A note scrawled by killer nurse Lucy Letby reading “I am evil” is claimed to have been written on the advice of a counsellor.
During his first trial last year, jurors were told the apparent confession should be read “literally.”
In her own statement, the nurse had previously said she wrote the message, found by police in her diary, when she was “panicking” after being transferred from the neonatal unit at her hospital.
Letby, 34, did not mention any other background to the notes and prosecutor Nick Johnson KC told Manchester Crown Court that they should be considered a “confession”. But a source told the Guardian last night that the note and others like it were written on the advice of professionals as a way of dealing with extreme stress.
The source went on to say that the notes were produced after counselling sessions as part of a “therapeutic process in which she was advised to write down her troubling thoughts and feelings.”
A note scrawled by killer nurse Lucy Letby (pictured) saying “I am evil” is claimed to have been written on the advice of a counsellor.
Letby is serving a life sentence after being convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill six more at the Countess of Chester Hospital between 2015 and 2016.
During his first trial last year, jurors were told the apparent confession should be read “literally.”
The Countess of Chester Hospital’s director of occupational health and wellbeing, Kathryn de Beger, is said to have encouraged Letby to write as a way of coping with extreme stress. Letby’s GP at Chester also reportedly advised her to write down thoughts she was having trouble processing.
In addition to writing “I’m evil, I did this” on the sticky note, covered in densely scrawled handwriting, she also wrote: “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to take care of them and I’m a horrible, evil person,” “hate,” “I’ve done nothing wrong,” and “police investigation, defamation, discrimination, victimization.”
Last week, a panel of experts called on the government to postpone an inquiry led by Judge Thirlwall, which was due to begin hearing evidence on 10 September.
Letby is serving a life sentence after being convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill six more at the Countess of Chester Hospital between 2015 and 2016.
In July, a jury found her guilty of attempting to kill a seventh premature baby at the Countess of Chester Hospital after a retrial.
The letter has been sent to ministers and signed by 24 neonatal experts and statistics professors calling for the inquiry to be delayed or its terms of reference amended to consider the possibility that “possible deaths from negligence” could be “presumed to be murder”.
The notes, written between July 2016, when she was removed from the courtroom amid growing suspicions, and July 2018, when she was arrested, were not included in Letby’s application to appeal her convictions, which was rejected.
At her first trial, Letby denied the notes meant she had killed or harmed babies and said she was seeing Ms Beger for support.
Defense attorney Ben Myers argued the notes represented Letby’s distressed mental state rather than “guilt.”
The Countess of Chester Hospital declined to comment ahead of the inquest.