September 5, 2023 • 35 mins
Thirteen vulnerable babies in the Countess of Chester Hospital neonatal ward fell victim to a series of horrifying crimes that shocked the medical community. Subjected to methods as cruel as air injections and insulin poisoning, their lives were put at grave risk. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack unravel the dark tale of Lucy Letby, the nurse responsible for these atrocities. They explore the systemic failures that allowed these crimes to go unnoticed, the role of autopsies in such cases, and the psychological aspects that might have driven Letby to commit these heinous acts that have forever changed the landscape of neonatal care
Time codes:
00:00:00 — Joseph Scott Morgan opens the episode discussing the vulnerability of newborns and infants.
00:01:17 — Joe Scott introduces the term "neonates," explaining that these babies are even more susceptible to harm due to premature birth or physical issues.
00:01:42 — The conversation focuses on the case of Lucy Letby, a nurse who attacked 13 babies in the neonatal ward.
00:03:19 — Dave Mack notes that Lucy had specialized training for the neonatal unit. Her problems began almost as soon as she started working there.
00:04:00 — A brief history of the Countess of Chester Hospital is provided. Dave Mack points out that Lucy was the common denominator in all the cases.
00:09:03 — Joe Scott highlights the odd nature of the medication errors and the strict procedures for medication access.
00:10:44 — The methodology used in administering medication through an indwelling IV is discussed, providing insight into how Lucy could carry out her actions.
00:14:44 — Joe Scott talks about the usual procedures when a baby is in distress. He points out that the unexpected reactions of the babies could have raised suspicions.
00:15:37 — Joseph Scott Morgan discusses the role of autopsies in understanding deaths. He notes how this process can be compromised in cases involving premature babies.
00:17:04 — A description is provided of the chilling scenario of a neonatal unit to which a dangerous person has access.
00:20:00 — Joe details the lethal effects of air injections in the bloodstream and in feeding tubes, one of the methods Lucy used, causing immense pain and cardiac arrest. He talks about
00:24:17 — Dave Mack talks about the unexpected nature of a nurse being a killer. He also talks about the moment a mother discovers Lucy in the act.
00:28:00 — The damning evidence found at Lucy's home, including clinical notes and confessions, is discussed.
00:30:40 — Joseph Scott Morgan talks about the final three murders, including two brothers who were part of a set of triplets. He confirms that Lucy can be classified as a serial killer, pointing out the rarity of female serial killers
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Bodybags with Joseph Scott Morgan handle care Fragile. You think
about things that are so vulnerable in this world, and
the first thing that comes to mind, I think for
(00:30):
us is humans, our babies. I'm a proud father. I've
been present when my children were born. I've seen them
up to this point in life succeeding. But a lot
of that was depended upon how my wife and I
treated and cared for them early on when they were
(00:51):
so very fragile, and you're terrified the moment that that
little life is handed over to you. I was particularly
terrified the first time I had to put a car
seat in the back of a car and place that
baby in there and had to make it home. But
you gain confidence, but you know there's a there's another
group within infants that are even more vulnerable to the
(01:14):
horrors of this world and everything that can be inflicted
upon them. They have to be guarded like you can't
even begin to imagine. And those are what are commonly
referred to as neonates. These are the babies that are
more and many times prematurely or they have other physical issues.
They almost don't seem to be living sometimes, but they
(01:37):
are and they begin to thrive within neoonatal units. Today
we're going to talk about the wake left behind by
Lucy let Me. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is
body bags. You notice I use the word wake is
(02:01):
an interesting thing because it is, first off, it's something
that is left behind, most commonly associated by a boat.
And you know me and my boat, love my boat,
like going down on the river and you disturb the
water which is otherwise peaceful, and you disrupted, at least
on the surface and certainly deep down. I think that
we could say that about Lucy let Me.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Lucy let Me secretly attacked thirteen babies on the neonatal
ward at the hospital where she worked, and when the
babies died, their deaths looked like natural causes, and investigation
showed that the thirty three year old nurse used methods
like injecting air into the baby's bloodstreams and stomachs, overfeeding
infants with milk, physically assaulting them, even poisoning them with insulin.
(02:48):
The babies she preyed on were mostly twins and triplets.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
So much grief in this path of destruction, so much pain,
so much mourning that I don't think that any of
us can begin to plumb the depths of it as
to how she impacted the lives of so many families.
And I would say also a nation, the UK, and
(03:14):
the story that is nothing short of just pure horror.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
In the case of Lucy Letby, she had her registered
nurse degree and then she spent an additional three years
of training in schooling three more years to be able
to work in the neonatal unit, and problems began almost immediately.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Joe, I think it was in twenty twelve when she
first took the position, and she's working. Let me kind
of set the stage because she's this is in the UK,
and so the hospital where she is is a hospital
is referred to as the Countess of Chester Hospital. As
hospitals really old, certainly old by US standards. It was
first established, I think, like in eighteen twenty nine, is
(03:58):
like a mental health facility. They called it a lunatic
asylum back then, but as time progressed, the nature of
the place kind of changed. But it was well known.
You know, Dave that I absolutely loathe the word why,
I truly do, because you can chase your tail all
day long on this and to try to get that answer,
and you'll never come to anything that's satisfactory. But I
(04:21):
think a bigger, probably more appropriate question is going to
begin with what what is it that wouldn't motivate her
to want to do this? And that's going to be
for our friends in forensic psychiatry and psychology, you know,
to kind of come to that determination about her. These
precious little angels who were under the care of Lucy Ledby,
(04:42):
they remain unnamed. They're simply known as child A, and
B and C. Not all of them died, but Lucy,
let be just so that everyone understands, was charged and
convicted of the murders of seven little babies in this old,
(05:06):
old hospital. And it's not the first time this has
ever happened in history, but I don't know that it's
ever happened to this level. And the real shame is
that it was not picked up on quick enough. She
was able to still have access to kids even after
the alarms were raised.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
They had a number of checks and balances here that
were ignored and that is what allowed her access. But
very simply in a neonatal unit, you're going to have
children are going to pass, they are going to die.
A sick infant is as fragile as he gets, and
you know, suspicions a rose around Lucy fairly quickly. When
(05:48):
she finally finally got approved for that to work in
this unit, they saw changes right away, just simple mathematical changes.
