The father of two triplet babies murdered by Lucy Letby has described frantic scenes as the children collapsed as medical staff searched online for manuals to guide them through “mundane” medical procedures.
Letby injected air into Child O’s bloodstream and also into his stomach through a nasogastric tube. He also administered air into the stomach of his brother, Child P.
The deaths in June 2016 were previously seen as the ‘tipping point’ for consultants who suspected Letby was the culprit and called for her to be removed from the ward at the Countess of Chester Hospital.
Letby, 34, was sentenced to 15 life terms after being convicted in two trials of the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of seven others.
A public inquiry, led by Lady Justice Thirlwall at Liverpool Town Hall, is investigating events on the hospital’s neonatal unit, where Letby was a nurse from 2015 to 2016. She was first arrested in 2018 and sentenced in 2023 and 2024.
In a statement read out during the hearing, the father of babies O, P and R described the frantic moments when he realised that child P had collapsed, less than 24 hours after he had lost child O in similar circumstances.
“We rushed back to the unit and it was like déjà vu,” he said. “It was almost an exact repeat of the day before. Everyone was running around like headless chickens, and it seemed like they had no idea what was wrong. I asked one of the doctors what was going on and said, ‘It’s happening again, isn’t it?’ No one said anything to me. No one could explain it again.”
The father, who cannot be named, continued: “There was another doctor at what looked like a makeshift desk looking up on a screen how to put in the chest tube and where to put the incisions and tubes. It was like they were following a tutorial and not really knowing what they were doing.”
Letby was involved in the efforts to resuscitate child P, he recalled, and he saw another nurse ‘look up a procedure on Google’.
“She was young. She had a PC screen in front of her and as soon as I saw this on the screen I panicked. I didn’t understand why she was googling this.
“The procedure was a lung drain. On the screen was a picture of a person with an arrow pointing to where the incision was going to be. It was a medical diagram. I think the staff heard me talking about it.
“I was angry at that point. I remember other staff coming to the computer to look at it. They all had a word with each other and did the procedure. That worried me because it was a daily procedure, one that hospital staff has to do day in and day out.”
The father could still remember how he interacted with Letby, for example when he was told that she had been arrested.
“It was so hard to understand at first because she was so visibly upset when Child P died. When she was working she came across as this robotic and cold lady, but after Child P died she seemed devastated.”
He told the investigating judge he did not believe the Countess of Chester Hospital had shown a duty of openness to him and his wife, the children’s mother.
He said: “I believe the Countess of Chester Hospital knew far more about Letby’s crimes than they have publicly admitted, and I understand from my lawyers, but by the time the children were born there there were already serious concerns about Letby.”
The investigation is still ongoing.