Italian television news, if it wants to introduce something with a little eccentricity or pageant or both, will present items from the British Isles . The majority of these concern, predictably, the Royal Family; Prince(?) Harry’s confession in particular have had Italian housewives pontificating about his life-crises on the various chat shows which litter the TV channels. Recently, however, the focus has turned to a thirty-three year old nurse who may well become the UK’s most prolific baby murderer and be one of only three British women with a total life sentence. (The world’s most prolific baby killer will, no doubt, be a toss-up between Putin, the leader of the Third Reich or any of the tin-pot instigators of the various genocides which afflict the world).
In a land where the ‘bambino’ is the supreme focus of adoration in the family, Italians are finding it very hard to comprehend why an attractive girl, a recent graduate from university and now in a career she wanted to practise, should set about murdering babies, injecting them with insulin and air.
Apparently, even UK journalists are unable to reason why these horrific events should have taken place. A part- answer may eventually be declared by psychologists but only if they construct a new theorem that may explain those facts.
The way the events leading to Letby’s arrest unfolded over a period of over eight years is unsettling. Apparently, the professional opinion of doctors counts less than their bosses’. If one consultant suspects a murderess in the hospital’s maternity department then he/she had better be very careful to avoid being coerced into apologising to their suspect for believing that they could be other than innocent. Sadly, this train of events has been echoed before so many times in a society so flooded by hypocrisy as the United Kingdom continues to be. Just think of Saville for a start.
Moreover, was Letby ever observed when carrying out her nursing duties? Why did no one see when she filled in the hypodermic syringe with poison? Why did no-one link her presence on duty at all events where an infant mortality was recorded? How could all this have gone on for years without anyone noticing something irregular? Doubtless the fear the medical staff had of perhaps losing their jobs if they criticised managerial decisions must play a part in this atrocious neglect of what was really happening. Hospital managers ugh! They have far higher salaries that most doctors, take up the majority of funds the taxpayer contributes to the NHS and – judging by the straits the jewel in the crown of the UK’s care system now finds itself in – could well be largely responsible for the NHS’s current mess. It would be interesting to note how the rise of managerial salaries in the past fifty years compares with doctors’ and especially, nurses.
Murder is the most horrible of all crimes. When the act of removing another person’s most precious possession, their life, revolves to killing babies, when the killer is a nurse, when that nurse is a young woman capable of bearing her own children, when that woman looks so affectionate and happy with her smiles, when that murderer is so implicitly trusted…. then all explanations fail. For there are none!
To return to Italy, where the reason for the country’s declining birth rate is that parents cannot afford to give their promised offspring the finest of clothes, food and housing, where little lord Fauntleroy must have the best of everything and be spoilt beyond all measure, the case of Lucy Letby signals to many Italians that there is something very wrong somewhere in British society. For, just in Bagni di Lucca, the only case of a baby being murdered was that of Liliana Urbach gassed in a German concentration camp in 1944 aged just two.
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