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.

She might never have been arrested but for the insulin cases, since she police decided they were evidence of direct harm. The consultants dug them up a year into investigation having previously had no concerns about the test results.

I'm one of them, and I'm utterly stunned that so much evidence pointing to natural causes was withheld from court. Who would ever have thought so much was left unsaid? If a trial is ten months long, you kinda assume that no stone was left unturned. That's not an unreasonable assumption!!

And before I read a bit more, I assumed the 14 experts were saying that she wasn't the murderer. I was floored to learn that they're saying there were actually no murders at all!!!! That's just wild.

It was PN, not just glucose, I think?

When it became evident that the bag and the IV access had both been replaced part way through the day, and when LL was not on the ward, it was then suggested that LL had tampered with the other PN before she went off shift.

Or do I have two babies mixed up?

I might have two babies mixed up. I heard Dr Lee talking about the case but the gist is as he described. The correlation between her going off duty and the blood glucose improvement wasn’t factual and the management of the baby had been poor

Significantly, The British Medical Journal published this today “Lucy Letby: No medical evidence to suggest murder, experts conclude”

www.bmj.com/content/388/bmj.r250

Yeah I’m a midwife. I know the difference between the two. Both were definitely air embolisms.

I think a lot of the reason people don’t want to accept that she’s possibly innocent is then you have to accept the NHS is irretrievably broken and not full of ‘hero’ health workers.

@Oftenaddled Yes - it seemed to take a while for the highly abnormal insulin levels to be noticed on the unit - IIRC the lab in Liverpool claimed to have urgently phoned the results thro' to the unit as soon as the assay was completed but the assays weren't done daily so the baby was by then recovered. At some point the results came to the attention of Dr Brierley [2-3 weeks later]

He then made a ward based investigation and found that Baby F wasn't prescribed insulin and in fact no babies on the unit were being prescribed insulin on 4th August, By that time it was impossible to work out how much insulin was missing from the insulin bottle in the locked fridge or who might have accessed it illegitimately - and the TPN bags and giving set used had long been thrown away so couldn't be tested for insulin

He was left with the alarming but insoluble mystery of how insulin had got into Baby F which he shared with the other consultants and management and then as you say nothing happened for 12 months until the police became involved

Except that there was now the seed of suspicion planted that 'someone' on the unit had deliberately [or accidently = gross negligence] poisoned a baby with insulin and therefore there was [potentially] a serial killer responsible for the spike in inexplicable baby deaths - that suspicion fell onto LL because she was caring for Baby F overnight on 3rd/4th August and she had until then been sympathetically noted to have been the unlucky nurse who had been present at so many of the deaths

And that seed of suspicion grew with the continuing excessive deaths

Sincere apologies for my muddled and incorrect post at 14.34 - Baby F = TPN bags and Baby L = dextrose bags

LL wasn't on duty for the 2nd TPN bag or some of the dextrose bags

Sorry

@MikeRafone my source is Tim Dowling Chester Standard livefeed of the trial

.

Thanks for this thread OP.

I'm another one who didn't pay much attention to the case, although I did see the 'confession' note at the time and thought it clearly looked like a stream of consciousness thing to try and quiet a negative inner voice - hardly a confession of murder.

I was so shocked when I watched the press conference last week - I really hadn't realised the case against her was so flimsy.

What I can't get my head around is that Dr Evans offered his services to Cheshire police. He was tasked with looking to see if there was any foul play, knowing that if he found what he suspected to be malfeasance that he would most likely be employed as the court 'expert'.

How is this ethical?

He stood to gain financially (quite a substantial amount) - plus the attention/interviews which a cynic might suggest he looks like he enjoys. Where is the impartiality? How can we implicitly trust a man who will benefit financially if he finds enough 'evidence' for a nice long trial!

Is this how it always works with this kind of thing?

Absolutely. She isn't innocent. Too much pointing towards her. Missing insulin? Blood round baby's mouth.

Is this sarcasm or did you genuinely completely misunderstand?

No. I was agreeing with your statement that you think there will be a refusal to accept that no crime was committed.

What missing insulin?

There wasn’t any missing insulin, that was something the prosecution couldn’t explain

Viviennemary

just pops in the thread to make inane comments, has nothing to base her comments on and the last one is clearly just made up - as it was very clear during the trial there wasn’t any missing insulin

A baby with blood around the mouth, possibly from tube rubbing, for whom Letby called the registrar to check and help.

It's not a pleasant image, but of course nurses around the UK deal with situations like this all the time. Are they all murderers?

There was no missing insulin. Why drop that in as an assertion? It's not true

Yeah, I know 🙂.

Missing insulin was raised on this thread. That's why I put a question mark after insulin. If you know better than the jury verdict then crack on. I think she is guilty.

