[imagesource: Chester Standard]

‘Killer nurse’ Lucy Letby, the most prolific child serial killer in modern British history, has been convicted of murdering babies in Chester’s Countess of Chester Hospital in northern England.

During her criminal trial last year, Letby faced a total of 22 charges — seven counts of murder and 15 counts of attempted murder relating to 17 babies in total — but was not found guilty of all charges.

The 34-year-old former nurse is now serving multiple life sentences in prison after being found guilty of murdering seven infants and attempting to kill seven more between June 2015 and June 2016.

In recent months, there have been questions raised about Letby’s guilt from many scientists, doctors, nurses and statisticians.

The public struggles to believe Lucy Letby is a serial killer because “we prefer our monsters to look like monsters” even though “evil is banal”, a barrister representing the families of the babies said via The Telegraph.

Richard Baker KC, who spoke at the Thirlwall Inquiry, which was examining how the deaths could have been prevented, said people questioning the verdict “should be ashamed of themselves” for “recklessly promoting conspiracy theories”.

“Evil can be banal,” he said. “We prefer our monsters to look like monsters, to be easy to identify and to be far removed from ourselves. It creates a profound cognitive dissonance. Many monsters do not fit a stereotype. It is sometimes hard to accept.

“The cognitive biases who see a young woman working in a caring profession and cannot conceive of a darkness that may lay beneath the surface. But we should not be so naive. To be successful, a serial killer must hide in plain sight.”

Peter Skelton KC, who is representing the parents of children A, B, I, L, M, N and Q, (how they were referred to in the trial) also addressed the ongoing speculation that Letby may be the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

“Letby was not convicted on the basis of questionable statistics but because the factual and expert medical evidence demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that she had harmed children at the hospital,” he said.

However, a few senior doctors and scientists have told the BBC they have concerns about how crucial evidence was presented to the jury at Lucy Letby’s trials.

The BBC’s File on 4 has delved deep into the role expert witnesses played in constructing the case against the disgraced former nurse. The programme highlights the daunting challenge courts face when confronted with cases steeped in overwhelming medical complexity. In Letby’s two trials, juries were tasked with navigating vast swathes of intricate medical evidence tied to each child’s tragic fate.

Experts who spoke to the BBC now cast doubt on pivotal aspects of the case — from the amount of insulin allegedly used to harm the infants, to the frail health of one baby she was convicted of murdering, and even the pathology findings laid before the jury.

Meanwhile, a public inquiry aims to uncover how Letby could have committed such heinous acts under the hospital’s watch. At the inquiry’s opening, Lady Justice Thirlwall, a senior Court of Appeal judge, unleashed her fury upon those questioning the guilty verdicts, declaring that their scepticism only heaped “enormous additional distress to the parents”.

Thirlwall made it clear that she wasn’t buying into what she described as an “outpouring of comment”.

“I make it absolutely clear that it’s not for me, as chair of this public inquiry, to set about reviewing the convictions,” she told the inquiry at Liverpool Town Hall.

“The Court of Appeal has done that with a very clear result. The convictions stand.”

Thirlwall further stated that the questions about Letby’s guilt had come almost exclusively from people who did not attend the former nurse’s 10-month trial. Some of the details are horrendous.

The inquiry was also set to probe the Countess of Chester Hospital and specifically examine whether management was too slow to identify it had a serial killer in its ranks. On the first day of evidence, the inquiry heard there were a series of “missed opportunities” to prevent Letby from murdering and harming babies and that the hospital failed to investigate a cluster of unexpected deaths, despite staff describing them as shocking and odd.

Counsel assisting the inquiry Rachel Langdale KC told the hearing that doctors found the process of reviewing child deaths at the Countess of Chester Hospital to be “desperate and inconsistent” and that one senior doctor “deeply regrets” not escalating his concerns about Letby sooner.

In a written opening on the third day of the hearing, Andrew Kennedy KC said that until March 2016, the hospital had been looking for a “clinical explanation” for a rise in death rates.

However, the inquiry was also told there were concerns about Letby’s time at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, where she worked in 2012 and 2015.

The prosecution’s case in Letby’s original 10-month trial included the testimony of six expert medical witnesses, thousands of documents, blood test results, X-rays and handwritten notes by Letby including one that read “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough”. Yet, a small but adamant group of medical experts and statisticians are pushing for the evidence used in her trials to be re-examined.

They argue that a spreadsheet produced by the prosecution is misleading. It shows which nursing staff were on duty during 25 suspicious deaths or baby collapses in the neonatal ward. Letby is the only name with an X in every box. However, the spreadsheet doesn’t include doctors, technicians and cleaning people, while other deaths in the neonatal ward during that period were also absent from the spreadsheet.

An audit of her time there, showed that dislodgement of endotracheal (breathing) tubes occurred on 40 per cent of shifts that Letby was working – despite dislodgement usually happening on fewer than one per cent of all shifts.

We’re also sharing this chart seen by the jury which shows Lucy Letby was on duty every single time a baby in this case collapsed or died. pic.twitter.com/fOGHkzEOYC

— The Trial (@thetrialpod) May 1, 2023

The spreadsheet is just one example of data some statisticians like Professor Gill say was wrongly presented to convict Letby.

“This was a textbook example of an investigation driven by confirmation bias, it has become completely clear that is the case,” Professor Gill claimed.

Many of these criticisms formed the basis of Letby’s two appeal attempts, which were denied.

Prosecutors claimed Letby used various methods to kill her infant victims, including injecting air into their bloodstreams and poisoning them with insulin. During the trial, hospital doctors revealed they had sounded the alarm about Letby a full eight months before she was finally removed from the neonatal unit. Their concerns, however, were reportedly met with indifference by management, who chose to dismiss the warnings.

The delay in action, they claimed, allowed the nightmare to continue far longer than it ever should have.

[sources:abcnews&bbc]