Lucy Letby informed to jot down letter admitting ‘I’m evil’ by counsellors

A note scribbled by killer nurse Lucy Letby saying ‘I am evil’ was written on the advice of a counsellor, it has been claimed.

During her first trial last year, jurors were told the apparent confession should be read ‘literally’.

In her own evidence, the nurse had earlier said she wrote the message, found by police in her diary, when she was ‘panicking’ after being moved off her hospital’s neonatal unit.

She said she was ‘blaming myself but not because I’d done something, because of the way people were making me feel’. Letby, 34, did not mention any other background to the notes and prosecutor Nick Johnson KC told Manchester Crown Court it should be viewed as a ‘confession’. But a source told The Guardian last night that the note and others like it were written on the advice of professionals as a way of dealing with extreme stress.

The source went on to say the notes were produced after counselling sessions as part of a ‘therapeutic process in which she was advised to write down her troubling thoughts and feelings’.

A note scribbled by killer nurse Lucy Letby (pictured) saying ‘I am evil’ was written on the advice of a counsellor, it has been claimed

Letby is serving a whole life order after being convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill six more at the Countess of Chester Hospital between 2015 and 2016

During her first trial last year, jurors were told the apparent confession should be read ‘literally’

The head of occupational health and wellbeing at the Countess of Chester Hospital, Kathryn de Beger, is said to have encouraged Letby to write as a way of coping with extreme stress. Letby’s Chester GP reportedly also advised her to write down thoughts she was struggling to process.

As well as writing ‘I am evil, I did this’ on the Post-it note – covered in densely-scrawled handwriting – she also wrote: ‘I killed them on purpose because I am not good enough to care for them and I am a horrible, evil person’, ‘hate’, ‘I haven’t done anything wrong’, and ‘Police investigation slander discrimination victimisation’.

Last week, a group of experts called for the Government to postpone an inquiry led by Lady Justice Thirlwall, which is to begin hearing evidence on September 10. 

Letby is serving a whole life order after being convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill six more at the Countess of Chester Hospital between 2015 and 2016.

A jury found her guilty in July of trying to kill a seventh premature baby at the Countess of Chester Hospital after a retrial.

The letter has been sent to ministers signed by 24 neonatal experts and professors of statistics asking for the inquiry to be delayed – or its terms of reference altered to consider the possibility that ‘possible negligent deaths’ were ‘presumed to be murders’.

The notes – written between July 2016 when she had been taken off the ward as suspicions grew, and July 2018, when she was arrested – did not feature in Letby’s application to appeal her convictions, which was rejected.

In her first trial, Letby denied the notes meant she killed or harmed babies and said she was seeing Ms de Beger for support.

Defence counsel Ben Myers argued the notes represented Letby’s anguished state of mind rather than ‘guilt’.

The Countess of Chester hospital has declined to comment ahead of the inquiry.