Lucy Letby: Did she Drown or did she Float?

Nurse Lucy Letby was accused of multiple murders of babies in a neonatal ward and was given concurrent life sentences that meant she would be in prison for the rest of her life. She was never seen to murder a baby and the evidence against her is, therefore, circumstantial. However, it convinced the jury who were unanimous in condemning her as a serial murderer. Since her incarceration there has been much controversy over the case especially around the medical evidence. Various aspects of the case have, post-trial, been re-examined. First, the medical evidence as to how and why these babies died has been challenged, second the statistics that were used to prove that Lucy Letby was a constant, likewise, and third there has been an attempt to discredit the medical expert witness for the prosecution. My focus in this article is on Lucy Letby. I question her possible motivation for killing and suggest that she lacks the psychopathology that we might expect to find in a killer nurse, that she might in fact be innocent. She may have been the object of projective identification or the bad object that enabled splitting in the institution. I suggest that, as a single childless woman, she was the ideal subject to carry the projections of those around her lost for an explanation as to why there were so many neonatal deaths.