Does it strike you as odd that only Dr Evans made the air in stomach ‘diagnosis’ and has not been able to properly explain his diagnostic criteria? The way he talked about it sounded like a hunch rather than a verifiable diagnosis.
In the account Dr Dewi Evans gives of the work he did for the police and prosecution cases against Lucy Letby, he says he suspected “foul play” within 10 minutes of reading the first medical records of a baby that he saw.
Evans, then 67, a retired consultant paediatrician, says when he looked at postmortem photos of that first baby he saw bleeding over the liver. “I thought, ‘Oh my God. This baby has suffered trauma.’ We knew instantly that something suspicious had gone on.”
So he made up his mind there was ‘foul play’ in the first 10 minutes and got quite a well paying high profile job that he seemed to relish the idea of as a result. The actual evidence that the liver damage was most likely caused by the traumatic birth rather than an attack by a nurse during the following 48 hours was ignored and he used a faulty interpretation of Dr Lee’s study to make the diagnosis of air being injected into the stomach
“Dr Evans said the rash observed was a signal the boy had been injected with air” (from the BBC report linked earlier)
Cheshire police were impressed, agreed fees, then supplied Evans with the medical records for all babies whose collapses at the Countess of Chester hospital they were investigating.
He was supplied with the medical records and dismissed them even though they related to the births in some cases only 48 hours previously and by his own admission he assumed that the babies were in good condition despite them being poorly enough to be on a neo natal unit having had a traumatic or very premature birth. He was then instrumental in refusing these records to the defence.
Asked by the Guardian to explain how he diagnosed air embolism when none of these experts did, from the same medical notes, Evans said he had done so independently.
“Well without being too blase about it, it’s only difficult if you don’t know the answer, OK. Once you know, you know … It’s not very good asking me why I diagnosed air embolus. I think you should be asking other people why didn’t they make the diagnosis.”
He explained that he identified it due to rashes, air observed in some postmortems – although bodies produce air after death – and by excluding other medical causes. But he also acknowledged that air embolism is very difficult to prove: “Trouble is you don’t get evidence: air embolus doesn’t leave any marks, you see.”
So he can’t explain his diagnosis, has clearly used Lee’s standards which he has misunderstood but then minimises the weight he gave them in the diagnosis while listing his other criteria which seem quite spurious. None of the other medical experts have looked at the notes he saw and made the same diagnosis and he verifiably got at least one wrong and then changed his story because LL wasn’t even there.
It seems that he and the CPS ignored the saying “when you hear hoofbeats, look for horses not zebras”
All the other globally renowned unpaid doctors reviewing the same notes that Evans did can see horses.
With his extremely ambitious account that involves knitting together the rarest of rare events with the shift pattern of a nurse who worked many shifts, ignoring other known and significant medical factors and changing his account when basic facts like timing and her not even being there are demonstrated, Evans seems to be seeing zebras.
He had a professional interest in getting this conviction - from his interviews, he saw this as ‘winning the case’, not giving neutral and objective medical evidence based on the facts which is the job of the medical expert. He comes across like a maverick tv detective who boldly goes against all the boring old opinions of other better qualified doctors with his ‘brilliant’ leftfield diagnosis and now his professional legacy is dependent on her being guilty. It comes across like he decided that it was definitely murder straightaway and settled on her guilt as soon as he managed to cobble together an outline narrative. Inconvenient facts appear to have been retconned to fit this.
We need to ask a) why they refused to show medical birth/maternity records to the defence, even though there was a gap as small as 48 hours between birth and death and b) why does every other medical expert who has looked at the notes disagree with him. They have no skin in this game, no pay, no future lucrative gigs as expert witnesses. Why?