Wokery and Government overreach are the great issues of the early 2020s. Lucy Letby isn’t of the same order. Nevertheless, this young woman, of previously blameless character, has been imprisoned for the rest of her life on circumstantial evidence. With rare exceptions, the media have relished turning her into a ghoul. They are ably assisted by the Cheshire Constabulary who, post-trial, drip-feed corroborative detail to add verisimilitude, as in Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘The Criminal Cried’. They tell the media that Letby kept an “encrypted diary”, with “L.O.” having some sinister meaning. In fact, Letby has a cursive script and it’s L.D. not ‘L.O.’, being nurses’ common shorthand for ‘Long Day’, or a 12-hour shift. They’ve auctioned the film rights for their investigation, with ITV placing the winning bid. I’d advise ITV to check carefully for spin.
No one who cares about justice should be comfortable with this case. To briefly re-cap: Ms. Letby worked at the Countess of Chester neonatal unit from 2012. From at least 2014 this was a Level II unit, meaning that it took very premature babies. From mid-2015 to mid-2016, 15 infants died and a similar number had major collapses. This was far more than in the preceding and subsequent periods (figure 1). The consultants raised alarms, leading to internal investigations then a review by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH), commissioned in mid-2016.
Concern about Ms. Letby arose early, and she was moved to a desk job in July 2016. In response she began a grievance procedure, claiming that doctors were persecuting her. At this stage their concern surely related to competence; no Royal College would touch an investigation that should properly be a police matter. Assertions that “Doctors suspected Letby from 2015” should be read in this light. Post-mortems, performed for six of the seven deaths for which Letby ultimately was convicted, recorded “natural causes”.
Initial findings were in Ms. Letby’s favour. Her grievance was upheld and the RCPCH report, released at the end of 2016, expressed concern about the unit’s staffing and safety, saying that it was unsuitable for Level II. By then it had been downgraded to Level I anyway, with the most premature and sickliest babies delivered or sent elsewhere. There’s no mention of Ms. Letby or any other staff member, but it is beyond credulity, given the consultants’ suspicions, that she wasn’t quietly discussed. Doubtless there were separate confidential communications. They can’t have been damning, for Countess of Chester management notoriously forced the consultants to apologise and indicated that Letby would resume clinical nursing. Unhappy with these outcomes, the consultants involved the police in the spring of 2017, igniting the powder trail.
A 10-year retired paediatrician and professional expert witness, Dr. Dewi (David) Evans was recruited by the police. By his account he reviewed 30-something deaths and collapses, distinguishing 15 (eight murders and seven attempted murders) for which Letby was charged. Unfortunately, we don’t have his workings, nor the exact reason why he excluded seven deaths, except that he told talkRADIO that “they died for the usual problems why small babies die: haemorrhage, infection, congenital problems”. Nor do we know why the judge threw out one murder charge.
Now, go to figure 1 and examine the critical mid-2015 to mid-2016 period. Even if one removes the seven deaths for which Letby was convicted (orange and blue), the remaining eight (grey) form an excess cluster compared with the previous period (the subsequent period is not comparable owing to the unit’s downgrade). That means that we are asked to believe that Letby’s murders coincided, quite by chance, with a spike of other excess deaths, all of them unsurprising. I’d accept this if Letby was a strychnine poisoner, if seven babies died from strychnine and seven died owing to a concurrent viral outbreak. It’d be shocking, but clear. But these were highly-vulnerable babies, mostly premature and with other health issues. Do the suspicious and non-suspicious excesses really divide so precisely? A lifetime in biology and medicine tells me it’d be remarkable if they did. Biology and medicine are full of grey zones.
Dr. Evans says that – very correctly – he was working blind to whether Letby was present at a death or collapse or not. But, given the complexity, why was he the sole reviewer? And how does that much-published list of nurses’ presence and events look if all events, suspicious or otherwise, are included? Was she also present at many non-suspicious events? Maybe she just worked a lot.
The causes of death Dr. Evans found variously included air embolism in the blood (infants A, D) or stomach (C, I and P) or interference with nasogastric tubes (infants E,O). They differed from the natural causes identified at post-mortem by coroners’ pathologists, from whom we heard nothing at the trial. Methods of attempted murders included insulin poisoning (infants F and L), excessive feeding (infant G) and traumatic assault (infant N).
