Lucy Letby: a condensed update on recent developments

[Kittybythelighthouse]

So, in the past week or so alone we’ve had:

Leading neonatology expert Dr Shoo Lee (Professor Emeritus at University of Toronto, Honorary Physician at Mount Sinai Hospital, President of the Neonatal Foundation, Founder of Canadian Neonatal Network, Previously Head of Neonatology at University of Toronto and a hospital for sick children) says his 1989 paper, which the prosecution relied on as their only proof of alleged intravenous air embolism (skin discolouration) was misused by the prosecution. He actually went to the appeal hearing and had his paper Judge-splained to him by three CoA judges who probably don’t even have a science A level (the judiciary have a poor record regarding science). He was so astonished and aggrieved that he has has published a new peer reviewed paper filling in all new evidence since 1989 and distinguishing between intravenous and arterial air embolism which the 1989 paper didn’t do. The conclusion: there is zero evidence for skin discolouration in intravenous air embolism, which is the only possibility in this case. This means there is absolutely no evidence to support an allegation of air embolism. It didn’t happen.

https://t.co/TRokh1hneu

Dr Shoo Lee pulled together a blue ribbon panel of the world’s best experts in relevant areas. Never before in legal history has a group of such highly regarded international experts come together to challenge the evidence against a convicted serial killer. They went through all of the evidence independently and pro bono (with the proviso that they would publish reports regardless of findings). Yesterday they held a press conference. Conclusion: there were no murders. There was plenty of poor care, medical malpractice, mistakes, and a poorly run struggling hospital.

“If this was a hospital in Canada, it would be shut down”

Link to their summary report: drive.google.com/file/d/1aV4zwwdBYw8Z_E-Tpe9_-iPR7n8cZdFk/view

A leak from an Operation Hummingbird detective which reveals that deaths were chosen as suspicious or not based on whether Letby was on shift (remember, most of the babies had uncontroversial post mortems at the time). There were ten other cases originally classed as suspicious until it was established Letby couldn’t have done them, then they magically became unsuspicious.

“Four more children would later be added, two children would be dropped, collapses deleted and added as the focus was turned in different directions, and the whole chart thoroughly chopped and changed. The guiding principle being, always, that Letby must be in the frame.” Trials of Lucy Letby on X.

https://t.co/FOO55lWlCi

Chester Police responded with a statement to The Mail on Sunday:

“There is a significant public interest in these matters, however, every story that is published, statement made, or comment posted online that refers to the specific details of a live investigation can impede the course of justice and cause further distress to the families concerned. It is these families and the ongoing investigations that remain our primary focus.”

“Cheshire Constabulary's statement to the Mail on Sunday is remarkable, coming from a police force that put out an HOUR-LONG promotional video about their own investigation.

They claim to be demurring from commenting now because "every story that is published, statement made, or comment posted online that refers to the specific details of a live investigation can impede the course of justice and cause further distress to the families concerned."

Such concerns did not stop them, less than two years ago, from flooding the press with incendiary and prejudicial commentary, going so far as to announce that they'd be reviewing the care of 4,000 babies that Letby may have ever come into contact with.

The lead investigator, Paul Hughes, even sat down with the co-hosts of the Daily Mail podcast for an episode called "Catching the Killer Nurse," where he speculated to no end about the supposedly evil and cunning machinations behind Letby's every move, and concluded that "she clearly does love the attention. I think she's loved the attention of a trial." (From The Trials of Lucy Letby on X).

Is Letby the one who loved the attention? The investigation was as active then as it is today. Why the silence now? 🤔

Thirlwall released the witness statement of Michelle Turner on behalf of Liverpool Women’s Hospital. She speaks about Letby's placement in 2012 & 2015, including how unlikely she would have been in an intensive care room without another nurse present.

thirlwall.public-inquiry.uk/wp-content/upl…

Former Director of Public Prosecutions Lord MacDonald to BBC’s World at One: “It is clear that there is now this quite impressive body of work. Something may have gone wrong here. That clearly has to be taken seriously.”

