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 😞

Interesting new article from the Telegraph, about deaths and collapses after Lucy Letby left the unit, and emails from police to concerned parents saying they weren't of interest to their investigation

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/02/07/letby-police-ignored-other-baby-deaths-on-unit/

Archived version web.archive.org/web/20260207203103/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/02/07/letby-police-ignored-other-baby-deaths-on-unit/

Agreed - she was obviously pretty horrible at her job. She walked past shredders every day to take those trophies home. And then kept them in the box for her own shredder.

Her mums cry as they led her away really got to me :-(

I only watched a few minutes of the programme - switched off after the AI bit. I might go back to it today.

Regarding the handover sheets: how far back did they go - did she only start keeping them when the unit was being investigated?

Having a large haul of handover sheets is certainly against the rules and odd behaviour but it doesn't mean that someone is a murderer of babies.

In 2015 a male nurse murdered two patients in Stockport by tampering with IV bags and is serving life. Other nurses inadvertently administered these fluids to their patients.

Initially a female nurse was arrested - there must have been some reason for her arrest e.g. being on shift at certain times, her patients affected, etc. At her home police found medications including Tramadol that she'd stolen from the ward. You can't get much more serious than that, and was obviously errant and illegal behaviour.

How long she'd been stealing meds I don't know but it didn't make her a murderer.

Oh c'mon , what about the mother of baby 'Zoe' whose vulnerable newborn was murdered? Do you feel more sorrow for the mother of a murderer than her?

Ah, so there were only 5 handover sheets in that box marked 'keep' and none of them related to the babies in the case.

https://lucyletbyinnocence.com/transcripts/searches+police-interviews-day1-baby-a-17-04-2023.pdf

Quite a lot of people dispute this murder.

Unfortunately, irrespective of guilt or innocence, one thing that has emerged in the last decade is the woeful state of maternity care in the U.K.; Telford and Nottingham to name but two. If you read the link posted by @Oftenaddled two parents had their babies die at Chester due to incompetence which had nothing to do with letby: it was after she was removed from the ward.

So there are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of women who were excitedly waiting to meet their baby and instead experienced heartbreak and grief and loss. I think that they all deserve answers.

But I’m not standing in the camp of ‘well this happened to THEM therefore I don’t feel sorry for YOU.’

In 1996, in Chester, a little girl was raped and murdered and her body was thrown into the River Dee. I doubt many of you have heard of her, yet just three years later another little girl disappeared from an affluent suburb in the south and was found to have been sexually assaulted and murdered. That one caused a national outcry (I’m sure many remember the news of the world and their campaign, if we can call it that.) The press always cherry picks who we feel sorry for, which victim is deserving of pity.

The Chester victims killer is out now. No outrage as far as I can see. While letby is still in prison. It stinks.

I felt extreme sorrow for both - a total living nightmare for both mothers, whether LL in reality is innocent or guilty.

And how additionally heartbreaking for the mother of baby 'Zoe' that the whole tragedy may have been avoided for her if she had been administered antibiotics in time, and then failing that, if her baby had been administered antibiotics in time.

Not seen it yet but fascinated by this case. I strongly believe there’s been a miscarriage of justice and the hospital are using her as a scapegoat for their own failings. I thought she was guilty originally.

It would have been avoided if she wasn't murdered. The baby was doing well.

Yes, biased heavily edited documentaries would do that .

Exactly, LL is still alive, their children were murdered.

I watched it last night and I do think she is guilty but I did feel like some of the evidence was made out to be stronger than it was.

The notes saying ‘I killed them’ for example, it was referred to as a confession but it could have been confessing to killing a load of ants for all we know.

The police seemed to have decided she had done it from the off to me based on just the fact that she was present for all of the deaths but I didn’t feel that the documentary looked at the bigger picture - for example how many shifts did she work compared to other nurses, how many sick babies did she treat compared to those with better expected outcomes?

Like I say, I think she’s guilty but I do think that some of the evidence was a bit flimsy.

One thing that I couldn’t understand was how did they know that the insulin had been administered via the nutrition bags? Was that just a theory?

She then denied owning a shredder when it was clearly visible in the room. The amount of circumstantial evidence was huge hence the conviction. Her parents are deluded and do not want to believe their "perfect daughter" could do anything likes this (I understand this to w point). They see the surface she portrayed, and I suspect she kept her real self buried ao deeply she was conflicted herself. I honestly felt she was/is a deeply disturbed individual.