Even if we reject the contemporaneous post-mortems and accept Dr. Evans’s later diagnoses, air embolism is not proof of deliberate injection. A PubMed search combining “air”, “embolism” and “neonates” yields 271 hits. If I then add “infection” I retain 37 hits and if I instead add “enterocolitis”, I have 17. Sato and colleagues describe an infant with bacterial peritonitis producing so much gas that ultrasound revealed “intravascular microbubbles moving into a pulmonary artery”. Smith and Els describe four fatal cases of infant cardiac embolism (i.e., air in the heart) and underscore the hazard of air being accidentally or negligently introduced in infants with difficult venous access. Beluffi and Peroti describe air embolism as a “rare complication of intensive care, noting links to enterocolitis (i.e., gut infection), surgical procedures and infant respiratory distress syndrome (which they call hyaline membrane disease)”.
The possible role of infection should be underscored. The Chester unit’s sewage system, or that of the ward above, was defective, providing an obvious source of infection. That is why the hospital plumber, called as a defence witness, visited repeatedly. Contaminated water systems notoriously cause clusters of neonatal unit deaths. What outbreak investigation was done at the time? Any? None? Were sewage leaks the reason why the Unit was later rebuilt?
Turning to the two insulin cases, which played a major role in the conviction: why was no alarm raised about extraordinarily high readings? A clinical biochemistry department signed them off and a paediatrician received them. Did either read them? The second case (Baby L) was in April 2016, when the unit staff were acutely aware of a string of adverse events. For baby F, in August 2015, there’s the question of how the insulin was delivered. The prosecution alleged it was via an intravenous feed bag rigged to run over 48 hours. But this bag had to be changed after Letby went off-shift owing to problems with the line. As her defence pointed out, it’s inconceivable that it’d be replaced with the one other bag that she’d also spiked or that, if she’d spiked multiple bags, there was no cluster of insulin-poisonings. What really happened is deeply uncertain, and the blood samples were discarded long ago.
Dr. Evans’s analysis was one major factor in Letby’s conviction. The other was her own notes, most notoriously one on green paper (figure 2). This includes the much-quoted phrases: “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them”, “I’m a horrible evil person” and “I am evil, I did this”.
Reading the note is tricky. Words overlap and those on the same line do not always belong to the same sentence. The most convincing decrypt I’ve seen asserts that it was written in five parts shown, colour coded, in figure 3 (though I’d put everything in block capitals into the grey block).
Much is a stream of fear and self-loathing but what’s critical is in green, bottom right, below the heavily encircled “HATE”. This reads: “They accused; they went…”, followed by those claimed confessions. “Accused” isn’t certain to me, being obscured by the heavy circle around “HATE”, but the meaning is clear from “They went”, which is to say that “They [the police] asserted that…”. Read that way, it’s a shell-shocked woman describing a police interview, not a confession.
I do not know that Ms. Letby is innocent. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn she wasn’t the world’s best nurse, nor that the doctors had legitimate concerns about her competence. But I am far from convinced that she is a murderess on the evidence that has been presented.
She worked on a Level II unit that, based on the RCPCH report, wasn’t fit for purpose. Her ‘killing spree’ coincided with an excess of other deaths that the principal expert witness says were “due to the usual problems of small babies”. Air embolus – if it was the cause of death – was diagnosed long after the event and can arise for other reasons besides malicious injection. Her ‘confession note’ can be construed very differently. In a remarkably similar case, a Dutch nurse, Lucia de Berk, was convicted of neonatal murders based on circumstantial evidence and an ambiguous diary, then exonerated. Many think that Letby’s defence barrister failed to make the best of her case, with no expert bar the plumber called on her account. It is vital that she is allowed an appeal.
It is vital too that the pending Statutory Inquiry interprets its brief as widely as possible, and considers the possibility, however small, that it is built upon a false premise. The Countess of Chester Hospital was not a happy place to work. In December 2015, one unnamed paediatrician wrote to the management: “Over the past few weeks I have seen several medical and nursing colleagues in tears… they get upset as they know that the care they are providing falls below their high standards,” adding “chronically overworked” and “no one is listening”. Doctors and the hospital management clearly disliked and distrusted each other. Dr. Gilby, who became CEO after Letby’s arrest, is now suing for constructive dismissal, asserting she was bullied and undermined by the Trust Chairman.
