Lucy Letby - what's happening

[Viviennemary]

In the last few days I've heard conflicting news stories. One an ex coroner saying she is innocent. And another piece of news saying the Cheshire police want to charge her with more crimes believed to have been carried out at two other hospitals she worked at.

No, not this, and your assertion is not only basic, it’s insulting. The circumstantial evidence against her is, as I said earlier, flimsy.

Here is one example of the hospital's internal investigations, based on the information they extracted from external reports which the jury never saw. It's for Baby O. The report for Baby P had the same conclusions:

a. Significant suboptimal care that is possibly relevant to the outcome,
b. Failures in care to recognise problems and
c. A failure to act appropriately

The report notes, among other failings, that consultants failed to attend the child for 40 minutes after he collapsed needing resuscitation. That should have been a maximum of five minutes.

At the time when the consultants brought their concerns to the police, the unit had been downgraded and they wanted it upgraded again, against management advice. (It has never been upgraded again). Coroner's inquests were due for four children Letby was later accused of killing, who never had them. In all four cases the hospital itself has documented failings in medical care. In at least three it's clear consultants would be implicated. These inquests never happened because of the police investigation.

I don't believe that the consultants consciously stitched Letby up, but they had a huge interest in alternative explanations for the deaths and nothing to gain except exposure of their errors by keeping their heads down.

https://thirlwall.public-inquiry.uk/evidence/inq0018008-pages-9-and-10-of-document-titled-level-2-root-cause-analysis-investigation-report-relating-to-child-o-dated-23-06-2016/

Anyway my guess is that in the next few years there will be further prosecutions brought against her for other murders or attempted murders when she was working elsewhere. You don’t work normally for ages and one morning become a serial killer. She will have been building up to it for a long time. There will be a litany of others. I feel deeply sorry for anyone unfortunate enough to have come into her hands and I am glad she was caught and convicted.
Whilst being different or odd is not any indication whatsoever of guilt I think people have misrepresented who she was and painted her as an entirely normal young nurse who just happened to get caught up in this mess. The evidence from the trial and inquiry shows someone quite different and I don’t quite agree with the “I can’t believe she would do it” arguments. She wasn’t “normal” whatever that means. While she socialised with colleagues and texted them, she doesn’t seem to have had many actual friends - one childhood friend and a woman in her 60s who were the only ones supporting her at the trial. She wasn’t universally popular on the ward and wouldn’t hesitate to report people for what she thought was a breach of regulations. She had a very high opinion of her own capabilities which wasn’t really shared by others - she certainly wasn’t a “star” nurse by any means although generally seen as competent. She hoarded medical notes in her home. She had a strange obsessive crush on a much older married man which doesn’t seem to have been reciprocated and wrote song lyrics about them being together. She had a strange enmeshed relationship with her parents and did not seem independent, eg her dad getting involved in her work HR issues. As I said, none of this indicates guilt but some people seem to be basing their conviction of her innocence on how normal she was and how no “dirt” was raked up on her when that isn’t really the case.

I'm saying the facts of what happened. Multiple expects don't have evidence of the whole case.

I don't think I was clear in this post, there have been new articles about Lucy being charged with more murders. Have you seen this?

I agree with this, I do think Lucy is guilty but I'm not sure if her affair played a part in he receiving support from senior management? Depends on what the evidence says really.

Fair, Lucy is being charged with more murders so will have to wait for evidence to come to alight through the news to see what she has been further charged with. Its part of more investigation really. If another nurse or doctor was involved, they need to be charged also.

The neonatologists were working from exactly the same materials as the trial expert, if I remember correctly?

He was not a neonatal expert and misinterpreted Shoo Lee's paper, that evidence being presented to a load of non-medical experts on the jury who took it at face value. I am not confident about this conviction at all. A trial like this needs, in my opinion, an expert jury who can understand the evidence.

As you say, none of that is relevant to her guilt - and a lot is distorted and exaggerated.

She worked in a hospital. They'll be able to find other cases to link to her, just because she was around, while ignoring other cases, because she wasn't around. You can read about that aspect of the police investigations at https://unherd.com/2025/02/why-the-letby-case-isnt-closed/ , which explains how "suspicious" incidents Letby wasn't present for were somehow all dropped from police scrutiny.

My prediction intersects with yours - I think Chester police are determined to keep going with this nonsense, since they obviously stood over it first time around, and they won't stop until some higher authority puts a foot down. I'm hoping that will be the CPS. But if new cases come to trial, Letby will benefit in the end. She'll have dozens of real, heavyweight experts in her corner.

