When doctors and nurses become serial killers chilly stories of Lucy Letby
One of the chilling stories from the United Kingdom last week was of the guilt, by a jury, of a 33-year old nurse, Lucy Letby, of wilfully murdering seven babies entrusted under her care and attempting to kill seven others while working at the Countess of Chester hospital between June 2015 and June 2016. Two of Lucy Letby’s victims were twin brothers, who were born prematurely. They were just days old when Letby tried to kill them in April 2016.
Reports indicated that Lucy Letby attempted to portray the harm she intentionally inflicted on babies under her care as nothing more than the exacerbation of each baby’s pre-existing vulnerability. However, the reality was that she turned innocuous substances like air, milk, fluids, and medications such as insulin into weapons. Police arrested her twice in connection with their investigation in 2018 and 2019, ultimately apprehending her in November 2020.
She was in her mid-20s when she committed those heinous crimes. One of the hand-written notes authorities found during searches of her home read: “I don’t deserve to live. I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them.” In another memo she also reportedly wrote, “I am a horrible evil person” and in capital letters “I AM EVIL I DID THIS.”
But Lucy Letby was not an isolated case of those entrusted to help preserve life turning into life takers. Before her were other cases – both in the UK and elsewhere. One of the most celebrated cases in recent times in the United Kingdom revolved around Harold (aka Fred) Shipman. Reports indicated that Harold, as a teenager, saw his mother suffer through the agony of battling lung cancer and felt a profound influence from the relief that morphine provided. Reportedly, he developed an obsession with opiates from that point onward. By 1974, only a year into his medical practice, authorities caught him forging prescriptions of Demerol for himself. He paid a small fine for that and served a short period in rehab for drug addiction. He returned to medical practice afterwards as a respected member of his community.
However, in 1998, the coroner became aware of the elevated death rate among Shipman’s patients, yet there wasn’t enough evidence to accuse him of anything. One Kathleen Grundy however turned out to be his Waterloo. Suspicions arose when investigators discovered that Grundy’s will omitted her family members but allocated a significant £386,000 to Dr. Shipman. They initiated an inquiry, which resulted in the exhumation and autopsy of Grundy’s body. Notably, her system contained not only heroin, but also evidence revealed that someone had falsified her medical records and composed her supposed will using Dr. Shipman’s typewriter.
There were more exhumations of people who had died under Dr. Shipman’s care and further investigations revealed a pattern: he would administer lethal doses of heroin, sign death certificates and falsify medical records to show an alternative cause of death.
In 2000, authorities sentenced Shipman to 15 life terms for killing 15 women through deadly heroin injections between 1995 and 1998. Estimates indicated that Shipman took the lives of over 218 patients using this method throughout his career, establishing him as Britain’s most prolific serial killer to this day. In 2004, he hanged himself in his prison cell, aged 57. Even after his guilt, Dr. Shipman and his wife, Primrose, continued to maintain his innocence and disputed the scientific evidence against him.
But medical personnel turning into undertakers is not only a British phenomenon. In Italy, there was also the celebrated case of the emergency room doctor Leonardo Cazzaniga, 65, and his nurse lover, Laura Taroni. Prosecutors accused the doctor of killing in a “delirium of omnipotence” by administering overdoses of anaesthetic and sedative drugs to his patients”. Police investigated 40 deaths between 2011 and 2014 that aligned with Cazzaniga’s work shift. Remarkably one of the patients was Dr Cazzaniga’s own father. While Dr. Cazzaniga’s defense lawyers contended during his trial that his practices aligned with standard palliative care, the prosecution pointed out that one of the victims passed away after entry with nothing more than a dislocated shoulder.
Dr. Cazzaniga received guilt for the murder of his nurse-lover’s father-in-law and for acting in collaboration with her to kill her husband. Taroni reportedly persuaded her husband that he had diabetes and intentionally administered fatal doses of insulin to him. A police wiretap recorded Taroni’s statement: “From time to time, I want to kill someone.” I need it.” Dr. Cazzaniga’s guilt involved ten counts of murder, leading to in a life imprisonment sentence. Meanwhile, Taroni received a 30-year jail term for the murder of two family members.
One of the famous cases of medical personnel turning into life takers in the USA was that of the neurosurgeon Christopher Duntsch. Born on 3 April 1971, Duntsch completed his undergraduate medical degree in 1995 and also successfully completed an MD-PhD programme in 2010. He completed his neurosurgery residency program at the University of Tennessee Health Science Centre. Reports indicate that he finished his residency with fewer than 100 surgeries (which is a tenth of the typical number) and also supposedly participated in a training program for impaired physicians during a portion of his training, primarily due to his cocaine use.
Upon joining Baylor Regional Medical Centre at Plano in Texas, he promptly conducted surgery on a patient, resulting in partial paralysis. Subsequent patients experienced similar disabilities or injuries due to his incompetence and lack of care. Overall, Duntsch, who earned the monikers Dr. Death and Dr. D, faced charges of harming 33 out of 38 surgery patients over a span of two years. Dr, Duntsch left a trail of injured patients still at more hospitals. He faced arrest in 2015 on criminal charges and received a guilty verdict in 2017, leading to a life imprisonment sentence.
In systems where the institutions are strong and searching authorities are methodical without fear of being accused of ethnic or religious witch-hunts if they raised red flags against anyone, many of the bad eggs in the medical and other professions eventually get caught and weeded out. If we have not heard of medical personnel who are serial killers in Nigeria, it is not because they do not exist. Most likely they do but the system that should sniff them out seems rather weak. This is especially so in the rural areas where pharmacies (or chemists) and community health practitioners do not feel responsible to anyone even in faces of obvious neglect. This should be a challenge to the new Minister of Health and the various commissioners of health at the state levels.
That serial killers are also among medical doctors and nurses – who are usually among the most respected members of the society in virtually every clime – brings to mind the words of Johanna (‘Hanna’) Arendt, the German-American political theorist. In her classic work, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil” (1963), Arendt informs us that history’s major atrocities weren’t carried out by fanatics or sociopaths. Instead, they were perpetrated by regular, even respectable individuals who embraced the principles of their disgraceful deeds. Consequently, they engaged in those abominable actions under the belief that such actions were standard.
This is the so-called doctrine of ‘normalising the unthinkable’ or routinization of evil. This elucidates why tragedies such as the Jewish Holocaust or the Rwandan Genocide implicate respectable individuals – including medical doctors, academics, and even clergy – as participants or partners in the extremely acts. Betrayal of trust is a frequent event – take bodyguards, for instance, who occasionally kill the individuals they’re meant to protect, as demonstrated by the assassination of Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984. Moreover, African politicians frequently turn against the very people who elected them. However, there is a distinct poignancy when doctors and nurses betray their patients.
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Jideofor Adibe is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Nasarawa State University, Keffi and Extraordinary Professor of Government Studies at North Western University, Mafikeng South Africa. He is also the founder of Adonis & Abbey Publishers and can be reached at 0705 807 8841(Text or WhatsApp only)
