Dear Lucy
I’m writing to say how sorry I am that we won’t get to meet. Some years ago, we would have perhaps met in HMP Holloway. The Lifer Unit there was very well resourced with pets and everything! sadly it’s now no more. Demolished. Although no longer in HMP Holloway, I’m still working with people who have killed in a similar way to you by weaponizing drugs, surprisingly they are exclusively men and within the context chemsex, not nursing or hospitals I’m afraid. Anyway, I thought I would write, just to let you know the sort of things we could have talked about.
It’s a shame we won’t get to chat as I also some questions that I think you may have found refreshing. Unlike it seems the world and its mother, I would not need to ask, ‘How could you murder those babies?’ The act of murder is, I’ve come to understand, really very simple. I get it. Your own method in fact, easy as pie. No, my main question would be, why so many?
I’m also wondering if you got as bored as I did with people being so shocked about the fact that a nurse could murder? and that you didn’t look like someone who could murder? Gosh people are so predictable. Yawn.
O Lucy! you have made an awful lot of people so very angry indeed. But here’s the thing, they don’t appear to be angry about the fact that you have murdered many, but rather than you don’t look or sound like someone who would. One journalist. Judith Moritz, I think it was, wrote columns about you and clearly could just not get her head around the fact that at no point have you fulfilled whatever image it is that she holds in her mind of what a murderer looks like. Her lengthy piece for BBC News ended in despair. “I just don’t understand” she says. Bless. But seriously though, it’s about time that Judith Moritz, her other journalist friends, and the many despairing others stood in front of a mirror and realise what they see reflected back is what someone who murders looks like.
Lucy, the fact that you were a nurse and chose your nursing context and environment in which to kill comes as no surprise to me. I would go as far as saying, if one wishes to commit murder, it’s a perfect role and hospitals are the perfect setting I’m more shocked in fact about you getting found out, caught. Mind you, it took them quite a few years.
Despite all the interest in crime fiction, thrillers, real life crime genre and the like it does seem that the collective response of disbelief, in relation to yourself, reveals very little imagination. Think nurses. Think doctors. Think hospitals. These roles and institutions clearly sit in our minds in a very particular way. A way in which we are heavily invested and need to maintain. There are reasons for that investment. It offers the illusion of comfort. We need nurses, doctors, and the places we go to when vulnerable with sickness to be safe, kind, caring, empathic, often to a level that is superhuman. So much so, we end up referring to the personnel as ‘angels and the buildings as sanctuaries of healing. My guess Lucy is that you knew this fact very well indeed. Which makes me want to ask another question if I may; At what point did you decide to use your context, your ‘angel’ identity to transfer your own imaginations into reality?
Yes, you and I Lucy appear to have a shared knowledge about the idealisation of those involved in health care and how such idealisation is born from the primitive fears and anxieties of our own vulnerability. In vulnerable situations, we need to make nurses ‘Angels’ and doctors ‘Saviours’. Anything less is just too risky. For those on the receiving end of such powerful projections that is a lot to live up to. It’s not just murder that challenges this delusion. Just look at how quickly adulation changes to denigration when nurses and doctors dare to go on strike.
Lucy, I want to go back a bit if your able to; Can you recall for me the very first moment you put on your nurse’s uniform. Tell me what did it feel like? How did other people respond to you? What did their reactions make you feel about yourself? Does power have a role to play here? Narcissism perhaps? Definitely even.
My guess is Lucy, what you are likely to have described in response to my curiosity , would be very similar to what other nurses have told me. What you and they recognise is the associated unconscious dynamics that until now have been a powerful part of your working life. This is especially so in relation to your very particular setting of the Special Care Baby Unit. Here, even more dynamic influencing factors would have been at play. Infant vulnerability confronts us with our very own. Not surprising then that such a unit and all those that work on it again need to be seen and thought of as deeply caring, dedicated, able to banish pain, suffering and able to achieve survival. Tell me how aware of those beliefs of others were you? what did that make you feel? And what did you think of those who had those expectations of you? Sorry, a lot of questions I know.
