Nurse Lucy Letby joins list of UK’s most notorious child killers

Lucy Letby, 33, was working at the Countess of Chester Hospital when she carried out the string of attacks on tiny, premature infants.

Lucy Letby is facing life behind bars (Elizabeth Cook/PA) (PA Wire)

A nurse was unmasked as the worst serial killer of children in modern UK history on Friday after a jury found her guilty of murdering seven infants and attempting to murder six more while working on a neonatal unit.

Lucy Letby, 33, was working at the Countess of Chester Hospital when she carried out the string of attacks on tiny, premature babies between 2015 and 2016.

Jurors spent 22-and-a-half days deliberating before reaching their verdicts in one of the UK’s most high-profile criminal trials.

The nurse, who is facing life behind bars, joins a list of the UK’s most twisted child murderers.

Here the PA news agency looks at some of the notorious names whose company she has joined.

– Beverley Allitt

In a case with disturbing echoes of Letby’s crimes, Beverley Allitt is serving 13 life sentences – one for each of the children she murdered or attempted to murder as a paediatric nurse in the 1990s.

Allitt attacked 13 children who had been admitted for minor injuries between February and April 1991 at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital, Lincolnshire, injecting some of them with dangerous amounts of insulin.

She succeeded in killing four of them. Her youngest victim, Liam Taylor, was just seven weeks old.

After the death of her fourth victim, 15-month-old Claire Peck, staff became suspicious of the number of cardiac arrests on the children’s ward and police began to investigate.

It was established that Allitt was the only nurse on duty during the medical episodes and she was found guilty of four counts of murder, three of attempted murder, and a further six of grievous bodily harm in 1993.

The 54-year-old is imprisoned at Rampton Secure Hospital in Nottinghamshire.

– The Moors Murderers

Ian Brady and his girlfriend Myra Hindley kidnapped, sexually assaulted and murdered children before burying their bodies on the moors above Manchester between 1963 and 1965.

Brady, then 28, was given three concurrent life sentences in 1966 for killing Edward Evans, Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride.

It was only in 1985 that he finally confessed to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett.

The couple’s victims were aged 10 to 17 when they were killed.

Hindley received two life sentences plus seven years for harbouring Brady knowing he had murdered Kilbride.

The pair narrowly escaped the death penalty because it had been abolished a year before their trial concluded.

She died in prison of pneumonia in 2002 while he died in a psychiatric hospital in 2017 after going on hunger strike.

– Robert Black

Robert Black was a Scottish serial killer who was found guilty of murdering four schoolgirls in the 1980s.

He carried out his first known murder in 1981 when he abducted, sexually assaulted and killed nine-year-old Jennifer Cardy in Ballinderry in County Antrim, Northern Ireland.

Five-year-old Caroline Hogg was his youngest victim, who disappeared while playing outside her Edinburgh home.

He took her to a nearby funfair before killing her and dumping her body more than 300 miles away.

He was also convicted of killing 10-year-old Sarah Harper, who was abducted while buying a loaf of bread in Leeds, and 11-year-old Susan Maxwell who vanished in the Scottish town of Coldstream in 1982.