Lucy Letby

[kkloo]

New thread as the last one has filled up.

Most people have no argument against the concerns around the medical evidence, so they have to focus on minor, irrelevant details like the handover sheets and diaries.

Just my opinion, but I have yet to see anyone form a coherent argument to defend Evans' piece of science fiction, sorry, "medical evidence".

Well maybe, but the various things seem to me to be of the same ' nature', indicating a slightly unusual personality. There seems to be something obsessive about it all. Although perhaps you could argue that anyone might become paranoid/ obsessive about surviving / proving their innocence if accused of such heinous crimes..Someone on here said they thought it odd that no forensic psychiatrists / psychologists had been involved in the investigation / trial.

Hmmm, well I e been to an inquest for a baby which was damaged during an elective caesarean section and subsequently died so that’s definitely not true!

I think she may have had a bit of an obsessive personality and fixated on her job. When I was young and enthusiastic I was like that about my job, which was much less important and intensive then caring for newborn babies.

But I just don't see how that makes her more likely to start murdering people.

I've known a few carers and nurses who made their career their entire personality and would turn up on their days off to sit with residents/patients and play board games or read to them. I think that kind of vocation attracts people who lean towards that personality type.

They were the least likely to murder anyone, ime, and the best at their job.

When I first started in care, I was still hairdressing and would occasionally and grudingly bring in my kit to give residents a haircut/blowdry/perm after my shift finished if and only if I was asked to, but coming in on my day off or actively volunteering to spend extra, unpaid time there would be a step too far. I think I did it once when someone's mobile stylist let them down an hour before an event they were due to attend, but I wasn't happy about it and made it known to everyone and anyone who would listen that it was not something I would be repeating.

No one thought it particularly odd that some of us did things like this. It's human to care and to want to make a positive difference in the lives of others.

The subsequent trawl for more cases post conviction gave me real "Satanic panic" vibes tbh. Would love to know what "evidence" was presented to the CPS and then rejected, because surely in the light of the growing disquiet around the convictions, anything substantive to bolster their "safety" would have been seized upon. Wasn't it something like 3000 babies she had allegedly been on the vicinity of? And where are the inevitable extra parents or colleagues voicing their suspicions? The silence on that front has been deafening.

That's something else that has bugged me throughout - the lack of even one attempt to "dish the dirt" by someone who knew her back in the day. Her apparent unrelenting normalness in so many ways completely undermines so much about profiling that we have been fed over the years.

Even if you think bringing them home and letting them pile up is something you don’t understand, it still isn’t evidence of murder. There isn’t a rational way to link the handover notes to the relevant babies. The police lied in their documentary to attempt to make these notes meaningful.

Also didnt some of the parents say she was always hovvering around

what does this even mean? She was at work doing her job. My daughter had a baby in NICU late last year. There were people around all the time in high dependency and in and out all the time in the low dependency nursery. It’s busy and not private. Unfortunately we also witnessed a fair bit of obnoxious behaviour from some parents, so someone saying something like she was always hanging around isn’t meaningful at all.

Yes, one would hope that she was hovering around the babies on her rota, given that it was her job to monitor them.

We also need to remember that anything reported by the parents after the arrest is remembered through the lens of Letby being a convicted murderer. It is confirmation bias and cannot be relied upon to be a factual and balanced account of what actually happened.

It's telling that no one reported any serious concerns at the time she was working, and Letby was, by all accounts, well-liked by parents and nursing colleagues.

No, fair enough, you have a point. But just things like apparently photographing a card she'd sent or something ...have I got that right ? It just seems a bit odd. And looking up the parents. It feels a bit stalky or obsessive . But of course I get that you could probably take any person in UK, cherry pick things they'd said or done and weave it into some weird narrative. It's kind of a baffling case. Either a dreadful dreadful miscarriage of justice, or she's a chillingly complex murderer.

I understand the reasons why they aren’t an indication of her guilt, I guess my question is more wanting to hear from the people who think taking the handover notes home is an indication of her guilt.