Perhaps my comment was ambiguous - to be clear dr brierley's investigation was limited and he wasn't able to tell how much insulin was in the bottle on 2nd August and 4th august 3 weeks later - so wasn't able to say how much was 'missing' if any

How do you explain insulin apparently being given to the baby when LL wasnt on duty? - that's a bigger question

I have to totally disagree with this. The NHS may well be broken, but from what I have seen the mismanagement is in the support areas, and fear amongst those at the top. The NHS is full of hero health workers, individually there are huge numbers of committed, compassionate and skilled staff who are as let down as their patients as they are not being given the structure, finance and support they need to do their jobs.

It's also stuffed full of people who give appalling care to those dependent on them. People who are more interested in covering their backs. Personal experience of this includes doctors, consultants, hospital nurses, district nurses, HCAs, specialist medical staff, and support staff. Yes, there are heroic people and I've experienced them too, but the uncaring and indifferent are the ones with the ability to upend lives and walk off with barely a care.

I see from a pp’s subsequent comment that you are referring to the fact it is not possible to tell the exact volume of insulin left in a multi-dose vial, therefore it is not possible to say whether more insulin had been used than was to be expected.

Once again, your willingness to extrapolate from this and infer missing insulin shows that the average lay person cannot possibly be expected to understand and make sound judgments in a complex case like this.

It does possibly reinforce the point she was making though, albeit I'm not sure if it's in the way intended. There probably are lots of people who've already become attached to the idea that there were murders with insulin and the evidence points to LL. In the hypothetical event of convictions being quashed, those people may still not be willing or able to accept they were wrong and reframe their thinking.

Can you link to your source for this? It goes against every one of Brearey’s statements including at Thirlwall.

Dr. Brearey told Vanity Fair, in November 2023, that he was the one who had first spotted Babies F and L's irregular insulin and blood sugars, and that this was in February 2018 - 2 years after the tests were done. Far from raising suspicion at the time the insulin results were a total non issue until Brearey was asked by Cheshire Police to go back into the records from 2 years before. According to Brearey police asked him to look back into records in 2018. From that Vanity Fair interview:

“Of the patterns that emerged, many of the apparent victims were twins or triplets. So police asked Brearey to review medical records of all the twins and triplet siblings of babies they believed had been attacked. Brearey learned that two of these babies had suffered an acute hypoglycemic episode but survived. A closer inspection of their blood results revealed a disparity between insulin levels, which were abnormally high, and a hormone called C-peptide, which was low. This proved that they had been administered synthetic insulin rather than making it themselves -- someone had poisoned them.”

Whereas the Court of Appeal is under the impression that Dr. Evans was the one who first identified insulin poisoning in both Babies F and L. The prosecution made some general points to rebut the allegations of bias and unreliability, including that almost every opinion given by Dr Evans was corroborated by another expert. In addition, it was pointed out that Dr Evans was the person who had identified that two of the babies had been poisoned by insulin (Baby F and Baby L).

The current story (Thirlwall) is that Baby F was actually first flagged to Dr. Brearey by Dr.
ZA on June 6 2017:

“At the time of this email, I was on (redacted) leave and I just had something in the back of my mind nagging about Child F's results and the fact that at the time l'd dismissed the possibility of deliberate harm, but now, based on what we were thinking, that didn't seem so impossible any more.
But I couldn't remember Child F's details and I wasn't in the hospital to be able to look, so I wanted to flag that to Steve.”

It is currently unclear exactly who spotted Baby L's results, or when. In his statement from July 2024, Dr. Brearey writes:

“I also asked Dr Emma Lewis, consultant biochemist at the hospital, to send me the insulin/C peptide results from NNU over the last 5 years.
The data that she returned showed there were another two cases with similar suspicious results to those of Child F.”

Frustratingly, the Thirlwall Inquiry didn't provide a long enough excerpt to make it clear exactly when Brearey says he did this. However, if Baby F was the first anomalous case to be discovered, and that was brought to Brearey's attention by Dr. ZA on June 6 2017, then your version of events is wrong no matter which one of these is right. There is nothing out there that corroborates your version of this where Brearey, or anybody, was aware and alarmed by the tests at the time.

I would have thought that it is even more heroic to be struggling to save lives in a broken system, and the majority of HSP are heroes.

There was no missing insulin. That was clear during the trial.

Blood around a baby’s mouth? The child was a haemophilic and the hospital, as ever failing at every turn, had no Factor VIII for him. He had been through multiple (I believe the record said 7) failed traumatic intubation attempts. So, yes. His mouth had blood on it. The hospital were abysmal at intubations. That’s been shown time and again. That explanation is available to us. Jumping to the unevidenced conclusion that she - what? stabbed him with something? (With what? The prosecution were never able to say) Is ghoulish fantasy. Nothing more.