“We haven’t got evidence, but we’ve got concerns” – this is the story of a seemingly open and shut case about serial child murder turned out to be not as convincing as initially presented.
On the 21st of August 2023, after a trial lasting over 10 months, a jury convicted Lucy Letby in a 10-1 vote of the murder of 7 babies. This made her the most prolific child killer in the history of the UK. The murders were said to have taken place between June 2015 and June 2016. She was sentenced to a whole life order (life without the possibility of parole).
Lucy Letby had been an unassuming 33 year old nurse who had worked at the Countess of Chester Hospital in Chester, a city close to the English-Welsh border. Her ward was responsible for premature babies, many of them born well before 40 weeks.
Letby initially made headlines earlier in the year when she was arrested and charged with the murders. She was dubbed “The Angel of Death” by the English press. Many people asked the question of why it took so long to catch her.
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Shrouded in secrecy…
While most people quickly tuned out of the trial (which was hard to follow due to baffling secrecy court orders which I will get into later), it seemed that there was little doubt about her guilt. Despite most people being totally unaware of her motives or the cause of death in any of the cases, she quickly became the most hated face in Britain.
However, almost as soon as the trial began, reports slowly faded and eventually disappeared altogether following the conviction. The dissection of the sadism which is usually the custom following an uncovering of such a gruesome discovery did not follow. The public (including myself) quickly forgot about it.
Fast forward to 13 May 2024, an incredible report authored by Rachel Aviv in the New Yorker magazine cast doubt on the magnanimity of her conviction. The article exposes the multiple holes in the physical and statistical evidence against her. It also exposes the worst parts of the National Health Service (a healthcare system which has been on its knees for some time).
This article was blocked from publication in the UK.
The magazine confirmed the article was unavailable in the UK due to a court order restricting press coverage of the case. Member of Parliament David Davis enquired about the rationale for the court order blocking this important enquiry but was rebuffed in his efforts.
In a piece for the Law Gazette, partners at the law firm Simons Muirhead Burton described the reporting restrictions as “unusual”. The orders granting secrecy to the witnesses were based on Section 46 of the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999. These are set to last their entire lifetime, a bizarre move given that they are under no physical threat and the case has been concluded.
This also means that theoretically, it could be over 70 years before journalists are able to legally report on the case.
When the British Medical Journal published an analysis of the evidence against Letby from a medical perspective, one of their experts concluded it was far from open and shut. A few weeks later, they received a call from the police ordering them to take them the piece. Curiously, the police did not object to other articles on the BMJ website about the trial which did not question her guilt.
What was the evidence against her?
Officially, the cause of death in all but one case was attributed to air embolism. This refers to a process whereby air in introduced into the vascular system. This is then supposed to cause difficulty getting oxygen into the lungs which results in cardiac arrest.
There was only one small problem with this seemingly perfect crime…it has never been proven to result in death.
No medical paper had ever documented this as a cause of death.
The magazine interviewed medical experts who were baffled by the assertion and questioned whether it was even physiologically possible for this to cause death.
This understandably confused the jury who were unable to reach a verdict for days. When it appeared this was a stumbling block for the jury, the judge instructed them that they could convict Letby even if they were unsure of “the precise harmful act” which was committed.
This has the hallmarks of working backwards from a conclusion (that Letby is guilty).
For the single attempted murder case, the attempted cause of death was stated as insulin poisoning. But, it was later revealed that Letby wasn’t actually working when the baby began showing symptoms. Additionally, she did not administer the drip that cause the spike in insulin. The only way she could’ve poisoned the baby was for her to have added the insulin to the drip bag prior to her departure.
But she wasn’t to know which bag would’ve been selected by the next nurse. She would also have had to know about this rather ineffective method of killing. Despite combing through her belongings for several days and weeks, there was no evidence she searched this up on the internet or knew about this method of poisoning. Also more odd is that she would change her method of killing (that seems to have worked very effectively so far).
To compound matters, the lab in which the insulin was tested explicitly warned that such tests should not be used for the purposes of poisoning investigations. Yet, despite this clear warning, the police brought a charge based on this and were quite happy to retry this same flawed cause until her appeal was denied.
Finally, it does not seem in the MO of serial killers to not be present to enjoy their handiwork.
The most convincing evidence the prosecution presented against Letby was that she was present when these murders occurred. According to them, the odds of her being present on the ward at the time of the deaths was too suspicious to ignore.
