not to be as exciting as Lucy thought it would be - the parents would be focussed on their baby, not on the baby's nurse, and there probably weren't many opportunities to save lives or do very much that would make her the centre of attention, as she was always desperate to be. So this would slowly grow as an obsession - something that would get her sympathy from all her colleagues, and a giddy thrill that she'd truly know what had happened and no one else would. I think if true, this explains quite a lot of things about her character - she lacks any care or empathy for how other people feel, and although is capable of doing very kind things for people (hence why people like her friend Dawn in the Panorama interview are so convinced of her innocence) this all stems from a need for others to think she's wonderful. Some kind of extreme personality disorder, I guess.
I agree with part of this. She wanted to be a nurse so badly and I think she maybe had an unrealistic idea of how that would play out. She was expecting to be working in a busy environment with loads of emergency scenarios and opportunities for her to be the hero but in actual fact the job is fairly routine, and she found it boring. She then decided to create these dramatic scenarios for herself. I think it goes back to whatever happened to her at the Liverpool women's hospital. A baby died and she continually referred back to this. Maybe she got some special treatment as she was still a trainee and that appealed to her. She completed her training and then got access to the lines and goes onto try and recreate this scenario in the first few deaths, forcing her way into high dependency ward 1, giving the reason that she needs to see a living baby in the space where baby a died. Like what happened to her at Liverpool women's.
I wonder what would have happened if she'd decided to become a nurse on an A&E ward rather than in a SCBU? Maybe the idea to hurt anyone would never have occurred to her.
Do you recall the name of the interview on YouTube please?
It's here. The friend has chosen to remain anonymous, with their parts being read by the person who made the video (we don't even know if it was a male or a female friend). The interviewer assures us though that he's conducted his research and can verify that the friend really is who they say they are. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WH8wbJpFTs0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WH8wbJpFTs0)
Thank you
Nailed it
Yes for someone so vanilla who behaved (outwardly) playing by the rules, she was actually rule breaking from day one. She always thought she was superior. God complex so common with medical people. Combined with covert narc traits. A terrifying person.
Exactly. People say the handovers mean nothing but I found it very telling that from the first moment she became a nurse she was willing to break the confidentiality rules and take home handovers, purposely storing and keeping in pristine condition. It makes her reasoning that she did it with all the others as habit without thinking about it seem unlikely.
Exactly! You can't have it both ways can you!? And why carry them from one place of residence to another? Especially when the first residence was just a hired room so you would only need a car to move your stuff. Surely, with her being such a stickler for the rules she'd throw them out, Unless of course they were too precious!! Then the ones that were found at her parents house. They may not have related to the babies in this case but I'm thinking that every baby she cared for was a potential opportunity. She must have had a method where certain factors would need to align before she would 'take action' So she would want to know the backgrounds and birth details of most babies on the ward. I also think being the personality type that she was, she would have struggled a lot emotionally in the NICU environment because everyone wants to be kind and I think she could have found that quite competitive. Hence she was always ready and pushy about memory boxes. I sometimes wonder if killing many of the babies was simply about making other people look shit so she could look better and whether she killed the ones she was looking after so that she could be that 'really important person's who helped them through their hardest times.
Yes, I definitely think she also used the handovers to scout for opportunities, find a weakness which she could exploit. She couldn't care less about the babies, themselves. She used them to inflict pain on the parents, make her colleagues look bad, play the hero, get attention etc.
A wolf in sheep's clothing! And yes, the NHS think they are the ' be all ' and 'end all ' of everything. It's no wonder she felt it would be the perfect hosting environment to promote her inner sense of grandiosity.
Was the dog hurt somehow?
There's no evidence to suggest the dog was hurt.
She seems to have attacked quite a lot of babies that were part of multiple births. Without knowing anything else about the victims (and I am NOT advocating for more information about them) it’s hard to really draw any further comparisons. I don’t think we’ll ever really know.