Isn’t this the perfect setting for care to go horribly awry, without foul play? Or have we reached the point where it becomes expedient to blame miscreant nurses for the NHS’s failings, just as our 17th Century forebears attributed societal calamities to witches?
Dr. David Livermore is a retired Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of East Anglia.
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The latest in the Letby series that this substacker is producing is below. I think that above letter reads nothing like a confession and instead everything like a nurse cracking up under the strain of what she was going through. I can’t imagine the toll that would take on anyone’s mental health. Agree with the author that she should get an appeal.
”The picture I started to paint for you of the CoCH Intensive Care Nursery and Neonatal Unit being overrun with HWW pathogens and resulting infections, and how these more easily explain what was happening for these premature and poorly neonates, is really starting to take shape.
The more we populate the bigger picture on what was happening at the Countess of Chester Hospital at the time, and th subsequent decision to completely demolish the unit and rebuild from scratch, the more it is looking like a well orchestrated coverup of a combination of: (i) ineffectual and poorly supervised clinical interventionalism (negligent iatrogenesis); (ii) poor maintenance leading to hospital borne pathogenicity (nosocomial infection); (iii) insufficient nursing resources (practice outside guidelines); and (iv) negligent, toxic and decietful management.
Has a young nurse been thrown under the bus?”
https://lawhealthandtech.substack.com/p/ll-part-17-another-timeline
Wow the daggers are out for Richard Gill, who has been also covering the Letby case extensively. If you go to his Twitter you’ll see masses of good info and contributions from others, but somebody’s feeling very threatened, evidently;
https://www.change.org/p/tell-thames-valley-police-gill-s-home-police-force-to-charge-him-with-perverting-the-course-of-justice
Well done to Dr David Livermore for the clear readable ‘decrypted’ ‘confession note’, and especially for spotting what quite plausibly could be “They accused; they went…”,
Yes, as usual there has to be someone to point the finger of blame at. The deaths in the CoCH NICU didn’t drop off after Letby no longer worked there until the aged consultant in charge was eased out as it became clear to the management that it was a systemic problem.
As usual the fear-mongers whipped up the hatred and now anyone that speaks in her favour is assumed to be some sort of monster.
Utterly disgusting, don’t be surprised if it takes decades to right this wrong.
Visit scienceontrial.com . This group of concerned professions from medicine, law, science, as well anybody interested in the case, arose out of Lucy Letby’s conviction and has held some very insightful meetings into the farce that was her trial. There are also serious concerns about her legal team who seemed half-hearted to say the least. They are campaigning for a fair trial i.e. one where the science is held to proper scrutiny, not glossed over. Hopefully, she will get an appeal and a proper defence team. There is something about this trial that smells very, very bad.
Anyone of a lynch mob mentality (sadly around 80% of us it would seem) should carefully consider these 2 cases :-
Both subsequently pardoned/cleared of murder.
Alas, far too late for either.
Bentley was hanged by the State aged 19.
Poor Sally Clark was released from jail after two years but would die around three years later, doubtless of a broken heart.
Incidentally, the fact that her second baby had been vaccinated just 11 hours before his death was witheld from the jury (expert evidence having convinced the Judge that vaccination could not possibly be the cause).
Bigpharma rules even then.
Surely there must be stats re SIDS and its temporal relationship to jabs…..
I expect there is, carefully hidden to avoid upsetting the horses.
I’m of the generation of the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six. It was well known at the time that the Police would ‘fit someone up’ to get a result. I think it was widely accepted that criminals who should have been doing time, ended up in jail, maybe not for the things they had done, but the one that had been made to look like it, It was rough justice but justice of a sort. However things changed when the Police were fitting up genuinely innocent people for major crimes, rather than doing their jobs properly. Some things don’t change much.
Yes, 75% of SIDS cases happen within 48 hours of vaccination.
https://principia-scientific.com/the-mathematical-proof-that-vaccines-cause-sids-and-autism/
I always wondered about the Louise Woodward case. It was generally accepted that she was innocent, but no other explanation was ever offered.
