Is Lucy Letby Innocent?

 

Why is it only now that the question has entered the mainstream media that Lucy Letby might be innocent? Her trial is complete and now all that's left is for her to live out her life behind bars. This will not be a happy life. She will need to be held in permanent solitary confinement because HMP Bronzefield is home to some very mean bitches and some of them are mothers. How will they regard a woman who kills babies? What would they do to her if they caught her? Therefore if a mistake has been made it is very important that it be corrected. To be fair, a few journalists have raised questions previously about the neonatal nurse from Cheshire, such as Peter Hitchens, see below, but these were largely curtailed. It is possible publicity has only increased now because the end of her trial has lead to reporting restrictions being lifted. These restrictions are unfortunately indispensable so that the public, and therefore the jury, could not claim to be biased about her case. The downside of that is that the government, police and judiciary have a monopoly on the narrative given to the media and therefore said public. Lucy Letby graduated with a nursing degree in 2011 and began her service at the Liverpool Women's Hospital before moving to the Countess of Cheshire Hospital. She was determined to be a paediatric or neonatal intensive care nurse and she trained hard to qualify in that discipline. She once told people that general nursing was boring. Investigations began with typical NHS passive aggression and dithering; in 2015 a group of consultants "asked" the nursing officer to "move" Letby to a non-clinical role. She was transferred to a patient liaison team. Naturally it is a sad fact of life that in a neonatology unit (At OxRad this was called a SCBU, Special Care Baby Unit; usually pronounced "skuh-boo") babies are going to die regularly. They are often born prematurely and so cannot breathe by themselves or digest food. However, that particular unit had always experienced an average of two to three deaths per year; yet in a single month, June 2015, they suffered three. A fourth baby nearly died with a similar pathology to the other three, but was happily saved. There was another death the following month. Then the head paediatrician of the unit noticed that there was a single common factor; Letby had been on duty for all of them. This could have been a coincidence; after all she was known to put in a lot of overtime. The Trust board and Quality Care Commission rejected concerns on this basis. A year later following a number of other unexplained deaths the doctors once again petitioned the board for action, but the board refused. Interestingly once of their concerns was for the Countess of Cheshire's reputation, the very thing they used to dismiss me, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2022/01/ten-years-on.html. Following a fresh investigation by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, they concluded that the anomalous increase in deaths existed but had no obvious cause and therefore management could not be blamed. Around the same time Letby won an official grievance for being taken off the unit and was returned to frontline clinical care, this time at the Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool. Her accusers among the Countess neonatal team were ordered to write her a letter of apology. The police were first called in April 2017 and they immediately set up an undercover investigation to establish the cause of the deaths on the Countess neonatal ITU called "Operation Hummingbird". Eventually, after more than two and a half years since the spotlight of suspicion first shone on her, Lucy Letby was arrested. The irony is not lost on me that the decision to begin investigations against me took just eight days. The police found some personal journals in which she expressed negative and aggressive emotions. These included the words: "I am evil! I did this! I killed them on purpose!" This has been interpreted by some as a confession, although Letby never confirmed that formally. For all we know this could have been the ramblings of her imagination, a dream diary or notes for a fiction project etc. She did seem to have a rather morbid fixation with the tragic side of her work, looking up the relatives of the babies who died on social media. Most incriminating of all, she altered the patient notes, something also done by Dr Harold Shipman, possibly Britain's worst serial killer. She took medical records home with her and hid them in her bedroom, which is in itself a gross breach of confidentiality law. Letby's explanations for this behaviour were totally inadequate; for example she claimed she only took these classified documents home in order to shred them. However, the hospital has its own shredder; I used to take records to it myself in carefully sealed bags. After Lucy Letby left the Countess unit the unexplained deaths and injuries stopped. She has a whole life order on her sentence which means she can never be considered for probation.
 