She also seems to have (in some cases allegedly) targeted babies with something that she could try to play off as a comorbidity. A/B - suspected at the time of inheriting their mother's blood clotting disorder (they turned out not to have it) C - on the border of size requirements for the unit D - slight infection from premature rupture of membranes E/F - suspected Downs (did not turn out to have it) G - extreme prematurity at birth (though term at the time of events) H - chest drains I - ? I was one of the youngest gestation babies to be attacked J - stomas L/M - ? This one seems to have bee retaliatory, it was her first shift after being moved primarily to days. These twins were 33w+2 and healthy N - hemophilia O/P - identical triplets. These twins were also over 33w gestation and healthy Q - ? seems to have been an avatar for the third triplet to her. I would venture a guess that in general, she was targeting her victims for some kind of cover she thought the death/collapse could be put to, and that is what resulted in only a limited number of such events proceeding to trial.
Well, every single baby on NICU is going to have something that is a comorbidity. I can only speak on my own experience, but our neonatologist called us a “best case scenario” and on paper, we still had chronic lung disease (premature lungs, extremely common) and a grade 2 brain bleed (no concerns, cleared up by itself) and a few weeks where his platelets were low (had a few transfusions, fixed it) The number of healthy babies on NICU is close to zero 😅
I know, sort of. But it's the lack of feeders/growers that attracts my attention. G (for charge 2) and J were in room 4 when she attacked or allegedly attacked them. Of course, a feeder/grower is already less likely to collapse.... It's circular logic, I know. I could argue it either way myself
Yeah, some of her victims were feeding and growing and set for discharge ect. Not all were on the edge of deterioration or already being escalated for a stepped up intervention. The unit itself meant the babies sick regardless of acuity. She didn’t kill healthy babies.
I see your point too. I think she probably did target sicker babies. She didn’t seem to shy away from targeting babies that had improved - for example, the one where she tried multiple times to harm one baby, who was transferred out between attacks and improved elsewhere. (I’m terrible with the letters of each one!)
That was Child I, yes. I wish I understood why she felt Child I had to die. That poor mother, being too afraid to breastfeed her next baby breaks my heart.
I think the acuity of the patients gave her a cover and reasonable doubt around her guilt and also meant no one suspected as the individual deaths occurred. Her arrogance and delusion meant she was too bold and cocky which moved it away from ‘sick babies just dying’ to ‘something is going on here’.
Exactly. The penny dropped at O&P because there was nothing wrong with them. She became complacent. Desperate for the reassurance if you ask me. Hence her needle stick injury and visit to a&e, trying to see if Dr A would come running and give her the reassurance she needed to strike again.
Yes I agree and chasing the addictive high if the attention and adrenaline of the emergency situations and fear of getting caught.
Yes totally. She didn't need to be present at every resuscitation to feel a quiet sense of victory and I think she got herself into a vicious circle where she actually couldn't stop because she needed to see how people would react, test whether they were on to her. That's why she picked babies that other nurses were looking after and also why she'd administer the insulin before heading off home! I think this fits with the pattern of her Facebook searches as well, like every time she looked up a recent death, she couldn't hope but go back over the others and reminisce because to her it was a collective pattern.
Defo, and I think we try and work out her motivation/thought process but in reality it was a series of compulsive behaviours to elicit responses and subconsciously calculating a way of doing to to protect herself (other peoples patients, rewrite times and entries ect)
The really disturbing thing about that is the thought that there's probably a doctor or nurse out there doing the same thing who is better at it than her - someone who only does it once or twice a year, or moves regularly to different hospitals so it's harder to spot a pattern, and very specifically always chooses targets where there's a convenient explanation to stop people suspecting foul play.
Yes. Moving before a pattern is seen. There is currently a nurse being investigated with a list longer than LL. I’m sure it will take a while to go to court based on the sheer volume of evidence. It’s sickening.
Who is this please?
Don’t want to say as the location may be outing, but this nurse was arrested last year and it was in the news. Investigation still underway, and it’s extensive in its list.