Thank you for the link.
“Many think that Letby’s defence barrister failed to make the best of her case, with no expert bar the plumber called on her account.”
This is what I cannot understand. Why was her defence so poor?
Why wasn’t a statistician found who could challenge the statistical evidence against her? There are many who can easily be found now, who make a very good case that the statistical evidence is weak.
Why wasn’t a psychologist found who could explain that the note was nothing more than the rambling expressions of a not unnaturally highly distressed and anxious mind and clearly not a “confession note” as the jury and the general public apparently have been led to believe. What kind of a confession note would say “I did nothing wrong”, it’s a ridiculous claim.
As far as I am aware, there were no character witnesses called, yet many of her friends and colleagues are convinced that she was kind and caring and normal and would never do anything so out of character like this.
I wonder if the jury were persuaded by the authority of the medical evidence against her, rather than by the medical evidence itself? If a medical ‘expert’ says something is true beyond reasonable doubt, then it must be true – is what many people, who hold doctors and medical experts in such high regard, uncritically think.
And with no experts called as defence witnesses to challenge the prosecution’s authoritative medical experts, the jury were unlikely to question either the medical evidence or the statistical evidence, because what do they know about medical matters or statistics?
For justice to be done in any court case, the defence team have a legal and ethical duty to present the best possible case on behalf of their client, even if the client appears to be almost certainly guilty from the start. So why wasn’t the best possible case presented in defence of Lucy Letby. Something stinks here, and I don’t know what it is. I can only guess.
As you saw in the article, the medics pointed the finger after they were in danger of being found to be at fault by hospital management..
Effectively Letby is the victim of a turf war by people unused to being opposed.
It is interesting that the “Discovery” process appears to have not worked. In this all the prosecution evidence must be given to the defence before the trial. Why did the defence not counter each piece of evidence, particularly the lack of pathology, the statistics, etc. Something is fishy here.
Glad it’s not just me.
Dr. L makes a very good case for doubt, and it seems outrageous if LL is to be denied an appeal, but then our legal system is showing signs of warp not only with this but with the slapping on of a ban on naming the 19 year old ‘ST’ who is to be denied the life-proloning treatment that might sustain her until she can travel to Canada ,(God help her if that’s her only resource…)
The fact that this case followed so quickly on the heels of the man wrongly imprisoned for a rape he didn’t commit made me very uneasy. There’s been a lot of righteous thundering and condemnation of this young woman and I fear they might have spoken too soon.
Unfortunately, now even if her conviction is overturned, the rest of her life will be blighted by mouth breathers and she will need a degree of protection. She will also never be able to work as a nurse again. A substantial proportion of patients simply won’t accept her.
I’m in complete agreement with the paragraph that begins with “I don’t know if Ms Letby is innocent”
People who claim she is innocent and has been made a scapegoat are cherry picking certain aspects of the case to try and prove their point. A jury has heard far more evidence than can be obtained from media reports and concluded she was guilty. I trust their conclusion far more than armchair jurists who have declared Letby innocent.
It may well be the case that the jury wasn’t presented with all the evidence such as the other deaths in the cluster or all the medical data. It seems obvious that the jury wasn’t given enough expert help to interpret complex medical evidence or ambiguous evidence such as the green note that can be read and interpreted in more than one way.
Letby deserves a retrial with a much better defence team who’ll call more expert witnesses, but until this happens people who say she’s innocent are doing the same thing as the media saying she’s a monster, jumping to conclusions without a proper understanding of a very complex case.
I don’t think this case is complex. It only seems that way because of the dodgy evidence. It is likely that no murders actually happened. Remember, none of the deaths were originally treated as suspicious. Remember too, the jurors are lay people and may have less understanding of science than many people who are critical of the trial.
I’m afraid that I have little faith in the jury system. Accounts I have heard from former jurors themselves describe a kind of groupthink mentality forming quite quickly, which becomes very difficult to shift. People are not brought up to exercise critical thinking sufficiently well; indeed these days such thinking is often only deemed valid within a particular cultural context, which leaves juries vulnerable to manipulation by a clever prosecution.
