What turned a nurturer into a cold-blooded baby-killer? A criminologist explains

Criminologist Orla Lynch tells Amanda Cassidy why people struggle to reconcile a killer and their actions

Artist drawing by Elizabeth Cook of Lucy Letby listening to the verdicts being read at Manchester Crown Court. During the trial, Letby cut a pathetic figure, clutching a purple blanket, glancing up at her own parents now and then.

Bathing a brand-new baby is an intimate ritual. Bathing them after death is perhaps the most sacred act of all. Yet this was the heart-breaking reality for parents of some of the babies deliberately killed by neonatal nurse, Lucy Letby. 

As these mothers and fathers look back at how 33-year-old Letby had helped them wash their children’s lifeless bodies, or create tiny footprints they’d forever hold dear, it seemed even more heinous that she’d sabotaged this last private moment between parent and child.