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 😞

I find it strange that despite being convicted twice by a jury in a high court and despite the tonne of evidence pointing towards her guilt (the handover notes, her presence at all the deaths, her strange notes…still strange regardless of any therapy techniques…her strange conduct in front of the dead babies’ parents not mentioned in the documentary, the constant searching of the families on Facebook etc.) that everyone is still so keen to prove her innocence!

I honestly think that it must be because she’s young, white & pretty with seemingly no motive. The motive could be that she’s mentally unwell with some kind of munchausen by proxy type syndrome. Who knows what her family dynamic is like, there could be childhood issues at play here as no one knows what goes on behind closed doors.

For every expert who thinks she could be innocent, there’s another who thinks she’s guilty. Surely we have to assume that the police force, the internal hospital investigation team and the justice system did their job properly.

I’m struggling to believe that scapegoating at this level could happen. Surely there wouldn’t be several individuals in a hospital happy to throw someone under the bus in this way? It would take several doctors and nurses to all agree to do this, surely that’s implausible?

If it had just been the babies that died then that would be very suspicious but this was lots of random, unrelated notes.

As a PP said she was probably neurodivergent and the explanation that she kept the notes for her own learning and reflection could be plausible.

Collecting and storing hospital notes is definitely odd but it doesn’t mean she’s a murderer. It’s not a typical sign of being a psychopath.

Totally agree.

Surely we have to assume that the police force, the internal hospital investigation team and the justice system did their job properly.

Some of us don’t. Have you heard of the Sally Clark case?

Exactly, the idea that multiple doctors/nurses all sat down and cooked up this scheme is ridiculous.

Watching the documentary, you can certainly see why she came under suspicion. That’s not to say she’s definitely guilty but it does show how she ended up where she is.

Thing is, you’ve either got to believe that a young, quiet neonatal nurse is actually an unhinged serial killer of tiny babies OR that an unusually high number of babies died randomly and she was incredibly unlucky to be the one on shift every time and ended up unfairly convicted of murder.

Both are completely fantastical but one of them is true.

I think it’s important to note that other babies died when LL wasn’t on shift. Those deaths weren’t classed as suspicious by consultants because she wasn’t on shift. LL being a murderer was a hypothesis that I’m sure many at the hospital believed but that doesn’t make it true.

Nobody witnessed her doing anything wrong.

Even the senior consultant admits at the end of the documentary that he holds a bit of guilt in case he’s wrong and LL is innocent.

For those of you who believe coverup and scapegoating can't go on in the NHS are so wrong. It's not to say everyone was actively complicit in cooking up a scheme against Letby, however saying nothing for the fear of lifting your head above the parapet and the associated consequences are daily life in many parts of the NHS.

Most nurses I know (and I am one) don't believe Letby is guilty because they understand this environment in a way that the investigation team and the jury never can. Shit rolls downwards in the NHS. And that means it usually lands at the feet of nursing staff

So you honestly think that it’s all because of her looks that:
> an international (and racially diverse) panel of some of the foremost names in neonatal medicine was formed after the author of a paper used as evidence realised that it was misinterpreted, and has come forward clarifying that there is no evidence of foul play after their extensive review of all of the medical evidence;
> Thirlwell discovered emails that show one of the key witnesses “misremembered”/lied on the stand with a very damning statement about how LL left a baby to collapse without calling for help, when it turns out she did call for help and wasn’t standing rubbing her hands with glee like a villain over a dying baby like it was painted;
> door swipe data being completely incorrect; and
> new scientific evidence regarding insulin in neonates has been published showing that foul play is in no way a “given” as it was presented at trial?

Knowing the facts but disagreeing with interpretation is one thing but I honestly cannot believe you genuinely think people just think she’s innocent because of her looks when there is so much evidence to suggest otherwise.

