Cheshire Police are an incompetent bunch of useless bastards

She absolutely does not fit the profile of someone who would commit a crime like this - Shipman and other medical mass murderers display a god complex which Letby does not. I have been waiting for this to fall apart and fully believe that she was a convenient scapegoat for a negligently managed ward.

The prosecution didn't obviously base their case around statistics in court, but dodgy statistics are all they have, at the heart of the case.

The hospital consultants started to panic after a run of deaths. Look at their emails after 5 out of 7 of the children died, and they're working on lessons learned, planning for the future etc. Then after two more children died (after significant medical failures), they worked backwards from "she was there" to "she killed them in some invisible undetectable way".

Even if you accepted that children were murdered - and medical experts say there is no evidence of this at all - you can only pin it on Letby through poor use of statistics, since everyone agrees no crime was witnessed.

The judge also instructed the jury that if they found Letby guilty of some charges, they could assume it was more likely she was guilty of others, and they did not need to be sure how she had committed these other crimes to find her guilty of them. That's a clear invitation to convict her based on statistics.

The prosecution didn’t base their case in court around statistics. The media have done so, though.

The case of Baby C where it turned out she hadn’t even met the baby when the harm she had supposedly inflicted was shown in an x Ray.

www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/lucy-letby-was-not-working-on-day-baby-c-was-harmed-bbc-investigation-finds/ar-AA1rx5Rc?ocid=iehpLMEMhP&apiversion=v2&noservercache=1&domshim=1&renderwebcomponents=1&wcseo=1&batchservertelemetry=1&noservertelemetry=1

Yes, there were collapses while Letby was away or on other shifts. The hospital has never completed a full audit of unexpected collapses for the period because they don't have a definition and they did not report them. They gave evidence of this at the Thirlwall Enquiry.

A user called triedbystats posts details from the transcripts on Medium showing Letby's absence in some cases where she was accused of causing harm. They're quite involved but they are also very well evidenced.
https://medium.com/@triedbystats

Or for something less complex, there's David Rose's work for Unherd showing how cases were dropped because Letby wasn't on shift
https://unherd.com/2025/02/why-the-letby-case-isnt-closed/

You are right that the waters have got much murkier since the trial ended - I suppose people weren't allowed to discuss it until then (and until the retrial for one baby was over). And of course it is much more complicated to say, these children died of different causes, mostly related to inadequate care, than it is to say, this nurse was on duty, there are times when she would have been alone with the children, so we can assume she killed them by invisible attacks. I really think it is worth considering that something may have gone very wrong with this case, whatever your opinion of Letby and her professional conduct.

I haven't seen any evidence for her not being present. A bunch of stuff has been thrown around since the trial that has done nothing but muddy the waters. Were there collapses whilst she was away on holiday? Collapses on the night shift whilst she was on days and vice versa? Are you saying it's incorrect that the deaths and collapses followed her? If you've got any sources that'd be great.

I imagine there are still major question marks over those two mentioned as well. Without context saying stuff like "I gave into my compulsion" is quite alarming.

I don't put much weight into her not having an interest in murderers. Maybe she did but the police didn't think that was relevant? I mean plenty of us have an interest in true crime, doesn't mean we want to emulate the behaviour of serial killers. The babies might've just been collateral damage to her to get her the attention she craved (or revenge for not being given what she wanted) so she might not have gotten a kick out of actually causing the harm, just the aftermath. She did however keep trophies-that's pretty textbook serial killer behaviour.

There was no rule against Letby's social media searches when she worked at Chester. Her manager was asked about this and said they didn't have guidelines then. Quite likely they do now, but that's not relevant.

Air embolisms absolutely do kill (and faster than Dr Evans claimed when inventing murder scenarios for Letby).

Injecting what could only be tiny quantities of air into feeding tubes, on the other hand, is not a proven murder method, and I presume that's what the previous poster was referring to.

Babies get far more air in their stomachs from CPAP ventilation. Evans claimed during the trial that this was a clinically demonstrated murder method, then afterwards that it was previously unheard of.

All of this information is inaccurate. Letby didn't lie and claim not to know about air embolism in babies. That's not your fault, because it has been presented that way by journalists, specifically Judith Moritz's and Jonathan Coffey in their book, Unmasking Lucy Letby. That gets a lot of attention because Moritz is the BBC's main voice on Letby.

What Letby said is that when air embolisms were discussed on her unit, it was usually with regard to adults (that would be women delivering by Caesarean section especially). She never said she didn't know about them in babies: in fact she was clear that they'd had training in avoiding them, but not much else.

That means too that the text exchange - such was about another baby, not Baby O, but that is another thing Moritz gets wrong, was a perfectly reasonable discussion of a real risk.

