A nurse accused of murdering seven babies broke down in tears yesterday as a court heard she wrote a note saying: “I killed them on purpose.”
Lucy Letby, 33, cried in the dock when excerpts of her interviews with Cheshire Police after her arrest were read out.
It was said that she wrote on a Post-it note: “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. I am evil. I did this.”
Asked about the note, found inside a diary at her home in Chester after her arrest in 2018, she told detectives: “I just wrote it because everything had got on top of me.
“It was when I’d not long found out I’d been removed from the unit and they were telling me my practice might be wrong, that I needed to read all my competencies.
“My practice might not have been good enough. So I felt like people were blaming my practice, that I might have hurt them without knowing through my practice, and that made me feel guilty and I just felt really isolated.
“I was blaming myself but not because I’d done something [but] Because of the way people were making me feel.
“But like I’d only ever done my best for those babies and then people were trying to say that my practice wasn’t good, that I’d done something.
“I just couldn’t cope and I just didn’t want to be here any more. I just felt it was all just spiraling out of control. I just didn’t know how to feel about it or what was going to happen, or what to do.”
The detective asked: “Did you ever make any mistakes?” She replied: “No.”
Later Letby was quizzed about the notes. She said: “It was just a way of me getting my feelings out on paper. It just helps me process it a bit more.
“I felt if my practice hadn’t been right then I had killed them and that was why I wasn’t good enough.
“I didn’t know. I thought maybe I’d missed something, maybe I hadn’t acted quickly enough.” The detective asked: “And you felt evil?”
She replied: “Other people would perceive me as being evil, yes, if I had missed something.”
Letby is on trial at Manchester Crown Court accused of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder 10 others at the Countess of Chester Hospital.
The nurse, originally from Hereford, denies all the offences, said to have taken place between June 2015 and June 2016.
Jurors also heard that she had written: “I’ll never have children or marry. I’ll never know what it’s like to have a family.”
The detective asked: “What did you mean by that Lucy?”
Letby replied: “Because nobody would want to. If you say to somebody you had to be redeployed then people make assumptions, don’t they?
“And if my practice had caused these problems then I wouldn’t deserve to have children myself.”
The officer said: “Where you say ‘kill myself right now’, is that something you were considering?”
Letby answered: “I just felt so isolated and alone.”
The trial continues.