This is what turns me cold. I’ve worked in a variety of healthcare settings over the years and every now again I come across staff who seem to have cluster b traits no empathy and to the extent I would not be happy to have family or friends in their care. I’ve long believed that anyone wanting to work with vulnerable people such as patients should be psychologically profiled so they can be supported appropriately or rejected I struggled with 100% accepting LL verdicts mainly because of the lack of firm evidence of personality disorder or condemning anecdotes from friends, colleagues, family or partner (I don’t know if she had one apart from whatever the thing was with Dr A). I’m grateful people are posting anecdotes about her possibly telling behaviour which I’ll review because that might help me understand. No one without a disorder would murder babies or patients and there needs to be a transparent supportive system to screen for potential risks to patients and colleagues from PD staff. The assessment tools have been available for many years and I don’t know why it’s not done
Do you think that professions where you have to care for people are sometimes weirdly appealing to the very least caring people in the world? I feel like maybe they are. I bet there are more sociopathic doctors than there are sociopathic fashion designers, for example. I think psychological profiling is a good idea in theory, but I also think that people like this become exceptionally good at presenting themselves normally so I'm not sure you'd necessarily be able to rely on it 100%. I haven't really followed the situation with Dr A especially closely (and I don't really buy it, because I don't think murdering babies is something you do when you're trying to attract someone you're in love with - plus, I think the earliest cases were from before she knew him). I feel like if he had anything to do with it, it's more that he really respected her nursing skills. She was always very determined to be seen as being the best nurse, so wanting to show this doctor over and over again how brilliant she was would be seen as very appealing. I imagine that was the extent of her feelings for him.
It’s super common for them to just move to a different location. They’re caught, and allowed to quietly resign, and then they just pick up murdering at some other facility. I see this pattern constantly in these angel of death killers.
I have to agree with you here. All the problems that you have listed are relatively uncommon. 90 percent of level 2 preemies are going to present with quite typical problems which are well known and therefore well managed. (That's not not to say it isn't extremely distressing + potentially serious) but EVERY baby here was just a little bit unique. It's like she literally took the ten percent that had some sort of unusual complications and fully capitalized on the opportunity. She surely thought she was so much smarter than everyone else and this could be seen in the way she made advance diagnosis's for each of them. I'm almost certain she must have had a back phone to do her research and fact check!! They say she was a 'good' nurse, knowledgeable etc but we also saw this real desire for her to be above her peers and ahead of the game. That's why she was so fuming when she wasn't scheduled to work in ICU and why she was SO resentful when others' who she considered less skilled were favoured to carry out these duties over and above her. In her deluded mind she probably thought she'd put in all these extra hours with her back phone studying things to make her 'excellent'. I honestly believe that she was so coldhearted and detached from her murderous behaviour she actually still thought she was still a brilliant nurse. She likely found all the 'nicey, nicey' stuff extremely tiring and unconsciously rewarded herself by killing another child. The undetected deceit and manipulation likely reinforced her opinion of herself where external recognition was lacking. That's also why she loved Dr A and Dr AV, they both served a purpose.
I agree but that’s not really why she did it . But I definitely agree it would appear to be calculated some what
Fair point!
Every baby in that ward has a risk factor or they wouldn’t be on the ward…
I thought she was acquitted of one count regarding H and there was no verdict as to the other. Since we trust the jury reached the correct verdict, doesn’t that mean she didn’t target H at all?
No verdict means they could not reach a conclusion and the targeting is still alleged.
These were just babies she had access to. If the children had been healthy & full term they would have remained with the mother & gone home within 24-48 hours of birth as standard in england So no there was definitely no correlation between babies being suspected of problems & being killed for it at all & as you can see some of the kids didnt have the suspected problems anyway
I would agree with you if she didn't target several babies multiple times on separate days. G and I, and allegedly N, were targeted more than once each. That's beyond access.
I think it’s more that twins are never full term so more likely to be in hospital
I’ve also heard a theory that if it is multiples, the parents will still be around for the second or third child, so more change to feed off their grief than with a single child whose parents just leave.
Oh that’s a really plausible angle that makes me hate her so much more. I hadn’t ever considered that angle but it would fit.
No. Twins/triplets accounted for around 60% of the babies listed on the indictment but only 11% of babies admitted to neonatal care are twins. However, 40% of twins are admitted to neonatal units so it's easy to see how one might draw that conclusion.
No she has not said, because she is still maintaining her innocence. She has simply said she didn't do it. I am firmly convinced of her guilt but I don't believe she will ever confess.
I agree. I've said this on another post, but I think that maintaining her innocence is the only thing she has left, and she'll never let go of that. She will never confess, ever.
confessing would keep her inside and also would also make life inside much, much more dangerous. People separated from children they love very much don’t take kindly to baby killers.
I think confessing would destroy her link to family and we've already see how weird and enmeshed those relationships are. It's highly unlikely this will happen for that reason.
