Episode 18: Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies, I’m your host Julie Mattson. On today’s episode, we finish off our series on health care providers that kill, with a recent story about a neonatal nurse in Britain. Her name is Lucy Letby and she’s been charged with murder in the deaths of five baby boys and two girls, and the attempted murder of five boys and five girls, while she worked at the Countess of Chester Hospital in northwest England. Lucy worked first as a student nurse while she was in school, just like I did. After graduating, she continued to work at the same hospital. Soon after, strange things started happening on the shifts that Lucy Letby worked. At one point while she was working there, a mother of twins actually walked in on Lucy trying to kill one of her twin boys in the neonatal intensive care.
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SHOWNOTES:
• I started working as an LVN before I graduated from RN school. And so after graduation, I was able to pretty much continue my job there. But of course, my pay went up because at that point, I was actually a nurse and not a patient care tech. So I began working there and that required a lot of additional training. I got my NRP, which is going through the neonatal resuscitation program. And at that point, I was able to attend deliveries in the operating room for C-sections or vacuum extractions, which I’m not quite sure they do anymore. And they tried to do it to me when I was having my oldest daughter and I insisted that they take it off because I did not want any assistance getting her out. But there was a time too when they did a lot of forceps deliveries and those types of deliveries all put the babies in a little bit more danger than a normal vaginal delivery. And so they were done in the OR and we always had a resuscitation team on standby to actually assist in case there were any complications. And that team would consist of usually a couple of NRP trained nurses, which I was one of, and then also maybe one or two respiratory therapists. And our job was to, as soon as the baby came out, the doctor handed the nurse the baby, we would take it straight to the warmer, dry it off, keep it warm, suction the lungs or perform CPR, whatever was necessary. (03:43)
• So mom was coming in trying to drop off her breast milk and this nurse was basically attacking her baby who was only five days old. So mom noticed all this bleeding from the mouth. Now he was one of seven that she allegedly murdered when she was working there at that hospital between June of 2015 and June of 2016. So when mom saw her, she told the mom that the blood was due to the tube that was going down his nose into his stomach, irritating his throat, and that it was causing the bleeding. But apparently it was quite a large amount of blood and this little boy only weighed, well he weighed less than three pounds when he was born. He was actually pronounced dead less than five hours after mom saw Lucy attacking him. The doctors who actually examined him said that he lost more than a quarter of his total blood volume. So initially the death was ruled a natural death and the cause was ruled a GI disorder. So they did that before ever doing an exam of any kind. They just assumed that because the baby was premature and had some stomach problems going on that they were just going to rule it natural. (08:14)
• So again, from some of the other cases that we had talked about with nurses killing their patients, insulin was used and she’d also injected air into a four-day old’s stomach through the NG tube. And then she did the same thing with that little one, searching for his parents on Facebook soon after his death, just having a strange interest in what they were doing and how the death affected their family. She also had left a three-month-old with irreversible brain damage after she tried three times to kill her by putting air into her NG tube. Now she was arrested several times and then released on bail, and the reason for that is she would bail out and then they would claim that they were going to use that time to do more of an investigation. And so arrested in 2018, released on bail, arrested for a second time in 2019, and then posted bail again. And then her final arrest was in November of 2020. And at that time, she was charged with seven counts of murder and 10 counts of attempted murder. The infants that she murdered, five of them were boys and two of them were girls.(11:23)
• Great parents take great care of their children. Absolutely no known reason why the child would not survive, but for some reason they just don’t. Now at the same time, we have what’s called an overlay. And I think we’re all guilty of this at some point when our kids are young, where they sleep in the bed with us. Many moms will go to sleep holding the baby and breastfeeding the baby and the baby will end up being smothered by mom’s breasts or parents sleeping in the bed with a baby and the baby ending up face down in a pillow or up against mom’s back or dad’s stomach or falling between the bed and the wall and getting lodged there and causing the baby to asphyxiate or not being able to breathe. And of course, when those babies are transported to the hospital as death investigators, we still go to the home and we document many things, including where the baby was found. We have dolls that we use to actually have the parents show us where the child was found face down, face up, face against an item or a person. And so we ask a lot of questions of the parents. (15:13)
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