Meet the Other Phone. A phone that grows with your child.

Meet the Other Phone.
A phone that grows with your child.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

Chat

Join the discussion and chat with other Mumsnetters about everyday life, relationships and parenting.

Lucy Letby in the news

1000 replies

Viviennemary · 29/08/2024 22:33

I've just been watching the BBC news and apparently some experts have been questioning the validity of Lucy Letbys conviction. I must say when I read the details of the trial she did sound 100% guilty. But it would be a tragedy if she is innocent Personally I don't think she is but who knows. Somebody on the news said the only person who knows is Lucy Letby.

OP posts:
Thread gallery
38
mids2019 · 01/09/2024 22:35

These aren't mad conspiracy theorists questioning Lucy's guilt but erudite professionals. You don't get this kind of support for other child killers who have gained notoriety.

Firefly1987 · 01/09/2024 22:48

@mids2019 I dunno about that, Richard Gill seems a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Didn't he have to have a talking to from the police?

CormorantStrikesBack · 01/09/2024 22:52

HollyKnight · 01/09/2024 22:22

Similar thing happened in the maternity hospital in my area in 2012. Three babies on the neonatal ward died within a short period of time. They found all the babies were infected with pseudomonas. They did an investigation, tested the water and discovered it was in the pipes. Anyone who washed their hands or used the tap water for anything was just spreading it to all the babies. They had to rip out and replace all the plumbing. They tested the main hospital after that and found it was in the plumbing there too. Most people survive these infections, but not tiny premature babies.

The neonatal unit and and maternity wing I used to work in had the same thing. Afaik it potentially still does as they never ripped the plumbing out, just introduced a new flushing regime where all taps have to be run for two mins a day.

and yes the water is tested regularly. But the wards never closed when we had it. And it was there for weeks and weeks even after it was first found.

HollyKnight · 02/09/2024 00:01

CormorantStrikesBack · 01/09/2024 22:52

The neonatal unit and and maternity wing I used to work in had the same thing. Afaik it potentially still does as they never ripped the plumbing out, just introduced a new flushing regime where all taps have to be run for two mins a day.

and yes the water is tested regularly. But the wards never closed when we had it. And it was there for weeks and weeks even after it was first found.

Edited

That's scary. Thankfully ours was a bit more proactive. They separated the babies with infections from those without, transferred out the really sick non-infected ones, and any women due to give birth to premie babies were sent to other hospitals to have their babies. But then again, even after that, there were problems with sewage backflowing into the sinks and we even had ceilings in the side rooms collapse onto patients because of leaks above. Then there were the asbestos issues...

Old hospitals are really not great places.

MyrtlethePurpleTurtle · 02/09/2024 00:04

mids2019 · 01/09/2024 18:48

There seems to be a slow but growing voice of opinion that this could be a horrendous miscarriage of justice. I think posters have a good point when they state that not many are prepared to defend publicly a 'baby killer' so will have been reticent in coming forward with opinion.

As time has passed more and more statisticians and medics are coming forward showing how complex evidence can be manipulated or misinterpreted.

There has been a well acknowledged problem with our legal system in handling extremely complex fraud cases and so we have to say an adversarial court system with unqualified jurors may not be ideal. It is like a layman walking into a paediatric conference where two academics were arguing over a paper with reference to correlations, p values, t tests etc. or methods of detecting blood sugar levels.

Thrown into the mix is the fact the neonatal ward was failing generally at the time with a toxic work culture. The enquiry into neonatal deaths is stalled because people are not happy with having to assume the babies deaths were murders and should be reviewed holistically in terms of a failing NHS department.

The parents of those babies must be horrified at the possibility of a miscarriage of justice and all the anger channeled at Lucy is possibly giving way to confusion. The parents can't reach closure like this.

Also the jurors must now be tormented by the fact that there is debate now about the conviction and I wonder how they now feel?

To be honest, I don't think it's a jury problem here but a problem with the way the prosecution curated and presented the 'evidence'.

Mirabai · 02/09/2024 00:04

SherlockHolmess · 01/09/2024 22:07

@Mirabai I’m sure I read it somewhere in this thread. I can’t trawl through 18 pages atm to find where it’s mentioned but I googled and found this

https://www.scienceontrial.com/post/criminal-justice-in-england-disagreeable-facts

I’m happy to be corrected if this is not robust though.

Yes she’s the scientist who claims this but I haven’t seen it confirmed anywhere else.

