There’s a new circus in town this summer, and its butterfly-themed banners are emblazoned with the name of a nurse called Lucy Letby. Increasingly, vocal supporters would have us believe that the 34-year-old has been wrongly convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill six more for which she has received 15 whole-life prison sentences.
Pitching her as a loving nurse whose life of selfless dedication has been wilfully destroyed because of a problematic neonatal unit in need of a scapegoat for the babies that died on their watch, she emerges as a perfect heroine, you might think, for the next Netflix blockbuster.
Except that in the real world, the evidence tells us there has been no miscarriage of justice. Letby was convicted by not just one, but two, juries at two separate trials. Having spent nights and early mornings compiling a 17,000-word timeline of that lethal year at the Countess of Chester Hospital, like them, I have no doubt of the culpability of this nurse.
And according to the time-honoured workings of the UK legal system, she actually is the real deal – a convicted serial killer who murdered the most vulnerable infants in her “care”, causing untold devastation to their parents and all who loved them.
Barring a confession as to why she committed such an evil act, it’s unlikely we’ll ever get to know. Indeed the puzzlement which surrounds this absence of a motive – beyond the notion of a disturbed mind – has created a vacuum that is being filled by amateur sleuths convinced of her innocence.
While they create hot wind and hysteria, however, the rest of us would do well to cast our minds back to the scrawlings on Post-it notes, which were found after a police search on her home. “I am evil I did this”, she’d written. “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them [and] I am a horrible evil person.”
It was the closest to a confession the jury would get from the nurse who was convicted, in part, by the words tucked away on a scrap of paper in one of her diaries.
Of course, her supporters will direct you to some of the lines that could be interpreted as indicators of innocence: “I haven’t done anything wrong,” for example. And “Why me?” but these weren’t the ones that resonated most deeply with the original jury who had all the other evidence before them.
Throughout the trial, the one-time Ellie Goulding fan steadfastly maintained her innocence. Even as security guards led her out of court, she cried out “I’m innocent.” It was an echo of her mother’s own anguished cries when the first guilty verdicts were returned last August. “You can’t be serious,” Susan Letby shouted out in court. “This cannot be right.”
The “Letby Is Innocent” bandwagon started to really gather momentum with a 13,000-word article published in The New Yorker earlier this year. The timing of this piece, which questioned the logic and competence of the statistical evidence in her trial, was mischievous given that the retrial over one of the babies, Baby K, was about to begin.
As a result, the article was referred to the attorney general for investigation as a possible contempt of court. While online versions were banned from UK websites, a British audience quickly found a way to read it while proceedings for her second trial were active.
David Davis, the Conservative MP, seized on the issue, suggesting the court order was “in defiance of open justice” and demanded a review. The then justice secretary, Alex Chalk, had to remind him – as if he didn’t know – of the need to protect the neutrality of an imminent trial.
The spark of social media interest was already smouldering by the time the retrial got underway. A small but passionate cohort of Letby supporters turned up at Crown Square in Manchester, queuing for places either in Court 7 or the overspill seats in Court 16. Many wore yellow butterfly badges similar to one their heroine had once worn on her scrubs.
This time The New Yorker sent a researcher who spent full days sitting with the Letby fan club, chatting with them about “significant” parts of the evidence and scribbling notes in long hand.
Last weekend, the ante went up a notch when the Crown Prosecution Service confirmed there were errors in some of the time-swipe data presented in the original trial. This threw into question some of the precise timing of another nurse’s return to the neonatal unit and the possibility that Letby hadn’t actually been the sole nurse on the unit at a key point in the evidence.
But we’re talking of events eight years ago, and for half the trial there was actually zero door swipe data because the hospital had somehow failed to save it. There was also no CCTV to monitor because none had ever been installed. Ultimately, whether Letby was the sole nurse or not, the key evidence lies in the recollections of Baby K’s designated nurse, Joanne Williams, and the lead paediatrician, Ravi Jayaram – what they saw, heard and sensed in real time.
Jayaram, who already held suspicions about Letby and was therefore on high alert, recalls walking in and seeing the killer standing beside the infant’s incubator but doing nothing to intervene as her oxygen levels dropped to critical levels.
Letby’s very capable barrister, Ben Myers KC, questioned whether Jayaram’s account was “truthful” and alleged he had exaggerated the situation in the court proceedings simply to make things worse for his client and thus make the charges stick.
Jayaram, however, said that he was certain of what he felt and that it was a matter of “infinite regret” that he had not called 999. “I only wish I had the courage to do that,” he said, adding that he had been in “unchartered territory” feeling an “element of denial” that a carer in their midst could be a serial killer.
It is to the parents of her victims, all of them still trying to grieve for their lost babies, that our minds must turn