They were used to having, you know, two or three
babies that might pass any and they had that going
on in a month.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Yeah, and that's one of the things that you kind
of keep watchover in a hospital, particularly on units like this,
units like the nick you the Neo Care Unit, are
even the ICU for adults because when you think about it,
the mortality rate, there is a correlation some believe between
(06:23):
the mortality rate and treatment, and that makes sense. Now
everything's going to have multiple variables, you know when you
look at statistically, because some people have other complicating factors
that are at work. Some people, you know, as I mentioned,
have genetic predispositions. It doesn't matter how hard you try,
there's just certain things that you're not going to be
(06:44):
able to overcome. Within the medical sciences, it's they try
and they try, but you want to try to see
if there's a correlation and would let be there was
a statistically significant number of deaths that began to occur.
I think that the first actually occurred June eighth, twenty fifteen,
(07:05):
and they didn't know what happened. I mean within thirty
minutes or so of her, well ninety minutes of her
coming on duty. That's another corollary that you look for
in an investigation like this, a medical investigation. This child
was dead and never heard this child as child A.
And that's key, particularly from an investigative standpoint. And you know,
(07:27):
medicine is a lot about investigations, Dave, It truly is.
From a medical legal perspective, we've got that same nose
because we're trying to determine what happened, Whereas with people
that are in medicine, they're not only trying to find
out what happened, but now they're trying to develop a
treatment course. But for all of these children, it ended
(07:48):
in a terminal event, and within ninety minutes the murder
of child A of Lucy Letby's attendance there. When she arrived,
child just began to crash. And other than that, I
was doing fun.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Starting with that June eighth death, there were four children
on the neonatal unit that crashed that three of them died,
one did survive. There was one common denominator through all
of them, and it was that Lucy Letby was on
the unit working with these children during this entire time,
(08:21):
with all four of them. When the consultants were looking
at this, they did notice, Hey, we've got the same nurse.
What are the odds? And they were able to break
this down and they made an error in classification because
they instead of listing the deaths as something more that
they were more than just an unexplained collapse, they listed
(08:43):
these deaths as medication heirs. Had they been addressed as
a quote serious incident involving unexpected deaths, which is what
they actually were, they would have been investigated differently. But
that didn't happen, which is how she was able to continue.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
One of the things that you look for, and I
find it interesting medication errors. There's really technically only one
case that involved medication, and we have her let Be
actually pushing a bullus of insulin on a neonate and
that's almost unheard of. During that child's course, there was
(09:25):
no indication that the child had any kind of issues
relative to their pancreas, not being able to produce insulin
and the insulin cart. All the drugs on hospital units
are locked up. They have a drug cart that they
go to and it's carefully watched. Things have to be
logged in and logged out. Now it's done digitally, so
(09:48):
when you get access to this area, it has to
be accounted for and there has to be explaining this done.
And I don't really see how that kind of flew
under the radar with them. You have to have a
justification to go to that secured area to retrieve that medication,
and also that medication has to be written down in
the doctor's orders. Now, there are certain things that nurses
(10:09):
do as part of the daily course of them providing
patient care. It's understood, and there are many things that
doctors they don't have a clue about. If I'm going
to be treated in a hospital, it must be treated
by nurses, then treated by doctor. Most of the time,
the doctor kind of blows in and blows out, And
I've been in many circumstances where you'll see the nurse
(10:30):
kind of raise their eyebrow about suggestions that the doctor
makes and that sort of thing. But the doctor does
have to write out orders for very specific things. But
you know this goes to a bigger piece is who
has access to the children, to these babies on this
unit and what kind of methodology would be employed here. Now,
(10:52):
when you have neonates like this, and you can have
adults that are on ICU or cardiac care units, these
sorts of things, you're going to have an in dwelling IV,
all right. So with in dwelling IV, there's a port
where you can push drugs, and that means that you
(11:14):
inject the port. You don't inject the person. So they
draw up whatever type of drug it is and they'll
insert the syringe into that port and then push the
drug that is being prescribed. All right, So you're not
going to have you have one central area where this medication,
for instance, will be inserted into. You're not going to
(11:35):
have multiple like what we refer to in forensics as
npw's well physicians and nurses do too. Those are needle
puncture wounds. If you've got, like, for instance, an individual
that has been I'll give you a little aside here.
When we're looking, say, for instance, at a syringe being
applied to a heroin abuser, they're going into either the
(11:58):
left or the right what we refer to as they
and a cubital fausa. In other words, this fancy term
for the crooks of the arm.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
Thank you for clarifying that I had no I didn't
know if you were talking about the bottom of a
dude's butter is neck.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
In short, it's referred to as the ACF. So if
you're talking about somebody that's out on the street and
they're injecting, what we will do is well, literally, some
physicians refer to it as milking the arm. At autopsy,
you'll start up in the you'll extend the arm, you'll
break riger mortise, and you'll extend the arm even through
riger so that the arm is completely straight and starting
(12:31):
to bicep. You squeeze down the length of the arm,
and as you tightly squeeze down the decedent's arm, you
can begin to appreciate if there's a presentation of blood
and a fresh needle puncture wound. Well, in case of
hospital care, you're not going to have like npw's all
over the place. Once the person is on the floor
(12:54):
and they're being treated, you'll have a central line that
has been placed into the arm. Say where the IV goes,
and then you'll have this push that takes place. You
can also have which in the case of neoonates, you'll
have perhaps a feeding tube that's in place as well,
(13:15):
and so this gives you access, say for instance, to
the tummy so that they can uptake nutrition. And so
that's Those are some of the access points that you
might have in the case of someone that was looking
to do a great harm to one of these little
fragile lives.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
So Lucy let be already had everything.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Yeah, yeah, this is probably why her murders, the murders
that she was committing, were not picked up on as
quickly as a clinician. You're not sitting there thinking this
is a homicide. Okay. They're always God bless them. People
in the medical field are always thinking about treatment, treatment, treatment, therapy, therapy, therapy.
(13:57):
We want to try to heal this individual, and so
if they try A and A doesn't work, they're trying
everything that they possibly can and the patient succumbs and dies.
They'll try to investigate that as best they can.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
There are certain things doctors nurses expect when a baby
is crashing, and they do step by step. Here are
the things we need to do to resuscitate this baby,
and they have a reasonable expectation that the baby will
react in certain ways. And in this case of the
first four children, the three that died and the one
(14:34):
that survived. In the case of the three that passed away,
they did not respond properly. They did not respond as
expected rather and died.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
When you've got a child that is born, say prematurely,
those cases are not always reportable to the corner. So
you're not necessarily going to have someone trained in forensic
pathology that's going to get their eyes on the children immediately,
and the family might not. This is another way that
this can be masked. The family's already been through enough, Dave. Okay,
(15:08):
they might not necessarily want the hospital to do an autopsy.
