An expert witness helped lock up evil serial killer Lucy Letby when a review of cases of baby deaths found accounts of premature babies “screaming in pain for 30 minutes”.
Neonatologist and consultant paediatrician Dr Sandie Brohin examined the evidence of infant mortalities at the Countess of Chester Hospital when she was brought in as a witness for the prosecution in Letby's trial. Studying X-rays, the paediatrician spotted air bubbles, known as embolisms, in images of the babies' blood vessels.
'I thought, 'It can't be'. I'd never seen anything like that in my career... but nothing else explained it,' she said. 'The X-rays were in front of me, several of them, all showing air in the babies' vessels. That's when I thought, 'No, it has to be, and it has to be deliberate'.'
The grim reality was that each baby was effectively suffering a heart attack after Letby injected air into their bloodstream or stomach, causing lethal bubbles.
The doctor also knew that it was unusual for premature babies to cry for any long period. When looking at accounts from the hospital ward she found nurses describing “babies screaming for up to 30 minutes. She described the accounts as “unheard of”.
Lucy Letby administered a morphine overdose to a baby years before her first murder, an inquiry has heard
Letby will die in jail after being convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill six others while working as a neonatal nurse at the Countess of Chester hospital. Her campaign of terror took place over a two-year period between 2015 and 2016.
Speaking to Dr Brohin revealed the heartbreaking accounts of babies in distress could only be the result of “extreme pain” being inflicted upon them.
She said: “Babies will cry if they are in pain, obviously, such as when you take blood or put in a drip.
“That hurts, and there’s no getting away from it. But to have a premature baby screaming is really unusual.
“What was described on the ward was babies screaming for up to 30 minutes. Now that is just unheard of. Somebody had done something to cause those babies extreme pain.”
Earlier this week it was reported her crimes went unreported for so long as she was never actually seen harming the babies. Jurors heard how she covered her tracks by targeting babies with other health problems in order to make the deaths seem plausible. Some were extremely premature while others had inherited conditions.
With her smiling face and jolly demeanour, Letby couldn't have looked less like a brutal killer. Most of the murders took place at night when the babies' parents weren't around and the mode of killing was always subtle - air injected into intravenous long lines, insulin added to bags of nutrients, overfeeding.
But one night her evil crimes were almost exposed when she was very nearly caught in the act.
Five day old twin boys, known as Child E and Child F, had arrived in the unit after being born 11 weeks premature. At around 9pm on August 3, 2015, their mother arrived with expressed milk for her children and heard a 'horrendous' scream that echoed along the corridor. She ran into nursery one - the nursery for the most poorly babies - and saw Letby standing near Child E's incubator. Her baby had blood around his mouth and was in a state of extreme distress.
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