Lucy Letby has denied she is a “very calculating” serial killer who has deliberately misled the jury in her trial over the alleged murder of babies.
On a tense final day of cross-examination, the nurse admitted she was “drinking fizz and going to the races” and was very active socially at a time she claimed her life had been devastated.
Letby, now 33, had said she was suicidal after being isolated from all but three colleagues and that her “whole world was stopped” when she was removed from the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester hospital in July 2016.
But the prosecutor, Nick Johnson KC, said on Friday that the defendant’s social diary in the following months was “peppered with you out socialising with lots of different people from the unit”.
He asked: “All the time, really, you had a very, very active social life, didn’t you?” Letby replied: “Yes.”
Johnson put it to the defendant that she had deliberately misled the jury about the impact of her removal from the unit, which she denied.
Letby is accused of fatally injecting newborns with insulin, air or milk during a 12-month period at the Countess of Chester hospital. She denies murdering seven babies and attempting to kill 10 other infants between June 2015 and June 2016.
Giving evidence for a 14th day at Manchester crown court, Letby repeatedly denied she was in a romantic relationship with a married doctor she met several times in the months after her removal.
She admitted they had been on a day trip to London and had planned another trip to the capital that was cancelled.
The pair exchanged texts with a love heart, the jury heard, and met several times in early 2017 including at a Starbucks and at Cheshire Oaks designer outlet. He “was a married man, it was not a relationship at all, it was a friendship”, she said.
Johnson also put it to Letby that she had deliberately misled the jury about the circumstances of her arrest.
She had claimed she was arrested in her pyjamas but the prosecutor said she was in fact taken away in a blue Lee Cooper leisure suit over a nightie.
Asked what she had hoped to gain by claiming she had been arrested in her pyjamas, Letby replied: “Because that’s what happened the first time.” When asked if she wanted the court to see the video of her arrest, she did not respond.
“You are a very calculating woman aren’t you, Lucy Letby?” Johnson asked. “No,” she replied.
The prosecutor went on: “You tell lies deliberately, don’t you?”
“No,” Letby answered.
“The reason you tell lies is to try to get sympathy from people, isn’t it? Try to get attention from people?” Johnson asked.
“No,” she said.
“By killing these children you got quite a lot of attention, didn’t you?” he asked.
“I didn’t kill the children,” she replied.
The prosecutor put it to Letby that she was “getting quite a lot of attention now, aren’t you”. The defendant did not respond.
Johnson also asked Letby about Post-it notes on which she had written “I am an awful person” and “I will never know what it’s like to have a family.”
She said she had written the notes because “despite having done nothing wrong I was still in the position that I was in and I couldn’t see that was going to end”.
The prosecutor pointed out that Letby had been moved to a well-paid job in the hospital’s risk and patient safety office. She agreed that she also had a car, a house and a boyfriend. “There were times in those years that I did have good times, yes,” she said.
Johnson said she had been “drinking fizz” and “going to the races”. The defendant agreed.
The reason she wrote “I am an awful person”, he went on, is because “you knew you had killed or grievously injured those children”.
“No,” Letby replied.
Johnson asked: “That’s the truth, isn’t it?”
“No,” she said.
“And you’re a murderer?” he asked.
“No,” she replied.
Answering questions later from her barrister, Letby said she had been told “not to have any contact with anybody on the unit” after her removal in July 2016, but that this changed around September that year when she was allowed more contact.
Asked why she did not appear as sad on her social media photographs as she appeared in her Post-it notes, Letby replied: “Because despite what is going on you have to try and find some degree of quality of life”.
The trial continues.
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