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The Investigation of Lucy Letby is at least the fifth documentary that has been produced in the wake of the neonatal nurse’s convictions in 2023 and 2024 on seven counts of murder and seven of attempted murder of babies in her care at the Countess of Chester hospital. Probably the best of them was ITV’s Lucy Letby: Beyond Reasonable Doubt? last summer. It did a fine job of meticulously explaining the evidence against her – and why a growing body of experts believe that at the very least her conviction on the basis of what was gathered is unsafe, and at most that none of the babies were murdered by her, but were victims of a chronically understaffed and mismanaged unit that might have sought to scapegoat an individual for its failings.
The Investigation of Lucy Letby does not compare in its attention to detail, preferring a broader-brush, more emotive telling of the story of either one of the most prolific female serial killers in history or one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in recent times. Its publicity has made much of the fact that it contains hitherto unseen footage of Letby’s arrest at her parents’ home. Her mother and father say they were unaware that it would be shown until Lucy’s barrister told them. “We will not watch it – it would likely kill us if we did.” When the footage is shown, you can hear her mother howl in distress as the police take Lucy away. It is an almost inhuman sound. It is hard to say what value such an inclusion adds except to warn the viewer to brace themselves for sensationalism along the way as the case is pieced together using accounts from the police, people – from both sides – directly involved with the case, Letby’s best friend Maisie and Letby’s current lawyer (not the one who represented her in court), Mark McDonald, along with media reporting from the time and tapes of her interviews with investigators.
The first hour of the 90-minute programme lays out the police and prosecution’s case. It includes the spike in infant deaths and catastrophic collapses between 2015 and 2016, the correlation between their occurrence and Letby’s presence on the unit and the fact that they stopped happening when she was removed from the unit. There is also the matter of the 250-patient handover sheets – confidential documents – brought home from work and filed in date order in a box marked “Keep”, plus the Post-it notes found during a police search of her home. On the latter Letby had written “I am evil”, “I did this” and other such apparently conclusively damning phrases. The expert witness brought in by police and who testified at the trial, retired paediatrician Dewi Evans, asserted that certain symptoms in the babies could only point to deliberate attempts to harm, often by inducing air embolisms in the babies.
The last half-hour is spent with McDonald and Dr Shoo Lee pulling apart most (not all – we do not get an explanation of the handover sheets, which Letby says she accidentally brought home then couldn’t properly dispose of, despite a shredder being found in the house) of the evidence. McDonald notes that the trial judge was, in a very unusual move, emailed by a court of appeal judge during the trial to state “in robust terms” the latter’s concerns that Evans might be a witness whose evidence could be tailored as needed. The Post-it notes were written on the advice of the therapist provided by the NHS to Letby after the spike in infant deaths. According to Letby at her police interview, they were a product of her terrible fear that “I might have hurt them without knowing, through my practice”. They also contain such phrases as “slander”, “discrimination”, “victimisation”, born of the feeling that the unit – which Maisie says had always been “cliquey” – was using her to distract from systemic failures. The drop in mortality rates when Letby left can be attributed to the fact that the unit was downgraded at the same time and started treating fewer sick children.
McDonald (who became involved with the case only after Letby’s convictions) contacted Lee, the author of the paper from which Evans had drawn most of his conclusions, and Lee said they were mistaken and convened a panel of independent experts to go through the clinical notes, finding alternative explanations for all the prosecution’s theories and therefore, as he said to an assembled press, “no murders”.
The film includes contributions from the anonymised mother of one of the babies, which are of course heartbreaking. But it is a weighty decision to include them. They are there to make good television for the producers, pull in viewers and tug on their emotions and even if this is not the intention, they run emotional interference between them and a rational appraisal of the facts. Which, even on this partial telling, surely need revisiting in a court of law. Reports are with the Criminal Cases Review Commission. Its decision is expected in autumn. Everyone’s suffering continues.
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The Investigation of Lucy Letby is on Netflix now
