The investigation of Lucy Letby on Netflix

[TheRozzers]

Anyone watched it yet? It’s a really excellent documentary with loads of footage of her police interviews.

You see the police asking her questions about those ‘confession’ notes.

I won’t put spoilers in the OP but I’d love to hear what others made of her responses.

Mid way through I thought she’s 💯 guilty but by the end I’m really not sure. A lot points to her being innocent.

I feel for the parents of those babies so much, the uncertainty must be horrendous 😞

Why not read or watch the transcript of her actual witness testimony in court?

It’s revealing.

Not just Christmas day, and the Christmss day she searched she was at work, so presumably on a break there and not just looking them up over her Christmas dinner.

True and when the Landlord of Joanna yeats was arrested after her murder lots of people thought he must of done it because he looked " odd".

Yes it’s a big jump from inappropriate use of social media (common) to serial killer (very very rare). The only evidence that matters to me is medical evidence of an actual murder having taken place and being linked to her. The insulin is the only important evidence and the rest is window dressing and attempts to sway people’s emotions which is easy to do.

If she said the first thing at all, she said it privately to other nurses, not in front of the parents or other patients, about a child who was repeatedly crashing, while the doctor who reported it was panicking herself. Why wouldn't it be a genuine fear?

The second child's parents said they didn't know which nurse that had been until way after the conviction, so I would take that with a pinch of salt.

She didn't write a letter to the triplets and carry it around. She wrote their three names on a post-it along with something like, I'm so sorry. You should be here. That obviously could apply to one, two, or three of them. Her post-it notes aren't full sentences or coherent ideas - they are streams of consciousness. She contacted her counsellor on the anniversary of the triplets deaths to say that she was struggling.

I wonder how many people wouldn't seem a bit emotional, clumsy etc if we picked over everything they did for years and assumed the worst? I've been in hospital quite a bit. Nurses aren't saints or machines. They are human beings in a high stress environment who are sometimes awkward and sometimes emotional like anybody else.

What an odd thing to defend.

Take sworn witness testimony with a 'pinch of salt'? Er - no? I'll take it as evidence. Part of the huge collection of evidence of her evil personality and established guilt.

Defend?

Where as I completely agree about the pain the families must be feeling, the justice system isnt about the families having certainty as you quote. The issue is about the actual truth, not insisting she is gulity because the police told you she was. There is a question mark over her conviction and it needs to be addressed regardless to how the families feel. If it was you convicted unfairly would you say that's ok ill stay in prison my whole life because the families are upset. No you would not. Im not saying shes not gulity or not. Im saying it needs to be looked into.

The parents were perfectly clear about it - they were unsure who it was until eight years after the event at least. That obviously leaves room for uncertainty. But my wider point is that yes, people will say the wrong thing sometimes and misjudge tone, context, etc. Of course they will. It doesn't make them "evil'

I don’t think it was defending - it was just stating that it isn’t proof of murder

I think almost everyone in the world would be considered weird, if their social media and google searches were scrutinised and made public.

Hospital work, especially night shifts are really strange as it varies between being incredibly quiet and boring, to suddenly becoming an emergency situation with lack of appropriate staffing levels. You can end up doom scrolling for hours or searching for random things, as there is nothing else to do - and then suddenly your bleep or alarm goes and it is non-stop work again

Exactly - anyone working in healthcare will say the wrong thing at times, even very experienced staff. What works for one family, may be considered uncaring or inappropriate to another - it is not an easy role

I don't get why the social media searches are a big deal. I don't know a single carer or nurse who hasn't looked up a patient on social media. The only reason I never did it when I was caring is that I'm not on FB, etc. I've been in the break room while other carers were doing it, and I've asked if x resident's family is on there.

You've got to remember that carers/nurses spend 40-60 hours a week with patients and their families. You can't expect them not to develop an attachment. It's natural to think about people you've been close to and wonder how they're doing.

A lot of the circumstantial evidence confuses me. It's evidence of nothing, and I can't understand why it was included in the trial.

The social media searches - she searched friends, family, and colleagues, also, not just the parents. Searching for patients' social media is something all carers/nurses will have done at least once.

The diary "confessions" - she also confessed to being innocent. I don't get why one set of scribbles was given more weight than the other.

The handover notes - these are not confidential medical documents, as has been reported. They're just a list of things that need passing over to the next shift. I've taken home plenty of them because they have things that need looking at during your shift, so you pick them up, put them in your pocket and then forget about them. I've never worked on a neonatal ward, so I don't know what would need to be handed over, but I imagine it was similar to ours, which were along the lines of "Bob's family is coming at 13:00, please have Bob dressed to leave. Daughter has asked him to wear his red shirt. Beryl missed lunch, try to give her an early dinner and record what she eats in her food diary. Jim was late for morning meds. Lunch meds now due at 14:00. Mary keeps stripping naked again, please keep an eye on her and report to mental health if concerned."

And the handover notes she took were from all patients, less than 10% of them related to her victims.

That such nonsense was made out to be "evidence" only makes me more suspicious of the entire case. If she were guilty, why would they need to fabricate circumstantial evidence? Why does the case not stand up on its own merit?

Things that make me feel she’s guilty:

Evidence painstakingly placing her cotside in every case when it mattered
The insulin cases - these are very hard to argue against
Falsifying notes to throw timelines off
Claiming Baby E’s mum was incorrect about timings when the phone records proved otherwise - this made her look like a deliberate liar
’I knew what I was looking for … looking at’ and requesting a break in trial right afterwards
Waiting for a very prem baby ‘to self correct’ when alarm is silenced

Things that dont make me think guilt, but don’t help her case:

her demeanour in questioning
the Facebook searches
the weird interactions with parents
the notes

All true. I don't know enough about each case to say anything intelligent, so I really have no idea whether she's guilty or not.