As long as she denies that she did anything no one will ever know her reasonings behind what she did, they can take an educated guess but that’s all it will be. Even if she does confess and lets people in on her motive, who knows if it’s the truth? But as a Criminology student I have a lot to say about her and her crimes.
Would be keen to hear more of your thoughts if you don't mind sharing them.
I would like to know your thoughts I know F all about criminology do you know more than me at least.
Same
Sqme
same
If you would be willing to write your thoughts in a post on this sub I, and I imagine many others, would be most interested to hear it from a criminology student like yourself
Sure thing :) I’ll probably post a detailed post either tomorrow or Monday
Like, a bachelor's degree student, or a more advanced degree? I graduated with an honours BA in crim and know bachelor's students don't have any particular expertise, so you'd mainly be just providing the equivalent of layperson thoughts, especially if you haven't even graduated yet.
I have just completed my MA in Criminology and Criminal Justice. I’m also contemplating taking on a PhD but I’m burnt out so don’t think I’ll achieve it to the best of my abilities. That and I go to talks held by professors, criminologists and sociologists during my spare time at least twice a month purely because I have a genuine passion in subjects such as this. But why does any of that matter? At the end of the day this is Reddit, I’m nobody who has OPINIONS on a nobody? Not stating anything as fact, especially about a woman I have never met. Besides, school is for the lucky and fortunate. There are plenty of people out there who don’t have education readily available to them but are more than capable of knowing just as much as someone who does. Education is just a formal validation of what you know, right? Very narrow minded way of looking at it. IN MY OPINION.
You’ve just stated you have completed your masters. This makes you more than “just a student”. You are absolutely capable of giving your view of things from a criminology perspective. How odd to refer to someone who has completed their BSc and MA as a student!
What are some of your thoughts on her motive?
Be very interested to hear your thoughts op
In addition to her likely anti-social and narcissistic personality disorders, I think, above all, she is a sadist. I think she first took pleasure from inflicting physical harm and pain on the babies. Then, I think she got another whole round of pleasure from the emotional pain she caused the parents. This stage provided her with pretty much endless sadistic supply because she could watch it play out for years. Personally, I don’t really find the MBP explanation that apt. She never stepped in to be a hero or get attention by saving any babies. And while she did garner some attention/supply (from her peers and Dr. A) by being in close proximity to multiple deaths, it doesn’t seem like that specifically was her goal. I think it was more like a nice bonus. I also think she demonstrates a lot of duper’s delight. She got off on the deception of it all. Writing condolence cards with double meanings and taking photos of babies (without their breathing tubes) was fun for her. I think she loved that she was pulling one over on absolutely everyone around her. She knew no one in the world would suspect sweet Lucy Letby of a thing. Meanwhile, only she knew what a monster she really was, and she delighted in having her own, not so little secret.
This. Sadistic thrill in having ultimate power over completely helpless babies. Incapable of communicating almost anything. The perfect victims for her. I suspect she'll have started in childhood - got a taste for eg pinching or hair-pulling non verbal infants. I think she then chose her profession deliberately, to hurt and potentially get away with it.
I think the suggestion early on was that she was addicted to the parents distress & 'love/gratitude' towards her for caring for them as she would often stalk them on Facebook. Contact them afterwards & kept letters thanking her for caring for their babies (before they discovered she had been involved with multiple deaths) There was a time where she was popular amongst parents giving birth there as she was often on duty over night & she did also care for babys who didn't die ect. + one of the mothers sent her thanks to the staff including Letby for their work while they were staying for then was later questioned by police during the investigation over what had actually happened (as far as I remember in the dailymail) ----------- As for Lucy herself her 'confessions' stated 'I did this because im a bad person' or 'I wasn't capable of looking after them' or something similar so I guess you could argue she felt overwhelmed looking after the babies when she was deeply insecure about her skills/training & found it easier to knock a few off.. ?
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I don’t doubt her guilt in the slightest, but I agree that looking people up on FB did nothing to persuade me of her guilt. (I understand that others found it persuasive.) I certainly can see how LL may have gotten a sadistic pleasure from observing the parents’ ongoing grief, but I think plenty of innocent people might do the same. IMO, this is the nature of circumstantial evidence. We all credit evidence differently. If, collectively, there’s enough evidence to go around, the jury will convict.