"New documents released by the Thirlwall Inquiry also show how the Countess of Chester refused to take part in research to improve outcomes for premature babies."

Neena Modi: "The Countess of Chester was the only hospital to decline participation."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/04/the-10-baby-deaths-that-cast-doubt-on-lucy-letbys-guilt/

Meanwhile the CPS still (as far as we know) refuse to hand over former Dr Dewi Evans new report about how one of the babies died - written in October 2024 after BBC’s File on Four challenged him about Letby not having been on shift when an ‘incriminating’ x ray was taken. In fact she hadn’t been on shift since the baby was born. She was convicted of killing this baby.

The CCRC announced yesterday that they have opened their investigation of the case. They assembled a team specifically for this case late last year, in anticipation of an application. This is an extraordinarily speedy and organised response from the CCRC.

https://ccrc.gov.uk/news/lucy-letby-application-received-by-criminal-cases-review-commission/

This has been a remarkable, historic, run of events. It is now looking very likely that the case will go back to the Court of Appeal, or there may be a more expedient solution. Whatever happens, it’s very unlikely to take the CCRC their usual 10 years to deal with it. They are on the ropes recently, with a CEO stepping down and a raft of bad press. I am not Mystic Meg, but my money is on an exoneration within the year.

No and neither does anyone else because all the evidence suggests that he is guilty.

Right from the beginning of the Lucy Letby case doctors and statisticians have been trying to sound the alarm about it because they have realised that the evidence was flawed.

If Harold Shipman had managed to pin his murders on a young nurse, and she was found guilty, do you think he should be entitled get away with it because they've found her guilty and it is too late for new evidence? Some posters on this thread have suggested that.

As a GP with his own practice, Shipman was working autonomously, with patients who were relatively fit and healthy, being in a 'visit the GP' stage of illness rather than a hospital stage of illness. In almost all cases the patients died in their living rooms, with Shipman the only person present.

This is very different from Letby's environment, working with babies who needed constant life support, with a whole team of doctors and nurses involved in their care.

You’ve missed out cock-up as one of the options.

It’s naive to think a case involving some degree of scapegoating must be a concerted coverup from start to finish. In fact, it sounds as if you’re inventing a false position 2 in order to justify 1.

Or maybe you just didn’t understand systems failure.

Major miscarriages of justice are rarely attributable to one cause or person. They’re usually a concatenation of fuck ups and arse covering in different areas.

Well quite. It was very well presented for a lay audience. If they struggled with that I’m not surprised the main trial was beyond them.

So what is the "strong and clear reason"?

Plus he changed wills to benefit himself!

I agree. I don’t think it’s been a huge organised cover up. I think that people involved even the doctors to some extent believed it. Probably still do. They have a blip of bad outcomes, which even in a good hospital can be a simple statistical anomaly. I worked in a hospital maternity dept with no maternal deaths for twenty years, then 3 in 2 months and none in the next ten years.

so the doctors start looking at why there might have been a blip. Is it just a statistical anomaly or is something up? People generally aren’t very good at self reflection especially if there are hard truths to be faced inc poor care, incorrect sized tubes, late antibiotics, poor care planning…..then they realise that LL has been there for a lot of the collapses and deaths (she worked loads of overtime) and they latch onto this as it’s more palatable than recognising their own culpability. But subconsciously rather than a deliberate scapegoat.

The managers aren’t clinical, they don’t know the ins and outs and at some point have to listen to a doctor. Same for the police. And then there’s the perfect storm of Dewi Evans ringing them up and offering his services for a nice fee. Subconsciously he needs to earn that fee, this is literally his self employed business now and he needs to be on the winning side if he is to get future cases. He could be on a nice little earner for the next few years popping up as a medical expert once his name is known nationally…..but only if she’s found guilty.

Indeed - it was the amateurish job he did of forging the will of Kathleen Grundy (whose daughter was a solicitor) that exposed this and finally led to police taking seriously the earlier reports from another GP in the area and a driver of elderly patients that Shipman's patients had a suspiciously high death rate.