The one thing I would say, is that I'd be surprised if a nine-month trial is wrong. It's possible, of course. But she had this INSANELY long trial, during which every bit of evidence for both sides was presumably presented and sifted through and examined to the nth degree. It doesn't make sense to me that they got it wrong. As I said, it's possible. But it doesn't seem likely.

I believe she had called the doctor. I think she told the mother that.

I used to accidentally tske home handover notes too when I was a nurse but I didn't store them in chronological order
Often i didn't find i had brought them home until I had washed my tunic and they were all over the pockets..

Thanks for this. These (your first four,) are reasons people cite quite often and at surface level they look important. But they are flawed if you look harder. Just to take these one by one, so may come and go.

Evidence placing her cotside

This doesn't really exist. The prosecution gave a very vague account of when critical events "must have" happened. Their experts didn't commit themselves on how long the mode of attack would take to produce an effect.

So you have Lucy Letby, one of a maximum four (usually three) nurses qualified to do intensive care on the night shift. These nurses will be moving between four rooms, including in a supervising role. They will take breaks and cover for one another. They will leave rooms to get medications. They will all, in the course of a night, be alone with children at some point.

Now say you have a prosecution expert who says they can place the damage at a range of times. Say you are relying on medical notes to work out was where when, and you have all the gaps because people don't note when they are nipping out or swapping for lunch, and you can fill the gaps if you want to by speculating or accusing her of lying and changing notes.

Say you are using door swipe data too. Later, it will be discovered that the door swipe data was wrong. Police mixed up the record of people coming in and people leaving. Because security systems were designed to stop people leaving with babies untracked, not for clocking on. The ward even has one entrance with a number pad code, and somebody has kindly written the code beside it. Midwives take shortcuts through the unit using this door.

Then there are memories. There's a disturbing pattern to police interviews vs trial. At police interview, you have nurses saying one thing, in court another. They're not sure. They're doing their best to recall. It's all contradictory

And finally you have immediate collapses. What if she's alleged to have done the harm in front of eyewitnesses (who somehow didn't notice her doing it). Well, these were small nursery rooms. And she's in the notes. So was she there?

Yes, for the four babies who died when she was caring for them, she was there. You would be much more concerned if she wasn't, given her role. But the scenario the prosecution presents is that, for at least three of these four, she must have inflicted fatal damage while surrounded by other people, in one case at least while they were all working on the child.

Happy to go into detail on individual children or provide links if anyone is interested, but it needs to be said. By the method the prosecution used, anybody of duty could have been placed cotside where she was supposed to be working silently and invisibly. And in other cases, where we know she was present, the idea she could be proved to be there by eyewitnesses, but not seen doing anything, is pretty shaky.

I'd be worried about working in any role on a struggling ward, seeing how the prosecution was able to present such flawed and flexible "evidence".

She called the doctor like she said - this was confirmed by his notes which were published at the Thirlwall Enquiry.

The mother said she was a computer looking worried. I'm sure she was worried about the sick child.

The same mother said she and her partner thought about asking Lucy Letby to be godmother to their surviving child. They brought gifts back to the unit after he was discharged. They obviously didn't think Lucy Letby had done anything to harm either child at the time. The mother, as human beings do, put a new interpretation on things once the police started to talk about murder three years later

The pattern of following from nights to days isn't genuine.

When the police looked into suspicious collapses and deaths with Dewi Evans's guidance, they found some incidents where Lucy Letby had been on duty, some where she wasn't.

They dropped the ones where she wasn't on duty from the investigation. Now, the ones that were left seemed to follow Lucy Letby from night to day.

https://unherd.com/2025/02/why-the-letby-case-isnt-closed/

She hasn’t given her permission though, Mark McDonald was asked directly. She had an expert witness at her trial who was due to be called and then stood down. There must have been a reason for this.

My point is that he’s submitted an application to the CCRC based on what he describes as new evidence. However, this evidence is not new, he has simply obtained expert witnesses himself who would have been available to Lucy at the time of her trial.
In order to make a decision the CCRC will want to understand why no expert witnesses were called originally. They will need to know whether this was a tactical decision or bad legal advice (seems highly unlikely).

Either way, Lucy would need to waive legal professional privilege for the reasons to be understood and for a ruling to be made. She has not done so yet and understandably people are intrigued as to why. It makes any appeals quite difficult.

She is guilty. The jury, which sat through every day of the very long trial came to that conclusion. All the evidence fits together so neatly, even if some of it is circumstantial. Just because no one saw her doing it doesn’t mean she didn’t do it. As far as I know the families all believe she is guilty, and they will know lots more about the case than people reading about it online. it must be hell for them to see all these stories and conspiracies online. People wouldn’t be doing it if she looked like Harold Shipman, they just don’t want to believe a youngish blonde white woman would do such things.

I read it’s completely normal not to waive it because it opens everything up and can never be withdrawn and any good lawyer would advise against it

You can't randomly waive privilege - you wait for the CCRC or court of appeal to ask, because you waive privilege over particular information, recorded in particular documents. If the CCRC / CoA ask - they don't have to but quite likely will - that's the time to do it.

Meanwhile, Letby and McDonald can discuss any aspect of the case and associated decisions that they like, based on all of the documentation to which they both have access. I'm sure McDonald knows very well why the decision was made - Lucy Letby's account will be backed up by the reports etc that he now holds.