Now that autopsy would be a clinical autopsy. It would
be done in a hospital setting. So those are not
forensic pathologists that work in a hospital. In most cases,
some pathologists do, in fact have forensic certifications. Okay, but
the line's share of them are clinical atomic pathologists that
(15:33):
you know, look at tissues, underslides, and they run the
lab and all these sorts of things. Saying, yes, they
do autopsies, but it's from a clinical perspective to try
to understand what brought about not just the death, but
also what happened during the clinical course, you know, to
try to help make the clinicians better and secondarily do
(15:54):
that I think in that setting, to try to give
the family the answers. But if you're not doing autopsies
in the family would probably say no, I don't want
that to happen. Where this can be a real mask
is if you've got kids that are babies that are
born prematurely. They're already compromised to this point. Remember, they're
struggling just to survive. Hence that's why they're on a
(16:16):
neonatal unit. It's going to be hard for them to
rationalize why you should put them through anything else, and
they're not necessarily going to want to go down the
road to have an autopsy performed. So with somebody with
bad intentions like Lucy Letby enters into the world of
these little fragile, fragile angels, the fact that they were
(16:40):
already up against the odds only heightens the probability that
she can get away with pure evil. When you're a
(17:06):
trained clinician and you're dealing with the most fragile of lives,
and when you're in an environment where just imagine if
you can, you're in a lockdown area with critically ill babies,
and you're this monster rate, and if you did a
(17:26):
three hundred and sixty degree kind of panoramic turn all
the way around in the room, everywhere at waste level,
in these little incubators or potential victims. I'm not really
interested in her motivation. What I am interested in is
the fact that she did it, and she had access
to these children for a protracted period of time. There
(17:48):
were some reports that came out Dave where when a
code was called, and when they call a code, that
means that the child, the patient is going into arrest.
You've heard the old term in hospitals where you'll see
in movies where they'll call a code blue, and code
blue means cardiac arrests, that sort of thing. So that
means all hands on deck, and so people will go
(18:11):
racing through the hospital to get to that location in
order to save a life. And you can have people
come from multiple locations. But this is kind of a
within the neonatal world. Like you said, she had to
have specific training to be in there, So you've got
a limited group of people that would be responding to this.
But some of the remarks that came forward from let
(18:31):
Be's trial and you know, some of the peripherals that
were involved in this, the other clinicians that would come
over when these children were in distress, They said that
there were noises emanating in pain that they had never heard.
You know, babies cry, that's what they do. They cry
to let you know that they have needs. All right,
(18:53):
you and I both know that very well. But when
a child is in pain and they're screaming out, you're
trying to do everything that you can to soothe them.
There is nothing, according to these clinicians, that they could
do to kind of thwart this howling that was going on.
They tried everything to comfort these children, and a lot
(19:16):
of this had to do with the pain and discover
that is associated with either having a bullets of air
injected into their IV line.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
What happens to the body when air is injected like that.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
What happens is that there are any number of inbuli
that can be created. We have cases in forensics where
we'll have a bullet in baly. If you can believe
that you know of we're actually work cases where there's
been a person that was shot, projectile got into the
bloodstream and it created a blockage and the person died.
You can have all manner of fat and bla that
(19:51):
all these things are lethal because it creates this kind
of gap in the blood flow, and blood flow is
in fact inhibited. You can generally what we're well, specifically,
what we're talking about here is actually a gas embolism
and it can come about as a result of any
gas that is introduced into the bloodstream, and it's going
(20:13):
to cause pretty quickly death most of the time, but
it's a very painful death. And when the clinicians that
were tasked these they refer to them as investigators, medical
investigators that went back to try to go through all
of these records. Here's the thing that they were faced with.
Even though we've heard about people being injected with air
(20:34):
for years and years in cases of homicide, we've heard
this before. I have since I was a small child,
in kind of a literary form. There's not a lot
of research, as you can imagine, because it's a fatal event.
When I was preparing for the show today, I had
read back into my go to text, which is called
Spits and Fisher. It's our medical legal bible. It was
(20:57):
written back in the sixties and I think it was
doctor Spitz had written that there was a study that
was performed on canines and they tried to match the
weight equivalency of an adult male or a canine. I
know this is horrible. People don't want to hear this,
but this is the way they gauged this. How long
it would take for an animal to die as a
(21:20):
result of being injected with air. It comes about very quickly.
The fact that air would be introduced into an IV
line at some point in time and the child survive,
it would be the exception and not the norm, particularly,
you know, a little fragile life like this. Not all
(21:41):
of these cases were air being injected into lines. You
had a nasal gastric tube, which is essentially a feeding
tube where air was pushed into the stomach, which again
is horrible, It's absolutely horrible. The abdomen distends, there's an
(22:02):
incredible amount of pain associated with this, and finally the
child goes into cardiac arrest. And here's the thing about
it is that it virtually leaves little or no sign
but there's this one anomaly that occurs. There are color
changes that will happen in the event that you have
(22:22):
an IVY air embolism, the child's pallor will change in color.
At least three of the cases and Spits actually talked
about this in his writings back in the sixties. There
is a color change that takes place with this introduction
of air visa VI the IV Now we're not talking
(22:43):
about air going into the gastro tube. We're talking about
air being injected. And so three of the clinicians that
were on duty actually bore witness to this, to see
this color change that had taken place in these babies.
And I think, if I'm not mistaken, one of the
first ones where they saw this manifested was I think
(23:05):
the child they referred to as child D And that
would have been all the way back Dave on the
twenty second of June. Remember her first kill, her first
murder took place on the eighth of June. And just
in that June period you had four attempts and three fatalities,
and that was early on. It's almost like she had
(23:27):
started with a flourish that in that moment of times
it's almost like she was in this murders feeding frenzy,
and then again it continued on into August. At that
point in time, I think the child e was murdered
back in like August the fourth, you had another one
that was attempted on August the fifth.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
This is a neo natal unit. Want to back up
and remind everybody that's what we are dealing with children
that were already in a very fragile state. In the
case of the very first child on June eighth, it
was a twin, and when the twin actually had been
healthy and all of a sudden went through the exact
same thing as the first child, that's when everybody on
(24:07):
the unit was going bonkers. What do we do? There's
something bad happening. Everything on the neonatal unit change with Lucy.