So, according to Moritz and Coffey:

>When she was questioned by police, Letby said all nursing staff would be aware of the dangers of an air embolus [the air bubble itself], but she claimed she didn’t know much beyond this. She said ‘I don’t know exactly what [an air embolism] is. When we were taught about lines, we were taught about clearing lines because that’s what it would lead to.’ She also told police she was only aware of air embolisms in adults.

But - we have the transcript of the police interview, and they've quoted partially and misrepresented it. It's quite shocking how they have twisted it - either dreadfully careless or just not truthful.

Someone on Reddit has transcribed the interview, with link to video sources

https://www.reddit.com/r/LucyLetbyTrials/s/nIccei5cMA

Here is the relevant part.

Q: And what about air embolisms, Lucy? Did you receive any training in relation to those?
LL: No.
Q: Okay. Were you aware of them or?
LL: Not really, no.
Q: Have you heard of them before?
LL: Yes.
Q: When was that?
LL: I've heard of them more from an adult perspective.
Q: And tell me what that was in relation to.
LL: I don't know specifics. Like sometimes we've had mums on the unit who've been unwell and it's been found they've had AAP, pulmonary embolism. So that's just how I've heard of it via that.
Q: Specifically whilst working on the neonatal unit, have you ever come across it before?
LL: No.
Q: Has the air embolism training ever popped up in respect of dangers with other training that you might have had?
LL: Not that I can think of specifically.
Q: No, or any sort of general nursing training before you qualified?
LL: It's been mentioned in terms of line care. You'd have to be mindful that you don't leave a line open and things like that. But it's not something that's discussed frequently in any detail.
Q: When you say line care, you needed that competency assessment in May 2015 that we talked about, the safe administration of medication by the different lines. Is that the type of training that you're referring to?
LL: Yes. I'm not sure if that's on the list or not.

I hope Moritz and Coffey are planning to fix this in the revised edition. It's one thing having opinions on the case, but this claim of theirs is just objectively false.

There's no proof that at least one of the supposed murder methods would actually kill.

Air embolisms absolutely do kill.

She also lied about her knowledge of air embolisms during her police interview. She said that she was only aware of them in adults.

However, 2 weeks prior to the death of baby A, she had underwent training in administration of IV medicine where the dangers of air embolism were discussed.

2 weeks after the death of baby O, she has a text exchange with a colleague about inadequacies in baby O’s care - his catheter hadn’t been changed and a port had been left open - she was quick to point out that it was a massive risk of infection and air embolism.

In fact, apart from private discussions between the consultants, Lucy Letby was the only person to mention air embolism in the case of a baby who had died.

Nope it's against hospital rules to search the parents of patients you've taken care of. She didn't need to research murder methods, she was a nurse. She already knows what causes collapses. I don't know much about the other two people you mentioned, could you summarise what was suspicious about their backgrounds?

I think any parent will know that there will be peaks and troughs of activity when you work 13 - 14 hour night shifts caring for a couple of babies each - should have been one but usually wasn't in the cases Letby's accused of. And you'll manage to snatch the occasional break.

The question is what happens when a child goes into crisis - whether you have enough skilled people on hand for resuscitation for example. That's why Chester taking intensive care babies but not staffing the ward to intensive care levels was such a problem. At least two of the babies Letby was charged with killing could have had different outcomes with faster responses from medics in emergencies. For others, there were longer term missed opportunities to avert crisis.

It's a myth that most of the children Letby's accused of killing or harming would have been on the downgraded unit. Whenever I've seen people try to back that up with data, they refer to gestational age but ignore multiple and complex pregnancies, which also exclude babies from delivery and early care at level 1 units.

Even if they had been on the downgraded unit, that unit was much better run after Letby left the ward because the hospital was alerted to unsafe conditions. For example, consultants started to do two ward rounds a day instead of two a week, staffing ratios and space between cots were improved , and the hospital hired two dedicated neonatologists instead of relying on pediatric staff looking after the ward on the side.

Those are the conditions they needed to care for the least vulnerable cohort. The more vulnerable children they were taking in 2015 and 2016 before making those changes were not safe at Chester.

It very much sounds as though she was applying the very skills her job required to look into forensically suspicious deaths, but the police had made their minds up, and are now discrediting her. It's not like she has much to gain from coming forward.

I suppose some are arguing that all the professionals coming forward after Lucy Letbys trial are just after their five minutes of fame. However, that quote about all publicity being good publicity doesn't seem to apply in my opinion. I think it really is about the ethics and principles, and it's not like she doesn't have receipts.

@GossIsAGit

What I was meaning was it's intriguing that she was an expert when she was working for them carrying out the work. But now that she's spoken up they're saying it was just admin.

Either way, it puts them in a poor light. They'd either asked an admin person to do work way above her pay grade, or she was an expert they're now trying to downgrade because she's saying things they don't like.

I'm intrigued as to why Cheshire Polce employed this woman who's come forward to do what she was doing if it was just an admin role.

