Expert pinpoints where Lucy Letby came closest to confessing to seven baby murders

Forensic psychiatrist Dr Shoham Das has lifted the lid on what he believes were clues the evil nurse left to indicate she was guilty of killing seven babies in her care

The closest Lucy Letby ever got to confessing she murdered seven babies is believed to be in the Post-it notes crammed with her scrawling, an expert has claimed.

Forensic psychiatrist Dr Shoham Das has lifted the lid on what he believes were clues the evil nurse left to indicate she was guilty. The scraps of evidence were found by officers when they raided the 33-year-old's home on suspicion of carrying out the murders as she worked at Countess of Chester Hospital's neonatal unit in Chester, between June 2015 and June 2016.

Letby, from Hereford, harmed the infants in a number of ways, including by injecting air intravenously and administering air and/or milk into the stomach via nasogastric tubes. She also added insulin as a poison to intravenous feeds, interfered with breathing tubes, and inflicted trauma in some cases.

Dr Das told Mail Online the notes are a glimpse into Letby's psyche. He explained his job is to treat and rehabilitate what some call the "criminally insane". They are usually locked up for carrying out an assault, robbery, rape and in some cases they are killers.

The doctor's work means he visits high-security prisons and securely locked hospital wards across the country. He also gives evidence as an expert witness in court.

He said he had examined four women who murdered babies and they all were suffering from psychotic delusions so severe that their grip on reality "had broken".

But with Letby he said her scribbled notes showed no evidence she was suffering from a mental illness that was so serious that it could reduce her criminal culpability.

"What does leap out at me are the expressions of self-hatred, guilt, shame and self-loathing, along with a low self-confidence – what psychiatrists call 'negative cognitions'," he said.

"We see it in phrases such as 'I don't deserve Mum + Dad', 'Hate myself', 'I am a horrible evil person', 'I don't deserve to live' and 'The world is better off without me'."

On the right-hand side of a green note, Letby has added annotations in capital letters: "NO HOPE", "DESPAIR", "PANIC", "FEAR", "LOST". Dr Das said there are two 'overlapping' reasons which explain the outbursts.

He said the first is a modicum of awareness that what she has done is too terrible to imagine but it doesn't diminish the wickedness of her crimes.

She also writes: "There are no words. I am an awful person – I pay every day for that" which the doctor said appears to show some guilt. The words are squeezed onto small pieces of paper which Dr Das said as well as self-pity, they represent her conscience which is limited in scope and size.

But he continues that Letby didn't show enough guilt to stop killing the babies or to admit her actions during the trial.

However, he says that doesn't mean there wasn't a sliver of her subconscious mind that was conflicted by what she did. He said the frantic scribbling could possible be down to signs of depression and anxiety - but if that was the case her symptoms were not severe enough to stop her from functioning normally.

Letby's work colleagues have said she didn't seem unduly stressed in her high-pressure role of supposedly caring for poorly babies. Dr Das said some of Letby's thoughts were contradictory as she writes: "I haven't done anything wrong." But a few lines later, she admits: "I AM EVIL. I DID THIS."

He said that deep down Letby knows she murdered those babies, and harmed many more, but 'is deeply invested in her own lies' and has been left feeling aggrieved that she is not being believed.

He added that her true motivations were power, control and the thrill of being around the grieving process. Letby refused to attend Manchester Crown Court on Monday for her sentencing hearing.

Mr Justice Goss told the court in her absence: "There was a malevolence bordering on sadism in your actions. During the course of this trial, you have coldly denied any responsibility for your wrongdoing. You have no remorse. There are no mitigating factors."

Sentencing her to a whole-life order for each offence, he said: "You will spend the rest of your life in prison." The judge told her she would be provided copies of his remarks and the personal statements of the families of her victims. He added: "You killed seven fragile babies and attempted to kill six others. Some of your victims were only a day or a few days old. All were extremely vulnerable."

She is Britain's most prolific child killer and is the fourth woman in British history to be told she will die in prison after Myra Hindley in 1965, Rosemary West in 1995 and Joanne Dennehy in 2014.

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