About 11 months ago, following the most stressful but well-paid weekend of my working life, I emailed Simon a script called “Lucy Letby: The Serial Killer Nurse.”
This script, the second most psychologically disturbing video I have ever worked on, coming in just behind the Dunblane and Hungerford shootings, told the story of Lucy Letby, a seemingly ordinary, hard-working NHS nurse. Or, at least, that is how she appeared to almost everybody who knew her. However, as those of you who watched that video may remember, we were not far into the script before Letby’s carefully crafted public persona began to slip, and we caught glimpses of the personification of pure evil that lurked beneath.
Following a lengthy investigation, it transpired that this young nurse, who worked on the neonatal ward at the Countess of Chester Hospital, was responsible for the murder of seven premature babies and the attempted murder of seven more. For her crimes, which we will recap very briefly in just a short while, she received 14 life sentences. So, why am I starting a new script with this piece of human excrement in the title?
Why would I, someone whose child was born in that hospital at the same time she was working there, choose to once again dredge up that peculiar sense of survivor’s guilt that I have only recently almost completely buried?
Well, it turns out that although Letby will absolutely never leave prison alive—a fact that the presiding judge made abundantly clear in his closing remarks—there is, in fact, more to the story. While I could have passed this script on to one of the resident casual criminalist writers, whose talents are far better suited to this kind of thing than my own, I feel that, were I to do this, I would somehow be disrespectful to the families involved in this second chapter of the story.
With all that said, let us take a brief look at Letby’s original story, some of the flimsy controversy that was drummed up online after her conviction, how her stay in prison has been so far, and exactly how it was that she would receive a 15th life sentence.
Recap
As you might imagine, the story of Letby’s crimes is harrowing in the extreme. Should you wish to take a deep dive into it, I highly recommend watching the original video, which, depending on whether or not Simon remembers to do so, may be linked in the description. While I have no wish to revisit the story in detail, and I would bet that Simon feels similarly, I will provide a few paragraphs for anyone who is not entirely familiar with the story.
Born in Hereford during the 1990s, Letby left school with enough qualifications to pursue her dream of becoming a nurse. After studying nursing at university, she moved to the city of Chester and studied for a further three years to become a specialist children’s nurse. Upon becoming fully qualified, she quickly gained a position in the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital.
Initially, all seemed to be well. She was reasonably popular among the other members of staff, a favorite among the parents of her patients, and, to all outward appearances, a hard-working, diligent member of the team.
However, on the 8th of June 2013, all that changed. Letby deliberately, and with full knowledge of how much damage it would cause, injected air into the bloodstream of a premature baby. Hours later, the baby was dead. Twenty-three hours after her first attack, she attempted to use the same method to kill the twin sister of the deceased, but this time the alarm was sounded and the baby went on to make a full recovery.
Over the next year, despite many concerns being raised by other members of staff, Letby would go on to murder or attempt to murder at least 12 other premature babies. If I may, I would like to quickly return to the aforementioned concerns. Although the directors of the hospital didn’t seem to find it at all suspicious that premature baby deaths were increasing at an alarming rate, many other people working at the hospital did. However, when several consultants and senior doctors raised this issue with management, they not only had their concerns brushed aside but were forced to write a letter of apology to Letby for daring to do their jobs properly.
Eventually, after far, far too long, the hospital did report the deaths to the police, and once they became involved, they were able to put together the case that would eventually bring Letby to justice. As I said, the whole story is a little more complicated than that, but I have tried to include all the essential points. Now, let us move on.
After the Trial
Once the judge had assured the world that this poisonous piece of filth would never again be in a position where she could harm another child, almost the entirety of the United Kingdom breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, after years of public exposure and press hounding, distraught families had some closure and could attempt to go about the rest of their lives in relative peace, the police could congratulate themselves on a job well done and, in an exceptionally rare move by the UK legal system, an appropriate sentence had been handed down.
But not everyone was convinced.
There are, and still are, those out there who believed that the whole trial was a sham.
According to these individuals, Letby had undergone one of the most egregious examples of trial by media, the prosecution had relied on floored or fabricated evidence and there was no way that this “wonderful human being” was guilty of the crimes for which she had been convicted.
These people got pretty personal about it as well. A quick read through the comments on the previous video will find instances of both Simon’s and my own research skills and integrity being called into question, and I received at least two private correspondences in which I was accused of both being paid to write a pro-legal system piece and concealing the fact that I had previously been involved with the Countess of Chester, even though my entire introduction was based around how my child had been born there. Now, I’m really not complaining.
In this line of work you constantly get shit from people who disagree with what you write. The only reason I mention it at all is to raise the point that if people were prepared to come after us for making a video on the topic, imagine what the families who testified against Letby must have gone through?
