Lucy Letby thread

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Starting this as don’t think we have a new one.

Thanks
I'll do some serious listening then.
As an aside - can anyone remember another case that has spawned so many podcasts/ documentaries?
Obviously historically there weren't these options so there may have been a lone Panorama or something for a crime several years ago but this case seems to have interested so many people on both sides of the debate

@Oftenaddled I am a bit reluctant to make Snowdon the most serious representative, but he seemed serious at the beginning. I suspect it's just become a gig, since.

Yep, he did write an article about how he tested engagement farming.
https://archive.ph/scuv0#selection-941.0-965.65

My interest in engagement farming piqued a few weeks earlier when I noticed various accounts tweeting: “A year ago, I was 100 per cent convinced Lucy Letby was guilty. A year later, I’m 100 per cent convinced she’s innocent. Anyone else?” The most successful of these tweets attracted half a million views and 1,500 replies. Not too shabby. The key words, I noticed, were “Anyone else?” The shrewd engagement farmer knows that it is not enough to say something provocative. He must also pretend that he is interested in the opinions of others.

Based on the assumption that engagement = replies, I decided that put questions at the heart of my farming efforts. On Day One, I asked people to nominate their worst Beatles song (52 replies, 10,000 views) and tweeted “A year ago, I was 100 per cent convinced Lucy Letby was innocent. A year later, I’m 100 per cent convinced she’s guilty. Anyone else?” The latter got 115 replies and 38,000 views, not a bad return but not championship winning stuff.

Yes indeed. He is bit of a horror on social media too.

I do think he was a true believer in Letby's guilt and his own assessment of it back around 2023 / 4. I find him difficult to listen to. He has "man you've stuck next to at the bar giving you his valuable opinion" vibes.

But - who can you think of? I'm down to Susan Oliver in terms of podcasts, if I don't count Christopher Snowdon, preferably long ago when he came across less addled! And Oliver is neither an expert nor a journalist - her only qualification would be, produces audio material supporting Letby's sensationalist. Their best friends couldn't call Hull and Cheetham unsensationalist.

I'm attempting to check my biases but I cannot think of anyone better than Snowdon. Which says a lot!

Susan Oliver is a joke. I attempted to watch one of her videos but she can't expect to be taken seriously the way she goes on. Some people in the comments were asking valid questions and she would respond with 'Oh Hiiiiiii antivaxxer 👋👋

So someone can't be convinced of her guilt just because you're not?

There are plenty of cases I have theories on but am open to it not being who I think. Madeleine McCann, JonBenet Ramsey, Peter Falconio, even the Jeremy Bamber case. I'm sure on this because there is no other explanation that holds up. And she all but proved she did it herself.

There's no chance she's getting out. You'd have to overturn 15 whole life orders! And like I keep saying, if Evans' evidence was so flawed it wouldn't exactly be hard to counter it and yet she didn't even bother to try.

I think that applies to the innocent brigade far more than anyone else.

How did she all but prove she did it herself?

There are many more likely reasons for the tragic deaths of these babies, according to experts in the field who are more experienced than the expert witness.

I agree that it seems extremely difficult to understand why the defence was so poor. I did read a legal explanation that made some kind of sense but I've forgotten it.

As soon as anyone uses the term 'brigade', it seems to indicate that the user has a kind of tribalism that is less about reason and more about winning. People can disagree and not be a member of a brigade.

You have to read up on what was happening with each baby and how she ended up in the room time and time again with a collapsing baby the minute other staff members or parents left.

I won't go over all her weird behaviour again because I know no one on here finds that convincing but it's not just men that have red flags with what they say/do.

3 babies had died or collapsed within as many days of her coming back from holiday and people think she could be innocent, like how?!

The Telegraph printed a comparison of points from the Nottingham Ockenden Report with events at Chester today. Quite chilling. Accurate as to events at Chester too as far as I can see. Very sad to think of all these deaths in our overburdened hospitals.

