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18th August 2023
04:22pm BST
Police have released the body cam footage showing the moment baby-murdering nurse Lucy Letby was arrested.
The 33-year-old was found guilty on Friday of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder six others while working at the Countess of Chester Hospital.
The convictions make Letby the UK’s most prolific killer of babies in modern times.
Letby killed the babies by injecting them with air between June 2015 and June 2016. The attempted murder charges related to incidents in the hospital's neonatal unit, where she had deliberately injected babies with air, overfed them and poisoned them with insulin. She faced a total of 22 charges.
Letby was found not guilty of two counts of attempted murder and the jury could not reach verdicts on six charges of attempted murder.
At Manchester Crown Court, Letby was described as a "calculated opportunist" who used the vulnerabilities of premature and sick infants to camouflage her acts.
The court heard Letby made repeated attempts to kill the children and was "cold, cruel and relentless."
Suspicions were aroused at the hospital in June, 2015, when a full-term baby girl died 36 hours after her birth. It was the third infant death in a fortnight – equalling the total number of deaths on the neonatal unit for the whole of 2014.
Cheshire Police announced in May 2017 that it had launched an investigation following “a greater number of baby deaths and collapses” at the hospital between June 2015 and June 2016, with a focus on eight deaths. A review of seven further deaths and six non-fatal collapses would also take place.
Letby was initially arrested in July 2018 and the police probe was widened to 17 deaths and 15 non-fatal collapses between March 2015 and July 2016.
In November 2020, Letby is re-arrested and appears in court for the first time two days later.
She then stood trial at Manchester Crown Court in October 2022 accused of the murders of seven babies and the attempted murders of 10 others.
The footage released by Cheshire Constabulary shows the moment Letby was arrested at her semi-detached home in Westbourne Road, Chester, at 6am on 3 July 2018.
Letby is seen being put in the back of a police car before asking the officer to move the seat forward due to her having knee surgery.
During searches of her address, a number of closely written notes were also discovered.
On one green Post-it note she wrote: “I don’t deserve to live. I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them”.
“I am a horrible evil person” and in capital letters “I am evil I did this”.
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