Yup, completely agree. I only mentioned the affair because she may have got support from senior management through this and able to carry out committing more babies death. But, this depends on what the evidence says really.

The comments Dr Ravi got was horrific, compared to his colleagues who reported the same exact thing. He was born in UK aswell and studied hard, yet... Some people couldn't look past his skin colour :( quite sad really.

This has already happened. Three of them were arrested, even the one who moved away to France!

He was a junior doctor and there's no evidence they actually had an affair, never mind that it was raised as a work issue. He was white-knighting, she was sentimental, he breached confidentiality but kept his job. She looks to have had a crush on him. Mundane stuff. She only met him after most of the children had died so the idea that he motivated her doesn't wash. It's just tabloid drama.

There's no sign anyone knew about this before the police investigation, and no sign that it influenced management in the slightest.

How can they go to the police? They wanted police involvement themselves, but senior management refused - hence they got arrested?

It wasn’t really an affair. It was a woman having a teenage crush on a married man who was telling her about his children in their texts. I don’t for one minute think they had sex. I don’t think it clouded anyone’s judgement. But it did provide a reason why she might have engineered some of the collapses - because it meant she could see him and work alongside him and then commiserate over text with him about how traumatic it was. She did the same with her colleagues- immediately texting them and wanting to go over details of the events and puzzling over why the baby collapsed and how traumatic it all was. And her strange requests about wanting to be back in the high dependency room and having to be repeatedly sent back to her designated room. And insisting on being around the bereaved families. Comments about how it was boring when nothing happened. That’s not a normal response and her text conversations were often very one-sided - it was obvious her colleagues didn’t feel the same as she did.

We don't know who was arrested. I don't know why you keep telling us a manager moved to France after retiring as if we should all tut and gasp. It's the South of France, and he's been back and forth as required legally for Thirlwall etc. He hasn't fled to Outer Mongolia!

Oh, fair! It does sound likely she did the collapses so she could see him.

There are issues with the evidence presented in court on the basis of which LL was convicted. It seems to me that what's happening now is a doubling down on "it was her" and the ward/hospital was mis-managed which lead to LL being able to commit her crimes for a long time before she was stopped rather than there being institutional failings and pinning it on her. Hopefully this will be looked into properly. I don't know if she is guilty or not. What I do believe is that her convictions on safe due to the issues with the evidence.

Because it was suspicious how they quickly retired after Lucy was arrested. If they were innocent, why retire and quickly go into hiding in another country?

Tbh we don't know who's been arrested yet as you've said, so we need to wait for that as he may be one of them who's been arrested. At the end of the day, media experts and us only have information that police, government and NHS have chosen to release to us. We don't have all the details of the case ultimately, so if Lucy is being charged with more murders - then the police etc know something we don't.

Part of the challenge is media experts and us only have information that police, government and NHS have chosen to release. The public don't have all the details of the case ultimately, so if Lucy is being charged with more murders - then the police etc know something we don't. In addition, if senior management have been arrested - again the police know something we don't.

Just like they've chosen not to release names, they will do it when it suits them and follow the investigation.

We have no idea what normal texting culture was in that unit, because only Letby's texts have been scrutinized.

The only case where another nurse said she didn't see Letby's response as normal was a single night when Letby wanted to be back caring for special care children. She was qualified to do so. The nurse who'd been put on duty was not qualified, and the child subsequently collapsed "unexpectedly" and died after nurses failed to resuscitate and doctors failed to intubate until too late.

The other nurse pointed out at Thirlwall that all she meant was that she wouldn't feel the same way herself. But everyone copes with stress differently, and getting "straight back on the horse" is widely recommended as a strategy.

It shows you how little they had linking Letby with any crime that they spun trivia like this into supporting evidence for murder. I'd hate to think what a determined prosecutor could make of the average mumsnet thread.

Why would someone retire to the south of France after a stressful career in the NHS? Got to be suspicious 🙄

Its the timeline of events, that's what suspicious.

That's not "going into hiding"!

The manager in question was forced into retirement after Letby's arrest because people who believed she might be guilty held him partly responsible, and because his relationship with the consultants had broken down. He then moved to the South of France, rather than say, Slough - as people do when they have a nice pension.

If he was trying to disappear, he hasn't put much effort in.

The spreadsheet is public. Statisticians have been all over it. It's bollocks.