Lucy Letby: The Return of Evil

What to do with the word ‘evil’? It is the ultimate description of the depraved depths to which some humans descend. Here we find infanticides, serial killings and genocides. Here we meet Ian Brady, Ted Bundy and Adolf Hitler. Yet our age’s anodyne response is to avoid the word altogether. We are the philosophical descendants of Rousseau, who assured us that humans really are naturally good, and are corrupted only by society’s influence. This is liberalism’s faith: to release personal autonomy and trust the individual to do whatever s/he likes, as long as it does not harm others.

So how does the horrific case of serial-killer nurse Lucy Letby fit into this paradigm? Perfectly well it appears. After struggling at first to believe that a nurse could murder sick babies, the Media described Letby with adjectives such as ‘cold’ and ‘calculating’. This is because in liberal minds, Letby can be safely quarantined as an exception which proves the rule that most are basically good if given the chance.

Yet Letby’s crimes demand an explanation, and at her trial the prosecutor, Nick Johnson KC, attempted to give some, such as Letby’s enjoyment at playing God, sadism, boredom, attention-seeking and resentment at parents for having children when she had none. It is the view of psychologist David Wilson that we are unlikely to ever know what drove Letby to kill as she has (typically for serial killers) maintained silence on the matter.

What compounds our confusion is that we are faced with an individual who is Britain’s worst modern child-killer, and yet is so unexceptional that she was described as ‘beige’ by one of the investigating detectives.

More confusing is Letby’s niceness. So popular was she among colleagues and hospital bosses, that they refused to believe she could be a murderer.

Yet, ordinariness and niceness are no barriers to wickedness. Did Hannah Arendt not note at the 1961 trial of Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann how commonplace he looked? And did not Joseph Brodsky, the exiled Russian writer, warn in a 1984 speech to American college graduates that evil is ubiquitous because it is capable of hiding in the guise of the good?

Here we have a more realistic understanding of human nature. Though we are capable of great good and usually manage lots of smaller virtues in a lifetime, in every heart is the capacity for evil; which remains true regardless of how unexceptional or how nice we are. True, the great majority never stoop to Letby’s egregious depths, but surely, we face the uncomfortable question of how low we could go given the right circumstances and internal pressures. Perhaps that is what explains the enduring appeal of William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies, which narrates the descent of well-brought up boys into savagery while marooned unsupervised on an island.

Liberal faith therefore underestimates the power of what Augustinian Christians have called original sin. Whether we inherit the capacity for evil or not, what is useful about this concept is that it describes everyone as having the potential to commit misdeeds, even evil ones. Therefore, it is the conservative approach that is wiser for it accepts the fact of ubiquitous evil, and seeks to manage that reality through parental discipline, parables, religion, customs and traditions, accountability and laws. Everyone is presumed innocent when accused, but no one is above suspicion and therefore every indictment requires an unprejudiced investigation. This would mean less capacity on the part of wicked people to divert attention from their nefarious deeds by claiming to be a victim, which makes a mockery of real victims.

The last word goes to Letby. When she was arrested in July 2018, on one of the post-it notes found in her handbag was the confession: ‘I am evil. I did this.’ Despite her psychopathic lack of empathy, Letby had a flash of insight into herself which according to Arendt, Eichmann wholly lacked. At that moment, she had no illusions. Perhaps we too need to lose our Rousseauian illusions and pay more attention to Golding’s myth, if we are to make ourselves more effective at catching people like Letby.

Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).

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