A British nurse convicted last week of murdering seven infants between 2015 and 2016 and attempting to murder six more has been sentenced to life in prison.
The 33-year-old nurse, who will not be named per Daily Wire policy, became the United Kingdom’s worst serial killer of babies in recent times after she was convicted in 14 out of the 22 counts she faced, People Magazine reported. On Monday, she was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The nurse didn’t appear for sentencing, which has led some to call for changes in law to ensure that a guilty person is present for their sentencing hearing, CNN reported. During sentencing, Justice James Goss explained that the nurse deserved life in prison because her crimes were “a cruel, calculated and cynical campaign of child murder involving the smallest and most vulnerable of children.”
He spoke as if the nurse were in the courtroom and ordered his remarks and all victim impact statements to be sent to the convicted serial killer.
“There was a deep malevolence bordering on sadism. During the course of this trial you have coldly denied any responsibility for your wrongdoing. You have no remorse. There are no mitigating factors,” he said, according to CNN.
Following sentencing, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak denounced the nurse for not appearing at her hearing.
“I think it’s cowardly that people who commit such horrendous crimes do not face their victims and hear first hand the impact that their crimes have had on them and their families and loved ones,” he said. “We are looking and have been at changing the law to make sure that that happens and that’s something that we’ll bring forward in due course.”
The nurse’s trial took ten months to complete at Manchester Crown Court, with the 11-person jury failing to reach verdicts on six additional counts of attempted murder. She was also found not guilty on two counts of attempted murder.
The woman, who worked as a nurse in the neonatal ward of the Countess of Chester Hospital in Chester, England, would inject air into babies’ blood and stomachs, overfeed them with milk, physically assault them, and poison them with insulin, CNN reported.
Seven babies died as a result of the nurse’s acts, leading to seven guilty convictions for murder. She was also found guilty on seven counts of attempted murder relating to six additional babies, Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said in a press release on Friday.
During a police investigation, authorities found handwritten notes in the nurse’s home, including one that read, “I am evil I did this.”
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During the trial, which started last October, jurors were told that doctors at the hospital where the nurse worked began noticing an unusually high number of babies dying or unexpectedly collapsing. After finding no medical explanation, the hospital called the police.
“[The nurse] sought to deceive her colleagues and pass off the harm she caused as nothing more than a worsening of each baby’s existing vulnerability,” Pascale Jones, the senior crown prosecutor, said in a statement. “In her hands, innocuous substances like air, milk, fluids – or medication like insulin – would become lethal. She perverted her learning and weaponized her craft to inflict harm, grief and death.”
At trial, prosecutors introduced evidence showing that the babies were perfectly healthy before being attacked. For those who recovered from the nurse’s attempts to kill them, their recovery was too rapid for the harm to have been natural. Investigators also found falsified medical documents from the nurse attempting to hide her involvement in the deaths, including altering time reports to make it appear as though they occurred when she was not there.
Text messages and social media activity also coincided with the attacks, some of which seemed to live blog the events. This activity, according to CPS, showed the nurse had an “intrusive curiosity about the parents of babies she had harmed.”