Lucy Letby’s scribbled notes

[Figmentofmyimagination]

At times when I’m feeling acutely distressed, it’s not at all unusual for me to scribble all sorts of dreadful thoughts down on paper eg die die die, hate hate hate, I hate you, I hate you, what’s the point of you, my fault, stupid me, etc etc etc, usually scribbling them all out so nobody can see what I’ve written. I’m pretty sure this is quite a common response to acute mental distress. I agree with this article that it feels very surprising that Letby’s scribblings were used as evidence of a ‘confession’.

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/sep/03/i-am-evil-i-did-this-lucy-letbys-so-called-confessions-were-written-on-advice-of-counsellors

It doesn’t have to be universal; it is however within the normal range of reactions.
If someone seeks help in dealing with distress levels and managing anxiety, as you suggest another poster should do, it is very common for externalising feelings by writing them down to be precisely one of the things they are told to do.

How many people’s private writings do you actually have access to?

@Eldrick47s I just can't imagine scribbling that I murdered people when I categorically did not. Unless I was suffering from acute psychosis possibly. But I do agree that the things she wrote as stand alone evidence aren't particularly reliable.

Your comment reminds me of the murder of PC Blakelock, after which 3 men were wrongfully convicted.
I remember seeing one of their mugshots in a tabloid with the headline screaming "The Face of a Monster".
Turned out he wasn't even there. Yet most people who saw that pic probably agreed he looked like a monster.

Thankfully the weight of evidence in the LL case matches her status as a convicted murderer.

Except she didn’t scribble that she had murdered people.

She was told the deaths were her fault, she was taken off the ward and competence questioned, told she would have to do some retraining. She was distressed she may have killed them by incompetence despite not being aware of having made any mistakes.

That is the genesis of the notes as per her interviews with police.

Guilt is an ambiguous word. You might be able to see signs that that someone FEELS guilty, though whether you can reliably distinguish that from other emotions like fear and shame is another question. But whether someone feels guilty is a very different question from whether they ARE guilty, which is what you seem to be suggesting you can perceive.

What if people thought you had killed someone and someone suggested you wrote down all the bad things you felt like people were thinking about you, rather than the things you were thinking about yourself iyswim?
We don’t know exactly what she was trying to do when she wrote the notes but it could have been a mixture.

Here is some of LL’s evidence presented to the trial on the genesis of the notes. It gives context. From the Chester Standard Live feed:

Asked about the Post-it note – found inside a diary at her home in Chester after her arrest in 2018 – she told detectives: “

“I just wrote it because everything had got on top of me.

“It was when I’d not long found out I’d been removed from the unit and they were telling me my practice might be wrong, that I needed to read all my competencies – my practice might not have been good enough.

So I felt like people were blaming my practice, that I might have hurt them without knowing through my practice, and that made me feel guilty and I just felt really isolated.

“I was blaming myself but not because I’d done something (but) because of the way people were making me feel.
“But like I’d only ever done my best for those babies and then people were trying to say that my practice wasn’t good, that I’d done something.
“I just couldn’t cope and I just did not want to be here any more.
“I just felt it was, it was all just spiralling out of control, I just didn’t know how to feel about it or what was going to happen or what to do.”

The detective asked: “What people were they?”
Letby replied: “The Trust and the staff on the unit.”

The detective said: “Did you ever make any mistakes?”
“No,” replied Letby.
Letby appeared strained at times in the dock as she listened to the interviews being read out…. < >

Letby said: “It was more that I was worried they’d already gone to the lengths of redeploying me and moved me from the unit and banning contact, I didn’t know how it was gonna go.

“I didn’t think they’d find that I’d been incompetent but I was worried that they might try and assume that I had been just because I was there for all of these babies.”

She said she had met with the head of nursing in July and was told “there had been a lot more deaths and that I’d been linked as somebody that was there for a lot of them”.

Letby said: “They also said that there was some other people that had flagged as being on shift for a lot of them and that myself and these other people are gonna have to be going and redoing our competencies.”

Asked why she wrote “slander, discrimination and victimisation” on the note, she replied: “Cos I felt that the trust and the team were trying to imply that it, it was something I’d done.”

She added: “I’d lost everything and obviously mum and dad were down in Hereford… and I thought we were a good team regardless of who was my friends, we were a good nursing team on the unit and I’d just lost that. We were like a little family.”

The detective asked: “How would you describe the thing (the note) as a whole?”
Letby said: “It was just a way of me getting my feelings out on to paper, it just helps me process it a bit more.

“I felt if my practice hadn’t been right then I had killed them and that was why I wasn’t good enough.”

The detective said: “In what way do you think your practice might have been the reason why these babies have died?”

Letby said: “I didn’t know, I thought maybe I’d missed something, maybe I hadn’t acted quickly enough.”The detective went on: “And you felt evil?”
Letby replied: “Other people would perceive me as being evil, yes, if I had missed something.”

Asked why she wrote ‘I don’t deserve mum and dad’, she said: “I felt so guilty that they have to go through this, that I wasn’t good enough for them or any of them and it was all just becoming a big mess and I’d just be better off out of it for everybody.”

Letby said she was the first person in the family to go to university and move away from home. She said her parents, John and Susan, were “disappointed” and “really, really upset” at her removal from the unit in July 2016.
She said they were close and she would speak to them “every day”.

Following the collapse of a baby on the unit she would speak to her mother, Letby said: “I wouldn’t talk to her about it in the level of detail I would with a colleague.“I suppose I jut saw it was a safe way of me sort of offloading how I felt to someone I trusted.”