Letbe think about it. You don't expect somebody who is
trained to work with babies that has a good rapport
with their parents and doesn't seem I mean, it's not
like the devil wearing horns and a tail. This is
(24:27):
a nurse who's trained and appears to be loving and caring,
but in the meantime, she's killing the one she's caring
for she's loving them to death.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. And in the interim there
were initially reviews that were conducted on the deaths. I
think the first review came about like two loaves a second,
and it's noticeable. I think that there was a gap
between the murder of child D which was back on
the twenty second of June of twenty fifteen, and then
(24:58):
there was a review that was conducted in July, and
she goes silent and then picks back up with the
murder of child E.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
Just to be clear, Joe exactly that. Yeah, okay, you
had the four children that all collapsed, three of them
dying in the month of June. You had a doctor
raised the concerns over the suspicious the sudden collapses and deaths.
No action was taken against Lucy let Bey at that time.
It was so fresh. We're talking it happened in a
(25:28):
thirty day window. But after July second, everything stopped. There
was not another death between July second when the doctor
raised his concerns, until we go to August fourth, when
a mother walks into the unit to give her baby
boy who is child E, his milk and finds Lucy Letby.
Apparently in the process of attacking the child, she found
(25:51):
that baby was distressed, bleeding from the mouth. He died
after suffering a fatal bleed. They actually said in the
report flex of blood were found in his vomit.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Yeah, and that's only going to arise from some type
of trauma. She's interfering, essentially interfering with the nasal gastric tube,
you know, she's trying to manipulate the tube. And there's
also a change in her methodology. She had attempted the
IVY air embolism, and all of the early cases with
(26:24):
the exception of C and Murder C took place on
the fourteenth of June, and that's when she first introduced
air into the stomach and she killed this child's sea. Now,
this was after the failed attempt the case right before
this with Child B, where she tried to do the
(26:45):
air embolism again. She migrates over to on C Child
C where she's attempting to force air into the stomach.
She succeeds with it, and then Child D the last
case in June of fifteen, she goes back to the
iv but after the review in the first murder in August,
(27:07):
she's back on the ivy air of embolism again and
attempts that and that's that's when the mother had walked in.
And you know, I know people might find this hard
to believe, but the next day she attempted to murder
child f with insulin. So she's changing this thing up
almost like she's trying to find a groove with this,
(27:29):
like trying to establish something that is a failsay for her.
Her goal at the end was to try to kill
as many kids as she could without being detected. And
her mere presence within the room, within this environment is
indicative of the fact that you know, these children are
dying on her watch. And so that's when you begin
(27:52):
to think about this, think about the changing of the methodology.
When the police finally had pinpoints her that conducted the
search of her home, Dave, she had stolen all kinds
of notes, clinical notes that were stuffed into bags. She
had enough self awareness to write down things like she's
(28:14):
guilty of this, that she's doing this, and that she
can't stop and all I saying. She even went so
far as to send a sympathy note to one of
the family members.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
What they found in the investigation at her apartment, thousands
of pieces of evidence that came out at trial that
detailed the murder and attempted murder of the babies. On
one of these documents, handwritten out, she wrote, I am evil.
I did this. She wrote that on a green post
it note that was found inside a diary from twenty sixteen.
(28:47):
On that same note, she wrote, I killed them on
purpose because I'm not good enough.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
And because you have all of these clinical notes, you
have this documentation, not just from what they had recovered
at her home. And I'm thinking, I've worn scrub gear,
I've worn a lab coat over my years, and I'm thinking,
how big are your damn pockets that you can cart
all of this stuff out of the hospital. This is
a major no no. Anyway. The last three homicides she
(29:36):
committed in this particular in this series, the last three involved.
One was a child that had hemophilia, so the clotting
factors were not as they should be with a child.
And any kind of trauma, particularly if you're trying to
thrust this nasal gastric tube down into this precious little
(30:00):
angel's throat, any kind of trauma like that is going
to cause him to bleed out, potentially bleed out into
his belly, which I think that they were able to
deduce this after reflection. The two that followed after and
this is in June of sixteen, I think the third,
and then just a couple of weeks later, there are
(30:21):
triplets that are born, Dave and the last two that
she is known to have killed were actually two little
brothers that were part of a group of triplets. In
every one of these cases, she apparently had decided that
with her methodology that she was going to employ, that
she was going to use the method of the nasal
(30:43):
gastric tube into the throat and in just filling that
space up with air. Horrific ways to die for all
of these children, and she had settled on this. It's
so sad that this has gone down the way it has.
I'm glad that they were only able to come to
a conclusion that she was the perpetrator in these cases,
(31:06):
because it seems as though that she had hit on
something within within her mind, that she had settled on
a methodology she could have gone on, perhaps forever and
ever she could have done. Can you imagine, if you will,
And this is a terrible thought, what if she had
become an international traveling nurse, Dave, And then she's just
(31:28):
essentially moving from job to job all over the world.
And remember, she's got a very specific skill set, doesn't
she this high end training, and she's going to migrate around,
perhaps go to other facilities all over the place, and
everywhere she goes and she's got this rattling around in
the back of her mind. What was it that it
said in the note I killed them because of what
(31:49):
was it?
Speaker 3 (31:49):
I killed them on purpose because I'm not good enough?
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Here she is, you know, as you said, Dave, rattling
around this motivation. Whatever in the heck? This means I
kill them because I'm not good enough. That's merely the
little spark that kind of sets this thing off. Well,
it doesn't matter if you change scenery in your life,
you're still gonna think that you're not good enough. And
(32:13):
kind of, as a little aside, she'd actually left. She'd
actually taken holiday after the death of child in as
in the number nine on the third of June and
gone on holiday to Spain. Dave. I guess the scenery
(32:33):
down on the beautiful beaches in Spain didn't change her
mindset because when she returns from her holiday, she continues
to perpetrate this crime. And this is when the pair
of brothers, this group of triplets died that day after
one another.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
In your history of investigating what killed somebody, how was
it administry? I mean, there's a fairly broad range of
things you're able to narrow cast into. But would Lucy
let Be be called a serial killer in that she
killed many We've got seven deaths of six survivors and
probably many more. Does she fit that criteria to be
(33:13):
called a serial killer?
