Lucy Letby: have you changed your mind - thread 3

[Typicalwave]

New thread for those following or wishing to comment - originally started by @kittybythelighthouse.

I can’t look at a panelled bath without thinking about the horror she must have felt. You couldn’t get much more incriminating than semen and keys under his floorboards

'I Fought the Law' is out on ITV on Sunday 31 August and it details the story of Ann Ming and beloved daughter Julie.

Unfortunately, as you are showing, some people assume that the fact that some deaths and collapses couldn't be explained makes Lucy Letby guilty.

So I wonder if knowing that some people have that particular misapprehension might be the reason the defence didn't call Dr Hall. Obviously one would hope a jury would be able to properly understand, but there's no guarantee of that. Things like the defendant not having to prove their innocence are explained in jury service, but of course telling people something doesn't automatically mean they'll understand and accept it. I get the theory, but it looks like it was the wrong decision in this case.

I’ve read the whole of both the previous threads though haven’t quite caught up on this one. I just had to post in utter astonishment after reading that Reddit link kindly provided upthread (by @Oftenaddled iirc), detailing the actual background to Ravi Jayaram's claim that he 'caught' LL standing by Baby K and just watching while the oxygen saturations fell. I knew his claims were dubious but I'm now deeply, deeply troubled at seeing it all laid out so clearly. How on earth he sleeps at night I do not know.

To answer the question in the OP, I didn’t have a set opinion on LL's culpability to start with. But since reading the NYT article a way back, and then (especially) the very detailed blogs by Dr Scott McLachlan (in his Law, Heath and Technology Newsletter on Substack) I'm extremely worried about a MoJ. The juries simply didn’t hear a balanced picture in my view. In fact a lot of what they heard was simply wrong, and surely that cannot be a basis for safe convictions.

Obviously this is a sensitive issue so I don’t think the defence would be publicly speaking about this yet. I’m certain that the defence team are aware of this by now though and will have checked it out. I’m 99.99% positive that this UTC/BST time mixup is exactly what happened and that it likely is part of their whole CCRC application. It’s the only thing that makes sense unless everyone, not just Letby, has their timings wrong by an hour that night.

To contextualise for people who are new to all this: while the night in question was obviously traumatic, the mother of Baby E did not suspect Letby of harm at the time. She only began looking back at that night with suspicion, as anyone would, after the police came to her door several years later saying that Letby murdered her baby. I mean, hearing that, I would also start combing through my memories and poring over records. I think we all would. It wasn’t until then that she requested her phone records from the phone company to see what time she called her husband that night, knowing that she called him twice.

Telecoms standard CDRs (call detail records) generated by network switches are stored in UTC in the raw system, since that avoids daylight savings complications. Itemised phone bills are adjusted for daylight savings times, but it’s clear from the mother’s words, and the discussion around it, that what she was given was call records, not her bill. What she would have been sent are these call detail records (CDRs) and those are given in UTC, straight from the network logs, precisely because they’re system-level outputs rather than customer bills. An itemised bill in BST would still require everyone else to be an hour late in their own records in ways that it would be impossible for Letby to have arranged.

The specific timings of the midwife vs the mother etc were not dissected at trial. It’s only at Thirlwall that the midwife’s notes/times were referenced, but not in the context of analysing her timings against the mother’s. The prosecution built its narrative around the unadjusted “22:52” time and no one adjusted (or perhaps even thought of) the likelihood of a time difference.

You may think that the police would surely have thought of this and to that I’ll remind you that Cheshire police made a multitude of serious data blunders in this case. They managed to get the very simple data from the door swipes entirely back to front for the whole trial and that was something that was leaned on constantly by the prosecution to ‘prove’ Letby’s opportunities to ‘strike’. Not having picked up a UTC vs BST time difference in phone records that the mother sourced (not sourced directly by the police) would be the very least of their blunders and much easier to miss.

You may think surely the defence will have thought of this at trial, but this was a huge and complicated trial with many thousands of documents and pieces of data to comb through. The defence were not equipped to comb through literally everything with a fine tooth comb. They were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of everything and we’ve seen that other important details have been missed by them too (e.g. Dr Jayaram’s email that contradicted his own words at trial about Letby calling for help in the baby k case). A subtle thing like UTC v BST could easily be overlooked. It’s a needle that they didn’t even know they were looking for in a barn full of haystacks.

