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Is Lucy Letby innocent? Or, to put it another way, is there now enough reasonable doubt to declare her conviction unsafe? This documentary’s answer to the second question could hardly be clearer: yes.
Letby was declared to be the biggest child serial killer in modern Britain, though she could yet go down in history as the subject of our era’s most serious miscarriage of justice. Public opinion, media mythology and the law turn as slowly as an oil tanker. Letby could walk free … or she could end up the subject of unending and fruitless debate, in a kind of permanent standoff with her accusers, like the Menendez brothers in the US, contentiously convicted of killing their parents in 1989 and still in prison.
The film shows the struggle of Letby’s voluble and media-savvy barrister Mark McDonald to bring her case in front of the Criminal Cases Review Commission to have it sent back to the court of appeal – a process which is continuing. Among the interviewees on Letby’s side are Private Eye’s investigative reporter Dr Phil Hammond and the Toronto neonatal expert Dr Shoo Lee, some of many convinced that the conviction is unsafe. The Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens, a vehement commentator on the case, is glimpsed here at a press conference, but not interviewed. And on the prosecution’s side there is the expert witness Dr Dewi Evans, whose testimony was so important.
Letby, a former neonatal nurse at Chester hospital who was convicted in 2023 of seven murders of infants and the attempted murder of seven more, was at the centre of a trial that focused on the sensational handwritten Post-it notes recovered from her house in which she appeared to confess her guilt, and which surely swayed the jury. She claimed these were merely imaginary cathartic exercises encouraged by a counsellor (it is a fault of this film that it does not more closely examine the process of this counselling.)
Daniel Bogado’s documentary, which is due to be shown in two-episode form on Channel 4, focuses on the overwhelming importance of Dr Evans, the prosecution’s expert witness who was dramatically convinced of Letby’s guilt early in the process. Dr Evans himself, extensively interviewed in this film, is an experienced health practitioner and proud Welshman who is of the view that the current campaign is a London-based media stitch-up to put him and his expertise on trial. He calls Letby’s defenders the “Great Metropolitan Elite” or “God’s Most Entitled”. And in fact it is perfectly possible to feel sympathy for Dr Evans due to the abuse which he receives. The film also interviews anonymous parents whose infant was transferred away from Chester hospital and now believe that their child’s survival is due to escaping Letby.
As for Letby herself, she is a blond, blue-eyed former nurse who was once chosen as the face of the hospital PR campaign, and these are the qualities that might have made her the subject of prurient media fascination in the first place. But they might also have done her current campaign no harm; the film does not offer an opinion on that. But it certainly presents a very coherent argument in the case of each infant death that what could well have happened was incompetence and mishap; the all-important pattern of mysterious and questionable deaths, so easily attributable to a single malign person, could as easily be the result of systemic underfunding, understaffing or mismanagement. As Dr Hammond says: we don’t want to believe that it could happen in our NHS, so we blame an individual.
None of this solves the issue of guilt; the argument merely addresses the onus of proof. It is conceivable that the conviction was only partly faulty. Everyone involved here makes it clear they have utmost respect for the feelings for the bereaved parents, and declare that getting at the truth will help them in the long run. That may or may not be accurate; what remains to be seen is whether the Letby debate leads to an increase in the standards of neonatal care.