What the Nottingham report said [in bold] versus what happened at the Countess of Chester

Severe and sustained capacity pressure and overcrowding – The Countess of Chester recorded significantly higher "care days" than the long-term average, with high numbers of premature babies born at 31 to 36 weeks of gestation.
Frequent transfers of critically ill babies – Babies had to be taken to nearby hospitals when doctors at the Countess of Chester were unable to help.
Insufficient consultants cover out of hours – A review by The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) found severe understaffing, gaps in medical and nursing rotas, and an inability to consistently provide long-term high dependency or intensive care safely. There was a 21 per cent shortfall in nurses between 2014 and 2015, and the unit was rated "red" for staffing.
Insufficient emergency blood transfusion for babies with severe blood loss – Baby O suffered a life-threatening drop in haemoglobin, which was not spotted by doctors and no transfusion was given.
Failures in airway management with repeated intubation attempts and preventable extubations – A panel of international experts found efforts of medical staff often took several attempts to intubate babies. In 2014, baby Noah Robinson died after being intubated incorrectly.
Delayed escalation to senior clinicians – RCPCH uncovered a pattern of “insufficient senior cover and a reluctance to seek advice” from consultants.
Several babies died following hospital-acquired infections, including Pseudomonas sepsis – The Countess of Chester's neonatal intensive care ward was colonised by Pseudomonas aeruginosa between 2015 and 2016. Nappy pads were stuffed into the ceiling to stop waste water dripping into the unit.
Environments described as overcrowded and lacking adequate isolation facilities – An inspection by the Care Quality Commission in February 2016 found the neonatal unit “lacked storage space and resources for the care of patients who required strict infection control measures”. Rooms in the unit were small with cots placed too closely together.
Failures in recognising and managing severe neonatal hypoglycemia – Several babies collapsed with unexplained low blood sugar, which the prosecution said was because Letby had spiked feed bags with insulin.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/26/maternity-hospital-repeat-of-letby-ward/

I have read up on it. You do realise other babies died at other times and the suspicious cases were cherry picked to be suspicious once the idea that Lucy was responsible was floated? If you're referring to her notes and Facebook activity, I don't find that convincing at all. No one who knows anything about therapy would.

3 babies had died or collapsed within as many days of her coming back from holiday and people think she could be innocent, like how?!

On a ward with fortyish nurses, if they only take one holiday a year each, a nurse should be within three days of returning from her holiday roughly one day out of three. All year long. And that's just one hospital.

How many nurses should be on murder charges, do you think? Because we don't have enough capacity in our court system if we take that as proof of anything.

It's an easy soundbite. It's memorable. What makes it unusual? What makes it any more proof of murder than if it was her tenth day back?

Thanks @Oftenaddled - that comparison is so concerning - but not really surprising.

You have to read up on what was happening with each baby and how she ended up in the room time and time again with a collapsing baby the minute other staff members or parents left.

That's a common misunderstanding, @Firefly1987 . On some occasions she was unable to prove she hadn't been in the room with collapsing babies the minute other staff members and parents left, because the parents and staff weren't there to witness whether she was there or not. So the prosecution assumed that's when she attacked. It helped that their experts refused to be pinned down on timing - an air embolism or air in the stomach could take effect whenever suited. And how do you prove you weren't somewhere, aided by occasional medical notes, a decade later?

In other cases of course there is no dispute. Other people were in the room with her and testified accordingly. That's the case for babies A, E and P, for what were supposed to have been the moments she murdered them. Witness accounts (not just Lucy Letby's) are contradictory to put it kindly for babies C and D. Babies I and O didn't collapse immediately after anyone left them with her either. So it doesn't work for the deaths.

Of the collapses she was convicted of - I'd have to refresh my memory for some but it's not even claimed for babies F, L or M, and the prosecution had no evidence she was in charge of baby N when he collapsed. They worked backwards, assumed he was harmed, and therefore assumed she was the unknown nurse babysitting him.

People assume this was all pieced together carefully because how else would we know she killed them? The bad news is, it was exaggerated to the point of invention in some cases, and the logistics were just ignored in others. The closer you look, case by case, the worse the conviction looks.

Other babies she was almost always on for as well. How come the consultants and police didn't include those cases if they were only cherry picking babies she was on for? They'd have to include far more. They took the ones to court they thought they could prove. DE has already said he told the police not to let him know if they had any suspects in mind-somehow this gets forgotten about. He didn't do a bad job considering it's a complex case. She happened to be the common denominator. He didn't know this beforehand. 2 sets of police officers looked at all the deaths and came together and found again that she was the common denominator.

I wasn't actually referring to her notes and facebook.

@Oftenaddled baby E's mum testified Lucy was alone with her baby when he must've been attacked. No one else was in the room when the mum went in there. If there was another nurse there they probably would've done something about the poor baby's bleeding and distress.