So, like the legal scholars we are, let us take a look at some of the concerns that were raised and see if any of them are legitimate.
The most comprehensive collection of concerns, and the source most frequently quoted online in recent months, is an article from The New Yorker written by Rachel Aviv titled “A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It?”
After hearing about this article and deciding that it was definitely worth a read, I discovered that, due to certain UK laws regarding ongoing trials, I was unable to access it. Strangely, after closing my web browser, doing something, and opening it again, The New Yorker website seemed to be under the impression that I lived in Denver, Colorado, and was more than happy to provide me with the article. Given that the reasons for restricting this story in the UK are no longer valid, I don’t feel bad about this at all.
Before we go into this in a little more depth, I just want to say that one of my own personal criteria when it comes to assessing the validity of a source trying to convince me that things might not be as they seem is to cross-check the basic information about which there is no debate at all. It is just a small thing, but if somebody wants me to change my viewpoint on something, the very least they can do is get the basics correct.
With that in mind, I would like to draw your attention to this small extract:
“Last August, Lucy Letby, a thirty-three-year-old British nurse, was convicted of killing seven newborn babies and attempting to kill six others. Her murder trial, one of the longest in English history, lasted more than ten months and captivated the United Kingdom.”
Now, if we compare that to this further short extract from the judge’s sentencing remarks, you should notice the somewhat glaring discrepancy:
“Lucy Letby, on each of the 7 offenses of murder and the 7 offenses of attempted murder, I sentence you to imprisonment for life.”
I am by no means suggesting that, because of this mistake, we should disregard the rest of the article—really, I’m not. But when people directly cite it as “clear evidence” that we did not research the original case properly, it does raise a few questions.
So, does The New Yorker put forward any information that wasn’t widely publicized or mentioned in the original trial? Well, sort of. Quite near the beginning of the article, Aviv mentions that the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital was very old, too small, under-equipped, understaffed, and underfunded. While this was undoubtedly true, pretty much all NHS hospitals suffer from some or all of these problems, and there does not appear to be any overwhelming evidence to suggest that the unit was doing any better or worse than any other. Aviv’s primary reason for mentioning this is as an invitation for the reader to begin to infer that there are other explanations, apart from a murderer working there, for the huge spike in fatalities.
As the article continues, Aviv repeats that none of the other nursing staff had any concerns about Letby, and that her direct superior stood behind her even when the big bad consultants tried to suggest that something might be wrong. Far from using this to highlight massive systemic failure, Aviv again appears to want us to take this information as yet more proof that the end result may have been flawed.
But what about the evidence and the trial? Does the article provide anything that might compel you to believe that Letby is actually innocent?
Well, I am neither a lawyer nor a particularly talented media analyst, but as far as I understood it, there were a couple of arguments. Firstly, although Letby was found guilty of seven murders, nobody actually saw her doing anything untoward to any of the children. Those inclined to find fault with the trial argue that it is just possible she may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I covered this briefly in the original script and my view has not changed. In the case of one, two, or three deaths, the fact that she was working on or around the time when these babies died could, just about, be considered a coincidence, especially if there were no other evidence to link her to the crimes. If that number is more than double, then the “coincidence” argument seems to be stretched rather thin.
If you add in all the other evidence, such as the documents she stole from the hospital, the fact that she stalked the grieving families online (an action that Aviv’s article tries to explain away by quoting Letby as saying: “I was always on my phone” and that she had “searched for other people 2,287 times”), and the fact that she appeared to confess in several handwritten notes, then I believe that the margin for coincidence has almost completely disappeared.
Other points of interest include the fact that one of the prosecution’s main witnesses, Dewi Evans, was previously lambasted by a different judge for shoddy report writing in a different case, and that one of the jurors was “allegedly” overheard in a café during the trial saying that most of the jury had already made up their minds. All in all, and I read this article 4 or 5 times, no single thing, nor the article in its entirety, led me to significantly alter my opinion.
The thing is, and I don’t know this for sure, but I don’t think it was meant to. Aviv never says that she believes Letby to be innocent; rather, the entire article comes across more as information that didn’t necessarily go mainstream, coupled with the standard warning to do your own research before believing something you see in the news. The problem seems to have occurred when people started quoting random bits of the article to further their own arguments online.
A repeated example of this was used to back up people’s claims that the article had not been published in the UK for reasons other than there being an ongoing trial and therefore a direct court order preventing its publication. Many people started saying that it had been blocked in the UK because it had the potential to undermine confidence in the justice system.
