Lucy Letby joins a gruesome list of Britain’s medical monsters, from Harold Shipman to Beverly Allitt

Killer nurse Lucy Letby joins a grim list of medical professionals who exploited their place to hurt the weak sufferers they had been supposed to take care of.

Letby has been convicted of murdering seven infants and trying to kill six others, one of them twice, at a hospital neonatal unit.

Prosecutors stated Letby, 33, was a “calculated opportunist” who used the vulnerabilities of untimely and sick infants to camouflage her acts.

In 2015 and 2016, there was a important rise within the quantity of infants who suffered severe and sudden collapses within the neonatal unit on the Countess of Chester Hospital.

Under, we take a look at essentially the most infamous examples of Britain’s medical murderers.

“Physician Demise”

Dubbed “Physician Demise” by the press, Harold Shipman was one Britain’s most prolific serial killers and is assumed to have murdered a whole lot of sufferers.

As a basic practitioner in Larger Manchester, Shipman focused aged folks after successful their belief.

His modus operandi, which consisted of injecting his victims with a deadly dose of medication after which claiming they’d died of pure causes, meant that he evaded seize all through the Nineties. He was lastly convicted of 15 counts of homicide in 2000.

He started to entice suspicion after one of his sufferers, an 81-year-old girl, was found lifeless in her residence solely hours after Shipman had visited her in 1998.

After killing himself in jail in 2004, an official inquiry established that the extent of Shipman’s crimes was far better than initially thought, estimating that he had killed 250 folks.

Beverley Allitt

In a case with disturbing echoes of Letby’s crimes, Beverley Allitt is at the moment serving 13 life sentences – one for every of the kids she murdered or tried to homicide as a paediatric nurse within the Nineties.

Allitt attacked 13 kids who had been admitted for minor accidents between February and April 1991 at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital, Lincolnshire, injecting some of them with harmful quantities of insulin.

She succeeded in killing 4 of them, the youngest of whom, Liam Taylor, was simply seven weeks outdated.

After the loss of life of her fourth sufferer, 15-month-old Claire Peck, employees grew to become suspicious of the quantity of cardiac arrests on the kids’s ward and police started to examine.

It was established that Allitt had been the one nurse on obligation throughout the medical episodes, and he or she was discovered responsible in 1993 of 4 counts of homicide, three of tried homicide, and a additional six of grievous bodily hurt.

Allitt, now 54, is at the moment imprisoned at Rampton Safe Hospital in Nottinghamshire.

Scotland’s “Angel of Demise”

Colin Norris, from Glasgow, was one other nurse convicted of killing sufferers.

Known as the “Angel of Demise”, Norris was discovered responsible in 2008 of murdering 4 girls, and trying to homicide one other, by injecting them with insulin.

The 4 girls who died – Ethel Corridor, Bridget Bourke, Doris Ludlam and Irene Crookes – in addition to the fifth girl, Vera Wilby – had been all aged inpatients on orthopaedic ward in Leeds the place Norris labored as a nurse in 2002.

He was accused of injecting his victims with deadly quantities of insulin.

Now aged 47, Norris is serving a 30-year jail sentence at HMP Frankland.

He efficiently had all 5 of his convictions referred to the Court docket of Enchantment in 2021 after the Prison Circumstances Overview Fee concluded there was a “actual chance” they might be unsafe in gentle of new skilled proof.

Victorino Chua

Father-of-two Victorino Chua was discovered responsible of murdering and poisoning sufferers at Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport, the place he labored as a nurse. He was jailed for a minimal of 35 years in 2015.

Chua, now 57, killed Tracey Arden, 44, and Derek Weaver, 83, and tried to kill a third sufferer, Arnold Lancaster, 71, by injecting insulin into saline baggage and ampoules.

Talking after he was sentenced at Manchester Crown Court docket, Weaver’s sister, Lynda Bleasdale, described Chua as an “evil and diabolical” man who “loved watching folks undergo”.