Speaker 1 (33:15):
Yes, she's going to go down in the pantheon. All right,
I'll put it to you that way. First off, we
don't have a tremendous number of let's say it, female
serial perpetrators out there. They're out there, trust me, people
have talked about them. They're out there. But Dave, you
know you mentioned and I thought this was quite insightful
on your part because this goes more to methodology. You
(33:37):
mentioned just a moment ago she showed up with a
loaded gun, and she did. It's just the thing that
the loaded metaphorically the gun that she had was not
firing lead core projectiles. Lucy let Be is going to
go down, I think potentially in the annals of certainly
British crime as one of the most evil people that
(33:58):
has walked that star oil over there, simply because of
what she's done. And here's the thing, Dave, she was
employed for a long time there, and not every life
that she touched, not every little life that she touched
in that natal unit, succumb to her bad intentions. Some
(34:20):
did survive. How many more, Dave, how many more potentially
passed before her gaze, before her control that she attempted
to do something, or maybe it was thwarted in some way,
or it didn't succeed. How many more and maybe those
(34:41):
children are paying the price through life? You never know. Developmentally,
I think that there's probably a lot more of investigation
that will go on in this case as the year's developed.
But I know this, the path of destruction that she
left behind is going to impact the practice of neo
natal nursing for years and years to come. I'm Joseph
(35:07):
Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks
Bodybags with Joseph Scott Morgan handle care Fragile. You think
about things that are so vulnerable in this world, and
the first thing that comes to mind, I think for
(00:30):
us is humans, our babies. I'm a proud father. I've
been present when my children were born. I've seen them
up to this point in life succeeding. But a lot
of that was depended upon how my wife and I
treated and cared for them early on when they were
(00:51):
so very fragile, and you're terrified the moment that that
little life is handed over to you. I was particularly
terrified the first time I had to put a car
seat in the back of a car and place that
baby in there and had to make it home. But
you gain confidence, but you know there's a there's another
group within infants that are even more vulnerable to the
(01:14):
horrors of this world and everything that can be inflicted
upon them. They have to be guarded like you can't
even begin to imagine. And those are what are commonly
referred to as neonates. These are the babies that are
more and many times prematurely or they have other physical issues.
They almost don't seem to be living sometimes, but they
(01:37):
are and they begin to thrive within neoonatal units. Today
we're going to talk about the wake left behind by
Lucy let Me. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is
body bags. You notice I use the word wake is
(02:01):
an interesting thing because it is, first off, it's something
that is left behind, most commonly associated by a boat.
And you know me and my boat, love my boat,
like going down on the river and you disturb the
water which is otherwise peaceful, and you disrupted, at least
on the surface and certainly deep down. I think that
we could say that about Lucy let Me.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Lucy let Me secretly attacked thirteen babies on the neonatal
ward at the hospital where she worked, and when the
babies died, their deaths looked like natural causes, and investigation
showed that the thirty three year old nurse used methods
like injecting air into the baby's bloodstreams and stomachs, overfeeding
infants with milk, physically assaulting them, even poisoning them with insulin.
(02:48):
The babies she preyed on were mostly twins and triplets.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
So much grief in this path of destruction, so much pain,
so much mourning that I don't think that any of
us can begin to plumb the depths of it as
to how she impacted the lives of so many families.
And I would say also a nation, the UK, and
(03:14):
the story that is nothing short of just pure horror.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
In the case of Lucy Letby, she had her registered
nurse degree and then she spent an additional three years
of training in schooling three more years to be able
to work in the neonatal unit, and problems began almost immediately.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Joe, I think it was in twenty twelve when she
first took the position, and she's working. Let me kind
of set the stage because she's this is in the UK,
and so the hospital where she is is a hospital
is referred to as the Countess of Chester Hospital. As
hospitals really old, certainly old by US standards. It was
first established, I think, like in eighteen twenty nine, is
(03:58):
like a mental health facility. They called it a lunatic
asylum back then, but as time progressed, the nature of
the place kind of changed. But it was well known.
You know, Dave that I absolutely loathe the word why,
I truly do, because you can chase your tail all
day long on this and to try to get that answer,
and you'll never come to anything that's satisfactory. But I
(04:21):
think a bigger, probably more appropriate question is going to
begin with what what is it that wouldn't motivate her
to want to do this? And that's going to be
for our friends in forensic psychiatry and psychology, you know,
to kind of come to that determination about her. These
precious little angels who were under the care of Lucy Ledby,
(04:42):
they remain unnamed. They're simply known as child A, and
B and C. Not all of them died, but Lucy,
let be just so that everyone understands, was charged and
convicted of the murders of seven little babies in this old,
(05:06):
old hospital. And it's not the first time this has
ever happened in history, but I don't know that it's
ever happened to this level. And the real shame is
that it was not picked up on quick enough. She
was able to still have access to kids even after
the alarms were raised.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
They had a number of checks and balances here that
were ignored and that is what allowed her access. But
very simply in a neonatal unit, you're going to have
children are going to pass, they are going to die.
A sick infant is as fragile as he gets, and
you know, suspicions a rose around Lucy fairly quickly. When
(05:48):
she finally finally got approved for that to work in
this unit, they saw changes right away, just simple mathematical changes.
They were used to having, you know, two or three
babies that might pass any and they had that going
on in a month.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Yeah, and that's one of the things that you kind
of keep watchover in a hospital, particularly on units like this,
units like the nick you the Neo Care Unit, are
even the ICU for adults because when you think about it,
the mortality rate, there is a correlation some believe between
(06:23):
the mortality rate and treatment, and that makes sense. Now
everything's going to have multiple variables, you know when you
look at statistically, because some people have other complicating factors
that are at work. Some people, you know, as I mentioned,
have genetic predispositions. It doesn't matter how hard you try,
there's just certain things that you're not going to be
(06:44):
able to overcome. Within the medical sciences, it's they try
and they try, but you want to try to see
if there's a correlation and would let be there was
a statistically significant number of deaths that began to occur.
I think that the first actually occurred June eighth, twenty fifteen,
(07:05):
and they didn't know what happened. I mean within thirty
minutes or so of her, well ninety minutes of her
coming on duty. That's another corollary that you look for
in an investigation like this, a medical investigation. This child
was dead and never heard this child as child A.
And that's key, particularly from an investigative standpoint. And you know,
(07:27):
medicine is a lot about investigations, Dave, It truly is.