Deep down she knows she is guilty: she gave evidence and was ripped to shreds by the prosecutor. Lies always unravel on the stand. If you rely on memory you have a mental representation of the truth embedded in your head but when you start to lie you have to try and reconstruct a story and then the story has holes and inconsistencies. This is what she did and could only rememer convenient facts and not bad facts. The jury would not consider her a reliable witness and they clearly did not believe her. So yes her testimony, behaviour and demeanour align with someone who is guilty.

Sounds to me like she knew they were on to her and she treated it like a battle she had to win, hence her comment about them having ‘minimal on me’.

This isn’t backed up her texts to her colleagues though.

And if she really was worried that her practise was killing babies, she wouldn’t have fought so hard to continue to treat the sickest babies.

A genuinely caring nurse would have wanted to cooperate.

This is a very disturbing thing to write down...I agree that if someone feels the need to write about hating and other angry stuff, some sort of therapy might be good.

Why would writing stuff down like that even begin to help?

There were creepy things written ''Your {sic} dead from my sword''
and drawings of gravestones &c scrawled on the walls of the Australian death cap killer {Erin Patterson's} house.

Well it would wouldn’t it. Because some people are so excited and invested in her being a serial killer they can’t let go or revise their view.

She’s right they have no evidence, which is why post-trial this is now falling apart.

This was after she had been removed from the unit.

Which texts in particular.

The RCPCH report found no faults in her practice, on the contrary the comment was that she was seen as a respected and competent nurse.

But likewise, some people are so invested in the idea of events being a conspiracy / cover up / corruption in the organisation, that they can't let go of that idea. And yes, there have been plenty of those in history. Doesn't mean that every crime or evil act is a conspiracy to make some innocent individual the scapegoat. Two things stand out to me:

• the jury didn't convict on every count so had clearly thought about what had been convincingly shown in the trial and what hadn't
• consultants raising the alarm like this is very unusual. I'd have expected them if anything to be making the 'poor working conditions, bacteria in the ward' argument blaming the wider context. They seem to have been genuinely worried about a malign individual to the point of taking very unusual actions to bring this to light

I think she's guilty and I agree with posters saying she'd have far fewer supporters if black, Muslim and so on

On the contrary for me this case is all about the scientific and statistical data - or the lack of it. Whatever was going on in the unit is secondary to that.

It’s unusual as there are proper channels to follow and the consultants followed none of them.

I find the “if she wasn’t white” line particularly offensive as I am not white myself. It also belies a lack of understanding of the problems with the science and stats.

I don't know if Lucy Letby is innocent or guilty. But I do know that presenting those notes in court definitely doesn't represent any sort of gotcha moment. I have never murdered anyone or committed any other serious, violent crime, but there are times when I feel that I am the worst person who ever lived. Worse than any genocidal maniac or serial killer. Because I am, at that time, suffering from severe stress, anxiety and self doubt. I have written down things I would never, ever want anyone to read. Things that were definitely not true. I would be horrified if anyone read them, let alone thought they were reflective of who I am as a person. It's like a safety valve and probably stops me from hurting myself by forcing me to take stock of reality and quit spiralling. Nobody advised me to do this. It is just something I do naturally. Not often. Maybe once or twice a decade. I am not in need of urgent help. Nor am I a danger to others. I simply have intrusive thoughts at times of severe stress and this is how I have dealt with them.

@Mirabai Enough to know that in the few where it happens, the person is mentally unstable and needs help. How many have you?

And how many is that? How do you define “mentally unstable”? Is this your area of work? (I would think not by the use of that phrase).

Going by the metric that anyone writing down dark thoughts is mentally unstable and a danger to themselves and other people, horror writers must be in constant therapy and most are probably closet serial killers. Yet their books are published and sold, and may put their readers in danger of committing horrible acts through osmosis.

Also, mental state / stability can fluctuate massively over short periods of time. Yesterday's darkest hour may be replaced by tomorrow's hope. As "evidence" notes scribbled during a sanctioned therapeutic process are extremely dubious proof of anything much.

The whole scapegoat argument is crazy. How many times do senior managers have long telephone conversations and meals out with the parents of the person they wanted to scapegoat. The chief exec of the hospital trust went to Lunch with Letby’s parents and had frequent calls whilst the hospital investigated her. There was then an external investigation who clearly stated there were issues but they couldn’t rule out foul play and required further investigation.The senior managers then misrepresented the reports that stated that the deaths required further investigation by stating that the investigation showed the babies died of natural causes and refused to let the consultants see the full reports. Letby’s dad then was invited to attend the meeting in which the consultant was threatened with loss of career if they didn’t apologise to Letby. Letby was also assigned a plum job in a safety department whilst the investigation was taking place, which was only stopped after her first arrest. Does that sound like the action of a senior management team scapegoating a nurse?

A competent and respected nurse doesn’t harass families. She had to be told to leave a family alone when they were saying goodbye to their baby, that she was later convicted of murdering

A respected and competent nurse doesn’t neglect the patients she’s been assigned because the horrible little ghoul wanted the more poorly children

A competent and respected nurse doesn’t shout at a colleague who alerted for help when a baby was desaturating

Her colleagues stated they used to look at eachother and say “Lucy’s on” when a baby would crash. That isn’t competent or respected. That’s a predator, a cold evil monster

Wow! You've looked at every facet of this case from your armchair and concluded this:

IMO neither a brilliant judge nor a brilliant defence team can automatically understand the scientific arguments here, to understand what they are permitting/defending, and nor am I throwing any shade at the jury for finding based on the information they were given.

Yet in all your research, superior scientific knowledge and findings, you've missed the photo of LL plastered all over the place in her case.

They would have needed your service for sure. I'm sure LL would have been free by now.

She's in a job where deaths are expected. She's in an under performing hospital. There were other deaths that she was on shift for during the same time period

Weird behaviour is not evidence that she killed anyone