Lucy, what I’m going to say now is related to what we have just recognised and again, I think this is something that you have known and understood for a very long time. Please correct me if I’m wrong. But with all those parents and others so deeply invested in seeing only positive things about the unit and its staff, then the other part of the until and its staff does not get recognised or even thought about. I’m talking about the not so benign aspects of the unit and of hospitals in general I suppose. Because also present, perhaps even more so, are the realities of pain, risk, suffering, disappointment, not knowing, loss, sadism even, death even. Gosh that is heavy, and one can start to understand, just a little as to why the delusional belief of ‘angels’ becomes so important.
Look Lucy, to be honest, I thought it was quite unfair that some media and some people who looked at you in court then went on to describe you as cold, unfeeling, disconnected. There was no recognition that for you, your fellow nurses, doctors, and managers there is a massive need to remain distant, not to show feelings, to even cut feelings off. It’s something you would have learned to do very early in your career. It’s how you and clinicians manage to survive the full reality of working in a hospital. Had I been in court or if I’d written your report, I would have pointed out that outside of stressful situations away from the unit and indeed away from the court room you would and clearly had the capacity to feel fully, connect with friends, show emotion and to engage well with others. There was loads of evidence of such fact. But your career required you for long periods of time not to think and not to feel. For you, like many other health care professionals it had become a default way of being.
I think it would be helpful to both of us if you gave some time to thinking about the process I have just described and then write it all down. When did you start to be able to control your feelings by numbing them, but not feeling? Did this start at work or had you achieved the ability to do this before, maybe a long time before? Then describe for me the occasions when you did allow yourself to feel, when you connected, when you expressed ranges of emotion. Then please, if you would, describe for me the range of feelings you experienced when bringing about the deaths of the babies in your care. I know that won’t be easy, so perhaps do that starting with the first one and then work your way right up until the last. In that way we might start to see how the feelings you were experiencing changed over time. Usually, I would very much want to be with someone when they did this task and I’m sorry I’m asking you to do this alone. Maybe I’m being over concerned for you. Revisiting the moments of the babies deaths need not be horrific for you, those moments in particular may have been moments of extreme pleasure, immense powerfulness, omnipotence.
I hope by doing the exercise I suggest above that it will help us to think about you more wholly. I’ll be direct. I know some have labelled you as having a psychopathic personality structure. I’m not convinced. I think there may be other issues at play. You gave me a clue when you made the arresting officer adjust the seat in the police car because of recent knee surgery. Such was your concern, it made me think of your narcissistic needs. We all have them, but to varying degrees and yours, in that moment, seemed quite acute. I’m cheeky to say that without even doing a full assessment – apologies. Oh yes! There was one other thing that made me think the same. Your hair. You’ve changed its colour but not its style. You still wear it as you did in your school photograph. I’d love to ask you about that.
In closing, I just want to indicate where ongoing discussions would go if we were to work together. Childhood. Yes, that old chestnut, or more precisely, parents. Both your own and those of the babies you killed. Yours were present in court for the whole trial, this is highly unusual. Was this out of their love and concern of you? Was it that they hoped to learn something about you? or about themselves? or was there presence a sign of knowing? A knowing about you and themselves and the three of you together. How did you experience their presence? Was it Supportive? Oppressive? Controlling? Accusing? Shaming? Or all these things? and what about their presence throughout your life, how was that? How will it be now? You also formed attachments with the parents of the babies you killed, and it does seem that you went out of the way to do this, to include them in some way. Simply Lucy, was it about the babies or about the parents? If I’ll be bold and again correct me if I’m wrong. I think it was about the parents, yes?
Finally, I just want to recognise that your sentence is the loss of liberty, that, and nothing else is the punishment. The lifer progression process is not and should not be a punishment. I think you will come to know that. Although life will be very different for you, you will have a life and you’ll need to live it as fully as you can. You’ve created enough loss. Enough is enough. I say that to all the lifers I work with.
Your sentence is also about protecting the public. But truth is, that responsibility sits with the rest of us and I’m convinced it starts with us surrendering our immensely dangerous need for angels.
Br Stephen Morris fcc
