The ordinary Hereford couple, Susan and John, will now have to deal with ‘shock, disbelief, and even denial,’ says a forensic psychologist
For the parents of Lucy Letby’s victims, the last 10 months in court have yielded unbearable agony after unimaginable loss. But when the first guilty verdicts were read out in court, it was Letby’s own mother who appeared to find her crimes most inconceivable of all, falling into her husband’s arms weeping with the words, “You can’t be serious; this can’t be right.”
It was a moment that laid bare the impact of Britain’s most notorious baby killer on her parents, which began when the former nurse was arrested in 2018. On hearing that her daughter was suspected of murdering her infant charges, Susan Letby reportedly told police: “I did it, take me instead.”
Through the trial, too, both she and Letby’s father, John, were a permanent presence at Manchester Crown Court, the city to which they’d relocated from their home in Hereford in order to attend each day. That was until Letby this week refused to take her seat in the dock as the final verdicts were handed down, with her parents, a retired accounts clerk and retail boss, uncharacteristically absent too in an apparent show of solidarity.
Dr Sohom Das, consultant forensic psychologist and author of In Two Minds, says that the Letbys would have been “quite blindsided” by their daughter’s conviction for murdering seven babies, and attempting to kill six others – one of them twice. “She didn’t have any criminal history. She wasn’t antisocial. She wasn’t previously violent. So I don’t think she telegraphed any of her intentions for any of her crimes,” Das explains.