She was on shift for ten out of the thirteen deaths that occurred on the unit between June 2015 and June 2016. We do not know a proportion for 2012 - 2015. The 10/13 can be explained fairly easily with two things.

One is the lottery effect, which says that low probability things happen to somebody all the time. You just can't predict who they will happen to. I am not at all likely to win the lottery this year. But a handful of people will, though at the moment, it is just as unlikely they'll win it as that I'll win it. If we applied the logic applied in the Lucy Letby case, we would lock them all up for fraud.

On a ward with fortyish nurses, if they only take one holiday a year each, a nurse should be within three days of returning from her holiday roughly one day out of three. All year long. And that's just one hospital.

I don't know what this means. Did you miss some words out? What are the stats for 3 deaths/collapses in 3 days upon returning from a holiday? Somehow the unit managed fine whilst she was away. Anyway I don't need stats to tell me whether she did it or not, luckily I have common sense.

Baby E is supposed to have died from an air embolism, though. That's what Evans argued. When is it supposed to have been inflicted?

Letby had a great defence team with no expense spared. She had lots of experts ready to testify. They weren’t called to testify because after her own performance on the stand, her barrister rightly judged that the experts would stand to harm her case more in cross examination than they stood to benefit it in direct questioning. Which makes me think it’s the sort of evidence that sits better in the court of public opinion where it isn’t scrutinised as much.

I’ll keep an open mind and see where the CCJC goes but new evidence would need to be tested in court rather than in the media before I was willing to think the verdicts given were incorrect. McDonald doesn’t have a great track record of client success but he does get a lot of airtime.

You're the one who is bringing statistics into it!

Statistics is a recognized science for working out how likely or unlikely events are.

If we are going to lock people up based on something being unlikely, we have to use statistics (properly) instead of common sense.

The point is that there is no special significance in her having returned from holidays. That would be a likely happening whether the children died naturally or not. Nurses came back from holidays all the time

I didn't attempt to calculate the chances of two deaths followed by a collapse because we have insufficient data. We don't know how many collapses happened in a year. But they certainly were not rare. So the collapse is probably not worth taking into account.

Deaths, two days in a row? Likelihood depends whether they were independent events. Age of children (days not weeks) is a factor making death more likely. They were the same age. Identical triplets? More vulnerable. Identical errors by treating doctor, as identified by Lee's panel? A terrible consequence of the consultant of the week system at Chester, which placed twins or triplets born there under the same consultant while they did their one in six weeks at the neonatal unit - none of them worked there full time. Those aren't the only factors, but they are enough to tell us that the deaths of the triplets can't be treated as two events. They have related causes.

I agree Lucy Letby had a good defence team and at least one very impressive expert. But she was reliant on legal aid so it would be very far from no expense spared. I'm sure the fees for a legal team for such a complex case with a ten-month trial were eye-watering. But her solicitor would have had to justify every request for an expert witness with the legal aid agency.

Their rates are low and in decline, so that defence expert witnesses are worse paid than prosecution experts. The legal aid agency does not runnerstamp requests, limits the hours allocated, and can turn down strategies and the associated witnesses. It's a system in crisis. Lucy Letby's case cost the state a fortune, but that does not mean at all that she and her team had their pick of expert witnesses, or that any witnesses were paid appropriately for the amount of work the case needed.

Things are very different, of course, for the prosecution, who don't rely on legal aid.

I don't get what you mean?

Letby's answers were consistent the whole way through her testimony, and she was patient. Honestly, if I'd had someone berating me for 3 hours because I couldn't remember where or when I bought shredder 5 years ago, or how much I paid for it, I would not have been as calm as Letby.

If you're referring to her "admitting" the babies had been poisoned with insulin, that's not what happened. Her answer was that if the tests showed they had been given insulin, then that must be what happened.

What else was she supposed to say? She's a nurse, not an insulin expert. How can you expect a nurse to know or explain how a medical test could be wrong?

Here is one of many sources of information on the crisis in the expert witness system due to financial cuts and "inequality of arms" with the prosecution

https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/practice/forensics-shortfalls-and-legal-aid-rates-jeopardising-trials/5069642.article

Maybe not, 2 nurses did leave a baby who needed a stoma covered in her own faeces, of course the papers just reported it as a baby under Letbys care because she was the designated nurse, but she wasn't one of the 2 nurses in there when the mother confronted them. The parents complaint about it amounted to nothing too and they were just told they were tired and stressed and should go home.