On his own typewriter.

For a doctor, Shipman was surprisingly thick!

I would suggest that ultimately the police and hospital managment would have been swayed by medical opinion ( ask me how I know).

Thank you, same to you x

One of the babies who LL has already been convicted of murdering - has had his cause of death changed 3 times now - his parents heads must be spinning - so distressing for them

.

What on earth has that got to do with LL? What a stupid comment.

I think people need to actually look at miscarriages of justice and how they’ve devastated lives in this country and recently too.

I think it was Cromwell who wrote to someone in a rather despairing way "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."

I feel this ought to be said to everyone who has a fixed and unalterable opinion about this case. The point is that WE DO NOT KNOW. Lucy Letby presumably knows whether or not she killed any or all of these dead babies; nobody else does, or can now be sure whether they were in fact killed at all.

That is why further enquiry is warranted in the public interest. Because if she didn't, they died for some other reason than wiful serial murder and I, for one, want to know what led to their deaths. (In some cases we know the actual cause of death, in others we have been given different possible causes at different times, but it is how they got to that point that is important.)

Thing is there is always confirmation bias once something has been said.

I remember on FB not very long ago someone posted something about a blue van being driven recklessly after an incident. Very quickly there were several "omg I saw that van." with lots of comments about how it had gone through lights/nearly knocked them down/dangerous driving and "won't the police do something".
Original poster came back a couple of hours later to say (all credit to them) that actually they'd made a mistake and it was a red van, and it had pulled over, cctv footage had shown not poor driving, really nothing to see.

I am sure that many if not all the commentators had thought they had seen a dangerously driven blue van - but only after they'd seen the comment on FB. After seeing the FB post they'd then remembered seeing a vehicle go through a light, and put them together to make 5.

So people once they heard about LL then put incidents which clearly at the time were not suspicious to them as they didn't report them in their head and attributed suspicions to them. Because none of the apparently suspicious incidents were reported at the time.

My dad used to say "never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence" and most of the situation with the doctors probably falls into that category.

However I have personal experience how one manager who is determined to create a story can do it totally out of nothing and be very difficult to push back. One example with details changed.
Manager came to me and asked me to photocopy 3000 leaflets for something they did not in the job. This was allowed as long as they paid, and I have no reason to suppose that they weren't planning on doing so. However it was on the last day of the month when I had a huge number of reports to print out which basically took (as 3000 would too) the whole day to print (although not a huge amount of time as it was a case of setting it going). Yes, he would have known that I was doing this on that day.
I said I couldn't do it, however I was for various reasons going to be in at the weekend (unpaid, I'll add) so I'd do it then. He said he wanted me to do it as he never got the settings right, I offered to show him, and he said no that Saturday would be fine.
When I came in on Saturday he'd left a note saying he'd done it.
On Monday my line manager was chatting and commented that I did know if I was asked to do a job for a manager then I should do it. I said "yes, and I always do" which is true.
On Wednesday another manager said something similar.
Next week I discover that the original manager had gone to a meeting and said he didn't have notes to hand out because I'd refused to print them for him. When I told the person that wasn't the case they said "he did say you might have been confused." I was not confused, meeting notes were never mentioned.

But I'm left in a position here. If I email the managers and said what really happened, they will either think I'm being petty or assume I got confused as he said. If I don't say anything then it's put down as me being awkward.
My Line Manager's reaction when I spoke to them was along the lines of "don't worry, I knew you wouldn't have done it on purpose". Which really wasn't the issue. They didn't want to pick up that he deliberately lied to make me look bad.
So it goes into their consciousness that I was awkward to that manager about doing something he needed.
Repeat that behaviour again and again, and people believe it.

So if there was one doctor who was determined to make her out to be a problem, I can totally see how they slowly convinced other doctors.

"She does seem to always be there when they're taken ill. Of course she does do a lot of work." "She does behave oddly round the parents after the baby has died. Of course it is hard to deal with parents then." "she was not doing anything when I went it, and I would have expected it. Of course maybe she was..."

