Having been a constant presence throughout her ten-month trial, at the final moment of reckoning, John and Susan Letby were unable to face the truth about their only child’s wicked crimes.
Like Lucy, who cowered in her cell yesterday and refused to come to Manchester Crown Court to be sentenced, Mr and Mrs Letby also chose to stay away.
They were not there to hear the heart-rending statements from the grief-stricken parents of the precious, longed-for babies murdered by their 33-year-old daughter. Or to listen to Mr Justice Goss declare that she will now spend the rest of her life behind bars.
But then, right from the start of this hideous saga, the couple have been in utter denial about their precious daughter; unable or unwilling to accept that she could have committed the heinous crimes of which she was accused and, above all, never afraid to leap to her defence.
It was Mr and Mrs Letby who accompanied their daughter to a key meeting with hospital bosses in January 2017, six months after she was removed from the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital following the death of two triplet boys.
John and Susan Letby, the parents of nurse Lucy Letby, outside Manchester Crown Court ahead of the verdict in the case
Convinced of her innocence, the couple helped her secure a letter of apology from senior doctors who had raised concerns about their beloved daughter, and threatened to report them to the General Medical Council.
As devoted parents, their blinkered belief in their child is not exactly surprising. Letby is only the fourth woman in British criminal history to be given a whole-life tariff but, unlike killers such as Myra Hindley and Rose West, there is no suggestion that she endured a brutal or disadvantaged childhood.
Far from it. Those who know the family say 77-year-old former shop manager John and 63-year-old retired accounts clerk Susan doted on their daughter. Some might even say too much so.
Letby was born in January 1990, six months after her parents married and not long after they bought the house where they still live, a 1930s semi in a cul-de-sac in Hereford.
Their daughter, say neighbours, was always a ‘delight’ to her parents. They watched her thrive at comprehensive Aylestone School, then Hereford Sixth Form College. Her first part-time job was as a teenager at WH Smith.
When she became the first member of the family to graduate — with a BSc in Child Nursing from the University of Chester in 2011 — the couple were so delighted that they took out an advertisement in the local paper. ‘We are so proud of you after all your hard work,’ it read. They did the same again when she turned 21, accompanying the birthday notice with a photograph of their daughter as a sweet-looking child.
And while they were said to be unhappy about her moving away from Hereford to start her new job, they helped Letby buy her first home; a £179,000 three-bedroom semi, just a mile from the Countess of Chester Hospital, where she lived alone with her two rescue cats, Tigger and Smudge.
During her trial, the emergence of texts Letby exchanged with colleagues hinted that she sometimes felt smothered by her parents and also guilty about moving away from them.
Like Lucy (pictured as a child), who cowered in her cell yesterday and refused to come to Manchester Crown Court to be sentenced, Mr and Mrs Letby also chose to stay away
She continued to holiday with them, going on the thrice-annual trips to Torquay the family had enjoyed since her early childhood. She told one doctor, who was moving to New Zealand, that she would never have been able to make such a move, as it would ‘completely devastate them’, adding: ‘[They] find it hard enough being away from me now and it’s only 100 miles.’
Another time, she messaged: ‘My parents worry massively about everything and anything, hate that I live alone, etc.
‘I feel bad because I know it’s really hard for them, especially as I’m an only child, and they mean well, just a little suffocating at times and constantly feel guilty.’
Ironically, given the nature of Letby’s crimes, the key to understanding her sometimes claustrophobic relationship with her parents may well lie in her own infant years. One of the killer’s closest friends, who went to school with her and also refuses to accept her schoolfriend’s guilt, told the BBC’s Panorama programme last week that Letby wanted to become a neonatal nurse because she herself had survived a traumatic birth.
If true, this might go some way towards explaining why John and Susan Letby had a tendency to overprotect their daughter. What effect this might have had on Letby as she entered her adult years is another matter entirely.
One psychologist connected to the case told the Mail Letby was a ‘covert narcissist’. Having been at the centre of her parents’ universe for so long, she craved the attention she had received since childhood and, once she was living away from them, needed to find it elsewhere.
Letby was born in January 1990, six months after her parents married and not long after they bought the house where they still live, a 1930s semi in a cul-de-sac in Hereford
Other text messages sent throughout her murderous spree reveal how she sought sympathy and admiration from colleagues.
After the death of her first victim – Baby A – in June 2015, a fellow nurse sent her a message which read: ‘I hope you are OK, you were brilliant.’
Letby responded: ‘It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do… Just a big shock for us all. Hard coming in tonight and seeing the parents.’
According to Dominic Willmott, a lecturer in criminology at Loughborough University, some of the nurse’s texts suggest she wanted to ‘garner sympathy’ after the babies’ deaths. He said last week that she may have been motivated by a ‘pathological desire for attention and sympathy’.
Another key prosecution argument throughout her trial was that Letby wanted to gain the sympathy of a doctor with whom she had become ‘infatuated’.
There have even been suggestions that Letby was suffering from Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, a condition in which carers can intentionally harm children in order to gain attention for themselves. There are claims that she was animated after some of the murders, as if revelling in the drama she had created.
John Letby was present when his daughter was arrested for the first time on July 4, 2018.
He had stayed the night after driving her home the day before, following one of the family’s holidays to Torquay, and watched as she was led out of the house by police officers.
One psychologist connected to the case told the Mail Letby (pictured when younger) was a ‘covert narcissist’
In court, Letby was close to tears when she said that after her arrest, her father had made her bed.
Her room, as the jury saw from photographs shown in court, was rather childlike, full of stuffed toys, fairy lights and a saccharine sign on a wall that read, ‘Leave sparkles wherever you go’. In her kitchen was a ‘Happy Birthday Mummy’ note from her cats, sent by her own mother.
Letby was released on bail before being arrested on two further occasions, in June 2019 and November 2020, as investigations continued.
On one occasion, when she was arrested at her childhood home, her distraught mother is said to have pleaded with officers: ‘I did it. Take me instead.’
Before their daughter’s trial started last October, the couple, who still run a family radiator business, relocated from Hereford, renting an apartment close to Manchester Crown Court.
They may now choose to relocate once more, to be near Letby as she begins her life sentence at a prison likely to be far from the family home.
Throughout the trial, the couple were seen exchanging loving glances with their daughter, who often sought to make eye contact with them.
Determined to hear every last piece of evidence against her, they have, at times, been an irascible presence in court, lambasting journalists over their coverage of the trial and bemoaning its duration, which forced them to extend the lease on their rented flat.
They became a familiar sight during breaks in proceedings, both smoking cigarettes on the steps of the courthouse.
Letby (pictured in 2007) was released on bail before being arrested on two further occasions, in June 2019 and November 2020, as investigations continued
Despite everything they have heard about Letby’s wicked actions, the couple’s faith in her has proved unshakeable.
Last Friday, when all the verdicts were made public, Mrs Letby’s disbelief was laid bare in court when she collapsed sobbing into her husband’s arms, at one point shouting: ‘You can’t be serious. This cannot be right.’
Their decision to stay away from court yesterday was yet another clear sign of their continuing solidarity with their daughter.
Being forced to listen day in, day out to details of the evil she perpetrated is more than most parents could bear. And yet, it is still nothing compared with the grief of those whose innocent premature babies were given a chance at life, only to have it murderously snatched away.
At the heart of this monstrous tale stands a simple question.
How could a child raised by such adoring parents have turned out to be one of the worst child serial killers in modern British history?
If John and Susan Letby ever come to accept their daughter’s guilt, it is a question they will be asking themselves for the rest of their lives.
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