Lucy Letby: Have you changed your mind?

[Kittybythelighthouse]

The other thread has had a lot of really interesting discussion but we are running out of pages so here’s a new one for those who are interested in continuing the conversation.

Whether you’re sure she’s guilty, sure she isn’t, or are somewhere in between, I’m interested in hearing how your opinion has evolved (or hasn’t!) since you first heard about the case,

Please try to be respectful - this is a heated topic. Its a matter of huge public interest with a lot of strong opinions, but we are all adults and can disagree with each other in a respectful manner.

Old thread is here (the poll still has a few days left):
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5388914-lucy-letby-have-you-changed-your-mind?page=38&reply=146359313

Now I can sleep. Knowing we have a two tier ‘guilty& sustem - guilty and your staying inside, and guilty nif we’re going to punish you for our mistakes jyst in case your not guilty because to deserve to be punished for being found guilty in the first place and our not guilty is just somd sort of lip service bevause we can never be sure so still want to punish you.

@Oftenaddledi found the article.

‘McPartland told the inquiry that if she had known the hospital consultants were asking if deliberate harm had been inflicted, she would not have done the same exercise, and would have said the police and a forensic pathologist should be called in’

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/dec/20/my-kind-of-case-intense-focus-falls-on-lucy-letby-trial-expert-witness

Thanks @Typicalwave

I have found the relevant sections in McPartland's transcripts. She says of cases where she did post-mortem that the coroner should have been informed of any suspicions and police and forensic pathologist would have been used. But the consultants reported these deaths, so you can't blame management for that not happening.

Then of her review, which was 6-18 months after the deaths and based on notes and records only, she does say that if she was aware of suspicions of immediate harm, "I would have said that the police needed
to be immediately involved and a forensic pathologist would need to be instructed". That is fair enough, but it's a long time after the bodies were available for examination, unfortunately.

That article is such an eye-opener!

Evans told the Guardian he now recognised there were probable medical causes for the air in the stomach seen on the X-ray, including that the baby had not had a bowel movement.

“What I had not realised – I don’t think any of us realised – was the delayed bowel action was a more important factor in causing the air in the stomach,” he said.

In a subsequent email, Evans said: “Air via an NG [feeding] tube is one explanation regarding [Baby C’s] X-ray findings. [The baby’s] lack of intestinal movement, and … treatment with CPAP, later Optiflow [breathing aids], offer a more realistic explanation …”

Evans said his new opinion was based on the baby’s sudden collapse and unsuccessful resuscitation on 13 June 2015, on ruling out other possible causes, and realising that Letby was on shift, and had gone into the baby’s room.

Something must have happened,” he said. “I know that’s not a very scientific term.”

Are you an "expert" who can't tell the difference between attempted murder and ... wind? Never mind, Just check when Letby was on shift!

Aside from all of that, is Jo misquoted or not? Was there a chance to gather vital evidence or not?

She said about both the post-mortems she conducted, in 2016, and about the review of more post-mortems in 2017, that if she has been told there was suspicion on harm she would have said police and forensic pathologists must be involved.

But that doesn't mean vital evidence was missed in 2017, when it was the managers requesting the review, because she was reviewing notes and reports, not the bodies.

Vital evidence (if any) could have been missed at the post-mortems in 2016, but it was the consultants who submitted reports to the pathologists and chose what information to include, and they very clearly did not flag a single death as suspicious. So the responsibility, if evidence was missed, was theirs, not hospital management's.

Yes, people tend to think that babies died and the Drs straight away suspected foul play. That the pathologist who spoke at trial is the pathologist that performed the autopsies. None of that is actually true. The Drs felt that too many babies were dying and there had to be a cause (a misunderstanding of statistics) and that there must be a common factor. They didn’t have specific babies yet that they felt were harmed, They noticed that Lucy Letby was “always there” and that therefore she must be the cause (another statistical mistake).

These assumptions are statistical claims growing out of common misunderstandings that feel like ‘common sense’ - such as ‘the fallacy of small numbers’ and ‘the Texas sharpshooter fallacy’:

1. A random cluster of deaths which was not actually statistically remarkable and came within a nationwide spike in NICU deaths must = foul play (or at least incompetence from someone on the nursing team - note no evidence that Drs or other non nurses were explored).
2. That LL who was “always there” must be at fault despite the fact that she worked more shifts than anyone else because she was young and had no children etc + lived close to the hospital + was saving up for a house.

