Marantz4250b
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This is an interesting article (which is an extract from a book by Patricia Pearson called When She Was Bad: How and Why Women Get Away with Murder) talking about female serial killers working in health care settings. Briefly refers to LL, but is more general.
A good reminder that it's definitely not impossible that LL is guilty, even if it is unlikely.
When Healers Do Harm: Women Serial Killers in the Health Care Industry
That's extremely interesting. There are a lot of similarities between Wetlauffer and Beverley Allitt, I think. The striking one is that they both started killing (or at least attempting to in Wetlauffer's case) almost immediately that they started nursing. They both had unpleasant behavioural issues in their lives prior to going into nursing; Wetlauffer had a disturbing history including a domineering father, religious fundamentalism, repressed sexuality and abuse related to it ("Conversion" therapy, which is sick, quite frankly) and who knows what else. They were also similarly huge attention seekers; I don't buy her suicide attempt as being genuine as she'd experimented with how much insulin was needed to kill someone so if she was serious about doing it then she could have easily succeeded using that. Also, I find it difficult to believe that a nurse would underestimate the amount of pills to take.
Both of these people were doing more than just killing. Wetlauffer clearly enjoyed causing pain. Allitt was doing it for attention seeking reasons but she was clearly a sadist too given the she had a history of violence towards boyfriends and was known to have poisoned the family she stayed with for a time, including their dog. That's more than mere attention seeking, it's a desire to cause suffering in others.
You're right in that it's certainly not impossible that LL is guilty but for every serial killer I read about it just seems less and less likely that she is. She's nothing like any of them from what we know. Yes, there may be some unpleasant stuff about her that comes out at trial but it's not looking likely at present. The press had two and a half years to uncover any dirt they could on her and came up with the sum total of zero. If someone had said even the slightest negative thing about her we'd have known about it. As it is the most "negative" thing anyone seems to have said about her was that she was "slightly awkward" which is really completely insignificant. It's noteworthy that in the story about Wetlauffer her colleagues had serious reservations about her, one even putting in writing the comment ...why is she still here.... LL's colleagues all seem to be backing her 100%.
I'll stick my neck out here and say that I think that Lucy Letby is completely innocent of this. I don't think that she's been "set up" in the sense that people have intentionally fabricated evidence but, rather, that she's the victim of the prosecution going off down a wrong track and being unable to get off it. Perhaps it will come out at trial that she's had a horrendous background or has been abused or had drug problems or something but I seriously doubt it. We'd have some inkling of that were it the case. People who's only flaw is being "slightly awkward" (and, to be clear, I don't think it's a real flaw at all) do not turn out to be serial murderers. People often repeat the line "...normal people turn out to be serial killers all the time..., they don't though. If they did then there would be no point in the FBI, or anyone else, setting up criminal profiling departments and no one would study criminal psychology or the related subjects.