Mirabai · 02/09/2024 00:13

MyrtlethePurpleTurtle · 02/09/2024 00:04

To be honest, I don't think it's a jury problem here but a problem with the way the prosecution curated and presented the 'evidence'.

I dunno - even if you put 6 experts on either side: what would the jury decide on?

Probably the most certain, the most charismatic of the expert witnesses, not the soundest science.

Angela Cannings had 13 expert witnesses speak for her and she still lost.

Bulkbuyorrunoutandcry · 02/09/2024 00:21

I personally think she is guilty and a very unwell individual with a very sick hero complex. I don’t think she’s guilty beyond reasonable doubt - Like many, I listened to the trial word for word via the podcast about how. Where two journalist just repeated everything said in court and all the evidence

It seemed to me that no, there just wasn’t enough evidence to convict her. And the circumstantial evidence was all a bit odd.

Yet I do personally think she done it. And that is a scary thought, that the facts presented to me can be seen one way, but my gut tells me differently. And is my gut or, on balance, the gut of the Jury enough to sentence someone to life in prison, subjected to obvious abuse in whatever form from other inmates at some point? I don’t know.

tiredhv · 02/09/2024 00:32

@ToBeOrNotToBee "
When I was working in midwifery, for a 4-5 months, every single woman I cared for needed something like an emergency cesarean, forceps, I even had a shoulder dystocia and a very poorly baby as a result.
I was the common demoninator and it really impacted me. In fact this was the trigger for a period of time where I was suicidal and ultimately quit my career. I used to write in my journals similar things to what Letby did.
Reading people saying she must be guilty based on her own writing chills me to the bone because they would have found me guilty (of what I don't know) the same way.
I do believe there is way more to this than meets the eye. This is a very shaky conviction.

I just wanted to reply to this and say I have been in the exact same position. A few weeks into it, it became a light hearted joke amongst my colleagues that I'd been so 'unlucky'.. but then it carried on.
About 2 months into it I started feeling really wobbly about it.
Then I had this shift, beautiful family, perfect ctg, lovely shift, I remember thinking gosh, I'm finally having a nice normal day, then at handover she had a braddy that never recovered, cat 1 section and a very, very poorly baby afterwards. Trawled through the records, I'd done nothing wrong, was completely random. And it just totally tipped me over the edge. I'd lost all resilience to it after months of horrible emergencies and not a single normal delivery.

I'm not saying I think she's innocent, I really don't know either way, the circumstantial evidence is strong. All I'll say is I can see why she'd write those things.

Can't explain the psychology behind it but it gets to a point where when you are the common denominator, you think it absolutely must be your fault or something you're doing. You blame yourself 100% and feel guilty because if they'd been allocated another MW, they'd have had a normal delivery. It's like you're the bad luck so whoever you look after has a bad outcome and that's your fault.

Like you, I also left midwifery.

ToBeOrNotToBee · 02/09/2024 00:51

tiredhv · 02/09/2024 00:32

@ToBeOrNotToBee "
When I was working in midwifery, for a 4-5 months, every single woman I cared for needed something like an emergency cesarean, forceps, I even had a shoulder dystocia and a very poorly baby as a result.
I was the common demoninator and it really impacted me. In fact this was the trigger for a period of time where I was suicidal and ultimately quit my career. I used to write in my journals similar things to what Letby did.
Reading people saying she must be guilty based on her own writing chills me to the bone because they would have found me guilty (of what I don't know) the same way.
I do believe there is way more to this than meets the eye. This is a very shaky conviction.

I just wanted to reply to this and say I have been in the exact same position. A few weeks into it, it became a light hearted joke amongst my colleagues that I'd been so 'unlucky'.. but then it carried on.
About 2 months into it I started feeling really wobbly about it.
Then I had this shift, beautiful family, perfect ctg, lovely shift, I remember thinking gosh, I'm finally having a nice normal day, then at handover she had a braddy that never recovered, cat 1 section and a very, very poorly baby afterwards. Trawled through the records, I'd done nothing wrong, was completely random. And it just totally tipped me over the edge. I'd lost all resilience to it after months of horrible emergencies and not a single normal delivery.

I'm not saying I think she's innocent, I really don't know either way, the circumstantial evidence is strong. All I'll say is I can see why she'd write those things.