By adding the "of course" it's making the speaker seem generous, and giving the benefit of the doubt to LL, so working both ways. Firstly by putting a seed of doubt into the listener's mind, and secondly by making the speaker seem kind towards her so, of course (!) couldn't be trying to cause issues.

The things that make me doubt the conviction are the lack of any reports at the time, and also that no one before she was arrested seemed to have anything bad to say about her.
And with a conviction of that level I would want to see some definite evidence for at least one of the deaths. If there was that, then I'd be willing to believe the rest.

Maybe she did do it. But that still means she has the right for the conviction to be sound with evidence.

@MargaretThursday i had similar thoughts when one of the parents was saying that LL had upset her by talking about how her baby who had passed away had loved her bath.

Without any sinister context it sounded to me like she was just trying to remember any happy times with the baby and of course there won’t have been many as the poor baby never really left hospital.

@Kittybythelighthouse @Quitelikeit
One of you is highly intelligent, well-researched, articulate, engaging ,credible and unbiased.

Hint @Quitelikeit it's not you.

That's a great post @MargaretThursday

It was admitted at the trial that something similar happened to Letby.

She was accused of attempting to murder one child (baby G) by switching off her monitor so there would be no alarms, and hiding her behind a screen.

This was mentioned in the prosecution's opening speech, so another nurse contacted Letby's defence.

Letby had discovered the baby in that state and called a second nurse over to help with her.

This nurse now called the police and the testified that two of the doctors had left the monitor switched off and rushed off without handing care back to a nurse. They knew that at the time and apologised for it. She told her manager about it, which is why she received the apology.

The doctors claimed in court not to remember this, which may be true, but one of them at least conceded that it must have happened the way the second nurse said. Letby may have saved that babies life, but she only barely escaped being convicted of causing the incident.

I agree completely. It's why I think the poster who thinks the only two possible explanations are either she's innocent or there has been a massive and deliberate conspiracy is being completely reductive. It's ignoring human psychology and how these kinds of thing happen.

Most people probably don’t understand the level of arrogance and defensiveness in these professions. I had a sick child and at one point there was a big question mark over her prognosis. My friend and former colleague who was still practicing in paediatrics at the time gave me a name of an eminent paediatric neurosurgeon in NYC where she was working. We talked at length and ultimately all was well but my paediatrician went nuclear at me saying you expect me to consider the opinion of some maverick who’s never had anything published. He was raging. The NYC guy was one of the most famous and widely published paediatric neurosurgeons in the world at the time. The problem was the local chap was out of date, out of his depth and too fucking arrogant and lacking in insight to do some reading. This is not unusual at all.

I have always had doubts about LL’s conviction.
I was surprised that Dewi Evans volunteered himself for the job even though he wasn’t a neonatologist as it’s such a specialised area.

I worked in an NNU many years ago and it’s a very high stress environment. There were twice daily ward rounds, parents were very involved and though technical, it was a very compassionate and caring place to work. I can well imagine as a nurse, feeling that it’s your fault somehow when babies deteriorate. Did I miss something? After all, nurses are encouraged to be reflective practitioners.

The refusal to even consider that LL may be innocent is one that posters are unwilling to grasp.
Many experts have cast doubt on the verdict. It should absolutely be acknowledged that the judicial process must be robust; the beyond reasonable doubt exists for good reason. Unfortunately I don’t think it was applied here. It concerns me that juries are not equipped to deal with complexities such as presented in medical cases. There was so much at stake here- grieving parents, who had to cope with not only losing their precious babies but the bombshell that a nurse could have ended their lives. But if innocent or guilty, LL’s life is ruined either way and what would be said to these grieving parents if she is not guilty; Oh sorry it looks like it wasn’t murder’

It beggars belief and there are no winners here

Some of the responses here remind me of Les Tricoteuses at the guillotine or Monty Python’s ‘how do you know she is a witch?’ ‘ because she looks like one’