Lucy Letby - Baby Serial Killer

cwej said:
I find it interesting that no case of psychological illness/insanity was put forward to get a different verdict. Clearly her lawyers thought there was a good chance she would get cleared with the evidence they had. And it really does all seem to be circumstantial. Apart from those notes in her diary - which are… just extraordinary.
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I did, initially think the same when those diary notes first became public. However, I'm not sure it would be possible to claim mental ill health when she was - for all other intents and purposes - continuing to function in a job with very high demands. I can't see it being possible to be even make the argument of her being so unwell that she killed/attempt to kill so many children, but that she was well enough to maintain the façade of being a professional nurse for no-one to notice anything was awry.

As a nurse, the whole story has been very difficult to process. It's made me second-guess everything I thought I knew about the profession, and it's probably her age more than anything. She spends three years at university writing assignments, sitting exams, etc. and then four years later she starts doing this? Was the thought always there? Did something happen in that first four years? There are so many unanswered questions about the motivation.
 
Slave said:
I did, initially think the same when those diary notes first became public. However, I'm not sure it would be possible to claim mental ill health when she was - for all other intents and purposes - continuing to function in a job with very high demands. I can't see it being possible to be even make the argument of her being so unwell that she killed/attempt to kill so many children, but that she was well enough to maintain the façade of being a professional nurse for no-one to notice anything was awry.
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Sorry I didn't mean the notes were evidence of psychological illness. I meant they are evidence of guilt. (Though some experts are saying otherwise).
 
VoR said:
Would we think of Hitler and Stalin as mentally rational though?

I feel like it’s impossible to use ‘mental illness’ as a catch-all term in cases like this, because it both implies a reduced culpability and also risks stigmatising mentally ill people as a whole.

But I think I’m in a similar place to @Iguana where I have a really hard time with the idea that a totally normal, rationally-thinking person could do such hideous things. There has to be something - and concluding that ’some people are just evil’ feels like it abandons the possibility of ever finding an explanation.
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I think probably - like so many things - evil/good is a scale on which we all are (and probably shift around throughout our lives), like sexuality, gender and I'm sure many other things. And as a mathematician I can only assume we're probably all normally distributed around a basic level of goodness, with a couple of truly extreme cases, just born at one end or the other.
 
cwej said:
Sorry I didn't mean the notes were evidence of psychological illness. I meant they are evidence of guilt. (Though some experts are saying otherwise).
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Oh, that's interesting.

I can completely see why they would be regarded as evidence of guilt. But I also know many - if not all - nurses, including myself, who carry guilt or blame themselves when something goes wrong, particularly earlier on in their career. You replay situations over and over again thinking "If only I'd done this..." or "why didn't I notice that...".

If I saw those scrawled notes completely out of context of knowing everything else, my first thought would probably be that she was a relatively inexperienced nurse who was not coping in a difficult environment and needed time out of there. I wouldn't jump straight to it being an admission of culpability.
 
That's an interesting take - though with the context does it make you feel differently?
 
cwej said:
That's an interesting take - though with the context does it make you feel differently?
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Honestly...I'm still not sure. If we're talking about the context of the court case and all the evidence, then yes, I'd probably see be inclined to read them as an admission of culpability. If I was her manager at work and I didn't have the whole oversight (which took the police weeks to put together) but knew she'd been present at several deaths, I still don't think my first thought would be: "She must be a murderer".
 
How does someone like this get held in prison? Surely all the other inmates will kill her sooner rather than later or is she kept under 24 hour solitary confinement?
 
This whole story is absolutely horrendous and seriously upsetting. Makes me feel physically sick.
 
I also didn’t realise she got arrested in 2018. This has been going on for 5 years. She didn’t just kill those poor defenceless babies but also by pleading not guilty made the families go through the torture of a prolonged court case which in turn meant they couldn’t grieve the children they lost. I honestly have no words for such evil.
 
The methods were just so... benign on paper. I mean overfeeding doesn't sound like a murderous activity. But with all of the training and in context, so evil.

And that she targeted twins and triplets. Perverse.

She certainly became evil. Bear minimum, utterly wicked. She clearly got a thrill out of acting like God due to her own perceived failings. Surely a complex, if not a severe undefined condition. We are conditioned not to kill, despite it probably bring fairly instinctive. Her as nurse more than us.

All just so bloody unlikely.
 
I haven't delved too deep, but for all the 'She came from a happy, normal family', this doesn't really strike as very normal behaviour. Although who knows how you'd react if you found out your daughter was a mass-murderer?



Anyway, it's an obvious point but it's hard not to imagine how different the tone of the coverage would be if she wasn't white and/or a British national.
 
The normal family thing is such a distraction. Yes she was a bizarrely basic bitch, but I bet Rose West loved a Maccies and Noel's House Party.

Detached human behaviour can come from all manner of triggers. She, for want of a better phrase, took shit too far. I'd guess addiction, self harm or therapy are the fairly well trodden path for her apparent self resentment. She went down the salsa classes and murdering babies route instead.
 
VoR said:
I haven't delved too deep, but for all the 'She came from a happy, normal family', this doesn't really strike as very normal behaviour. Although who knows how you'd react if you found out your daughter was a mass-murderer?
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It does seem a slightly unusual reaction (not that there's a "normal" one in situations like this). But then you look at the way Lucy Letby led an almost infantilised home life, sleeping with teddy bears; fairy lights around the bed rails; a print that said "Leave sparkles wherever you go" on the wall.

I would imagine despite her age and the job she does, there was a degree of her parents still seeing her as "their little girl". The instinctive response to try and take the blame seems very in keeping with that. To be confronted with the reality must be an absolute head-fuck because they're being made to see her as someone they maybe/probably didn't: an adult. Let alone a serial killer.
 
At the risk of turning this thread into SPECULATE WILDLY ABOUT LUCY I did read that the only time she showed any emotion in the trial was when some doctor she had been infatuated with turned up for a declaration.
 
To continue speculating they said she may have attacked some of the babies so that the doctor would be called to help.
 
Peekaboo said:
I'm not saying I would have murdered some babies for attention but I've done some pretty awful things under infatuation.
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You think she may have carried out these heinous crimes because she was infatuated with the doctor? I suppose we will never know.
 
jivafox said:
To continue speculating they said she may have attacked some of the babies so that the doctor would be called to help.
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I mean that's one way to get a straight man's attention, but couldn't she have saved herself a lifetime in prison and just posted a slightly booby Instagram story?
 
it reminds me of that psychopath test question

A woman turns up at her mother’s funeral. At the funeral she meets a man she’s never met before, but just through looking at him she knows that he’s ‘the one’, and they will marry and live a happy life together.

The next week the woman murders her sister. Why does she do this?

PM FOR ANSWER
 
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edit:

I think my joke was maybe in bad taste
 
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Suomi said:
it reminds me of that psychopath test question

A woman turns up at her mother’s funeral. At the funeral she meets a man she’s never met before, but just through looking at him she knows that he’s ‘the one’, and they will marry and live a happy life together.

The next week the woman murders her sister. Why does she do this?

PM FOR ANSWER
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Is it because

she needs there to be another family funeral in order to see him again??
 
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