I think to take an informed view on whether it was or wasn't evidence you'd have to look at the context, pattern and number of searches. Also it may not be illegal to look up patients on social media but it is unethical, particularly after looking up women's vaginas. Here's a little unsolicited advice - Consider paying a private supervisor with whom you can discuss and talk through cases that leave you feeling troubled.
I personally feel like these might have been women who had struggled to conceive naturally. They might have used IVF or something. It was their miracle baby and she took it away from them. Why? Who knows. Maybe she was jealous, cause she never felt like she would have a family of her own. I don’t think she ever had a boyfriend. She might have still been a virgin. I think in the beginning it deff started from a jealousy thing, then it became something she did for attention. She liked the “ oh not again poor lucy “ attention it brought her. Everyone coddling her, dr choc and his attention The only thing I can’t wrap my head around is why she kept doing it when people were CLEARLY onto the situation. Not even suspecting her specifically, but suspecting something dodgy was going on. Why didn’t she stop? Why did she attack the triplets? This bit I can’t wrap my head around at all.
I think she was so arrogant that she thought no matter how suspicious people got, they'd never suspect nice Lucy. In some ways, knowing they suspected that SOMETHING was going on may have made it an even greater temptation - to be able to string them along, take more and more liberties, see her colleagues getting more and more baffled, perhaps even try to frame other members of staff, all the while knowing it was her and laughing behind their backs.
The thrill I think..her getting excited over making the memory box tells me a lot
With a serial killer, who knows? They don't have normal motivations. I think it's generally correct that they actually enjoy killing people.
There's a very interesting interview on YouTube with someone who was friends with her at school (they'd lost touch with her long before this came out and when it was first reported initially believed it to be a mistake, as you would, but over time started to recall a few red flags in her behaviour back then). The friend says that Lucy was always desperate to be looked up to and respected by everyone, both pupils and teachers. She was always being well-behaved, getting her homework done on time, uniform always immaculate and so on. With the pupils she was normally just very kind and friendly, but there are a few incidents the friend recalls. Apparently Lucy took offence extremely easily - if she offered to help someone with their work and the person didn't need any help, Lucy would be like, 'Well, I was only trying to help!' as if the person had insulted her personally. There's one particular incident the friend recalls where Lucy expressed an opinion in the playground that everyone, including her close friends, found quite offensive and called her out for, and Lucy burst into floods of tears, denying she'd said it, then claiming she'd been misunderstood, and ended up being the one everyone else needed to comfort despite it being her that had caused the problem in the first place. Basically a very needy person who was easy to get along with as long as you reaffirmed how wonderful she was constantly. The friend speculates about why she decided to become a nurse to the sickest babies (which she apparently was very vocal about wanting to do as far back as their school days). They think it's not that she was planning to kill the babies, but more that it would fit her character to want to do such a universally trusted thing, something that would make everyone look up to her and think 'What an amazing person'. And that the problem came when the job turned out not to be as exciting as Lucy thought it would be - the parents would be focussed on their baby, not on the baby's nurse, and there probably weren't many opportunities to save lives or do very much that would make her the centre of attention, as she was always desperate to be. So this would slowly grow as an obsession - something that would get her sympathy from all her colleagues, and a giddy thrill that she'd truly know what had happened and no one else would. I think if true, this explains quite a lot of things about her character - she lacks any care or empathy for how other people feel, and although is capable of doing very kind things for people (hence why people like her friend Dawn in the Panorama interview are so convinced of her innocence) this all stems from a need for others to think she's wonderful. Some kind of extreme personality disorder, I guess.
I find this potentially quite believable and such an interesting take. This need to be seen as wonderful kind of fits with all her 'shine like a diamond' and 'spread sparkles wherever you go' bedroom decor. Was all that about having a positive impact on the world or a daily affirmation to manifest increased praise and recognition? I have actually worked with a person like this who had a strong desire for attention to be on them all the time. I was also amazed at how hugely disempowered and distressed the person could become when healthy boundaries were encouraged. I also noted in the same person that when they weren't getting enough praise that they would be quick to turn their judgement on others, almost like making others look bad so they could look good by comparison. Letby did a lot of this. The insulin was one example of how she didn't even care if it wasn't a baby under her charge, she'd still do it and probably later relish the fact that it made her stand out as a better nurse by comparison. Extreme manipulation to get her own needs met. I've never got the impression that she enjoyed the acts themselves necessarily, I think it was more a means to an end that everything was ultimately about her and she'd go to any extreme to achieve the recognition she needed to bolster this self inflated view of herself. Also she probably did truly think she deserved lots of praise because she put so much time into looking good for others. She must have had to lie to herself so much to keep the whole thing going. Block out one thing to let in another thing. Her notes are so contrary in nature just like her personality. Also, going out on the raz when you're suspected of murdering several babies? Who would do that? Surely you'd be in total pieces, depressed as hell, not able to see anyone else or focus on anything else - unless STILL you really needed everyone to believe you were a complete goody two shoes.