Can't explain the psychology behind it but it gets to a point where when you are the common denominator, you think it absolutely must be your fault or something you're doing. You blame yourself 100% and feel guilty because if they'd been allocated another MW, they'd have had a normal delivery. It's like you're the bad luck so whoever you look after has a bad outcome and that's your fault.

Like you, I also left midwifery.

It's so odd isn't it.
The rational part of your brain knows its not you, just really bad luck. The irrational part of the brain thinks you're doing something wrong, there's something about you that's causing all this, and maybe you're evil. I remember writing something like "it's all my fault, I did this" after a particularly nasty PPH where I froze for a few seconds before pulling the alarm bell. A very normal human reaction. That was my last shift.
My mental health took a massive hit. I swung from insomnia to not being able to wake, losing all appetite, physically my body was wrecked. I was suicidal. My housemates (all nurses and midwives) had a rota system to make sure I hadn't topped myself.
I quit, had no money, no job for over a year, stayed with relatives whilst I pieced my life back together and years later was diagnosed (not by a Dr but by a therapist I was talking to for something else) with PTSD.
Like many other health care workers and ex health care workers, I've looked at some of the evidence against Letby and said "could have been me".

HollyKnight · 02/09/2024 00:52

@tiredhv I'm sorry that was your experience. I know what it's like, although not to that degree thankfully. Just that feeling of "I don't know what I'm doing wrong but it must be something because this can't be just a coincidence. It's happened too many times. I'm cursed." And then to have other people notice it too. It's awful. Really affects your mental health. And the thing is, it really is just a coincidence. It's not something you're doing. But how do you prove that!?

HollyKnight · 02/09/2024 00:55

My sympathies to you too @ToBeOrNotToBee . I missed your original post.

ChickenandaCanofCoke · 02/09/2024 01:44

"Unfortunately I met her when I was in hospital prior to my baby being born in 2016. In for complications but not restricted to bed so midwife took me up to the outside of the neonatal unit. LL came out in a hurry at end of her shift. She didn’t want to stop and speak at all and was distracted. You will all think it’s irrelevant, that I’m interpreting after the event. But, how can I say it so you can see what worried me, she isn’t normal. Didn’t react to her colleague normally. Didn’t actually speak in those two minutes or so that I was there with the midwife (who could carry a conversation on her own, bless her). It stuck in my mind. I turned it over and over about why she didn’t want to chat to someone she knew so well."

How do you know she knew that person well? This just sounds like a weird attempt to pretend you know her

EssieTheFirst · 02/09/2024 02:37

I’m sorry you went through a miscarriage but your statement is so far moved from reality. People are charged for crimes they have not committed all of the time. Charges are dropped in court due to lack of evidence everyday of the week. Defendants are found guilty when they are innocent. Look at that poor poor man from Manchester who has lost a large portion of his life serving time for a rape that he did not commit. You clearly have no experience of the criminal justice system and the presumption you make is astoundingly prejudiced.

EssieTheFirst · 02/09/2024 02:38

This

EssieTheFirst · 02/09/2024 02:40

Andrew Malkinson

Firefly1987 · 02/09/2024 02:44

ToBeOrNotToBee · 02/09/2024 00:51

It's so odd isn't it.
The rational part of your brain knows its not you, just really bad luck. The irrational part of the brain thinks you're doing something wrong, there's something about you that's causing all this, and maybe you're evil. I remember writing something like "it's all my fault, I did this" after a particularly nasty PPH where I froze for a few seconds before pulling the alarm bell. A very normal human reaction. That was my last shift.
My mental health took a massive hit. I swung from insomnia to not being able to wake, losing all appetite, physically my body was wrecked. I was suicidal. My housemates (all nurses and midwives) had a rota system to make sure I hadn't topped myself.
I quit, had no money, no job for over a year, stayed with relatives whilst I pieced my life back together and years later was diagnosed (not by a Dr but by a therapist I was talking to for something else) with PTSD.
Like many other health care workers and ex health care workers, I've looked at some of the evidence against Letby and said "could have been me".

LL was never going to quit. She practically had to be dragged off that unit. And the whole way through the trial acted like she was superior to all the other staff. She was hugely arrogant, so was Shipman. A far cry from someone questioning their abilities. It's understandable someone who has experienced what you have would want to believe it's the same situation with Lucy but sadly it's not.

Read the tattle wiki and you'll see how quickly babies collapsed around Lucy who were previously stable at handover. Or how other staff would go on their break, Lucy wouldn't even be designated nurse but she'd be in there and a baby had collapsed. This is not just bad luck-no one has that much bad luck.

