To think Lucy Letby could’ve done more to help herself if she really wasn’t guilty?

[Seymorbutts]

Just watched the new Lucy Letby documentary on Netflix. I think there’s one of C4 too, don’t know if it’s the same one? I’m leaning slightly more towards that she did it, but only about 60% sure she did it. 40% sure she didn’t do it. On this doc there’s a lot of footage of all her arrests and police interviews. What strikes me as odd IF she’s innocent, is how little she protests her innocence, how calm & composed she is. It’s the same during her arrests. I understand she must’ve been in shock when she was arrested so that could explain it. But she was interviewed for hours. Not once did she say “I didn’t do this” (unless directly asked, which she just answered with “no”) “I’m innocent”, “I could never kill a baby”. Nothing like that. Very little crying too. I know she’s supposedly very quiet and reserved and I’m sure was very scared, but I don’t think personality can account for a total lack of defending herself (or maybe she was just following the advice given by her lawyer). But still, if it was me I’d be absolutely raging, and protesting my innocence at every opportunity and giving clear, detailed reasons why I couldn’t have done it when they put it to me that I did. Or maybe she did do it and she’s a psychopath and unable to show remorse, which could explain her lack of any kind of emotion at all 🤷‍♀️ I really don’t know. If she is innocent though, I feel like the way she behaved made her look guilty. Interested to hear if people think she did it or not and why/why not…

I agree with the majority of posters so far on this regarding Lucy Letbys responses / tone of voice etc

If anything, I think the video footage supports the case for her innocence. Couldn't believe the ignorant and prejudiced attitudes of the investigating police officers.

I believe Lucy Letby is innocent.

but she just seemed resigned to it
Of course everyone reacts differently to trauma and some do go very quiet.

However I had that same sense as OP watching the programme with absolutely no views on whether she is guilty or not. She seemed so utterly resigned that her time had come to an end. That she spent months and months of stress trying to hide a big secret and now that it was out, although unwilling to admit it, she just accepted her fate.

Of course this is not in any way evidence of her guilt.

The onus is on the police/Court to prove her guilt, not on her to prove her innocence.

I don't think she was mentally well, even if she is innocent.

Thank you for sharing this. I hadn’t really thought about it like this before. I actually think there is a lot non-healthcare professionals can’t understand about this.

This post illustrates one of the huge problems of trial by jury. People tend to judge people by their behaviour / personality rather than focusing on the evidence. That's why a good lawyer will tell their client what to wear in the witness stand (why tf should it matter what they wear?) and coach them on how to behave.

The documentary was really poor.

They didn’t even go through every single baby she murdered and how.

It was incredibly biased.

Someone was killing babies. The administration of synthetic insulin was very clearly murder.

I agree with you op. I was thinking the same. She was caught lying several times as well during those interviews.

Personally I was thinking that if i was innocent and had nothing to hide, why on earth i would answer ‘no comment’ to so many questions.

Probably because the trial went on for months and they couldn’t fit all the evidence plus that new guy into a 90 min documentary.

If she had behaved hysterically - there would have been a thread on here proclaiming her behaviour to be over the top, and 'she's a good actress' etc.

She also knew she was under suspicion & had been under investigation for some time - she looked like a woman shocked, worn down and resigned to me. She would also have been strongly advised not to say anything by her legal counsel.

But actually - how I interpret her reaction doesn't matter, it's not evidence. And reactions have also seen a number of innocent people cast wrongly under suspicion in the past.

I watched a doc about the disappearance of Lucy Blackman yesterday, her father appeared very calm in the archive footage (there is zero question he had anything to do with it) but it struck me how different people react in different situations.

You weren't at the interviews or the trial. You don't know her. You do not know how you would behave in that situation. I had a truly shocking police-related incident once (fortunately resolved after a week or two) and was completely numb. Looking back, I can't understand why I was so quiet and passive and why I didn't speak up more, argue or challenge them. I'm surprised even by my own behaviour!

Also want to add that as an HCP you need to learn to stay calm in a crisis, sometimes this can look like detachment, if you are leading the cardiac arrest you can't fall to bits.

Sometimes this becomes so entrenched you end up not being able to acsess those feelings at all. Adam Kay is very eloquent on this.

This is why jury trails are such a bad idea, people decide someone isn't responding the 'correct' way and decide they're guilty rather than assessing the evidence. As someone who is neurodivergent it scares the fuck out of me. I do not behave the 'correct' way 99% of the time!

A lot of people have said the same OP but others have said she was on a lot of medication , naturally shy / quiet. Autism has been suggested , basically a lot of reasons to explain her demeanour

My worst nightmare would be to be arrested for a crime I didn’t commit because I’m not sure I’d act how people expect me to.

I think behaviour can be relevant especially relating to around when the crime happened but I think people can be unfair in expecting behaviours that don’t come naturally to people. I’m really reserved and go quiet when scared. If I were to try shouting and sobbing it could come across as forced.
It makes me think of some rape trails where the victim giving evidence came across as too calm and confident and the jury thought she didn’t seem affected by the supposed crime so let the guy go. You’ve no idea what’s going on in a person’s head.

Nobody knows how they would act. Personally her reaction makes me more convinced that she’s not guilty (BUT I haven’t sat in court and heard all the evidence so that’s just my opinion based on what I’ve seen and I could be wrong).