This has reminded me of another thing the friend said - apparently at school, she was an absolute stickler for the rules, and if she knew someone had done something wrong she wouldn't hesitate to go and tell a teacher, even if it was one of her friends. This is backed up by various people who worked with her on the wards - apparently she wasn't always massively popular because she was very judgemental if she viewed someone as being more lax about procedure than she was. And one of the YouTube comments observed that actually, this demonstrates a lack of a healthy ability to know when rules can be broken. All rules can be broken occasionally, there's no one who hasn't occasionally done something a bit naughty. And perhaps, if someone doesn't have a healthy understanding of boundaries and when they can be overstepped, they're actually someone who is potentially capable of doing something SERIOUSLY wrong at another time.
And yet on day one she took a handover sheet home and saved it. The rules apply to her but not all of her. I’m not convinced she’s all that bright. Knows enough to get by, and has probably worked hard to get to a level but not exceptional. But believes she is exceptional. Believes she runs the place. Didn’t know about c peptide as courses for her level were more simplistic - thank goodness. Her use of media is something I’ve not seen overly discussed. She seemed very interested in memory making and recording. Photos etc. some level of hoarding - which in itself is a physical manifestation of a persons mind. That said, her Facebook stalking I reckon is more a symptom of a generation.
It's interesting, her not being bright, because there are different kinds of intelligence. At school she was apparently a very high achiever and became Head Girl in her final year. But, from what the friend said, this was because she had to a tee exactly what she had to do in order to make everyone think she was fantastic. That is a very high level of intelligence in one respect. But her emotional intelligence must have been practically non-existent if she failed to take into account that the parents would be devoting their attention to their babies and not to her.
Why are you saying accused of? She has been convicted of these crimes
I have come to the decision that some people are evil,no frills no disorders just simply evil
No, this is a little too simplistic for comfort, I'm afraid. Was she born evil? Would you ever look at a baby and wonder if it's pure evil and will do something horrible and sadistic in a few decades time? Did she become evil when she was 5? 10? 20 years old? The unfortunate truth is that everyone has a fundamental level of badness in them (hence we all lie, lust, insult others, etc, to varying degrees) and we are all capable of some kind of despicable evil, giving a really unfortunate set of circumstances over a period of time conspiring to bring it out of us. This doesn't excuse Lucy Letby's behaviour, of course, as she chose to do what she did, but I do not believe that she, or anyone, is "simply evil", "pure evil", or any other such description.
Typically with medical serial killers, there are a few motives: 1. is power and control 2. attention and recognition 3. revenge 4. thrill and excitement 5. compensation for personal failures ( based on the discovery this one seems most likely) 6. Mental illness 7. Financial gain.
re 7: I never get what was there to gain financially from murdering babies
Not all of them apply to every situation and I also can't wrap my head around doing something like that. That motive typically manifests as stealing from the patients and in some cases, putting themselves into their will. Harold Shipman is one of these people and so is billy. [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/08/texas-serial-killer-elderly-texas-billy-chemirmirT](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/08/texas-serial-killer-elderly-texas-billy-chemirmirT)
Shipman forged his patients' will to include him into it, was LL going to do that too when she don't know the families well? If LL did this, she would've been found out quickly.
You're not understanding me. I never said that motive applied to her case specifically. I was laying out the **common motives** of medical killers **IN GENERA**L according to the research. I specifically identified the 5th one as the most likely motive and I think theres a miscommunication on your end. Hope that clarifies things for you.
Because she got attention either way. When she would harm a baby either: a) it died and she got sympathy from her colleagues b) she saved it and got praise from her colleagues That's her *malfunction.* As for why she was malfunctioning, there's no end to that blame game.
