The woman, who reportedly worked as neonatal nurse, was convicted of murdering 7 babies and attempting to murder 6 others as she tried to play God and tried to impress married doctor, prosecutors said. The murders happened over the course of one year. The killings all took place at the CC Hospital, between June 2015 and June 2016, making the 33-year-old woman, Lucy, 33, the UK’s most prolific child serial killer in modern history. Her victims included two identical triplet brothers, killed within 24 hours of each other, a newborn weighing less than 2lb who was fatally injected with air, and a girl born 10 weeks premature who was murdered on the fourth attempt.
Prosecutors said that the nurse reportedly used a variety of methods to target her victims, injecting the premature babies with air and poisoning them with insulin as well as force feeding them with milk. Prosecutors said the 33-year-old defendant will be sentenced on Monday. She will likely spend the rest of her life in prison. Although her motive remains unclear, the prosecution suggested she got a thrill out of ‘playing God’. They also suggested she had been trying to impress a married doctor. Inside her home, police found a Post-it note on which she had scrawled: ‘I am evil, I did this.’
Unfortunately, the nurse got away with her killing spree despite consultants repeatedly trying to blow the whistle to managers about the spate of deaths on her watch until police were eventually called in following an alarming rate of death in the neonatal unit, with suspicions that the deaths were the result of inside malice. During the trial, the prosecution had claimed that the nurse was a competent nurse who knew exactly what she was doing when she deliberately harmed the babies in her care. Her defence team argued the deaths and collapses were the result of serial failures in care in the unit and she was the victim of a system that wanted to apportion blame when it failed.
Families of the babies killed and harmed have demanded a public inquiry into how the nurse was able to murder and maim babies for so long. None of the parents had any idea their children had been the victims of foul play until they were visited by police up to three years later. Detectives are continuing to review the care of some 4,000 babies admitted to hospital while the nurse was working as a neonatal nurse. The lead consultant at the neonatal unit where the nurse worked told the BBC that hospital bosses failed to investigate allegations against the nurse and tried to silence doctors.