GUILTY UK - Nurse Lucy Letby, murder of babies, 7 Guilty of murder verdicts; 8 Guilty of attempted murder; 2 Not Guilty of attempted; 5 hung re attempted #38

[JosieJo]

Here it is M

The crucial detail that those defending Lucy Letby are missing​

While a new Netflix film on the investigation of the nurse convicted of murder offers a new perspective, there is one vital question that no-one is asking, says David James Smith​

Friday 06 February 2026 06:00 GMT
The crucial detail that those defending Lucy Letby are missing

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Lucy Letby is serving 15 whole-life orders and a new documentary looks at how she came to be accused and eventually convicted(Cheshire Constabulary)
If nothing else, the new feature-length documentary on Netflix,The Investigation of Lucy Letby, offers some corrective to the growing clamour of doubt that surrounds her convictions. It gives a different viewpoint to those inclined to believe she has been the victim of a witch hunt, made a scapegoat for institutional failures, or even been the target of a conspiracy, involving her former hospital consultant colleagues and Cheshire police.

As the film reminds its audience, there was a case to answer: a prosecution case that crossed multiple hurdles and was subject to repeated challenges. That rigorous process stands in contrast to the claim that she has been the victim of a miscarriage of justice, as advocated on Netflix by Letby’s new barrister, Mark McDonald, and the head of his expert panel, Dr Shoo Lee.

Together with a Twitter/X army of “Letby truthers”, they have so far had free rein to put forward the case for Letby’s innocence in the media. Sooner or later, however, that fresh defence will bump up against the reality of legal scrutiny. The court of social media may have been swayed but it will not be so easy to convince the Criminal Cases Review Commission that there is a “real possibility” of success if it refers the case back to the Court of Appeal.

Many commentators appear to assume that step is a foregone conclusion. But the outcome is far from certain. It is worth remembering that Letby has not exactly been fast-tracked to penal oblivion. She was first suspected by some doctors in June 2015, but for a long time there was internal wrangling at the Countess of Chester Hospital – broadly, the consultants versus the managers and execs – that stymied any action.

More babies died, or suffered collapses, meanwhile. It was not until August 2016 that Letby was removed from her frontline role. It was still a further 10 months before the case was formally referred to Cheshire police, in May 2017, nearly two years after suspicions about her were
The new Netflix film documents what followed. The police spent the next year investigating and only then arrested Letby for the first time in July 2018. She was arrested for the second time a year later and finally rearrested and charged in November 2020, half a decade after suspicions that she was harming babies were first raised.

She was interviewed multiple times – and often answered opportunities to give her version of events with the replies, “no comment” or “I don’t remember”.

Although the film doesn’t say so, the decision to charge Letby and put her on trial was made not by the hospital consultants or the police but by the Crown Prosecution Service, observing a double-headed legal test that there is a realistic prospect of conviction and that a trial is in the public interest. We saw the CPS exercising its independent judgment just recently, when it declined to prosecute Letby for further offences. We don’t know the reasons, but we know – because they told us – that it was not the decision Cheshire police had hoped for.

After Letby was charged in late 2018, she had nearly two years to prepare her defence case for trial, which began on 4 October 4 2022 at Manchester Crown Court. Letby called only one expert witness – a plumber. But still the trial lasted for 10 months, during which time multiple expert witnesses for the prosecution were robustly cross-examined by Letby’s highly experienced trial counsel, Ben Myers KC.

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Letby’s new barrister Mark McDonald in the new Netflix documentary (Netflix)
The last line (an on-screen caption) in the Netflix documentary is given to Myers, stating that he had declined to explain to the film why no defence experts were called. While that was Letby’s decision, not Myers’, it is likely that the KC and the rest of her legal team advised their client on the best course of action, and she agreed.

Unless or until Lucy Letby waives her right to legal confidentiality, Myers cannot tell anyone what passed between them, or how that critical trial decision came to be made.

