Their words were delivered through tears and trembling hands to a courtroom that, for 10 long months, had choked back the trauma of these horrors. This was the first time the parents of Lucy Letby’s victims had been able to express their grief.
The details were harrowing. A triplet boy, now seven, who asks his parents what happened to his two murdered brothers. The mother who, desperate to hold her dying newborn daughter, could only cling to her tiny foot as doctors tried in vain to save her life.
Another parent who allowed Letby to bathe and dress their seven-day-old son in a woollen gown the nurse had chosen for him. The boy’s grieving parents buried him in that same gown.
“Not a single day passes without distress over this decision,” the boy’s mother told the court, adding: “We encountered evil disguised as a caring nurse.”
In the packed public gallery, jurors, journalists, police officers and the families leaned on each other and sobbed. The parents, passing a box of tissues between them, had become like one big family, held together by a common unique trauma. They each wore little badges showing a ribbon for each of Letby’s victims.
In the dock, where Letby should have sat, there were two female prison officers instead. This was supposed to be Letby’s final reckoning, but the killer had refused to face up to the victims of her crimes.
She was brought to Manchester crown court from her prison cell at HMP New Hall, near Wakefield, early on Monday morning, as she had been throughout the trial, despite informing the judge that she would not appear in the dock.
Instead, Letby sat in the cells beneath the 1960s building as the judge ordered that she should never be freed. The justice secretary, Alex Chalk, called her non-attendance “an insult” to the families of her victims.
It was an insult, but their statements were all the more powerful as they were delivered to a vacant dock.
The mother of one baby girl, who Letby fatally injected with air on her second day of life, held on to a small grey rabbit teddy as she described how her “heart broke into a million pieces” the moment her infant daughter “lost her battle against evil”.
She spoke slowly and calmly as she recalled removing “all traces” of their newborn daughter from their home, the home she never got to see. The baby seat, never used, was taken out of the car. Her hospital bag left unpacked. All locked away for months in the room that would have been her bedroom.
In this tornado of grief, the parents had to arrange their daughter’s funeral. It took place the day before her due date. Her ashes were buried in a tiny box the day she was due to be born.
“My arms, my heart, my life all felt so painfully empty,” the girl’s mother told a silent courtroom seven. “I missed [Child D] so much. I was desperate to feel her, smell her, cuddle her. I needed to be her mum in every way to look after her and keep her safe.”
She was one of many of the parents who described how their lives had been traumatised and turned upside down by grief. Many needed antidepressants, one turned to alcohol abuse, several were haunted by horrific flashbacks of watching, helpless, as their newborn babies died in pain.
Another mother, sitting in the witness box where Letby had spent 14 days denying murder and attempted murder, said her parents were only able to hold her four-day-old son after he had been pronounced dead. Chillingly, his killer was also in the room.
“The trauma of that night will live with all of us until the day we die,” she said. “Knowing now that his murderer was watching us throughout these traumatic hours is like something out of a horror story.”
Eight years had passed since his murder, she told the courtroom, but the grief remained as heavy. She recalled in shattering detail his first moments in her arms – “the way he smelt, the feel of his fine blonde hair on my chin” – but is left wondering what sort of eight-year-old he might be now. “I think about what his voice would have sounded like, what he might have looked like now, who he would have been.”
The mother had made her son’s hand and footprints in a pendant she wore around her neck to feel close to him after he had died. She had not felt able to wear it since Letby’s arrest, but told the court on Monday: “Now we know as much about [Child C’s] death as I believe we ever will, I feel able to wear his hand and footprints for the first time in five years.”
She added: “I know now that they represent the love that I have for my son, and I will not allow evil to taint that. They represent justice and the truth.”
If Letby thought she could escape this sentencing by hiding in her cell, then the judge, Mr Justice Goss, had other ideas. He said he would make sure that she received paper copies of his sentencing remarks – and the statements of the families.
From her cell at HMP New Hall, where Rosemary West is one of the inmates, Letby is understood to have been vocal in telling prisoners and staff of her innocence. She spent long nights during the trial reading medical notes about her victims. She will now have many more long nights to read over the impact of her crimes.
Goss had already decided what sentence he would impose by the time he arrived in court at 10.02am. Thirteen minutes later, the discussion between the prosecutor and judge was over. In truth, there was little to discuss. Barely any crime touches the horror of serial infanticide.
Even Letby’s barrister, Benjamin Myers KC, told the judge there was simply nothing he could say to try to reduce her sentence.
After a 45-minute break following the families’ statements, the judge returned to court and – on live television – handed Letby a whole-life term for crimes that, he said, betrayed her “deep malevolence bordering on sadism”.
His final words, once the television cameras were switched off, were directed towards the families of the victims. To those whose children had been murdered he offered his “serious condolences” and then, as his voice cracked with emotion, he added: “For all of you, your lives will remain transformed. Your behaviour and dignity has been the highest.”