Lucy Letby - have you changed your mind thread 4

[MistressoftheDarkSide]

With thanks to the original poster @kittybythelighthouse and @Tidalwave for continuing the discussion.

“It wasn’t the prosecution’s case though that some deaths were suspicious because she was there.”

It’s certainly not how they framed it, no.

“It was their case that she had committed deliberate harm to each of the babies…this was supported by the large amounts of evidence”

Now I know you’re pulling our legs. The “large amount of evidence” has been utterly demolished by internationally renowned experts who hold senior positions in the world’s best medical centres and research hospitals e.g the Karolinska Institute - literally the home of the Nobel Prize for Medicine. They make the prosecution witnesses look like a pub five-a-side vs a Premier League team.

But for some reason you’re still clinging on to Dewi Evans’ daydreams and detective show fantasies. I mean he did diagnose murder “in ten minutes over a coffee” without having even seen the bodies, so I can see one might be impressed. Maybe he should move into writing horoscopes.

What still stands from the “large amount of evidence?” Post-it notes? Facebook searches? “A blue Lee cooper leisure suit”?

The point is that if the evidence was strong enough to support the allegations of murder - which it wasn't until Dewi Evans got all moist about it - why do anything other than say this baby died, here's how she did it, for each count.

The rota was simply there to imply a pattern solely implicating Lucy Letby, yet if other babies died on her watch that they couldn't link her to, it shows there is a possibility something else was going on, which you'd argue should have been part of the defence.

If the jury accepted so much of the prosecution nonsense, why wouldn't they accept a plainly stated fact that the other deaths were not suspicious, which would have to be stated as simple fact. This omission is relevant.

I'm fairly sure that if the prosecution could have nodded and winked at the jury that this was the tip of an iceberg worthy of Gengis Khan, they would have done.

As it is Evans and Cheshire Police are flogging that horse for all it's worth post trial.

Why would they not go into detail about how the other babies died? They went into detail with all the cases she was charged with. Why are we suddenly squeamish about going into detail?

I’ll tell you what would have avoided any need to explore the full dataset though: not presenting a grossly misleading chart to the jury every day, every other day, or even once.

@rubbishatballet not sure you are right about the number of deaths someone will be along soon to clarify.

Data involving incidents and collapses and insulin tests has definitely been cherry picked however.

To discover what should have happened you can read the statistics article which has been posted twice today.

Basically the police should have employed a statistician to analyse all the data. They could then have called them as an expert witness to answer questions from both sides. They actually started down this road but the cps told them to stop.

The defense should also have been given access to the data to employ their own statistician. The defense are stuffed at the moment in these sort of cases.

“13 deaths and she was there for 12” is incorrect but I’m waiting for little miss “what’s your source for that” to show where that data came from (I already have a strong inkling).

I'm beginning to think that someone is insinuating that maybe Lucy Letby us in fact responsible for all the deaths.....judging by this line if "questioning".

I thought that a few hours ago

I seem to remember a news story saying that they were still investigating 2 of the deaths.
God only knows what 'evidence' they think points to LL for those considering how weak the evidence was for the ones they put on trial.

Absolutely. I just can’t see how it could have been done. The idea that this hasn’t been looked into properly blows my mind.

Eh? It’s everyone else that’s suggesting that information about the other babies’ deaths should also have been presented to the jury at trial but I’m saying they are irrelevant (in this context), and that it may not have been particularly helpful to Letby if they had been.

Just so we're clear:

Do you think Lucy Letby is guilty?
Do you think she was convicted beyond reasonable doubt?
Do you think the trial was fair?
Do you think the evidence is scientifically sound?

Exactly this. Given she got charged and convicted for one of the deaths based on an x-ray taken when she wasn’t there and had been off work since before the baby was even born, via a murder method that according to the prosecution lead expert witness’s post trial statements didn’t happen and is almost certainly not even possible, it’s hard to see what could be weaker.

No, actually, though you see that figure a lot. 10 out of 13, not 12.

12 is in the Vanity Fair article which is heavily informed by the consultants back in 2023, and I don't know if the BBC also picked it up? I've certainly seen it elsewhere too.

At some point the Thirlwall Enquiry seems to have decided to put us all out of our misery and created its own table, but it hasn't been noted very widely I think

You can have a look, at https://thirlwall.public-inquiry.uk/evidence/inq0108782-table-produced-by-the-inquiry-legal-team-titled-all-of-the-neonatal-deaths-linked-to-the-countess-of-chester-hospital-in-2015-and-2016/

It also covers deaths off the unit and in babies transferred out.

