At the start of my career, I found myself working with a number of journalists who had come down to London from Central TV in Birmingham. They had all covered the Birmingham pub bombing and the first doubts were just emerging about the Irishmen convicted. “I can tell you one thing”, one of my new colleagues insisted “they are all guilty as hell”. Less than a decade later, we had all moved on to different jobs where we reported the release and quashing of the convictions of the Birmingham Six, as well as the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven.
This taught me to keep an open mind and never to be too sure. I always feel uneasy when journalese switches from normal courtesy to using surname only once a suspect has been convicted.
My learning experience was of course before the internet. Before the dissemination of conspiracy theories was as easy as pressing a few keys to send out a message on social media. Before Google Search, Whatsapp and Chat GPT made it easy to build up whatever distortion of reality you choose. And back when investigative journalism, such as Chris Mullin’s for World in Action, had the power and the audience to bring about change.
Which brings us to the case of Lucy Letby, “British serial killer (born 1990)” as Wikipedia indexes her. Former nurse Letby has now been found guilty and received a rare whole life sentence for the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of eight more at the Countess of Chester Hospital’s neonatal unit after an original trial lasting eight months, a second trial and an appeals process. A judge has twice denied her the right to appeal.
Yet those questioning her guilt extend beyond the usual conspiracy theorists drunk on true crime podcasts. Since the New Yorker published a 13,000 word article raising doubts, news outlets here including The Times, Telegraph, Mail, Guardian and Private Eye have published their own inconclusive pieces. “How safe are the Lucy Letby convictions for baby murders” is the headline in The Times, above a two page spread by Tom Ball and Tom Whipple.
Separately the former cabinet minister Sir David Davis plans to dedicate this August recess to reading through more than a million words of trial transcripts before deciding whether to take up the case. The veteran civil libertarian told me that he has serious concerns but has not yet reached any conclusions. If he does proceed he warns “these things take many years”.
The crux of those questioning Letby’s convictions is that all the evidence against her is either circumstantial or indirect. There is no direct forensic evidence. There are no finger prints on an intravenous feed. Suspicious behaviour is reported but no-one says they actually saw her take actions which harmed any of the babies.
For a few outliers this means that her guilt could not possibly have been established “beyond a reasonable doubt” – most of the guilty verdicts were by majority rather than unanimous.
Davis and others questioning the convictions require more exculpatory evidence than that. Their doubts centre on a statistical argument, supported by questions over the cause of death of the children, and the alleged motivation of doctors and hospital administrators to cover up their own failings – Letby accused senior doctors of “a conspiracy” against her.
In the absence of any motive, some even doubt that a normal, nice-looking, middle-class young woman could be guilty of such awful crimes.
At the beginning of the main trial, the jury was shown a chart plotting 25 suspicious deaths against the shift pattern of 38 nurses working in the unit. Only Letby was on duty at the time of every collapse. When she moved from nights to days, the disasters moved too. Senior statisticians warn that a false pattern may be being identified. It would not look so damning, they say, if eight other deaths judged not suspicious were included. Her presence could just be a coincidence; there could be a different explanation for the deaths. The case of a Dutch neonatal nurse, Lucia de Berk, is cited. She was convicted and later exonerated on a statistical fallacy that there could not be another explanation other than her presence at seven baby deaths and three other collapses.
Richard Gill, emeritus professor of statistics at Leiden University, was involved with the de Berk case. He now says: “There is less than a one in a hundred thousand chance that she [Letby] is guilty.” Against that – and circumstantially – there were three deaths in the year before Letby joined, eight and seven in 2015 and 2016 while she was working there, and only two in the year afterwards. Nor, in her case, unlike de Berks’, was the chart drawn up with her in mind. The lead prosecution witness, Dr Dewi Evans, was asked to compile the chart in 2017 following a series of suspicious deaths. Letby was not charged until November 2020.
Dr Evans says he has come under sustained social media attack since the trial. His record has been questioned and it has emerged that his professional conduct was severely criticized by a judge in an unrelated trial.
Letby was accused of harming babies in two ways – poisoning them with insulin and injecting air into their bloodstream. When she gave evidence she agreed that two babies who suffered hypoglycaemia, but survived, had been given insulin wrongly but she denied that she was responsible. Since the trial, other experts, some of whom were cited by Dr Evans, have questioned his diagnosis of “air embolism” based on the descriptions of the victims’ symptoms. Against this a radiologist who examined X rays of the victims and Dr Andreas Marnerides, an expert in neo-natal pathology who was consulted by the police in 2017 have both said the evidence they saw was consistent with air being injected into the blood stream. The prosecution did not call their own expert to dispute the clinical evidence in the main trial.
Then there are Letby’s private writings produced in evidence at the trial in which she says “I killed them…I am evil I did this”. David Davis says she may simply have been responding to the pressure of suspicion. She has never confessed but he says “false confessions are surprisingly common.” This might also explain the morbid and unusual interest she seems to have taken in bereaved families but not the suspicious behaviour around some of the victims which was reported by colleagues and patients’ family members.
To those who say her meek demeanour is not consistent with serial killers, Britain’s most prolific male serial killer Dr Harold Shipman was also a model of respectability.
As for The New Yorker, Americans have long been entertained by the failings as they see them of Britain’s socialised medicine provision. In-fighting between overstretched NHS staff and a sewage leak at the unit are hinted at as possible explanations for the upsurge in baby deaths.
Keeping an open mind is one thing, taking up a cause is another. It will be important to see whether, after due deliberation, Sir David Davis decides to pursue Lucy Letby’s claims of innocence.
One can only feel for the mother of one of the victims who told the The Times, “You don’t want to hear people shouting that she’s innocent. She’s not innocent, she was found guilty in a court of law.”
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