From a medical legal perspective, we've got that same nose
because we're trying to determine what happened, Whereas with people
that are in medicine, they're not only trying to find
out what happened, but now they're trying to develop a
treatment course. But for all of these children, it ended
(07:48):
in a terminal event, and within ninety minutes the murder
of child A of Lucy Letby's attendance there. When she arrived,
child just began to crash. And other than that, I
was doing fun.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Starting with that June eighth death, there were four children
on the neonatal unit that crashed that three of them died,
one did survive. There was one common denominator through all
of them, and it was that Lucy Letby was on
the unit working with these children during this entire time,
(08:21):
with all four of them. When the consultants were looking
at this, they did notice, Hey, we've got the same nurse.
What are the odds? And they were able to break
this down and they made an error in classification because
they instead of listing the deaths as something more that
they were more than just an unexplained collapse, they listed
(08:43):
these deaths as medication heirs. Had they been addressed as
a quote serious incident involving unexpected deaths, which is what
they actually were, they would have been investigated differently. But
that didn't happen, which is how she was able to continue.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
One of the things that you look for, and I
find it interesting medication errors. There's really technically only one
case that involved medication, and we have her let Be
actually pushing a bullus of insulin on a neonate and
that's almost unheard of. During that child's course, there was
(09:25):
no indication that the child had any kind of issues
relative to their pancreas, not being able to produce insulin
and the insulin cart. All the drugs on hospital units
are locked up. They have a drug cart that they
go to and it's carefully watched. Things have to be
logged in and logged out. Now it's done digitally, so
(09:48):
when you get access to this area, it has to
be accounted for and there has to be explaining this done.
And I don't really see how that kind of flew
under the radar with them. You have to have a
justification to go to that secured area to retrieve that medication,
and also that medication has to be written down in
the doctor's orders. Now, there are certain things that nurses
(10:09):
do as part of the daily course of them providing
patient care. It's understood, and there are many things that
doctors they don't have a clue about. If I'm going
to be treated in a hospital, it must be treated
by nurses, then treated by doctor. Most of the time,
the doctor kind of blows in and blows out, And
I've been in many circumstances where you'll see the nurse
(10:30):
kind of raise their eyebrow about suggestions that the doctor
makes and that sort of thing. But the doctor does
have to write out orders for very specific things. But
you know this goes to a bigger piece is who
has access to the children, to these babies on this
unit and what kind of methodology would be employed here. Now,
(10:52):
when you have neonates like this, and you can have
adults that are on ICU or cardiac care units, these
sorts of things, you're going to have an in dwelling IV,
all right. So with in dwelling IV, there's a port
where you can push drugs, and that means that you
(11:14):
inject the port. You don't inject the person. So they
draw up whatever type of drug it is and they'll
insert the syringe into that port and then push the
drug that is being prescribed. All right, So you're not
going to have you have one central area where this medication,
for instance, will be inserted into. You're not going to
(11:35):
have multiple like what we refer to in forensics as
npw's well physicians and nurses do too. Those are needle
puncture wounds. If you've got, like, for instance, an individual
that has been I'll give you a little aside here.
When we're looking, say, for instance, at a syringe being
applied to a heroin abuser, they're going into either the
(11:58):
left or the right what we refer to as they
and a cubital fausa. In other words, this fancy term
for the crooks of the arm.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
Thank you for clarifying that I had no I didn't
know if you were talking about the bottom of a
dude's butter is neck.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
In short, it's referred to as the ACF. So if
you're talking about somebody that's out on the street and
they're injecting, what we will do is well, literally, some
physicians refer to it as milking the arm. At autopsy,
you'll start up in the you'll extend the arm, you'll
break riger mortise, and you'll extend the arm even through
riger so that the arm is completely straight and starting
(12:31):
to bicep. You squeeze down the length of the arm,
and as you tightly squeeze down the decedent's arm, you
can begin to appreciate if there's a presentation of blood
and a fresh needle puncture wound. Well, in case of
hospital care, you're not going to have like npw's all
over the place. Once the person is on the floor
(12:54):
and they're being treated, you'll have a central line that
has been placed into the arm. Say where the IV goes,
and then you'll have this push that takes place. You
can also have which in the case of neoonates, you'll
have perhaps a feeding tube that's in place as well,
(13:15):
and so this gives you access, say for instance, to
the tummy so that they can uptake nutrition. And so
that's Those are some of the access points that you
might have in the case of someone that was looking
to do a great harm to one of these little
fragile lives.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
So Lucy let be already had everything.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Yeah, yeah, this is probably why her murders, the murders
that she was committing, were not picked up on as
quickly as a clinician. You're not sitting there thinking this
is a homicide. Okay. They're always God bless them. People
in the medical field are always thinking about treatment, treatment, treatment, therapy, therapy, therapy.
(13:57):
We want to try to heal this individual, and so
if they try A and A doesn't work, they're trying
everything that they possibly can and the patient succumbs and dies.
They'll try to investigate that as best they can.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
There are certain things doctors nurses expect when a baby
is crashing, and they do step by step. Here are
the things we need to do to resuscitate this baby,
and they have a reasonable expectation that the baby will
react in certain ways. And in this case of the
first four children, the three that died and the one
(14:34):
that survived. In the case of the three that passed away,
they did not respond properly. They did not respond as
expected rather and died.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
When you've got a child that is born, say prematurely,
those cases are not always reportable to the corner. So
you're not necessarily going to have someone trained in forensic
pathology that's going to get their eyes on the children immediately,
and the family might not. This is another way that
this can be masked. The family's already been through enough, Dave. Okay,
(15:08):
they might not necessarily want the hospital to do an autopsy.
Now that autopsy would be a clinical autopsy. It would
be done in a hospital setting. So those are not
forensic pathologists that work in a hospital. In most cases,
some pathologists do, in fact have forensic certifications. Okay, but
the line's share of them are clinical atomic pathologists that
(15:33):
you know, look at tissues, underslides, and they run the
lab and all these sorts of things. Saying, yes, they
do autopsies, but it's from a clinical perspective to try
to understand what brought about not just the death, but
also what happened during the clinical course, you know, to
try to help make the clinicians better and secondarily do
(15:54):
that I think in that setting, to try to give
the family the answers. But if you're not doing autopsies
in the family would probably say no, I don't want
that to happen. Where this can be a real mask
is if you've got kids that are babies that are
born prematurely. They're already compromised to this point. Remember, they're
struggling just to survive. Hence that's why they're on a
(16:16):
neonatal unit. It's going to be hard for them to
rationalize why you should put them through anything else, and
they're not necessarily going to want to go down the
road to have an autopsy performed. So with somebody with
bad intentions like Lucy Letby enters into the world of
these little fragile, fragile angels, the fact that they were
(16:40):
already up against the odds only heightens the probability that
she can get away with pure evil. When you're a
(17:06):
trained clinician and you're dealing with the most fragile of lives,
and when you're in an environment where just imagine if
you can, you're in a lockdown area with critically ill babies,
and you're this monster rate, and if you did a
(17:26):
three hundred and sixty degree kind of panoramic turn all
the way around in the room, everywhere at waste level,
in these little incubators or potential victims. I'm not really
interested in her motivation. What I am interested in is
the fact that she did it, and she had access
to these children for a protracted period of time. There
(17:48):
were some reports that came out Dave where when a
code was called, and when they call a code, that
means that the child, the patient is going into arrest.