Anything else requires everyone, not just Letby, to be wrong/lying. The UTC time difference in the call logs vs the hospital notes in BST is the only thing that makes sense.

It genuinely terrifies me that Jayaram is still a doctor in good standing. Whether LL killed the babies or not, both permutations still leave him very far in the wrong. I would not want him anywhere near a loved one of mine.

By all accounts he has a good way with children and parents as a paediatrician, but he isn’t a neonatologist and it’s clear that he wasn’t equipped to care for very premature neonates, who are not simply smaller full term babies. None of the doctors at COCH were.

He is dishonest though. He lied under oath multiple times. While I think he did it because by then he absolutely believed that Letby was a serial killer and thus he was ‘doing the right thing’ in his own mind, it’s very troubling. I think Dr Brearey is worse though. He is more calculating.

With baby I, LL was said to be standing at the doorway with baby deteriorating. Prosecution said it was dark / dim light so how could she know the colour of baby I?

Prosecution said it was dark; nurses working at the hospital said, in court, there was enough light to observe the babies from the window outside in the corridor, and that the babies were arranged so that they could be observed.

You wouldn't be shining bright lights directly in their eyes. But pale in a neonatal care setting can be a description of arms, legs, torso - nurses look out for pallor in these areas as a sign of deterioration.

I have never felt that this was solid evidence of anything, even before I started digging into the case. Someone's recollections years later of nursery lighting, how far in the doorway Letby was, precisely what she said, and the reconstructed picture used in court are not actually proof of anything. Also, the implications of saying that it was normal for nurseries to be dark enough that the nurse attending to the baby literally could not see him or her starting to desaturate would be problematic in the extreme, if literally true. If that were true, all those “unexpected” collapses become even less surprising.

Even if the room had been that dark, and Letby had been exactly where she was said to have been, and she said exactly what she’s supposed to have said, what is this all meant to point to anyway? Witchcraft? This was always a weird addition to the trial imo.

In the reconstruction photo presented at trial there were no monitors on, which would also have cast light. Below is that photo, taken from a guardian article. This lighting in the photo also looks totally different from source to source, and that’s just the reconstruction photo. We all experience light differently for a multitude of reasons. I’m always turning lights off while my husband keeps turning them on. I don’t think this means anything even if the anecdote recalled years later is 100% accurate.

(You have to assume the nurses weren't expected to blunder around in pitch darkness, unable to see the children they were caring for. This was room 2 where children were excepted to have 1 nurse to care for 2 babies max at all times. They weren't expected to sleep through unobserved).

If you were a cautious neonatal nurse after Lucy Letby's case, you would be very careful just to care for your own charges and to ignore everything else. Don't point out risks or problems. Don't alert anyone to another child struggling. Hold back - walk don't run - when an alarm goes. Do all this even if other nurses are less experienced and ask you for help - even texting you when you're off. Put your reputation ahead of children's safety.

Because all of these things were used against Lucy Letby at her trial.

Exactly. If the recollection were true it would be concerning primarily because it would mean unexpected collapses might be unexpected partly because babies weren’t being properly observed.

Yes. Let's remember that the nurse who said it was too dark to see the baby was in the room, mixing the child's bottle, presumably able to see enough to do that.

As to judging what Lucy Letby could see from what angle, surely we are all familiar with the manoeuvre of moving a step or two left or right to see what we want to see. Lucy Letby came into the room and had a look at the babies. That seems reasonable.

Also people are not identical in terms of what they can and can’t see in varying degrees of light. There is no universal standard for that. I like having lamps/candles for a cosy atmos at night. My OH has a habit of putting the big light on when he walks in because he “can’t see”. We’ve all surely experienced something like this. I’ve never understood why/how this anecdote is of any importance or what it’s supposed to signify even if it was 100% accurate.

Does anybody know where I could watch the panorama documentary? I can't get BBC player in ROI. I think I can get the ITV one on YouTube. Are any of the other YouTube ones with watching?

@Anotherdayanotherdollar

The Panorama one is available on YouTube.