The trial ended in August 2023, when Letby was convicted of seven murders and seven attempted murders, for which she received 14 whole life sentences. Letby faced a second trial for the attempted murder of Baby K and was convicted by a second jury in July 2024, when she was sentenced to a 15th whole life order.

By that time, Letby had also made her case for an appeal over a three-day hearing before a panel of three senior judges. She was again represented by Ben Myers KC, and now had the benefit of her own expert, Dr Shoo Lee, who gave evidence via video link from Canada, that the prosecution had misrepresented his earlier medical paper on air embolism.

Through a sequence of edits, the Netflix film implies that Lee was brought in by her new barrister, McDonald, but that was not what happened. Lee’s revised account of his earlier findings, and his claim that they had not been properly deployed by the prosecution, was considered at length by the Court of Appeal – and then rejected. Letby was refused leave to appeal.

It remains to be seen, given that failure at appeal, how Lee’s new evidence, and the evidence of his expert panel can help Letby further.

The Netflix documentary focuses on the death of baby “Zoe” and the moving testimony of her mother “Sarah”, who appears in “digitally anonymised” form. Letby was convicted of repeated attacks on Zoe, causing her death in June 2015. Letby could not remember, she said, searching Zoe’s parents on Facebook, three days after Zoe’s death.


Dr Shoo Lee is one of the experts working on a possible appeal bid for Letby (Netflix)
Sarah was surprised to find Dr Lee discussing Zoe’s death in public, at the July 2025 press conference when he outlined the work of his expert panel and said, “in summary, ladies and gentlemen, we did not find any evidence of murder”. He claimed Zoe had died instead because she had not been treated with antibiotics.

But this was not a revelation. Indeed, it had featured in the original trial when Zoe’s case was considered in great detail. The prosecutor had flagged up the concern in his opening speech to the jury, when he said that Zoe “should have been given antibiotics to stave off infection but she was not. That failure is a legitimate target of criticism”.

However, experts said that while Zoe might have died with an infection, she had not died of an infection. The jury heard the criticism – and observed the debate over the cause of Zoe’s death – but still convicted Letby. On that basis, Dr Lee’s evidence is not apparently new, in Zoe’s case, and is unlikely to find much favour with the CCRC. You can’t rehash trial evidence for an appeal. You have to have something new to argue, and it needs to be both relevant and substantial.

The documentary rightly focuses on what one contributor, Press Association court reporter, Kim Pilling, calls an “interesting” aspect of the case, namely, as he says, “the volume of circumstantial evidence. Singly (the strands) don’t prove she was a cold-blooded murderer, but when you bring it all together, you’d be forgiven for thinking, if this woman’s innocent, then she’s pretty unlucky.“

This indirect evidence of Letby’s guilt includes the 250 handover sheets, including some of the babies she was convicted of harming, that she took home (in breach of her professional duty) and carefully filed away in date order.

We see in the film an image of the box file marked “keep”, in which the papers were stored by Letby, sitting on the top shelf of a wardrobe. She is then seen in a police interview saying she had “inadvertently” taken the sheets home in her pocket and did not dispose of them because she didn’t have a shredder. But, we hear in the film, there was in fact a shredder where she was living. Indeed, Netflix shows us a photo of it.

And then there are the notorious Post-it notes which, it is suggested, were misrepresented to the jury as all being indicators of her guilt – “I am evil, I did this” – whereas, in fact they are a mixture of the damning and the exculpatory – “I am innocent”. But again, the jury heard and saw all this at trial. The two sides of Letby’s psyche, as revealed in the notes, were made clear by prosecutor Johnson in his opening speech.

Controversy surrounds the admission as evidence of Post-it notes on which the nurse supposedly admitted her guilt (Netflix)
The commission – and the Court of Appeal – will want to examine how the trial unfolded, what happened at the first appeal, and – first and foremost – they will be expecting to hear why the defence adopted the tactics it did, only calling one expert, a plumber.

In the Netflix film, Mark McDonald says he doesn’t know why that happened. It is easy to say this in public, but not knowing will not satisfy the CCRC or the Court of Appeal.