You've heard the old term in hospitals where you'll see
in movies where they'll call a code blue, and code
blue means cardiac arrests, that sort of thing. So that
means all hands on deck, and so people will go
(18:11):
racing through the hospital to get to that location in
order to save a life. And you can have people
come from multiple locations. But this is kind of a
within the neonatal world. Like you said, she had to
have specific training to be in there, So you've got
a limited group of people that would be responding to this.
But some of the remarks that came forward from let
(18:31):
Be's trial and you know, some of the peripherals that
were involved in this, the other clinicians that would come
over when these children were in distress, They said that
there were noises emanating in pain that they had never heard.
You know, babies cry, that's what they do. They cry
to let you know that they have needs. All right,
(18:53):
you and I both know that very well. But when
a child is in pain and they're screaming out, you're
trying to do everything that you can to soothe them.
There is nothing, according to these clinicians, that they could
do to kind of thwart this howling that was going on.
They tried everything to comfort these children, and a lot
(19:16):
of this had to do with the pain and discover
that is associated with either having a bullets of air
injected into their IV line.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
What happens to the body when air is injected like that.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
What happens is that there are any number of inbuli
that can be created. We have cases in forensics where
we'll have a bullet in baly. If you can believe
that you know of we're actually work cases where there's
been a person that was shot, projectile got into the
bloodstream and it created a blockage and the person died.
You can have all manner of fat and bla that
(19:51):
all these things are lethal because it creates this kind
of gap in the blood flow, and blood flow is
in fact inhibited. You can generally what we're well, specifically,
what we're talking about here is actually a gas embolism
and it can come about as a result of any
gas that is introduced into the bloodstream, and it's going
(20:13):
to cause pretty quickly death most of the time, but
it's a very painful death. And when the clinicians that
were tasked these they refer to them as investigators, medical
investigators that went back to try to go through all
of these records. Here's the thing that they were faced with.
Even though we've heard about people being injected with air
(20:34):
for years and years in cases of homicide, we've heard
this before. I have since I was a small child,
in kind of a literary form. There's not a lot
of research, as you can imagine, because it's a fatal event.
When I was preparing for the show today, I had
read back into my go to text, which is called
Spits and Fisher. It's our medical legal bible. It was
(20:57):
written back in the sixties and I think it was
doctor Spitz had written that there was a study that
was performed on canines and they tried to match the
weight equivalency of an adult male or a canine. I
know this is horrible. People don't want to hear this,
but this is the way they gauged this. How long
it would take for an animal to die as a
(21:20):
result of being injected with air. It comes about very quickly.
The fact that air would be introduced into an IV
line at some point in time and the child survive,
it would be the exception and not the norm, particularly,
you know, a little fragile life like this. Not all
(21:41):
of these cases were air being injected into lines. You
had a nasal gastric tube, which is essentially a feeding
tube where air was pushed into the stomach, which again
is horrible, It's absolutely horrible. The abdomen distends, there's an
(22:02):
incredible amount of pain associated with this, and finally the
child goes into cardiac arrest. And here's the thing about
it is that it virtually leaves little or no sign
but there's this one anomaly that occurs. There are color
changes that will happen in the event that you have
(22:22):
an IVY air embolism, the child's pallor will change in color.
At least three of the cases and Spits actually talked
about this in his writings back in the sixties. There
is a color change that takes place with this introduction
of air visa VI the IV Now we're not talking
(22:43):
about air going into the gastro tube. We're talking about
air being injected. And so three of the clinicians that
were on duty actually bore witness to this, to see
this color change that had taken place in these babies.
And I think, if I'm not mistaken, one of the
first ones where they saw this manifested was I think
(23:05):
the child they referred to as child D And that
would have been all the way back Dave on the
twenty second of June. Remember her first kill, her first
murder took place on the eighth of June. And just
in that June period you had four attempts and three fatalities,
and that was early on. It's almost like she had
(23:27):
started with a flourish that in that moment of times
it's almost like she was in this murders feeding frenzy,
and then again it continued on into August. At that
point in time, I think the child e was murdered
back in like August the fourth, you had another one
that was attempted on August the fifth.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
This is a neo natal unit. Want to back up
and remind everybody that's what we are dealing with children
that were already in a very fragile state. In the
case of the very first child on June eighth, it
was a twin, and when the twin actually had been
healthy and all of a sudden went through the exact
same thing as the first child, that's when everybody on
(24:07):
the unit was going bonkers. What do we do? There's
something bad happening. Everything on the neonatal unit change with Lucy.
Letbe think about it. You don't expect somebody who is
trained to work with babies that has a good rapport
with their parents and doesn't seem I mean, it's not
like the devil wearing horns and a tail. This is
(24:27):
a nurse who's trained and appears to be loving and caring,
but in the meantime, she's killing the one she's caring
for she's loving them to death.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. And in the interim there
were initially reviews that were conducted on the deaths. I
think the first review came about like two loaves a second,
and it's noticeable. I think that there was a gap
between the murder of child D which was back on
the twenty second of June of twenty fifteen, and then
(24:58):
there was a review that was conducted in July, and
she goes silent and then picks back up with the
murder of child E.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
Just to be clear, Joe exactly that. Yeah, okay, you
had the four children that all collapsed, three of them
dying in the month of June. You had a doctor
raised the concerns over the suspicious the sudden collapses and deaths.
No action was taken against Lucy let Bey at that time.
It was so fresh. We're talking it happened in a
(25:28):
thirty day window. But after July second, everything stopped. There
was not another death between July second when the doctor
raised his concerns, until we go to August fourth, when
a mother walks into the unit to give her baby
boy who is child E, his milk and finds Lucy Letby.