Entirely different but my ex’s family essentially made up a whole story that I had cheated on him. It was based on loose facts (that I’d seen a male friend who was having a rough time for a coffee and happened to be wearing makeup) but the rest was just nonsense. When they told my then boyfriend and he reacted, whilst I cried I did not hysterically protest my innocence. I was so surprised at the bizarre story and why they’d even do this that I didn’t say a whole lot (and I couldn’t say I hadn’t seen him that day and chatted). They made me feel like I’d genuinely got something to be ashamed of, even though I knew I’d done nothing wrong. I questioned whether even seeing him was wrong. The lies went so deep that after a week I honestly felt like a disgusting cheater. I was silent for the vast majority of all this and just let it all happen around me. Whilst I said it wasn’t true I didn’t protest continuously by any means. I just did nothing. Looking back I’m livid that I didn’t defend myself and call out his family for being so horrid but in a way I’m glad I didn’t give them the satisfaction

Interesting you mentioned Knox. These questions are so often asked (accusingly) about women but not men.

I've got no idea if she's guilty or innocent. Only she truly knows what she did.
What I will say is that people can have really strange reactions to accusations. Some decades ago now, my horrible, sick ex took me to court on child custody issues, and portrayed me as a mentally ill alcoholic. I've never had any mental health issues and was in a really good place in my life, and I don't touch alcohol. Yet, I was so stunned that my reaction was, for some reason, to just withdraw and go really quiet.

I remember the CAFCASS woman saying that she had brought tissues to the courtroom "for a reason" and then saying that the fact I didn't use them meant that I didn't "care". Stunningly ridiculous. I don't know if that sort of thing still happens today.

I certainly had MH problems after that, though! Nothing I didn't bounce back from thanks to my lovely family. But yes, we can have very odd reactions sometimes. I will have to watch the LL documentaries.

I agree with others that she seemed resigned and accepting. She was apparently on anti-depressants but with some people they lose their efficacy after a time. I note she was alert enough to lie, more than once. Perhaps there was a feeling of “I’d better not say anything incriminating so I can get a lesser sentence, they won’t have much (if any) proof because I covered my tracks well”.

But my view means nothing and I do believe her conviction is unsafe.

I think I’d go “flat”. Either that or sarcastic - these are my, admittedly unhelpful, instincts when I’m being accused of something.

I don’t think her flatness helped but not did it condemns her imo. Other things did though.

They didn’t call any medical experts - apparently they had one but he was binned off at LL instructions. They just had the maintenance man who came about the sink. Nobody challenged the medical evidence at all.

They didn’t challenge the famous “chart” that showed her on shift. I don’t understand it myself but lots of people claim it’s a statistical nonsense.

They didn’t challenge the insulin assay test - just admitted that the insulin babies had been deliberately harmed and she was the only one around for both incidents.

They didn’t challenge the mysterious rash on the air injected babies. The author of the paper the prosecution used has said his findings have been misinterpreted. Did nobody for the defence think to ask him?

They didn’t mention any incidents where babies had adverse events or deaths when she wasn’t there. There are lots of vague claims that these were excluded because they didn’t fit the narrative but why didn’t the defence use that if it’s true. Surely the defence would be allowed the patient notes that the police had access to.

The prosecution used an X-Ray taken on a baby that LL had never seen at the time it was taken - she hadn’t been at work. Why didn’t they point that out?

She claimed she wasn’t having a relationship with the married doctor despite going on shopping trips etc and having him over to her house. Married men don’t go on shopping trips to London with female colleagues as a general rule. Maybe it was all completely innocent but she shouldn’t have wept and hand wringed about it. It made her look like a liar. “I quite fancied him but he was married and it didn’t go anywhere” or “we had a connection but it was more me than him” or “we had an affair for several months” would have sounded more honest. She pretended she didn’t know what “go commando” meant when one of her friends used it about her when she said he had asked her to do something. Almost everyone of her age, sex, and background would know and it was obvious from the message that she knew. She lied on the stand in a murder trial over something so trivial so of course it’s hard to believe she’s telling the truth about anything.

All the talk about her mysterious childhood illness, her not being able to sit in the back of a normal car because of her knee and not being able to walk from the dock to the witness box because of her mental health made her look like she had munchausen’s. Not the image you want when defending yourself from Munchausen’s by proxy.

The administration of synthetic insulin has since been dismantled by experts: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/feb/07/strong-reasonable-doubt-over-lucy-letby-insulin-convictions-experts-say

Also: if those two babies (Baby F and Baby L) received such massive insulin overdoses - how on earth did they make full recoveries?! There was another baby who allegedly received an insulin overdose, but Letby had nothing to do with that case so they quietly dropped it…

I remember doing training at work many years ago where we looked at court cases and decisions based on affect. There was a case of an underaged girl being sexually assaulted by a family member. There was a camera footage, irrefutable proof of the crime being commited but perpetrator received not guilty verdict not because the proof wasn't there but because jury members judged the victim as "not being sufficiently upset" at the trial.

She was interviewed for hours and we have literally seen snippets. She may well have protested her innocence, we just haven’t seen it.

But let’s remember that not everyone deals with things the same way. I hate this idea that if you don’t act a certain way, you must be guilty/have something wrong with you.

If someone close dies, I just make a few jokes and crack on with life. I don’t ever let anyone see me cry or upset. I find emotional people very draining.

Yes. As a woman innocent of any crime I wonder if I should be getting some acting lessons just in case. It's terrifying that people allow themselves to be swayed by this shit.

I remember once I was with someone who was doing something very unsafe, thinking it was fine. I was trying to convince them to not do it and it all started going wrong. At that point I started laughing and couldn't stop. It wasn't because I thought it was funny, it was uncontrollable panic coming out as laughter. In situations where I can be in control (e.g. injured child, first aid, etc.) I am calm and totally together. But in this situation where I wasn't in control and couldn't stop it, I just kept laughing. It was awful because I couldn't get my words out properly either. Someone watching might have thought I was happily participating with the situation. It freaks me out as I don't know how I would stop it in the future.
It taught me that reactions are meaningless. The outward presentation has no relation to what's happening inside.