IT was the baby’s relentless cry that will forever haunt the nurse caring for her.
“There was no stopping or starting, no fluctuation,” Ashleigh Hudson told the jury at Manchester Crown Court.
“It was a very loud, relentless cry – the sort of cry I hadn’t experienced before”.
Baby I’s suffering was far from isolated. Letby’s 10-month trial was littered with accounts of her inflicting unimaginable pain on her tiny victims.
A day-old baby girl suffered what an expert paediatrician described as “extreme distress and terror:” after being injected with no more than a spoonful of air.
On another occasion a little boy of six days bled so profusely – and so unusually – that a registrar had to take time off work to recover from the trauma.
A two-week-old baby boy screamed for half an hour following another sadistic attack by Letby.
One of the medics giving evidence about him rocked back in her chair as she re-read her medical notes and saw again the word “screaming”.
She did so because babies the size of her hand simply don’t scream.
As medical expert Sandie Bohin told the court: “I have never observed a premature neonate to scream”.
Much of the trial was filled with a microscopic examination of medical notes filled with jargon that at times even the barristers struggled to understand.
Hundreds of documents, diagrams and x-ray images were put up on the TV screens set up in Court 7 of Manchester Crown Court and the annexes both nearby and in Chester.
Nick Johnson KC, prosecuting, seemed to follow a deliberate strategy of stripping away as much emotion as possible from the case – rather than allowing the jury to feel the full horror of Letby’s crimes.
In line with that the number of parents giving live evidence to the jury was kept to a bare minimum.
Most of their contributions came in the form of statements read out by junior counsel.
When it was the turn of doctors and nurses to give evidence they, too, were held to a strict tack of discussing this aspirate or that aspirate, this blood sugar level or that sugar level.
Often the deeply harrowing collapses of tiny neonates were given the bland medical term “desaturations”.
But every now and again there would come some terrifying insight into the horror being inflicted by Letby day after day – all of it done furtively, but in plain sight of colleagues who felt they had no reason to suspect her.
Why should they? She was one of them. They trusted her.
And yet more and more babies were either dying or collapsing in ways that defied normal medical explanation. At the time it felt unnatural.
Years later, in a Manchester courtroom, they would realise without doubt that it was.
One incident in particular showed just how much fear and confusion she had spread even among her colleagues.
Baby O, a triplet, had inexplicably collapsed and died one day.
Twenty-four hours later his identical brother, Baby P, did likewise.
By then an expert transport team from another hospital had arrived.
They were meant to be collecting Baby P. But when he died the infants’ father begged the team to take his surviving son instead.
Astonishingly, a female paediatrician joined him in pleading with the team’s leader to take the baby – because she knew in that moment that despite her own, undoubted skills she was powerless against the “mortal danger” posed by Letby.
“Even though I didn’t beg,” she told the court, “in my heart I just wanted him to leave too because I knew that was the only way he was going to live”.
Mercifully, that baby survived the killer and is now aged seven.
Letby, 33, even betrayed the married doctor she was infatuated with.
Dr A, who was given anonymity by the court, stuck with her to the end – oblivious to the fact that the woman he so admired was a killer.
At some of the most harrowing times he was working alongside her.
Him trying to save the baby in front of him, her trying just as hard to snuff out the infant’s life.
The Facebook messages between the pair reveal just how much she deceived him.
He repeatedly praised her abilities as a nurse, telling her how “proud” he felt of the way she dealt with a terminal collapse she actually caused.
In one message he wrote: “You are one of the few nurses…that I would trust with my own children”.
Even without the suspicions of the so-called Gang of Four, there were times Letby was almost rumbled.
Eight days after the murder of Baby D one of her best friends on the unit, Nurse A, said in a WhatsApp message: “There’s something odd about that night and the other 3 that went so suddenly”.
Letby responded: “What do you mean?”
Nurse A then said: “Odd that we lost 3 and in different circumstances…”
Her observation shows she was on the right track. But with nothing more to go on, she pulled back and the moment was lost
“Ignore me,” she wrote in her next message. “I’m speculating”.
What she didn’t know was that the woman she trusted and had once mentored was “playing God” with neonates small enough to fit inside the palm of her hand.
And that she, like her colleagues, was an unwitting player in the macabre spectacle Letby was choreographing for her own private pleasure.
In October 2015, for example, a smiling Letby joined friends on the unit for the hen weekend of nursery assistant Jennifer Jones-Key.
But on her very first shift back she claimed another baby’s life and later used the new bride as cover for a murder she had no idea was happening.
On another occasion the killer helped make a banner to celebrate the 100th day of life of a baby girl – and later made the first of a series of attempts on her life.
Tragically, even some of the babies who survived Letby’s attacks will spend the rest of their lives needing round-the-clock care.
The prosecution suggested that Letby somehow got a thrill from killing.
In her mind it was a bonus if she could “help” bereaved parents by preparing a memory box for them.
She took a photograph of two dead twins lying side by side in a Moses basket and wrote a condolence card for another baby in time for the funeral.
Like Harold Shipman, the Hyde GP who preyed on hundreds of his grown-up patients, Letby is a narcissist.
For that terrible year she put herself centre-stage in a cruel, depraved drama.
And when she was finally brought to justice she couldn’t summon up a single tear for her tiny victims.
Those were all reserved for one person and one person alone – the woman lying distraught in a cell below Court 7. Lucy Letby.