Apparently in the process of attacking the child, she found
(25:51):
that baby was distressed, bleeding from the mouth. He died
after suffering a fatal bleed. They actually said in the
report flex of blood were found in his vomit.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Yeah, and that's only going to arise from some type
of trauma. She's interfering, essentially interfering with the nasal gastric tube,
you know, she's trying to manipulate the tube. And there's
also a change in her methodology. She had attempted the
IVY air embolism, and all of the early cases with
(26:24):
the exception of C and Murder C took place on
the fourteenth of June, and that's when she first introduced
air into the stomach and she killed this child's sea. Now,
this was after the failed attempt the case right before
this with Child B, where she tried to do the
(26:45):
air embolism again. She migrates over to on C Child
C where she's attempting to force air into the stomach.
She succeeds with it, and then Child D the last
case in June of fifteen, she goes back to the
iv but after the review in the first murder in August,
(27:07):
she's back on the ivy air of embolism again and
attempts that and that's that's when the mother had walked in.
And you know, I know people might find this hard
to believe, but the next day she attempted to murder
child f with insulin. So she's changing this thing up
almost like she's trying to find a groove with this,
(27:29):
like trying to establish something that is a failsay for her.
Her goal at the end was to try to kill
as many kids as she could without being detected. And
her mere presence within the room, within this environment is
indicative of the fact that you know, these children are
dying on her watch. And so that's when you begin
(27:52):
to think about this, think about the changing of the methodology.
When the police finally had pinpoints her that conducted the
search of her home, Dave, she had stolen all kinds
of notes, clinical notes that were stuffed into bags. She
had enough self awareness to write down things like she's
(28:14):
guilty of this, that she's doing this, and that she
can't stop and all I saying. She even went so
far as to send a sympathy note to one of
the family members.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
What they found in the investigation at her apartment, thousands
of pieces of evidence that came out at trial that
detailed the murder and attempted murder of the babies. On
one of these documents, handwritten out, she wrote, I am evil.
I did this. She wrote that on a green post
it note that was found inside a diary from twenty sixteen.
(28:47):
On that same note, she wrote, I killed them on
purpose because I'm not good enough.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
And because you have all of these clinical notes, you
have this documentation, not just from what they had recovered
at her home. And I'm thinking, I've worn scrub gear,
I've worn a lab coat over my years, and I'm thinking,
how big are your damn pockets that you can cart
all of this stuff out of the hospital. This is
a major no no. Anyway. The last three homicides she
(29:36):
committed in this particular in this series, the last three involved.
One was a child that had hemophilia, so the clotting
factors were not as they should be with a child.
And any kind of trauma, particularly if you're trying to
thrust this nasal gastric tube down into this precious little
(30:00):
angel's throat, any kind of trauma like that is going
to cause him to bleed out, potentially bleed out into
his belly, which I think that they were able to
deduce this after reflection. The two that followed after and
this is in June of sixteen, I think the third,
and then just a couple of weeks later, there are
(30:21):
triplets that are born, Dave and the last two that
she is known to have killed were actually two little
brothers that were part of a group of triplets. In
every one of these cases, she apparently had decided that
with her methodology that she was going to employ, that
she was going to use the method of the nasal
(30:43):
gastric tube into the throat and in just filling that
space up with air. Horrific ways to die for all
of these children, and she had settled on this. It's
so sad that this has gone down the way it has.
I'm glad that they were only able to come to
a conclusion that she was the perpetrator in these cases,
(31:06):
because it seems as though that she had hit on
something within within her mind, that she had settled on
a methodology she could have gone on, perhaps forever and
ever she could have done. Can you imagine, if you will,
And this is a terrible thought, what if she had
become an international traveling nurse, Dave, And then she's just
(31:28):
essentially moving from job to job all over the world.
And remember, she's got a very specific skill set, doesn't
she this high end training, and she's going to migrate around,
perhaps go to other facilities all over the place, and
everywhere she goes and she's got this rattling around in
the back of her mind. What was it that it
said in the note I killed them because of what
(31:49):
was it?
Speaker 3 (31:49):
I killed them on purpose because I'm not good enough?
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Here she is, you know, as you said, Dave, rattling
around this motivation. Whatever in the heck? This means I
kill them because I'm not good enough. That's merely the
little spark that kind of sets this thing off. Well,
it doesn't matter if you change scenery in your life,
you're still gonna think that you're not good enough. And
(32:13):
kind of, as a little aside, she'd actually left. She'd
actually taken holiday after the death of child in as
in the number nine on the third of June and
gone on holiday to Spain. Dave. I guess the scenery
(32:33):
down on the beautiful beaches in Spain didn't change her
mindset because when she returns from her holiday, she continues
to perpetrate this crime. And this is when the pair
of brothers, this group of triplets died that day after
one another.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
In your history of investigating what killed somebody, how was
it administry? I mean, there's a fairly broad range of
things you're able to narrow cast into. But would Lucy
let Be be called a serial killer in that she
killed many We've got seven deaths of six survivors and
probably many more. Does she fit that criteria to be
(33:13):
called a serial killer?
Speaker 1 (33:15):
Yes, she's going to go down in the pantheon. All right,
I'll put it to you that way. First off, we
don't have a tremendous number of let's say it, female
serial perpetrators out there. They're out there, trust me, people
have talked about them. They're out there. But Dave, you
know you mentioned and I thought this was quite insightful
on your part because this goes more to methodology. You
(33:37):
mentioned just a moment ago she showed up with a
loaded gun, and she did. It's just the thing that
the loaded metaphorically the gun that she had was not
firing lead core projectiles. Lucy let Be is going to
go down, I think potentially in the annals of certainly
British crime as one of the most evil people that
(33:58):
has walked that star oil over there, simply because of
what she's done. And here's the thing, Dave, she was
employed for a long time there, and not every life
that she touched, not every little life that she touched
in that natal unit, succumb to her bad intentions. Some
(34:20):
did survive. How many more, Dave, how many more potentially
passed before her gaze, before her control that she attempted
to do something, or maybe it was thwarted in some way,
or it didn't succeed. How many more and maybe those
(34:41):
children are paying the price through life? You never know. Developmentally,
I think that there's probably a lot more of investigation
that will go on in this case as the year's developed.
But I know this, the path of destruction that she
left behind is going to impact the practice of neo
natal nursing for years and years to come. I'm Joseph
(35:07):
Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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