I don’t think it’s indicative of her guilt but I also don’t think it’s normal behaviour, tbh.

I think it may be linked to a campaign of bullying though.

I don’t think anyone would argue that she didn’t have a SM addiction and that that’s not a bit obsessive. But to me it indicates too much investment rather than too little that you would expect to see in psychopathy.

And frankly if people analysed my SM lookups they’d infer I was interested in all kinds of people that I’m not.

From observation it seems to be based pretty solidly on the "trophy" er - trope - that the media stirred up and the Netflix documentary capitalised on and actually falsified by claiming "neatly filed in date order" - which is easily undermined by police records anyway.

I could better understand the fixation if those pertaining to indictment babies had been marked in some way or framed or something. But nothing of the sort has ever been disclosed, and given the furore around the diary scribbles / post it notes any such thing would have been three ring circus fodder.

Best person to ask from the guilty perspective is ol' Firefly... I'm sure they'll be happy to talk about it till the cows come home....

I thought I read somewhere that certain things had an asterisk next to them.

There isn't any dirt for her former colleagues to dish. She was as normal as anyone else working in the hospital at that time. The description by Steve Brearey of "nice Lucy" and Eirian Powell and Karen Rees being adamant she hadn't done anything to harm babies in her care supports this.

Well @rubbishatballet seems a strong contender on the face of it but couldn’t manage anything more than “I can’t even bear to think about why she had all those notes”, so let’s not hold our breath.

In her work diary, some dates were marked with an asterisk at some point. She said that she did this for her reflection, which makes sense because for appraisals, future courses etc she would be expected to reflect on how she had handled difficult situations. And remember that she was retested on her skills after the run of deaths, so it's certainly possible she was preparing to discuss them, then and with external reviewer.

Though it's always possible she starred them in the couple of years when she was trying to work out who the consultants were accusing her of murdering. I'm sure she thought about that a lot.

I have lots of things starred and underlined and boxed in my notebooks. It usually means they were important for some reason at the time. I don't think I'd need to use stars to remind me if I had murdered anyone.

Exactly.

So much "nothing to actually see here" versus the press and police claiming "the monster in our midst".

In cases where guilt is nigh on 100% certain and accepted, someone usually has some childhood anecdote or suspicion to feed to the tabloids. The deafening silence speaks volumes IMHO.

Anyone who things the handover sheet keeping indicates guilt have still not commented.

Funny that.

Firefly doesn’t normally log on until about now 😜

It would be interesting to know what was starred. I find the 'reflection' argument odd.

And looking up the parents. It feels a bit stalky or obsessive .

She looked up lots of people, not parents specifically. From https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/20/lucy-letby-was-found-guilty-of-killing-seven-babies-did-she-do-it (worth reading if interested in the case):

she’d searched on Facebook thirty-one times for parents whose children she was later accused of harming. During the year of the deaths, she had also searched for other people 2,287 times—colleagues, dancers in her salsa classes, people she had randomly encountered. “I was always on my phone,” she later testified, explaining that she did the searches rapidly, out of “general curiosity and they’ve been on my mind.”

So looking up the parents was 1% of her total searches. If anything, it shows a lack of special interest in the parents of babies in the court case, compared to other parts of her life. But even if she had been more focused on families who lost babies, that could simply reflect her being more affected by the losses, than by cases which went well.

Reflection is an activity/technique that nurses are taught in university. It wasn't just Letby stating she wanted to reflect on the dates, it is an actual part of her job. Nurses often have reflection meetings or tasks to complete. Keeping notes to help with her reflection is what she has been taught to do.

Look up reflective practice/nursing.

So true. The things I’ve read generally about murderers and serial killers is that there is often a reportable history that builds up to murder. Cruelty to animals, extreme or abnormal behaviour etc. I haven’t seen anything like that reported about LL.

And doing lots of night shifts and weekends - a lot of hospital work can vary between periods with not much to do and then suddenly everything happens at once and you don’t eat or use the loo for the next 8-hours. I can easily imagine doom scrolling endlessly during the very quiet periods at night, when you are just waiting to do the next feed