No, there really aren’t just as many experts willing to call her guilty. On one hand you have the retired paediatrician (not neonatologist) Dewi Evans, that inserted himself into the case for a hefty fee before miraculously determining in ten minutes that there was definitely foul play (despite the post mortems declaring otherwise) and then invented entirely new ways for murder that have never been seen (air into the stomach?) and relied on faulty interpretations of papers (around air embolism) as evidence which he stood by vociferously (except when he was changing his mind on the stand about the cause of death) and completely failed in his duty to be neutral because he had decided she was guilty (behaviour he was known for and that was serious enough to make another judge write to the presiding judge in warning about). The others from the trial have remained remarkably silent. On the other hand you have tens of world-leading experts in neonatal care and insulin studies, and statisticians, as well as other doctors and nurses, all saying the conviction isn’t right after reviewing all of the medical evidence available, and pointing natural causes and a completely substandard level of care being the cause.

Her presence at the deaths and the notes are explainable (and really aren’t strange in the context - I’d love to see your journals after years of sustained workplace bullying, police investigation for murder, and medication!). Acting strangely (often noted with hindsight after being told she was a murderer) and having a bit of a Facebook obsession do not a murderer make if the babies died due to hospital failings.

Why on earth would we “assume” they’d done their job properly when there is so much to suggest they didn’t and we know they have got it wrong in high profile cases plenty of times before?

If you honestly don’t believe that there are some consultants who are objectively failing in their duty of care, who were out of their depth and providing completely substandard care on a failing ward, that would convince themselves that it’s a nurse’s fault and not theirs, I have a bridge to sell you. No one is saying they knew what was wrong but lied to get her in trouble. Just that their sheer hubris and refusal to acknowledge their own failings played a large part in why they went after her so hard (in some cases actually lying though). As we’ve seen from Thirlwell, plenty of nurses don’t think she’d done anything wrong, but were told coming forward would destroy their careers. It was the doctors that went to the police.

There's a good short article by John Ashton this morning explaining how a "stitch-up" could happen.

https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/lucy-letby-innocent-until-stitched-up-5HjdRpN2/

(Stitch-up isn't quite the word I'd use as I think of that as deliberate, but I think this might answer your questions)

Oh i totally agree with you. The press conference was handled terribly, but I can understand the reasoning behind it, he needed to create enough noise to keep the story in the headlines.

Her only real chance with the CCRC rests on new evidence, so bringing in that panel of experts made sense. My original point was that we still don’t know why there were no expert defence witnesses at her original trial, and a lot may depend on that.

I do think the CCRC will refer the case back to the Court of Appeal, but I struggle to see how she could ever be tried fairly again after all this speculation online.

Agree. The interviewing was poor IMO. Why such junior police officers, clearly trying to prove guilt only, were given this job I can't fathom. In the most part they were obviously reading in a stilted fashion from a script. Using inflammatory words such as "attack" is concerning.

Yes i didn't understand that ,I used to be a nurse albeit a mental health nurse so very different our handover notes were just notes I had written my self, and yes I did sometimes go home with them in my pocket, but I would just rip them up and throw them away ,she had over 200 ( i think) all kept and filed in chronological order, very strange behaviour.

Probably shouldn’t start threads like this if you’ve no idea about the process.

None of the people commenting on social media know for certain but I think it’s likely that she’s guilty. It wasn’t an excellent documentary. There’s lots they didn’t include.

It suggested the prosecution used one expert witness when they used multiple who all agreed on her guilt. The defence were criticised for not using their own expert witness/psychologist to defend her. When asked about this they have refused to comment. It was such a highly publicised trial. Do people really think they wouldn’t have tried to get expert witnesses/psychologists to defend her? More likely they did and their own experts/ psychologists who also thought she was guilty so they didn’t use them.

It implied she had no motive and made no mention of her flirtatious relationship with an older married doctor in the hospital, whom she wanted attention from and got it via the babies. It didn’t focus on the jealousy they thought she felt towards the parents and likelihood that she harmed the babies to hurt them (apart from a brief mention of a Facebook search for one couple).