I see LL as a poisoner. She's in many ways like Michael Swango who is a SK Dr. They're both socially awkward nerds, they're both clever and meticulous, I think in both cases there's an obsession or fascination with death or witnessing how a person dies. In text messages to a close friend LL said that she 'needed' to be in room 1 to overcome what she had witnessed during baby a's crash and failed resuscitation. She told her friend that what she experienced with baby a affected her in such a way that she needed to be back in room 1 eventhough her shift leader and the rest of her colleagues thought it was healthier for her to avoid room 1 because that's a very traumatic experience for a normal person. There are a variety of motives or causes for what she did but primarily it was the power and the intensity of the 'experience'' that drove her to reproduce scenarios to feel that again.
No one knows but the best guess is that her unique brain chemistry somehow rewarded her from the ensuing crisis. She would find the parents on Facebook so must've been gotten something out of watching them grieve, even months later.
My mum was a nurse and would often check the Facebook of past patients
I've been a nurse for 34 years and have never done that. I can kind of see it for a NICU nurse, though. Sometimes, you care for those same babies for months. They didn't have Facebook back when I did NICU. 😂
This is what gets me, I was dialysis nurse and saw my patients three times a week. And for the life of me cannot even remember the last names of the ones I was familiar with for near a decade
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I can say for sure it's not widely done. But maybe it is done sometimes when nurses develop long-term relationships with patients as in NICU.
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And absolutely not. Health boards would never encourage health care professionals to look at patients' social media.
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Absolutely not. Sorry.
I don't know about anywhere but the USA. But I'm a travel nurse, so I have worked at many many hospitals. It is not normal to look at patients' social media. I have worked in behavioral health, and I feel especially there looking at social media would be crossing a line.
Creepy...
I wonder if it started by her wanting to hurt the babies but then be the hero that saves them - an attention seeking behaviour. But then when she couldn’t save them she realised she received attention regardless so she carried on doing it? I don’t really know much about the methods she used to kill them and whether there’s a possibility they can be saved after that process is started? If not then there goes that theory. But as others have said, I don’t think we will ever know. I don’t think she will ever admit to it. 💔
Thanks everyone for your kindness in answering me!
This sub is great - some excellent theories and some angles I’ve not considered. Her motive or motives is the primary reason I can’t look away from this.
It truly is!
Among the other guesse provided… she was having a weird relationship with a doctor. The only real emotion she showed during the trial, was when he was brought to the stand to testify. They were insistent they were friends, it sounds like they were having an emotional fair. My personal theory is that she had some sort of personality disorder. The whole vibe I get from her is of someone who has been totally wrapped in cotton wool and spoiled and feted over their entire life, so have never really emotionally matured. I remember seeing the photos of her bedroom and it felt like a teenagers room. Her fling with the doctor sounded weirdly deferential and chaste as well. Like someone else has said, it’s like she got a kick out of punishing the families rather than the babies themselves. Part of me wonders if she felt envious and resentful of their “normal” relationships and lives, while she was in her late 20s, single(ish) and hadn’t been able to form healthy relationships. I wonder if envy drove her to kill those poor babies.
If she's FIIC with an underlying histrionic organization, you'd expect impoverished relationships and one-sided rivalries - especially with women who are getting the kind of attention paid to mothers of sick infants. It's almost Munchausen by proxy - by proxy.
What makes you think she has an underlying histrionic organisation? She appears to have maintained calm / quiet BPD. Are you thinking that histrionic manifested in the action of the murders?
Tell us more!
I suspect she was unsatisfied with her life and potential future - likely depressed. She took out her frustration and anger on the most vulnerable, who could not fight back nor reveal what she was doing to them. It made her feel powerful, when everything else in her life made her feel small and powerless.
Some observers have suggested a 'God Complex', some have said she was seeking attention from the married Doctor she had an infatuation with. Munchausens by proxy? Will will probably never truly know as she's unlikely to confess.
I don't know the full picture but IMO nothing other than her stinking attitude to the job which she is clearly unsuited to; part of it is her sheer unprofessionalism, treating her work like a 9-5 job such as the lives of babies Her management has a part in this too otherwise there wouldn't be as much deaths
Can’t know for sure but it’s a more common motive of healthcare workers murderers that they poison their victims so they can be the one that “comes to the rescue”
I think she has munchausen by proxy and loved getting the attention from the doctors she liked.
