At first glance Lucy Letby seems like a totally ordinary young woman. Blonde and vivacious, her social media posts were packed with photos of nights out and smiling friends. She'd had a happy childhood as the only child of devoted parents. She was the first from her family to go to university and her career as a neonatal nurse looked promising. She was trained to care for the most vulnerable and premature babies and the hospital even used her as a poster-girl for its fundraising campaign. No one, looking at her from the outside, could possibly imagine how her story would end.
Today, Lucy Letby is reviled as one of the world's most notorious killers. Convicted of murdering seven babies, and attempting to murder a further seven, she is officially the most prolific child killer of the modern era, and only the fourth British woman ever to receive a whole life prison sentence. Still only in her early thirties, she will die in prison. But although Letby's journey from obscurity to infamy has made headlines across the world, very little is known about her. While her trial was one of the longest murder cases in British legal history, and her crimes were analysed in forensic detail, the jury was told virtually nothing about her possible motive or psychology.
So, who is the real Lucy Letby? What made this seemingly ordinary young woman set off on a path of attacking and killing desperately vulnerable premature babies? How was she able to carry on harming babies for a year? Who knew what - and when - at the hospital where she worked? And why did it take so long for the police to be called in to investigate? Drawing on interviews with those most intimately connected to this tragic story, as well as exclusive sources and documents, these are the questions that award-winning journalists Jonathan Coffey and Judith Moritz set out to answer.
The book also deals head-on with questions which have been raised since the verdicts, including the science which was so instrumental to Letby's convictions. Why did Lucy Letby have no expert witnesses? No one saw her harming a baby, so how was she convicted? Is it possible that the Lucy Letby case is a miscarriage of justice - as her supporters and some sceptics now claim? The result is a gripping account of one of the most notorious, controversial, devastating and complex criminal cases of our times.