Ravi Jayaram (a consultant paediatrician) at the hospital made a list of all the deaths he considered suspicious. Jayaram marked the shifts where Letby had been working with an X. To him, and medical investigator Dewi Evans, this was too much of a correlation to ignore. However, as the defence pointed out, Jayaram made multiple errors in reaching this conclusion. For example, he incorrectly included a shift which, it turns out, Letby was not actually working. University of Edinburgh professor Burkhard Schafer made this observation:
I spoke to a friend of mine about the case who remarked: “why would healthy babies who had been expected to survive suddenly die mysteriously”. Such sentiments are commonplace in a UK population who have been starved of vital details about the case.
The fact are, the babies were far from healthy, they were all born premature and usually with life threatening conditions. Additionally, they were being treated in a hospital ill-equipped to care for them. In some instances, the hospital even accepted babies below the age threshold for which they were supposedly equipped to handle.
To top this all off, there was incredible strain on their resources which meant babies often received substandard care. Here is a paragraph from the Aviv’s article:
The warning in the last sentence now looks a lot more ominous in light of recent events.
People also point to the fact that deaths reduced after Letby was removed from the ward. However, this is likely because the hospital was downgraded to no longer receive intensive care patients. Women delivering before 32 weeks were also no longer admitted. According to the university of Utah, a baby chance of survival jumps from 60-70% if born at 24 weeks, to 95% if born at 32 weeks. This does not factor in other conditions like quality of care (a massive issue in our scenario), which would undoubtedly reduce these odds.
At Countess hospital, parents often complained about the quality of care. This was the case in one of the deaths she was charged with, that of Child A:
She was found guilty of murder in this case of Child A.
Prosecution’s star witness
Quality of evidence was a consistent theme throughout this trial. One of the prosecution’s star witnesses, Dewi Evans, a retired paediatrician, was in the witness stand for days and was the chief investigator working with the police. In a previous case just months ago, Evans provided evidence that the Judge had described as “worthless”. The Judge had made this conclusion of Evans’ work:
This appeared eerily similar to what Evans was doing in this case, working backwards from the conclusion that Letby was the culprit, contorting the evidence to promote this narrative and excluding many other theories which conflict with this conclusion.
When the defence moved to prevent Evans from testifying based on the discovered evidence about his professional competence, the judge denied their request.
The lack of any direct evidence against her, and given that the babies were premature and extremely vulnerable, was likely amongst the reasons why charges were not filed for almost a decade.
Infact, Letby had previously been twice arrested. But after being unable to find any evidence linking her to the deaths, she was released without charge.
The New Yorker piece also revealed the shocking level of incompetence at this hospital. In one case, a nurse was seen coughing and sneezing heavily while handling an incubator baby. In another example, multiple doctors and two anaesthesiologists were unable inserted an oxygen tube into a premature baby. A doctor was observed by a parent searching the internet for instructions on how to insert a line into the chest of a baby.
Such accounts might provide fuel for speculation around alternative reasons why the state seems to be enforcing such incredible secrecy in the case. Full transparency might bring these incompetencies into the full view of the public.
It appears this did not factor into the verdict of the case. In one of the cases for which she was convicted, the baby had died with pneumonia. After an initial autopsy years before the trial, this was confirmed by the pathologist. However, during the trial, the pathologist changed his opinion from “died from pneumonia” to “died with pneumonia”. This paved the way for the insinuation that this baby was likely another one of Letby’s victims. She was also found guilty in this case.
Conclusion
There is a popular saying amongst Nigerians: “I hope Nigeria doesn’t happen to me”. This is, of course, a prayer that one does not fall victim to the incompetence of the inefficient and often corrupt system. It appears we might need to adapt a version of this for the UK.
It is unclear whether this renewed interest will make a difference in this case. Letby’s guilt seems to have been decided the moment her faced was splashed across the TV and she was dubbed “the angel of death”. Once the trial actually begun, the public were unable to get any insight into the quality of evidence against her.
A few weeks ago, Letby’s application for an appeal was denied. She will be tried for attempted murder in the aforementioned insulin case (which is full of holes) this month.
For the foreseeable future, she will continue to languish in prison until perhaps one or more witnesses decide to change their story. But I doubt even that will be enough. The real perpetrators in this story is a system (the NHS) which has been badly degraded by a decade of systematic cuts and neglect. That story is one the government will go to great lengths to avoid telling.
This article was written by our guest contributor, Ade Joseph. He is a UK based political commentator who covers the UK and US. You can find his work at his website: (whatintheworldweekly.com)
You can also enjoy his work as a podcast series which can be found at Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.