The prosecution made the other deaths relevant in this context by presenting hokey statistics implying proof of malfeasance without presenting the full dataset. This is such Witchfinder logic and it’s wild to see it in 2025.

“it may not have been particularly helpful to Letby if they had been“

This is just pure invention. Are you suggesting that Cheshire Police spent millions of pounds and and 6 years investigating the COCH deaths but didn’t bother looking into all of them? Damning indictment of Cheshire Police and the CPS if so.

But of course you know very well that they did.

Just to be clear, Letby was charged and convicted of killing 7 babies. So there is still a higher number of deaths than usual even if we remove the serial killer from the equation.

What killed those other babies? In this hospital that had recently fired its advanced nurse practitioner staff and crazily upgraded itself to a level 2 NICU?

A hospital that at the same time as the deaths had:

• Raw sewage dripping from the ceiling in the nursery and backing up in hand basins

• Lethal to neonates pseudomonas bacteria in taps

• Only 2 ward rounds a week from consultants vs the recommended 2 per day

• That didn’t have basic lifesaving medications and equipment on hand.

There are quite a few possibilities there for starters I’d say.

The causes of death for the other babies are all listed in that Thirlwall document that @Oftenaddled has very helpfully provided a link to.

Yes. The four babies transferred out would also be counted in Chester's mortality figures, so we are looking at a "spike" of eighteen deaths in 14 months from April 2015, as opposed to the usual 2 to 3 in 12 months in the years before that.

Indeed. These babies had post mortems showing natural causes of various kinds just like the babies in the indictment. How do you think poor care and infection caused by, say, pseudomonas shows up on a post mortem?

I have no idea, I am not a pathologist.

The causes of death of all the babies, as identified at PM, are listed. How can you possibly be certain that some were so very wrong, and others were right?

I think I would be happy for her to be a nurse for my baby at the time. She'd passed her exams and nobody was raising concerns about her skills. Like a lot of people I wouldn't ask her to babysit, but then I wouldn't ask anyone I didn't know really well to babysit.

She failed her first placement due to being "cold" and having little rapport with parents. Also being prone to having an expressionless look that put people off.
And her first assessor also said-

She said she found that Letby's clinical knowledge was "not where it should be", and that she "struggled" to retain information on medication dosages and to recognise side effects of common drugs.

I guess that's why she'd go on to overdose a baby with 10x the amount of morphine (the baby could've died if it hadn't been spotted) and gave a baby antibiotics they didn't require.

She only scraped through after asking for another assessor who was hesitant to pass her given what the previous one had said but had to admit she'd technically reached the level required by then.

Later that first assessor testified overhearing Lucy-

Ms Lightfoot also told the hearing she overheard an "inappropriate" comment from Letby in the wake of the deaths of two triplets in June 2016 - who Letby was convicted of murdering.
She said she overheard her telling a colleague: "You'll never guess what's happened."
Ms Lightfoot said: "The way she said it seemed like she was talking about some sort of exciting event she had witnessed.
"It wasn't an appropriate response to the death of a child.
"I have never, and I have never since, seen a response like that to a nurse involved in a patient's passing."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyz904y0xyo#:~:text=Lucy%20Letby%20failed%20her%20final,a%20public%20inquiry%20has%20heard.

She'd also more than likely have your babies medical notes stashed under her bed.

In the rush to defend her posters forget she was a terrible nurse even in the (vanishingly unlikely) case she's innocent anyway.

I mean if she's innocent she's the unluckiest person in the world-would you really want someone who's such a bad omen around your baby? And before anyone comes at me with she worked there 24/7-she wasn't working on the day shift when babies were collapsing at night and she wasn't working on the night shift when babies started collapsing in the day because she'd been removed from nights!

I’m taking all of that with a massive pinch of salt.

I agree she’s been horrendously unlucky, though.

I didn’t think you were. However, the people who actually did the post mortems on all of the babies, including the ones Lucy Letby is currently serving 7 whole life orders for, were actual pathologists. Neonatal pathologists. They returned natural causes for all of them, including the ones LL supposedly murdered.