You wouldn't wipe the blood away before the doctor came. You would want him to see its colour and volume - a child of baby E's size would have not much more than 100ml of blood in their body. You also would not move or touch a child of this weight and gestation more than absolutely necessary, especially if there was a sign of something going wrong. "Care needs" like cleaning them would wait.

Er well, assuming she's not guilty yes. But she is so...

I'm sure it would not take long to pocket or bin an instrument with blood on it, if that's where your imagination is taking you.

Yet you seem to think it'd take ages to inject a baby with air and turn an alarm off?! She did something terrible to that baby, all the evidence points to it. My imagination wouldn't take me there otherwise because I'd never think anyone could do something so evil. But the mum saw and heard her baby and he lost so much blood 😢explain why it just so happened when Lucy was there again? Even you admit she had sole "care" of him. So what happened?

The post mortem was left up to the parents IIRC and that wasn't really fair to let them make that decision. Baby E+F's mum spoke about how she feels guilt over that, because it could've been stopped there. The mum has my total admiration. After all she's gone through at Lucy's hands to then blame herself for not requesting a post mortem. Those poor parents. An apology was made in court by the doctor who told the parents that a post mortem wouldn't tell them anything.

If the doctor had any suspicions that there wasn't a natural cause of death, her job was to tell the parents the postmortem was needed and, if they refused, to alert the coroner, who can override parents in those sad cases where it may be necessary.

Parents can always refuse a postmortem except where the death is suspicious. Of course, it wasn't.

So she’d damned if she did clean up the small amount of blood on his chin and damned if she didn’t?

Thats akin to saying ‘burn the witch’ isn’t it?

He lost around 30 ml of blood in all, and none of those losses were whilst Lucy was on her own. When the first Dr arrived at approximately 10:10 there were what appeared to be ‘flecks’ of blood in his mg aspirate. The two larger bleeds came later.

Can you recall thd names of the midwife and other registrar yet whose contemporaneous notes matched up with Lucy’s on a time line indicating mother’s timeline based on her request of call logs two years later was the only timeline that didng match up being 1 hour earlier?

Well no one thought a nurse was attacking babies did they because it's unthinkable. I don't think anyone would be like "better do a post mortem because baby might've been physically attacked by one of the staff". And why did the mum see her baby in terrible distress with blood all around his mouth and Lucy doing nothing? Why did it happen again when she was alone with a baby?

I don't think even you believe what you're saying. You certainly wouldn't be dismissing all this evidence if it was a man.

For the air embolism, nobody is claiming Lucy Letby switched off the alarms. The alarms going off and the children collapsing is part of the agreed narrative.

And here, quoting the expert witness panel on baby B, is why that undermines the prosecution case so badly:

If air was deliberately infused through a
central venous line to cause air embolism, the line will have to be reinfused with fluid to
prevent detection. Collapse from air embolism occurs instantaneously. It is doubtful that this can be achieved quickly enough before other staff in the unit respond to the collapse.

lucyletbyinnocence.com/shoo-lee/International Expert Panel New Summary Report of additional 10 cases.pdf

Please stop introducing your own inventions into this case, or make it clear that you are just inventing. It's bad enough having to deal with all the ridiculous fantasies from Evans and Bohin.

’if it was a man’?

Yes if it was a male nurse around all these suspicious collapses, caught in the act by one mother (you certainly wouldn't be dismissing her testimony like you have done on here) facebook stalking families and hoarding hundreds of handover notes under his bed. It would take a mere 5% of all that evidence before you condemned a man. But it's excuse after excuse for this female serial killer.

Sigh.

Any unexpected death should be flagged and referred for post mortem / to the Coroner. It's a massive and basic failure, and if it had been done we might not be here at all, and that poor mother wouldn't have been put through the wringer, because the cause of the gastrointestinal bleed would have shown up.

That said, the doctor who failed in this case obviously was confident enough that what they observed wasn't suspicious, and that the outcome wasn't completely out of the question.

The blood is described variously as flecks in aspirate, round the mouth, etc etc. The later bleeds are higher volume. 8 years after the event the recollections of all concerned are likely to vary.

The fixation on Lucy Letby doing something violent and heinous via an instrument down the throat is lurid and also the ability of a baby to scream after such an attack is questionable as the diameter of the windpipe etc and proximity / potential damage to vocal chords would imply a certain amount of precision in the "attack". How feasible do you really think it is?