Cheshire Police are an incompetent bunch of useless bastards

[GossIsAGit]

After Sally Clark

They should have remembered that If a doctor of medicine tells you that a coincidence is so unlikely it must mean a woman has been killing babies then maybe you should consult a statistician and actually listen.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/10/lucy-letby-police-cps-handling-case-raises-new-concerns-about-convictions?CMP=ShareiOSAppOther

She also lied about her knowledge of air embolisms during her police interview. She said that she was only aware of them in adults.

However, 2 weeks prior to the death of baby A, she had underwent training in administration of IV medicine where the dangers of air embolism were discussed.

2 weeks after the death of baby O, she has a text exchange with a colleague about inadequacies in baby O’s care - his catheter hadn’t been changed and a port had been left open - she was quick to point out that it was a massive risk of infection and air embolism.

In fact, apart from private discussions between the consultants, Lucy Letby was the only person to mention air embolism in the case of a baby who had died.

There's no proof that at least one of the supposed murder methods would actually kill.

Air embolisms absolutely do kill.

You seem very concerned about trivial, peripheral matters but not at all concerned about the holes in the medical evidence such as Letby not being present when harm was alleged to have been inflicted.

You must admit there is nothing that shows cruelty or an interest in murder or murderers in Letby’s search history. She searched casual acquaintances all the time. It’s meaningless.

Lucia de Berk wrote something like ‘I gave in to my compulsion today’ on the day a baby died. Daniela Poggiali was photographed doing a thumbs up of both thumbs over a corpse.

All of this information is inaccurate. Letby didn't lie and claim not to know about air embolism in babies. That's not your fault, because it has been presented that way by journalists, specifically Judith Moritz's and Jonathan Coffey in their book, Unmasking Lucy Letby. That gets a lot of attention because Moritz is the BBC's main voice on Letby.

What Letby said is that when air embolisms were discussed on her unit, it was usually with regard to adults (that would be women delivering by Caesarean section especially). She never said she didn't know about them in babies: in fact she was clear that they'd had training in avoiding them, but not much else.

That means too that the text exchange - such was about another baby, not Baby O, but that is another thing Moritz gets wrong, was a perfectly reasonable discussion of a real risk.

So, according to Moritz and Coffey:

>When she was questioned by police, Letby said all nursing staff would be aware of the dangers of an air embolus [the air bubble itself], but she claimed she didn’t know much beyond this. She said ‘I don’t know exactly what [an air embolism] is. When we were taught about lines, we were taught about clearing lines because that’s what it would lead to.’ She also told police she was only aware of air embolisms in adults.

But - we have the transcript of the police interview, and they've quoted partially and misrepresented it. It's quite shocking how they have twisted it - either dreadfully careless or just not truthful.

Someone on Reddit has transcribed the interview, with link to video sources

https://www.reddit.com/r/LucyLetbyTrials/s/nIccei5cMA

Here is the relevant part.

Q: And what about air embolisms, Lucy? Did you receive any training in relation to those?
LL: No.
Q: Okay. Were you aware of them or?
LL: Not really, no.
Q: Have you heard of them before?
LL: Yes.
Q: When was that?
LL: I've heard of them more from an adult perspective.
Q: And tell me what that was in relation to.
LL: I don't know specifics. Like sometimes we've had mums on the unit who've been unwell and it's been found they've had AAP, pulmonary embolism. So that's just how I've heard of it via that.
Q: Specifically whilst working on the neonatal unit, have you ever come across it before?
LL: No.
Q: Has the air embolism training ever popped up in respect of dangers with other training that you might have had?
LL: Not that I can think of specifically.
Q: No, or any sort of general nursing training before you qualified?
LL: It's been mentioned in terms of line care. You'd have to be mindful that you don't leave a line open and things like that. But it's not something that's discussed frequently in any detail.
Q: When you say line care, you needed that competency assessment in May 2015 that we talked about, the safe administration of medication by the different lines. Is that the type of training that you're referring to?
LL: Yes. I'm not sure if that's on the list or not.

I hope Moritz and Coffey are planning to fix this in the revised edition. It's one thing having opinions on the case, but this claim of theirs is just objectively false.