Sorry double post when I attempted to correct the typos.

Yes, this was just a theory. Since the trial, scientists have done experiments to show it couldn't be done with the amount of insulin she had access to, because too much of it would stick to the plastic.

Agreed. If the note was isolated, it could have easily been viewed as somebody feeling responsible for the deaths, because they were there, and felt guilty they could not stop them. It was encouraged by her therapist to write her feelings down. It could have been seen as a young nurse struggling to cope with the job, babies dying, and they most be evil with others viewing them so negatively to the point they saw her capable of doing those things, moved from the nursery etc.

However, the note in combination with the huge amount of other circumstantial evidence shows a guilty disturbed individual IMHO.

The hospital obviously thought the baby was doing well because they took her off oxygen, but the pathologist who examined her body at postmortem explained that as well as pneumonia, she had hyaline membrane syndrome, so the pneumonia would have developed faster than the hospital believed.

She also explained that it was not unusual for newborn babies to have a fluctuating course, seeming better one minute and deteriorating again the next. So the fact that hospital thought the baby was get better was part of the problem - they weren't recognizing and treating the severity of her condition.

Definitely, I thought it strange that they mentioned the occupational therapist encouraging her to write down her feelings etc but the same therapist wasn’t called as a defence witness.

It struck me as a very strange case and I definitely wouldn’t have wanted to be on the jury. Regardless of me thinking she was guilty I wouldn’t want the responsibility of sending someone to prison for the rest of their life based upon circumstantial evidence, regardless of how much of it there was.

Yes
a) ‘well’ or ‘stable’ for a premmie bay in NICU is a relative concept and them deteriorating suddenly is a common occurrence even when thought to be well. Ask anyone who ever had a baby in NICU.
b) this was a crappy failing hospital understaffed and way out of its depth. The fact that they thought the baby was better is no proof of that being true.

I started off like you. The apparent presence of exogenous insulin was what had convinced me until I realised that

a) the test used was the immunoassay, rather than the proper test for exogenous insulin
b) the theory was that it was added to the PN bags in advance, yet insulin “sticks” to the bag material so an unfeasibly large amount would have been needed

I assumed that there was evidence that the babies had been murdered or harmed deliberately. But really, there isn’t any, and there’s plenty of evidence that the babies were very sick, sicker than the hospital realised because of organisational failings including infrequent consultant ward rounds.

The evidence is highly suppositional, and the prosecution expert witness has changed his mind about the causes of death in some of the cases after the trial.

This is exactly the trouble. There is no evidence that they were murdered at all. They were very sick and they died. The limit of viability is about 24 weeks. The mortality rate for babies born at 25 weeks is as much as 20-30% in any case. It’s really only past 28 weeks that survival is more of a sure thing. Still 6% of babies born under 32 weeks gestation don’t survive to hospital discharge.

In Telford, Morecambe Bay and now Nottingham there were scandals where mortality rates were significantly higher than the national average and this was deemed to be due to poor care in all those cases and not to a serial killer. Why is Chester any different? Because Drs there were too arrogant to accept their part in the failings and looked for someone to blame.

Given that there is no direct evidence at all of any babies being killed let alone by Lucy Letby I would want to understand what makes this hospital different from those other ones. It is acknowledged that the unit was understaffed and the care standards had been investigated and found wanting.

The only difference here is that the consultants became convinced that LL was the cause and they went after her determinedly. You know that it was them that raised the air embolism rash bollocks and ferreted out that ancient paper and not Evans right? They went to the police with their theory and the police cherry picked the cases to support their theory. This is exactly how a miscarriage of justice happens. Just like Lucia de Berk in the Netherlands,

There are lots of cases in which a powerful Dr can sway a lot of people to their opinion eg Roy Meadows whose erroneous opinions caused the incarceration of multiple innocent women or Andrew Wakefield and the MMR. Look up New Brunswick disease for a terrifying example of mass misdiagnosis by one influential Dr.

And it’s always male Drs and women who are scapegoated and suffer.

I cannot credit a NICU where the consultant ward round is only twice a week. My DD was in NICU and it was the most terrifying time of my life but she was reviewed daily and often twice daily and I would have expected no less. This is supposed to be ‘intensive’ care.