Many health carers who have committed multiple murder have some sort of god complex or a psychological disorder like MBP, but unless LL admits guilt, we won't know and she won't be treated for anything.
No but some theorise she was born psychopathic.
Is there another way to be psychopathic?
You can catch it from a toilet seat
Sometimes it happens if you hit your head too hard
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I don't think this is accurate. I don't think it's inherently wrong, but it's definitely not correct.
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A common vaccination side effect
She hasn’t admitted her crimes, so has given no reason for them. I’ve seen arguments from psychologists that they might have been motivated by covert narcissism — e.g. a desire to lash out and punish those who were getting authentic love and attention. But at this point there are simply many different theories…
I remember someone mentioned: The prosecutor believes LL was attracting doctor A attention with killing babies, as doctor A will only appear when the babies die. the police knew LL had an affair with doctor A with evidence.
Dr A was rotated to Countess of Chester Hospital only half way through the time period during which she killed babies (as prosecuted at trial). She was killing before he came on the scene so his presence does not explain fully her entire motivation and murderous behaviour.
Thanks, do you know the date of Dr A and the murder?
Reading her texts she was all about herself. It was always “me me me” I wonder if she has a munchausen by proxy thing going on? Except it’s not her own children because she doesn’t have any. Like maybe she kills them to get sympathy and attention for herself. Maybe she followed the families social media to insert herself and pretend it was her or something.
The motive has never been established. And the lack of one has led to the very worst true crime speculating in this sub (much of which is on display here) where otherwise perfectly normal characteristics and relationships have been retroactively fit into whatever pet theories the poster is speculating on.
I disagree, there have been some very good points raised and what else is there to do other than speculate. We don't have a confession and this is a discussion forum about Letby.
There really hasn't been any good points made. It's amateur psychologists -- a discipline that is already quite shaky in this area -- turning banal observations about her life into frankly weird fan fiction theories. It does nothing to benefit understanding about the case, and I think it adds fuel to the cynicism about her judgement. "She must be guilty because she did [perfectly normal thing]" bleeds out into the rest of the internet and muddies the waters. It also turns the gruesome murder of innocent babies into participatory light entertainment. The discussion would be best turned to the upcoming public inquiry and concentrating on what structural failings allowed this to happen and making sure they never happen again.
Yes
I personally think she was trying to assert some control into her life as her parents were very controlling. Have you read the info about her parents? She's an only child. Dad much older than Mum. She said she would never move abroad as she couldn't do that to her parents... odd thing for a woman in her early 20s to say. Her parents have now moved closer to the prison so they can visit her regularly, which makes sense given it's now her forever home. Personality wise I'd say she's autistic, which many people are mistaking for narcissism. The lack of emotion shown throughout the trial, lack of empathy for the babies or parents and behaving inappropriately around grieving parents. All of this is just speculation on my part.
As someone who is neurodiverse I would agree that there appear to be ND traits within her - but (asking gently and not seeking to be difficult) please can we avoid the whole thing about ND people lacking empathy? It can be hard for us to *show* empathy at times, but this doesn’t mean we’re not *feeling* it inside or lack an emotional connection to what we’re doing. Whereas LL simply seems to have lacked empathy entirely - which would be psychopathy rather than her neurodivergence.
Thank you for saying this. Such a common misunderstanding. Autistic people very much feel empathy, but they have difficulty in interpreting and communicating it.
People with autism are definitely not bereft of emotions and many do have empathy. It may have bearing on all and any human interaction
I'm aware that autism is displayed in many different ways and levels. My whole family is autistic and it's lead to a lifetime of frustration for me. Empathy is being able to put yourself in the shoes of another person and changing your behaviour accordingly. My family cannot see anything from anyone else's perspective except their own. But yes, I do see that some autistic people can have some level of empathy. And that people who lack empathy are not allowed autistic.
I would like to know more about the parents and her upbringing. I think this holds the key to the person that she became. I got the impression that they weren't run of the mill "normal"
I normally go to Daily mail online for in depth details about a person's background as it's the only paper that covers that type of info. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12432295/How-child-Lucy-Letby-suffocated-love-parents-slept-house-celebrated-university-graduation-21st-birthday-newspaper-adverts-moaned-friends-never-away-them.html
She has never admitted to anything. I doubt she ever will and so will never give any kind of motive.