Air embolisms absolutely do kill (and faster than Dr Evans claimed when inventing murder scenarios for Letby).

Injecting what could only be tiny quantities of air into feeding tubes, on the other hand, is not a proven murder method, and I presume that's what the previous poster was referring to.

Babies get far more air in their stomachs from CPAP ventilation. Evans claimed during the trial that this was a clinically demonstrated murder method, then afterwards that it was previously unheard of.

There was no rule against Letby's social media searches when she worked at Chester. Her manager was asked about this and said they didn't have guidelines then. Quite likely they do now, but that's not relevant.

I haven't seen any evidence for her not being present. A bunch of stuff has been thrown around since the trial that has done nothing but muddy the waters. Were there collapses whilst she was away on holiday? Collapses on the night shift whilst she was on days and vice versa? Are you saying it's incorrect that the deaths and collapses followed her? If you've got any sources that'd be great.

I imagine there are still major question marks over those two mentioned as well. Without context saying stuff like "I gave into my compulsion" is quite alarming.

I don't put much weight into her not having an interest in murderers. Maybe she did but the police didn't think that was relevant? I mean plenty of us have an interest in true crime, doesn't mean we want to emulate the behaviour of serial killers. The babies might've just been collateral damage to her to get her the attention she craved (or revenge for not being given what she wanted) so she might not have gotten a kick out of actually causing the harm, just the aftermath. She did however keep trophies-that's pretty textbook serial killer behaviour.

Yes, there were collapses while Letby was away or on other shifts. The hospital has never completed a full audit of unexpected collapses for the period because they don't have a definition and they did not report them. They gave evidence of this at the Thirlwall Enquiry.

A user called triedbystats posts details from the transcripts on Medium showing Letby's absence in some cases where she was accused of causing harm. They're quite involved but they are also very well evidenced.
https://medium.com/@triedbystats

Or for something less complex, there's David Rose's work for Unherd showing how cases were dropped because Letby wasn't on shift
https://unherd.com/2025/02/why-the-letby-case-isnt-closed/

You are right that the waters have got much murkier since the trial ended - I suppose people weren't allowed to discuss it until then (and until the retrial for one baby was over). And of course it is much more complicated to say, these children died of different causes, mostly related to inadequate care, than it is to say, this nurse was on duty, there are times when she would have been alone with the children, so we can assume she killed them by invisible attacks. I really think it is worth considering that something may have gone very wrong with this case, whatever your opinion of Letby and her professional conduct.

The case of Baby C where it turned out she hadn’t even met the baby when the harm she had supposedly inflicted was shown in an x Ray.

www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/lucy-letby-was-not-working-on-day-baby-c-was-harmed-bbc-investigation-finds/ar-AA1rx5Rc?ocid=iehpLMEMhP&apiversion=v2&noservercache=1&domshim=1&renderwebcomponents=1&wcseo=1&batchservertelemetry=1&noservertelemetry=1

The prosecution didn’t base their case in court around statistics. The media have done so, though.

Oftenaddled’s sources are good. This one https://x.com/LucyLetbyTrials/status/1943075554170741094
also shows the time of inflicted harm for Baby O was originally said to be during the night when Letby was and still on holiday.

The prosecution in the original trial didn’t claim Letby kept handover sheets as trophies. She didn’t have any for Babies A to D, which is three murder charges, and she had a lot of others. I don’t think she had one for Baby K either.

I don’t put much emphasis on Letby’s on-line activities either but if there was anything relating to murder, the prosecution would have used it.

Lucia de Berk’s compulsion was tarot cards.

The prosecution didn't obviously base their case around statistics in court, but dodgy statistics are all they have, at the heart of the case.

The hospital consultants started to panic after a run of deaths. Look at their emails after 5 out of 7 of the children died, and they're working on lessons learned, planning for the future etc. Then after two more children died (after significant medical failures), they worked backwards from "she was there" to "she killed them in some invisible undetectable way".

Even if you accepted that children were murdered - and medical experts say there is no evidence of this at all - you can only pin it on Letby through poor use of statistics, since everyone agrees no crime was witnessed.

The judge also instructed the jury that if they found Letby guilty of some charges, they could assume it was more likely she was guilty of others, and they did not need to be sure how she had committed these other crimes to find her guilty of them. That's a clear invitation to convict her based on statistics.