The evidence for this? Aviv used almost exactly those words in the article, and she did. Unfortunately, she was writing about something completely different and the quote has been cherry-picked. Aviv was actually talking about her attempts to contact Letby’s lawyers for comment and wrote:
“Lawyers in England can be sanctioned for making remarks that would undermine confidence in the judicial system.”
Not quite the accusation of conspiracy that it was portrayed as, is it?
But why are there so many people who continue to believe in her innocence?
The problem seems to stem from the fact that Letby was, for want of a better description, so normal. Usually, when a serial killer comes to trial, you can look back through their history and point to at least one thing from the past that should have raised a red flag. Regular viewers of this channel will know that a fairly extensive list has been compiled:
- Childhood physical or sexual abuse,
- Obsession with one’s mother or father,
- Unbelievable cruelty to small animals,
The list goes on and on. Letby had none of these flags and, as we mentioned in the previous video, had she stopped after her third murder, it is exceptionally likely that she would have never been caught at all. We, as a species, have a tendency to attempt to explain away our errors of judgment, and in the case of “lovely Lucy from the neonatal ward,” it really does seem to be easier for some people to believe that the legal system made a catastrophic error rather than to believe that such a person went undetected for so long. After all, if she could be a serial killer, how many other outwardly perfect people are out there doing it?
Appeal, Retrial and Conviction
Almost as soon as the original trial ended, Letby’s legal team said there would be an appeal. Not long after, it was announced that in the case of “Baby K”—one of six attempted murder charges about which the original jury were unable to decide—Letby would undergo a retrial. Then, there was almost nothing. Unlike the original case during which news channels broadcast up-to-the-minute developments live from the courtroom, these two developments received little to no news time at all.
As we would discover later, there was a very good reason for this. With regards to the retrial, the Crown Prosecution Service issued the following statement:
“We have sought a retrial on one count of attempted murder against Lucy Letby—there should be no reporting, commentary or sharing of information online which could in any way prejudice these proceedings.”
Whilst the logic behind this decision is sound, it does mean that there is far less information on actual proceedings than there was last time. As far as I have been able to ascertain, the courtroom transcripts are not yet publicly available, so the following information on both the appeal and the trial have been pieced together from what I’ve been able to find in various news articles.
In April of this year, Letby applied for permission to appeal against her convictions.
According to The Guardian: “Letby had put forward four grounds of appeal, each of which involved the submission that the trial judge wrongly refused applications she made during the trial at Manchester Crown Court.”
As I said before, full details have not yet been released, but it seems to have been generally accepted that at least one of these refusals involved a request that the star witness we mentioned earlier, Dewi Evans, be prevented from providing further testimony.
An article from the BBC also claims that the defence questioned the diagnosis that several of Letby’s victims had died from air embolism.
Whatever the other grounds for appeal were, they were deemed to be invalid. On the 24th of May 2024, Judge Victoria Sharp, the President of the King’s Bench Division, said: “This court, having heard that application, has decided to refuse leave to appeal on all grounds and to refuse all associated applications.”
This appears to be the end of the line for the appeals process. Although the judge said that further appeals would be considered should they arise, Letby and her team would have to come up with some pretty devastating evidence. Considering that the last appeal seems to have been based on legal technicalities rather than evidence of her innocence, this seems unlikely. But what about the retrial?
This trial, which took place throughout June of this year, saw Letby accused of attempting to murder Baby K by repeatedly interfering with a breathing tube. Again, details are more scarce than in the last trial, but the following extract from an article written by an attending independent journalist gives us a good idea of what happened:
“The baby, born at 25 weeks’ gestation and weighing just 692g, was said by the prosecution to be the ‘epitome of fragility.’ But about 90 minutes after her birth, Letby deliberately dislodged the baby’s breathing tube through which she was being ventilated with air and oxygen. Letby told the court she did not recall being in the nursery at any time during the shift on the day it happened.
But the prosecution said she was caught in the act of dislodging the baby girl’s breathing tube by consultant paediatrician Dr. Ravi Jayaram, before later interfering with replacement tubes for the newborn on two more occasions in a bid to cover her tracks. Dr.
Jayaram told jurors he saw ‘no evidence’ that she had done anything to help the deteriorating baby as he walked in and saw her standing next to the infant’s incubator. He said he heard no call for help from Letby or alarms sounding as Child K’s blood oxygen levels suddenly dropped.”
Dr. Jayaram quickly took over and was able to stabilize the baby’s breathing, and she was transferred to another hospital shortly afterwards. Sadly, she would deteriorate again and would later pass away due to unrelated issues. Once again, Letby’s defense was unable to convince a jury that there was reasonable doubt, and she was found guilty of a further count of attempted murder.