So, you are not a pathologist and neither is the “expert” who diagnosed murder “in ten minutes over a coffee”, overwriting the opinions of these actual pathologists, several years after the fact, having never so much as seen the bodies, having no pathology expertise whatsoever. Where on earth does your confidence in these verdicts come from?

As @EyeLevelStick put it: “How can you possibly be certain that some were so very wrong, and others were right?”

I can see you’ve never failed an exam in your entire life. You must be extraordinarily successful, maybe even a genius? Impressive!

Obviously you’ve also never once in your entire existence done anything that upset anybody else, ever. Nobody has ever not quite gelled with you. Do you give lessons in charm and deportment? You really should.

You’ve clearly also never done anything, no matter how small, that could possibly be twisted in retrospect should you ever be accused of murder? An incredible achievement! Well done. Do you iron your knickers too?

Even though you are a self proclaimed true crime fan there is nothing in your search history, or your bookshelves, or your text message history that reflects this morbid curiosity? Are you absolutely sure? Your Tattle history only reflects an interest in cupcakes and doilies does it?

I haven’t murdered anyone (you’ll have to take that on trust) but I have almost certainly got things in my search history that you’d clutch your pearls at if someone called me a murderer, even though you likely have the same or worse in your own search history.

I’ve also certainly upset people, had fallings out, or rubbed someone up the wrong way.

Lucy Letby’s entire social history was combed over. As was her internet search history, her house AND her parents house. They even dug up her garden. What did they find?

1. She made ~2300 Facebook searches for people she knew or met. A handful of those were for some, not all, of the parents of babies in this case. The other ~2000 were for old friends and people she met at salsa class. Many nurses have said they have also looked up families they made a connection with. Lucy Letby was well liked by the parents in this case, as well as pretty much everyone else, UNTIL several years later the police came knocking to tell them she murdered their babies. One couple had even wanted her to be godmother.
2. After she was removed from her job and under investigation for murder she wrote notes which either look like a “confession” if you take two isolated sentences out and ignore absolutely everything else, or they reflect the anguish of an innocent nurse being accused of the most horrendous crimes and being hounded out of her job, home, life, and freedom.
3. She kept some of her handover sheets, as many other nurses have said they do too. The vast majority of the handovers had nothing to do with the case.
4. She kept track of her shifts in a diary which was completely uncontroversial except for the fact that Cheshire police stupidly thought that they’d found a secret code, like Poirot, but it was in fact just ordinary nursing shorthand. Embarrassing.

Am I missing anything? She called a tracksuit pyjamas? She said she didn’t know what “go commando” meant in a text that someone else sent? She rejected offers of cosy lifts home from a doctor she supposedly was bunny boiling for? She won money on the grand national the same day a baby died in the literal intensive care unit she worked at?

Lucia De Berk started keeping her handover sheets once she felt she was under suspicion. They actually helped in her eventual exoneration. Lucia De Berk also wrote “incriminating” things in personal notes, more so than Lucy Letby. She still didn’t kill any babies though. She died yesterday btw, aged only 63. I’m sure the vicious hounding, the dehumanisation, and the injustice of a wrongful imprisonment as The Netherlands’ most hated woman didn’t help.

I feel like I’m forgetting something…Oh yes. Judith Moritz, who apparently combed over Lucy Letby and her parents entire social history, managed to find someone who was in Letby’s geography GCSE class and said she was really good at taking notes and always used highlighters 🙄

So she reached the required level second time around, which isn't uncommon.

If Ms Lightfoot said nothing about this story of her inappropriate reaction until later I'm inclined to think it's another thing that's been put through the 'evil murderer' lens.

And actually most of her feedback was very positive at the time, which means an awful lot more than people trawling back through their memories for things in the 'knowledge' that this apparently pleasant and ordinary woman had been murdering babies.

I'm not saying I would want Letby looking after my baby, but there certainly isn't enough evidence to convince me she should be in prison. Once accusations like that have been made, it's human nature to want to be cautious - one of the things that's particularly cruel if she is innocent. I'm about 95% on her innocence, so as far as I'm concerned that's a clear 'not guilty' but I wouldn't take a 5% chance with a child. I'm sure she wouldn't either - imagine if anything went wrong. It's a pointless conversation really given she is currently in prison and certainly won't be in a position to be working with children, whatever the outcome.

As far as bad luck - the parents had the incredible misfortune of having sick babies on a failing ward in an underfunded NHS. I don't believe in omens but I do believe our healthcare system is broken.