I think people really need to look over the evidence and realise how quickly this all happened when LL got a chance to be alone with a baby. Start with baby A-LL was handed the care of baby at 8p.m, he was stable, 8:26p.m she calls a doctor as he is deteriorating. No resuscitation procedures work like they usually would. Pronounced dead at 8:58p.m. So in just over 20 mins a baby has gone from stable to needing resuscitating (which doesn't work) all coinciding with one staff member taking over-to go along with ALL the other instances of this happening from then on. I'm sorry but any theory about bad luck or bad plumbing goes out the window.

LonginesPrime · 02/09/2024 02:47

If she wanted to rely on the fact there was no proven crime, she shouldn't have conceded that the insulin babies were murdered by someone (but not by her).

From her statements and cross-examination, it seems she has a very lax attitude to medical documentation (not completing babies' drug charts until the next day, inputting notes retrospectively, making countless favourable errors on dates, times and sequences of events that were contradicted by phone records, witnesses. etc), and that blasé approach seems to have extended to her having formally agreed a large amount of evidence put forward by the prosecution (including witness testimony from the babies' parents and medical staff) which she then sought to dispute under cross-examination. What did she think all that paperwork the prosecution sent her was for? Didn't her defence team explain what it meant? She agreed that reams of stuff could be read out to the jury as mutually accepted facts, so it was and the jury heard it in that context, and then much later she turns round under cross-examination and says that actually, she doesn't agree with huge chunks of what had been presented as agreed - well, the jury can't unhear it at that point, can they? Plus it looks suspicious that she agreed witness statements before but then she's changed her mind now she's realised which bits suddenly look more damning (e.g. after phone records and other documentation have confirmed timelines that were previously presented as different or more vague).

She also sought to add extra key details to her original police statements on cross-examination, which obviously doesn't look great to a jury if she's seeking to rely on these details as her defence but only thought to add them in later. She had years to get this stuff right - why on earth was ensuring her defence was 100% factually accurate not her utmost priority?

There were also several instances where she tried to point out other people's involvement in specific events, but then refused to name the colleagues she was talking about, as if she were being accused of spreading a high school rumour as opposed to being tried for multiple murders. Obviously the prosecution suggested that she knew if she named names, those people would dispute what she had said, so her repeated vagueness made her look like a liar, regardless of whether she was telling the truth or not.

Sure, it could be argued that if she's innocent, perhaps she genuinely didn't believe she'd ever be convicted, but this investigation had been going on for years and she'd seen the evidence against her - I can't imagine being wrongly accused of such serious crimes yet approaching my defence in such a vague and haphazard way, as if I'm not that bothered whether I get convicted or not.

If you're innocent, you don't just concede "yes, if you say so" when witnesses are supposedly lying about you, and you don't just agree that their made-up and damning version of events can be presented to the jury as the agreed truth - you say "no, that's not what happened" every time you're asked if you agree with it. You don't just say "yeah, whatever" and then wonder what went wrong.

Nc209 · 02/09/2024 03:13

Firefly1987 · 02/09/2024 02:44

LL was never going to quit. She practically had to be dragged off that unit. And the whole way through the trial acted like she was superior to all the other staff. She was hugely arrogant, so was Shipman. A far cry from someone questioning their abilities. It's understandable someone who has experienced what you have would want to believe it's the same situation with Lucy but sadly it's not.

Read the tattle wiki and you'll see how quickly babies collapsed around Lucy who were previously stable at handover. Or how other staff would go on their break, Lucy wouldn't even be designated nurse but she'd be in there and a baby had collapsed. This is not just bad luck-no one has that much bad luck.

I think people really need to look over the evidence and realise how quickly this all happened when LL got a chance to be alone with a baby. Start with baby A-LL was handed the care of baby at 8p.m, he was stable, 8:26p.m she calls a doctor as he is deteriorating. No resuscitation procedures work like they usually would. Pronounced dead at 8:58p.m. So in just over 20 mins a baby has gone from stable to needing resuscitating (which doesn't work) all coinciding with one staff member taking over-to go along with ALL the other instances of this happening from then on. I'm sorry but any theory about bad luck or bad plumbing goes out the window.

If so many happened so soon after handover then how do you know someone wasn't harming them before their own shift ended???

For one of the babies Letby had finished her shift a few hours before the baby collapsed.