During sentencing, and I am aware that this script contains a lot of quotes but I believe this one to be especially important, the judge made the following remarks:
“Although whole life sentences of imprisonment are reserved for wholly exceptional cases, for the reasons I gave when sentencing you last August I was satisfied that such sentences were appropriate in your case. Baby K was another of your victims in what was a campaign of murder spanning almost 13 months. She was exceptionally vulnerable and in a place where others were striving to provide her with dedicated medical and nursing care.
You betrayed the trust of Baby K, her parents, and all those working at the hospital. You caused her physical suffering and added psychological suffering to her family. During the course of this trial, as you did in the last trial, you have coldly denied any responsibility for any of your wrongdoing and sought to attribute fault to others.
You have no remorse. There are no mitigating factors. In their totality, the offences of murder and attempted murder were of exceptionally high seriousness and just punishment, according to law, requires a whole life order.”
He would then, as he had done less than a year previously, inform Letby that she would spend the remainder of her life in prison.
Before we end for today, I would just like to take a brief look at exactly what that life in prison has been like so far. When I was looking back through my notes for the previous script, I found a message that I sent to Simon expressing my belief that, although she had been granted many whole life sentences, that life may be considerably shorter than one might naturally expect. So far though, she seems to have remained relatively unscathed. There have been several reports online claiming that she was hospitalized after various attacks, but these later proved to be untrue. As for her living conditions, according to an article from The Daily Record, they could almost be described as palatial, especially considering her crimes.
Personally, I would, if she was lucky, provide her with the bare minimum required in order to stay alive. Alas, her stay at HMP Bronzefield has been described thusly:
“Letby seems happy as Larry. She is in a nice cell and on her own. The facilities at Bronzefield are much nicer than most jails, because it’s privately run. She is with prisoners who have earned more rights to watch TV, spend their cash and have visits.”
Letby’s case has once again sparked much debate online as to whether or not the UK should bring back the death penalty and, whilst I am generally not in favor of this, if I were to change my mind, it may well be her who persuaded me to do so.
Key Takeaways
- Lucy Letby received a 15th life sentence after being found guilty in June 2024 of attempted murder of Baby K by dislodging her breathing tube.
- Letby’s appeal against her original convictions was refused on all grounds by Judge Victoria Sharp on May 24, 2024.
- Online controversy about Letby’s innocence stemmed partly from a New Yorker article whose details were frequently misrepresented or cherry-picked by supporters.
- Hospital management initially dismissed staff concerns about rising infant deaths and forced consultants to apologize to Letby rather than investigate.
- Letby is serving her whole life sentence at HMP Bronzefield, where reports describe relatively comfortable conditions in a private cell with privileges.
Dana Ortiz covers prosecutorial mechanics, evidentiary procedure, and how investigations unwind decades after the original case file went cold.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who wrote the article about Lucy Letby?
Dave Page wrote the article.
What was Lucy Letby’s occupation and where did she work?
Lucy Letby was a specialist children’s nurse who worked in the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital.
How many babies was Lucy Letby convicted of murdering and attempting to murder in her original trial?
Lucy Letby was convicted of murdering seven premature babies and attempting to murder seven more in her original trial.
What was Lucy Letby’s first known attack?
On June 8, 2013, Letby deliberately injected air into the bloodstream of a premature baby, who died hours later. Twenty-three hours after this, she attempted to use the same method to kill the twin sister of the deceased.
What happened when hospital staff raised concerns about Letby?
When several consultants and senior doctors raised concerns with management, their concerns were brushed aside and they were forced to write a letter of apology to Letby.
What sentence did Lucy Letby receive?
Lucy Letby received 14 life sentences in her original trial, and later a 15th life sentence after a retrial.
What was the main source of controversy and claims of innocence after Letby’s conviction?
The main source was a New Yorker article by Rachel Aviv titled ‘A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It?’ which some people cited as evidence of a flawed trial, though the author never explicitly stated she believed Letby was innocent.
What was the outcome of Letby’s appeal in May 2024?
On May 24, 2024, Judge Victoria Sharp refused leave to appeal on all grounds and refused all associated applications.
What was Lucy Letby retried for, and what was the outcome?
Letby was retried for the attempted murder of ‘Baby K’ by repeatedly interfering with a breathing tube. She was found guilty of this additional count of attempted murder in June 2024.
What has Lucy Letby’s life in prison been like so far?
According to an article from The Daily Record, Letby seems ‘happy as Larry’ at HMP Bronzefield, where she is in a nice cell on her own with relatively good facilities because it’s privately run. She is with prisoners who have earned more rights to watch TV, spend their cash, and have visits. Reports of her being hospitalized after attacks proved to be untrue.
Sources
- Original Casual Criminalist video: Revisiting Lucy Letby…
- Hero image source by Llywelyn2000 / openverse, by-sa.