Both of these assumptions led directly to the eventual “ten mins over a coffee” diagnosis of murder by Dewi Evans, based on cases given to him by the Drs who already decided it was LL. Everything else flowed inexorably from there.

This case has always been about statistics. The Cheshire Police not understanding that and firing their statistician before she even got started doesn’t make it not true. There would be no case in the first place if it wasn’t for statistics and, especially, catastrophic in context errors/misreadings of data.

Do you have evidence for your point 2? My understanding was that Letby took TOIL for additional shifts, or have I got that wrong?

I've never seen it suggested that this was mainly Time off in Lieu, though doubtless Letby like anyone else worked the odd extra shift to free up time when she wanted it.

Coffey and Moritz refer to Letby working "extra" shifts several times in their book, if you'd see them as reliable sources on Letby.

One source for this is also reproduced in the linked Telegraph article. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/11/23/lucy-letby-hospital-reasons-innocent/

Now, you could read that as saying only that "LL is also available herself to work overtime when the acuity of the unit is over capacity.”, and that she may have taken TOIL at other times, if you really want to. But that wouldn't matter. If she was volunteering at times when the ward has more of the most vulnerable babies than it could otherwise cope with, these are obviously the shifts on which babies were most likely to die.

ETA: this was @rubbishatballet

In my experience it's unusual for whole additional shifts to be TOIL - there'd just be no real incentive to do them. It's hard enough to get annual leave approved on a short-staffed, let alone your accrued TOIL! Usually additional shifts are paid as overtime and the odd bit of time past the end of your shift when you can't get away on time would be TOIL. Every hospital/ward may be slightly different though.

Nurse W at Thirlwall gives evidence demonstrating we are taking about extra shifts, not shifts worked for TOIL:

A. So she was qualified in speciality which meant she had done the two postgraduate, two neonatalpostgraduate courses. She had also done her mentorship course which meant she was allocated students on a frequent basis. But she hadn't completed the QIS by too long. However, she did work full time and she did pick up extra shifts. So when you are working full time and working extra shifts you can become more senior quicker than if you were working part time.

She's guilty but they had to rely on the circumstantial evidence (very compelling) rather than the type of evidence you'd expect in any other case for obvious reasons (she worked at the crime scene!) unfortunately they didn't have CCTV on the unit. I seem to remember hearing that they were talking about possibly getting it at one point and Lucy was not happy about this idea-strange that! 🤔

There was one eye witness account from baby E's mum but Lucy managed to fob her off and put the babies injuries, blood round his mouth and horrific crying down to something else. Then Lucy doctored notes to make it look like whatever incident it was happened at a different time. She wasn't caught most of the time because she had ample time alone with her victims plus a credible explanation if she was caught doing something. I don't think Healthcare serial killers should get off just because most of the evidence you'd look for in any other case wouldn't apply to them. That's obviously been the main issue for people who are unable to look at the circumstantial evidence though.

I can only assume there must be swathes of irrefutable forensic evidence, CCTV and (credible) eye witness accounts that the jury were privy to, that for whatever reason was not made public.

You haven’t been following the case then…😌

That CCTV claim sounds like a complete invention. Where did you find it? Can you please give a source for it?

Given that Letby was alleged to have committed several crimes invisibly and cleared up the evidence simultaneously, in rooms full of people, why would CCTV have been a problem.

The child whose mother saw him with blood around his mouth died later that night. The international panel explained that this was because of a GI haemorrhage of which the blood around the mouth was the first sign. He had had an emergency delivery for a syndrome that put him at risk of this. The junior doctors on duty failed to give him the blood transfusion he needed, and he died. The consultant in charge clearly saw no suspicious circumstances as she advised that no post-mortem was needed.

Letby's notes, the junior doctor's notes, and notes by the midwife who communicated with the mother all line up on times, though it's not clear why it would be particularly significant if someone had made a mistake on this point anyway.

Amen🙏

She’s guilty.