The medical profession contains more than its fair share of psychopaths, so I found it easy to go along with the ‘psycho-nurse’ narrative. As Matthias Desmet says, this surface-level emotional reasoning is how mobs form. How easy it is to just go along with the mob.
Lucy Letby gets sent to prison on the basis of very shaky evidence, meanwhile those who orchestrated and effected the injection of poison into the arms of millions of young children continue to walk free.
Correct + I tried to post the current 2m high maternity dept poster from Worcester hospital (but I’m useless) telling new mothers to get jabbed
Whatever happened this Girl has suffered & Suffered , & hasn’t she been attacked in prison already , she’s been paraded around in the media as the worst person ever known by the same people who have been silent for at least 3,1/2 years ! + how many healthy babies around the world who are far older than the frail mites in this saga are ripped from the safety of their mothers wombs every single day , ! She better be guilty because her suffering is unimaginable!
Hmm, slightly different circumstances, perhaps.
I believe they should let the NHS process the appeal. That should take about 4 years.
That poor girl. She sounds desperately close to suicide.
Seconded. I hope there can be a rapid appeal with sound thinkers like Prof Norman Fenton coming to her aid on the shaky statistics.
Any Christians here should be praying for her – and for justice (fat chance in our current world).
Circumstantial evidence is very dangerous, and the Judge should have warned the jury that there were zero “hard facts”. A case where there there was no pathology, and obvious statistical evidence that there were several factors at work, is very unsafe. The reason for this conviction, in my opinion, is simply that the jury was not presented with a proper scientific defence and they were overwhelmed with the prosecution claim that Letby was guilty by association. The decoded notes (green paper) and trying to use the LD in a diary as proof of guilt is ridiculous, my daughter (a Doctor) makes the same note all the time! It is possible she is guilty, but equally possible she is innocent, and this is far less than “beyond reasonable doubt”. Circumstances alone can never reach that threshold.
The jurors should be asked one simple question – did they watch that dreadful fictional film ‘The Good Nurse’? The intravenous drip bags story line fits what the witness described, many years after natural causes were declared!!!
Good question, I wonder if that is where the prosecution got the idea from?
Not exactly the same kind of scapegoating, but potentially another cover up by the Elite is happening in Maui, where over 1000 children are still unaccounted for and hundreds of families missing following the magic fire which only destroyed undesirable properties recently in order to facilitate a land grab.
Absolutely. Ginger Breggins (I think) did a recent article on these missing children/adults. And all the officials were off the island!
Same judge who gave Carl Beech an 18 year sentence for ‘fabricating’ details about a Westminster pedo ring. But there was/is a Westminster pedo ring. So who does Justice Goss work for?
Having followed much of the trial reports I was shocked at the gulty verdict. I worked in the hospital supply field for 30 years and spent a lot of time working with neonatal units. The whole prosecution case smelled to me of ‘cover up’ at whatever cost. An appeal must be allowed and more expertise brought in for the defence especially considering the severity of the sentence.
It looks more like ‘things will never be like they used to’ under the word HATE. Also, the sentence is ‘I don’t deserve Mum + Dad, Tom + Matt’ (her two cousins).
Well it is different – there is no question that Mair killed Jo Cox.
In what sense was she a vile traitress?
I salute this girls friend who, despite all the vitriol, stood by her after the verdict in the face of the MSM, MP storms. Bless you for your indefatigability.
Ms Letby’s suggestion that sewage contamination might have been responsible for some of the deaths may seem absurd to the layperson.
However, leaky pipework in a hospital might result in water damage to patient’s notes when these are stored in basement libraries (they are always in the basement due to the weight of tens of thousands of volumes). If only air dried and reassembled, instead of being properly treated and disinfected, can it be certain that they don’t carry infection when taken back to a ward, placed at the end of a patient’s bed or at the nurses’ station, and then handled by staff?
There is something deeply disturbing about this conviction. It stinks. And especially when all her friends stand by her and her family.
A patsy if ever I saw one.
Aside from being totally improper this extract tells us a great deal – the Cheshire police went out of their way to use trial by media to convince people she was guilty – indicating Cheshire police knew people would not be convinced by the trial verdict – and they are right because it stinks.