There must be a reason – we know the trial defence team instructed multiple experts, they just never called any of them. Why?

If that was an error (which in itself is implausible) Letby may have some hope, but if it was the best tactical decision that could be made at the time, then unless McDonald has uncovered some genuinely startling fresh evidence that might have altered the outcome of the trial, evidence that the CCRC is satisfied will stand up to the scrutiny of cross examination and the court, and there will be little hope for Letby’s future freedom.

One of the most sensible realistic articles for a long time

 

[WaneLyrical]

So you are neurodivergent and think Letby is. This explains every single post you have made in relation to this case. You have an inherent bias. You are unable to view any piece of evidence against Letby in an impartial manner. This is not a slight against yourself. It's JMO.

Perhaps. Though I could say the same about people with an interest in true crime, sufficient to visit online crime forums, that unconscious bias may exist.

For me, when I stand back from this case, I don’t accept that Letby was “beige”. She was literally a goody two shoes, head girl at school, well respected member of staff. When she wasn’t ’killing babies’ she was salsa dancing, buying her first home, and getting together with her friends. The press have found exactly zero skeletons in her closet, and on the contrary we’ve had all the women who have been closest to her, throughout her entire education and career, speak out to say “this person is the exact opposite of what she’s being painted as”.

All of the spooky strands of evidence need to come together to paint this big picture. Yet each strand is nonsense on its own. Who cares about Facebook searches. If she hadn’t searched any of these families, people would be questioning why she’d searched thousands of families, but not these specific ones. That would become suspicious. If she had hundreds of handover sheets, but zero relating to this sample of patients, again that would be used against her. If she was a lesbian, we’d be hearing she was in love with Ventress. We’ve got notes ranging from: I didn’t; I did; maybe I did; I don’t know if I did. And that’s somehow a “confession” because she wrote the words on purpose.

This person, where we can find not a single other to say a true bad word about her, except maybe the person who didn’t sign off her placement as her displays of empathy weren’t subjectively sufficient, is seemingly a mastermind criminal underneath, employing all these methods to murder which leave little or no trace. In fact, she seems to have got air embolism down to such a fine art that she can attack in a way where it appears immediately, or 20 minutes later, and always produces different results. Someone so psychopathic, that they can attack a baby in the morning, organise a housewarming party at lunchtime, then attack another in the afternoon. Someone so intuitive, that they know when a line is going to tissue, and they poison the perfect number of bags in advance. But not psychopathic enough to genuinely stalk these families, or join grief forums to revel, or google a single thing.

And we must believe that Ravi Jayaram had a psychic experience while he was sat outside of nursery 1, that a pull from beyond the veil helped him catch a murderess in the act at the perfect moment. As opposed to him subconsciously hearing the alarm beeping through the wall briefly before being switched off, and him getting up in response. It’s absurd.

Dewi was clearly biased, he came on board knowing a single nurse was under suspicion, and handed a file showing what appeared to be physical assault. His mind was made up for him. He didn’t even need the maternity notes, he knew this was cold-blooded murder.

Those who have since reviewed the files are critical of them being incomplete, reflective of a unit run off its feet. A unit with ingress of wastewater and no paper trail. Just because they can’t now find the exact causes of death, doesn’t mean the only remaining possibility is murder.

We are to believe that the increased stillbirths which happened at exactly the same time as there murders, were just an unfortunate coincidence. And nothing to do with the state of the unit or the fact that the consultants’ time was consistently concentrated in the paediatric unit.

I believe a case has been constructed against Letby, for crimes that do not exist. I believe the entire case is an illusion, the horror equivalent to the white or blue dress. 4000 babies reviewed, and they can’t get a single other purported crime through the CPS’s evidence test. So we must accept she just snapped one day, came into work, and started murdering babies.

I don’t think anyone set out to deliberately scapegoat her, but this case has every hallmark of a witch hunt.

 

[Sweeper2000]

Air embolism is broadly known as a difficult to trace way to kill. I knew that despite no medical background.