They spoke of her being on the rota more due to her additional training, but if someone else was harming the babies then you would expect that she and that other person would both be on the rota as much and their was no suggestion of anyone else having the same access as she did.

And yeah, the ward was downgraded after she was removed but they’d been struggling for years before she joined, and didn’t have the high incidents of suspicious deaths until she joined.

She’s already in jail for the rest of her life so the CPS needs to decide if it’s in the public’s best interest to pursue further charges. Given the expense involved and controversial media surrounding this matter, I can see why they wouldn’t pursue further charges even if they felt they did have sufficient evidence.

And I’ve seen people commenting about how ‘she doesn’t look like a killer’. Quiet, thin, young, white women are just as capable of evil as anyone else.

The CPS announced that the new cases didn't meet the evidential standard.

They do this test before considering public interest. They never considered whether it was in the public interest to pursue new cases, because the evidence didn't exist to do so anyway

www.cps.gov.uk/cps/news/no-criminal-charges-against-lucy-letby-relation-further-allegations-deaths-and-non-fatal

That consultant quote is being misused a lot by people trying to defend Lucy on social media today. The consultant also says that he doesn’t think there’s been a miscarriage of justice, and her friend who defends her all the way through the documentary says that ‘there’s always doubt because as much as you know someone…they can still have things that you don’t know about them’.

In other words, he thinks it’s highly probably Lucy is guilty and she thinks it’s highly probable that Lucy is innocent, but they both have the emotional intelligence to understand that they might be wrong.

That is why I find it so odd when people get angry about Lucy Letby exercising her right to do what every prisoner can do and apply to the CCRC. Even if people are personally convinced she is guilty, they must know that this is a safeguard for everyone, and that the CCRC will only accept her application on strong evidence.

I agree with this. I interpreted his comment to mean that he deep down believes in her guilt but that this constant discussion of her innocence makes him question himself as he’s fundamentally a decent human being, who doesn’t want to have made a mistake. But it’s almost like gaslighting - he knows she’s guilty but is constantly being told he’s got it wrong.

I followed the trial very closely and watched the documentary and she's very clearly guilty. The evidence is very clear. There's absolutely no other way to look at it when you see it all together. And to me, her demeanour is enormously guilty and yes I do think that's important although obviously it's not the reason she was convicted. There seems to be a lot of pro-Lucy Letby PR going on since the trial which strikes me as odd but fortunately it doesn't matter. She's guilty in the eyes of the law and that's that. The CCRC thing seems like it will come to nothing - her barrister takes a lot to the CCRC and isn't successful.

I worked in criminal justice for 40 years.
When interviewed initially most people have a Duty Solicitor. We knew them as ‘station runners’. New and with little experience. They always without fail advise a no comment interview. This is why police say it’s your chance to speak, it’s your interview.
It gets passed to a more experienced solicitor if it’s more complex. Personally, if someone asked me if I had killed babies I would say “NO I HAVE NOT”. You can still no comment for the rest or anything questionable.

I watched it and still think she's guilty.

Watching the documentary now, the police think it’s suspicious that she can remember the processes she was trained and tested on to become a nurse but can’t remember the fine details of an event 7 years previously?!? WTF! I couldn’t tell you the minute by minute details of some of the most significant events of my life. And asking why she wrote things in her diary, the same reason anyone would write in their diary ffs, it’s the purpose of a diary. I thought the first half was supposed to convince us she’s guilty?

I would be very careful about believing anything like this on Netflix as they have form for doctoring interviews and such. Making a murderer is a good example. There is an alternate documentary which Netflix has tried to squash, with extended police interviews, official papers, actual evidence and phone conversations between the shows producers and the accused which shows that they both are indeed incredibly guilty. It is very easy to make everything seem true when it isn't. She could very well be innocent but try not to be swayed by a 'documentary' that a multi billion dollar corporation has released.

I agree,I listened to all the court reports ( I had Covid and couldn't even read I was so ill so just lay in bed listening to pod casts !) and it's very clear why and how they came to the guilty verdict.