She absolutely does not fit the profile of someone who would commit a crime like this - Shipman and other medical mass murderers display a god complex which Letby does not. I have been waiting for this to fall apart and fully believe that she was a convenient scapegoat for a negligently managed ward.

I think some of the comments on this post point to a worrying (and, on past evidence, unwarranted) faith in the British justice system.

There are more than enough doubts about the way the prosecution of Letby was conducted to point to the need for (at least) a swift retrial. Unfortunately, nobody within the Govt or Justice system hierarchy has the slightest inclination to have a spotlight cast on prior convictions. Which is why the process is glacial.

And unless she can prove that the prosecution was malicious, she’ll end up with nothing to compensate for her loss of livelihood, pension, reputation or the eventual years she’ll have served in a high category prison.

Yes, of course they do, but there’s no actual evidence that the babies who Evans said had died of air embolism had actually died of air embolism. The original pathologists did not suggest it, and Evans’s misinterpretation of Shoo Lee’s paper has been thoroughly debunked by the author.

Injecting air into a NG tube can’t cause air embolism.

Injecting air into a NG tube can’t cause air embolism

And that’s leaving aside that it would be fiddly and difficult to do under most circumstances and particularly difficult to pull off unobserved.

Yet, in many of the proposed ‘murders,’ Letby would have had to have managed it in seconds and with nobody seeing her do it!

Yet at the time of their deaths on an individual basis nothing untoward was suspected. They were given non suspicious causes of death.

To backtrack on that seems crazy. Especially in view of the fact there is no new evidence concerning their causes of death. The babies had been buried/cremated. Evan’s theories on things like air via the NG tube don’t make sense to me (as a midwife who has worked in a neonatal unit). None of my former colleagues think she’s guilty. 🤷‍♀️. I get none of us have been to the trial but I for one read the newspaper journalists live bullet points most days, listened to the podcasts, read the court papers which were released about the medical evidence for each baby. There was something not great at that hospital but i don’t think it was criminal or down to one individual.

And in a room full of people, in three cases, with others working directly on the babies at the time in two of them.

The whole case is like some sort of dystopian experiment on how many people you can blind with pseudo-science

And I do get people who say that anyone who thinks she may be innocent are “armchair detectives”. I can even understand the sniggering and saying how can you know over a jury who sat through it all, etc.

My main issue though is a load of neonatal experts and statistical experts who have been given all the evidence don’t think she’s guilty. So do we believe world leading experts who are best placed to understand the evidence or 12 lay people? 12 lay people who appear to have been misdirected by a rather fired up retired ex paediatrician, who I believe was not a neonatal specialist?

Remember Evans approached the police and offered his services (odd). He was paid a very good wage for doing so, tens of thousands of pounds. He had set up his own medical-legal expert witness business and obviously had a vested interest in a guilty verdict. A guilty verdict was going to increase his standing as an expert witness and get him more work and money.

its also important that nobody needs to prove she’s innocent. The question is not is she innocent but is there enough evidence to say she’s guilty. That’s a big difference. And I would say there isn’t.

@autocorrupt Evans was paid hundreds of thousands of pounds. It can be very lucrative being an expert witness!

He's on record as saying he's only "lost" one case out of the many he's been EW for, which I think is an odd way of thinking.

I don’t. I am in no doubt she did
it.

It's a corrupt way of thinking. His duty is to the court, not to one side or the other.

Same

Really? Not one doubt whatsoever? Can I ask what you base that certainty on?

Have you watched the Panorama documentary (incomplete as that was)? Or read the many articles in Private Eye or the post-trial coverage in almost all of the Broadsheets?

What makes you put so much faith in the evidence of an ‘expert’ (Evans) who was criticised by the judge in a previous trial he’d participated in? The judge in that case was so concerned that he wrote to Letby’s trial judge saying Evans shouldn’t be used as an expert witness! And the other main prosecution witness, Dr Sandie Bohin, is being sued by the parents of eight babies she’d treated, accusing her of poor / negligent care.

Dr Sandie Bohin, is being sued by the parents of eight babies she’d treated, accusing her of poor / negligent care.

Oof! I didn't know that.