That CCTV claim sounds like a complete invention. Where did you find it? Can you please give a source for it?

That Lucy didn't seem keen on the idea of CCTV? Something that came out wayyy before the trial I'd imagine. Back when there wasn't much stuff to read about-some of us followed this case from as far back as her first arrest remember, not just when the NYT article came out...

I'll try and have a search to see if I can find it again but might be difficult considering the mountains of stuff on her since then.

Letby's notes, the junior doctor's notes, and notes by the midwife who communicated with the mother all line up on times, though it's not clear why it would be particularly significant if someone had made a mistake on this point anyway.

Do you have a source for that? I'd imagine they just wrote it up based on what LL put down. They weren't in the room at the time only LL and the mother. Now we know the mother had the time as an hour earlier, backed up by phone records. Of course it's significant! Lucy didn't put herself down as having been there when an incident happened where the baby was in terrible distress with blood around his mouth.

No, Lucy Letby didn't conceal the fact that she was with the child when the child started bleeding. She was on shift with the child before it happened.

No, a midwife on another ward would not have used a random nurse's notes to write up her own account of her duties that evening and then lied to the court that these were her own notes. Why would that happen?

No, a junior doctor would not write up his notes of his activities on night shift based on a random nurse's notes, and then lie to a court that these were his own records. You are getting into the realm of conspiracy theory if you think these things happened.

You have links to sources for the timings from this twitter thread: https://x.com/JabesAllowed/status/1838561198423343374

Obviously if the CCTV claim is just half-remembered pre-trial online gossip, it doesn't matter.

What was the hour discrepancy then? She was in the room when the child started bleeding-at last we agree on something!

The original point about the CCTV was that there was none on the unit. So posters expecting there to be CCTV evidence and thus declaring her innocent or "there must be all this CCTV, forensics and eye witness accounts we don't know about" is not really helpful. Because most of those don't apply in this case.

She never claimed she wasn't in the room when the child started bleeding. Why should she be anywhere else? She was caring for the child.

@Oftenaddled

https://www.chesterstandard.co.uk/news/24594130.child-e-f-mum-tells-night-caught-lucy-letby-off-guard/

She said she had gone to the unit with expressed breast milk at 9pm, where she heard Child E "screaming" as she arrived. Letby was nearby, not doing anything, "not making eye contact" and being "abrasive" and "dismissive". Child E was seen with blood around his mouth.
"I think I caught her off guard," the mother told the inquiry. "Something had happened to make [Child E] bleed. Stable babies don't bleed."
Letby told the mother to leave, and said she had contacted the registrar. Records later showed Letby had informed the registrar after 10pm.

So she lied to the mother about having contacted anyone.

The link I posted above explains that the mother based the time of the conversation on times of phonecalls. But the time she thinks she made her calls are an hour out from other people's records, not just Lucy Letby's. It seems that either she got times wrong or all three of them did, independently.

@Oftenaddled OR no one was called by LL until after 10p.m so that's what they put down for when they were notified about it. The mother came down at 9p.m, everything happened around that time. That's the discrepancy. No one else was called about it until after 10p.m.

That doesn't explain the one hour discrepancy between the mother's records and the midwife's though, since the midwife was recording when she herself called the mother. Nothing to do with Letby. The mother's records just seem to be an hour out

I’ve been listening to this podcast (link below) and they talk about the time discrepancy. They have suggested that the time difference could actually be because it is standard for the phone company to report using GMT when we were on BST at the time. This would make the mother’s phone records an hour out. The way they said this wasn’t like they’d confirmed it, but were mooting it as a possibility. However I thought this interesting as ii had heard something very similar happening on another case in the past, where there was the wrong timestamp on phone records - googling indicates this could be the case of George Zimmerman. Anyhow, an interesting point that needs further investigation. If true, it throws a whole different light on this incident.

I think the mention is in this episode but not 100% sure, but the show is worth a listen anyway, little bit of a sensationalist presentation sometimes but some very interesting bits of info and a couple of interviews with Dewi Evans (who couldn’t sound less convincing if he tried!)

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/was-there-ever-a-crime-the-trials-of-lucy/id1616634411?i=1000678511152