Nc209 · 02/09/2024 03:18

@LonginesPrime
From her statements and cross-examination, it seems she has a very lax attitude to medical documentation (not completing babies' drug charts until the next day, inputting notes retrospectively, making countless favourable errors on dates, times and sequences of events that were contradicted by phone records, witnesses. etc)

I think that was true for a lot of them though, one of the nurses said she co-signed to 'pre-authorise' medication during the day shift that was due to be given during the night-shift so it could be taken off the system.
And she'd then text to make sure it was done. I think she said it was the practice there. What was that all about? Were nurses really going home from the day shift and then texting at night time to check? And why would they do that? Why would it need to be taken off the system anyway and not just stay on the system until the time it was supposed to be given?

Thevelvelletes · 02/09/2024 05:12

HollyKnight · 02/09/2024 00:01

That's scary. Thankfully ours was a bit more proactive. They separated the babies with infections from those without, transferred out the really sick non-infected ones, and any women due to give birth to premie babies were sent to other hospitals to have their babies. But then again, even after that, there were problems with sewage backflowing into the sinks and we even had ceilings in the side rooms collapse onto patients because of leaks above. Then there were the asbestos issues...

Old hospitals are really not great places.

Edited

New hospitals in Scotland aren't much better.
Glasgow hospital was rushed open
Patients died after water borne infection
One of whom was a young girl with cancer.

Tworoads · 02/09/2024 06:19

Firefly1987 · 01/09/2024 20:33

@mids2019 we don't know though do we because they've released very little about her life growing up. There could be all sorts we don't know about. I've already highlighted some unusual behaviour but it's all been dismissed. Anything we find out about her behaviour will be dismissed because people just refuse to believe she did it.

I agree. Pretty, young, blond woman can’t possibly have done anything wrong.
The momentum is gathering for her conviction to be overturned because people do just refuse to believe she did it.
The hospital was clean because I was there for an extended period with a shower room attached. People weren’t complaining about smells or falling ill etc. The standard of care was excellent. I had personal experience - you don’t. CoC was not substandard.
But you have all made up your minds and the forthcoming documentary will only encourage you all to light up your calabash pipes and spout your theories.

There was plenty of evidence against her.

CormorantStrikesBack · 02/09/2024 06:54

ChickenandaCanofCoke · 02/09/2024 01:44

"Unfortunately I met her when I was in hospital prior to my baby being born in 2016. In for complications but not restricted to bed so midwife took me up to the outside of the neonatal unit. LL came out in a hurry at end of her shift. She didn’t want to stop and speak at all and was distracted. You will all think it’s irrelevant, that I’m interpreting after the event. But, how can I say it so you can see what worried me, she isn’t normal. Didn’t react to her colleague normally. Didn’t actually speak in those two minutes or so that I was there with the midwife (who could carry a conversation on her own, bless her). It stuck in my mind. I turned it over and over about why she didn’t want to chat to someone she knew so well."

How do you know she knew that person well? This just sounds like a weird attempt to pretend you know her

I agree with this. As a midwife I don’t know the nurses on the NICU, literally couldn’t name them. I certainly don’t know them well. I know the ANNPs who attend Labour ward but not the nurses.

also you say it was the end of her shift……maybe she had other more important stuff to do? Maybe babies needed care, maybe documentation needed doing. It’s not clear from your post if the midwife had rung up the unit and asked if they could accommodate a visit, but I’d always ring first and check not just rock up and even then I wouldn’t necessarily expect any of the staff to have time to talk.

Bulkbuyorrunoutandcry · 02/09/2024 07:08

I mean, I personally get a feel she did it, like I said. But I’m shocked at people saying ‘Well absolutely everyone on Tattle thinks she is guilty’. They did from the off - It is a site with a sole purpose to ridicule, belittle and verbally abuse people in the public eye without doing so to their face. Just a horrible pit of nasty people saying nasty things.

NigelHarmansNewWife · 02/09/2024 07:44

@SherlockHolmess I believe that if a defendant confesses their guilt to their legal team they cannot then argue they are innocent in court and the barrister can't defend them. It's not a game. Of course, someone may confess under duress or because they feel the evidence is insurmountable, but that's not the same thing.

You can't say, "I'm guilty, but let's see if the jury can work it out."

Please create an account

To comment on this thread you need to create a Mumsnet account.

This thread is not accepting new messages.