A lot of people online have been speaking out ever since the news reported on her charges and I have been contacted personally by three individuals asking me for my opinion. A lot of them reckon she was set up as a scapegoat to conceal the institutional irresponsibility of the Trust board and unit management. I think not. If this were true then we would see NHS nurses being carted off to the slammer every week. What's more, if that were even half true, it hasn't worked. The government has now turned its attention towards the Trust officials and ordered the DHSC to carry out the "Thirlwall inquiry" which is going to destroy a lot of careers and might even result in some criminal malpractice charges. They also face a class action lawsuit from the victims' parents. The New Yorker magazine's Rachel Aviv wrote a very long article claiming that Lucy Letby was a victim of bad luck and wilful bias in analyzing statistics. She also rejected the testimony of one of the expert prosecution witnesses, Dewi Evans, because he had been criticized for his unreliability in previous cases. Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/20/lucy-letby-was-found-guilty-of-killing-seven-babies-did-she-do-it. (This article is currently invisible in my country. I have included the link in case that changes.) The Guardian have published a similar article: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/09/lucy-letby-evidence-experts-question. I have written a lot about Peter Hitchens in the past, for example https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2024/06/hold-your-nose-and-vote-tory.html, and am doing so again because he has joined this movement. He doubts the qualifications of the jury because the case involved a lot of specialist medical knowledge. There is no direct evidence against Lucy Letby. Nobody has even caught her in the act. None of the path reports have been designated as unlawful killing by a coroner, meaning that malicious intent does not have to be the only cause of what was done to the victims. None of the babies had, for example, a stab wound or unexpected injection mark. The defence could not, or would not, put expert medical witnesses of their own on the stand. It was only outside the courtroom that several doctors voiced their scepticism. The test to reveal insulin overdoses, for example, did not detect the drug itself, only the antibody response which can "cross react" with other substances. Similar doubts have been raised by other toxicology results listed on the path reports. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNB0CaKI3IM. Several people, including those who know Lucy Letby well, have said things like: "But she doesn't look like a serial killer!" or "She seemed so normal!" This is not evidence of innocence. Serial killers often do appear normal. In fact excessive normality is a bit of a red flag for me, for example: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2019/10/peter-croft-and-ben-emlyn-jones.html. Psychopaths have to wear a "mask of sanity", which is actually the title of the first book about the subject. They tend make this mask as conventional as possible to avoid suspicion. Because there is no real personality behind this facade there is no reason why it should have any oddities. People with eccentricities are usually those who are most likely to attract repulsion and distrust, but they tend to be pretty harmless... A name leaps to mind immediately! A good fictional portrait of the "Mr Perfect" who is really the opposite is Patrick Bateman, the antihero of Brett Easton Ellis' book American Psycho and Mary Harron's 2000 film adaptation. Letby was considered so ordinary by her peers that her nickname was "vanilla". However, this is not evidence of guilt either; some people are just naturally very nondescript. If Lucy Letby is the victim of a miscarriage of justice then is it deliberate or accidental? There seems to be no motive for a conspiracy to frame her. Nobody has benefited from her imprisonment, as I have said. She is not a white straight male so will not aid government's attempt to "balance the conviction rates". Is this supposed miscarriage therefore accidental or maybe just a product of the subconscious drive to assign blame so that things simply make sense? The justice system is supposed to control for that, but there are numerous examples of where it fails abysmally to do so. If this is the case, then an appeal would definitely be justified; but on what grounds? I think there is only one way, the same way accusations stuck to her in the first place: circumstantial evidence. Hypothetically, if Lucy Letby is an innocent woman wrongly incarcerated then eventually this will become very obvious through the same kind of research that was done to incriminate her in the first place. If the mysterious deaths continue then what could be the cause of those? Maybe the data gathered by the Thirlwall inquiry will help. Unfortunately building a statistical case to exonerate this young woman will take a long time, hopefully less time than the four years Operation Hummingbird was running. This article will probably be the first of a series of publications on this subject and I will shortly be presenting a special episode of The Gas Spanner about it. This will include a listener's question and answer session, see: https://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-gas-spanner-programme-89.html.