I'm on the fence with this. Don't have a clue either way.

It kind of feels like when they were pursuing her for murder, they took anything and everything to fit her to it. For instance, Dewi Evans identified a further ten "suspicious" baby deaths (this being the man who could identify wrongdoing within ten minutes of reading notes), but they discounted them because she wasn't there. Now, the deaths were either suspicious or they weren't. They can't be suspicious, then not suspicious because the person you're investigating wasn't there when they died. Why were they suspicious? Why wasn't that pursued? Unless he was just looking for anything to build a case on.

However, with this coroner's officer, maybe I feel that since she spoke about a case she was working on to experts (one of whom leaked to the press), when she shouldn't have been talking to anyone, it does make you wonder why she's coming forward. So, this muddies the waters further to me rather than clearing them in any way.

I'm not 100% sure it's a safe conviction, the statistics were used poorly and don't prove anything for instance. However, just because you your trial was sup par doesn't mean you're innocent.

It does mean there'll always be doubts though.

And two of the consultants need to be looked at, imo, because they seem to be part of the reason the babies received poor care.

Dr Evans had several bites of the cherry on this.

His cause of death / method of killing the babies changed when he found his initial hypotheses weren’t credible. If I recall correctly, on at least some of the babies, he changed the method three times!

And when at least one of the babies (that he initially said was murdered) was shown to have died when Letby wasn’t working, he changed his testimony / ‘evidence’ to remove them from consideration. Despite the post mortem results being near identical. His analysis of the pathology has also been called into doubt by many much more qualified (and experienced) consultants since.

A lot of the ‘evidence’ about Letby’s ‘weirdness’ had been hyped up by the red tops and daily comics. The same ones, in some cases, which have reverse-ferreted and are now reporting doubts about the conviction’s safety.

The unit was clearly chaotic (or let’s settle for very badly run). That much became very clear during her trial. Unsanitary, reliant on unqualified or under-qualified temp nurses, consultants recorded as not turning up to emergencies etc.

Plus, if it was a well run service:

a) it likely wouldn’t have been downgraded so quickly (the ‘murders’ wouldn’t have been enough for that - the CQC already had concerns and Letby hadn’t been convicted before they did it)

b) the police wouldn’t now be looking into its mismanagement (whilst desperately denying that the CPS conviction of Letby might be impacted by that).

The babies that Letby ‘murdered’ were certainly not in the categories the unit was approved to treat - that was also made very clear at trial and subsequently. It’s not something that’s in doubt.

Indeed.

I have yet to see an alleged serial killer who managed to be so cunning, conniving, manipulative and prolific while at the same time "stupid enough" to hand over "mountains" of dubious evidence.

Similarly the lack of people lining up to "sell their stories" to the tabloids once the trial was over. Indeed it appears a good number of her colleagues were gagged from submitting character references to support her, with the implication their jobs would be at risk if they did.

Her background reveals nothing of note.

Zero, zilch, nada in terms of abuse, trauma, mental instability, addiction - nothing to suggest she was anything other than an average young nurse living her version of her best life.

I've seen criticism of her close relationship with her parents. As an only child myself, I don't find that particularly damning.

It speaks volumes that the tabloids are occasionally falling back on "Lucy Letby is friends with other serial killers" as if she has much choice other than to rub along with her fellow prisoners in the hope she isn't shanked in the shower.

And those grasping at straws will mutter "ooh, it's always the quiet ones" completely overlooking the fact that she was basically convicted on the say so of an "expert" who fancies himself in the Southall and Meadows mould, with a strong sense of "crusade" about him, hoping for a last hurrah on his professional stage. And that his proposed mechanisms of death and injury are not supported by forensic evidence, were formulated in "ten minutes" and certainly were not proven "beyond all reasonable doubt" as the judge basically said "if you think she did one, you can extrapolate she must have done the others".

I have experience of "the system" which I've posted about before. Nobody wants to believe how it can go horribly wrong in cases based on "medical evidence" - i certainly didn't when I was given quite the rude awakening 30 years ago. But it does happen, and with a high profile case like this, the ramifications are disastrous for the justice system, plus everyone else caught up in the hoopla. Those babies parents deserve some sort of closure based in fact, not conjecture, hypothesis or opinion , and it's a long way off because of systemic failure in the NHS and the justice system.

The only way to make her present for all the suspicious deaths is to define suspicious deaths as the ones she was there for.
Oops, turns out a mistake has been made and she wasn’t there for that one? It wasn’t suspicious after all, cross it off the list.
You might think they did well in finding a scapegoat who didn’t throw paperwork away and FB searched parents, which no nurse has ever done before of course. I think they did very badly in finding one with absolutely nothing suspicious in her background, none of the typical history of a serial killer, to the extent that people flailing around for a motive are forced to come up with the bizarre argument that her very normality is suspicious and she killed the babies because she was ‘beige’.