I’ll ask you one simple question.

Would you like to be in prison for life?

…

Well, then. There you are.

This is a follow-up to my previous post about her, about her possible motive.

We tend to think of such people as clever, scheming and cunning, don’t we? Lucy Letby certainly was scheming, but her notes have revealed how utterly miserable she was, so she wasn’t feeling superior to others. The fact that she’s rotting in prison now tells us that she wasn’t very clever either.

Seriously criminal behavior almost always comes at a great cost to the people who commit these crimes, too. Just consider how this whole thing must have taken over her entire life.

When you think of the victims, you get overwhelmed by their side of the experience and all you see is evil-doing. But what is it, evil?

The people who get fooled by the easy smiles and eager helpfulness of the likes of Lucy Letby have a lot to answer for too.

That not all is well within the NHS at management level has been known for years as well.

Yet calling out things that aren’t right and should be remedied will almost always get you vilified. That’s because it is metabolically costly for the brain to consider opinions that upset one’s firm beliefs, if it’s not political.

Similarly, most of us have the tendency to believe that if a person smiles a lot and appears very eager to help, she must have a matching character.

(I got this latter bit of wisdom from a paper about psychopathy. We tend to associate certain behaviors with certain character traits, but there may be no correlation at all. We are too eager to take things at face value. We also tend to assume that children who smile a lot aren’t being abused at home, for example.)

Instead of vilifying people like Lucy Letby, which is very easy (yes, for me too), I would like to know how we can prevent future repeats. I have no answers. I have lots of questions.