Amanda Knox has said she believes Lucy Letby may be innocent and claims there are ‘convincing’ explanations for the deaths of babies in her care.
Knox says she thinks a lot of the prosecution case against the nurse ‘rests on speculation about ambiguous evidence’ and questioned the level of care provided at the hospital where Letby worked.
Speaking on Good Morning Britain today, the 38-year-old said she was struck that Letby had ‘no history of mental illness, no history of violence, no apparent motive’ before being charged.
Letby was found guilty of the murder of seven babies and attempted murder of eight others between 2015 and 2016 at the Countess of Chester Hospital. She is currently serving 15 whole-life orders, meaning she will never be released.
Knox told hosts Susanna Reid and Ed Balls that she saw similarities in the case with that of her own wrongful conviction for the murder of British student Meredith Kercher, in that many people were also convinced she was guilty.
The American had been found guilty of killing Meredith, 21, at their shared home in Perugia, Italy, in November 2007 before her conviction was overturned and she was released from prison in 2011.
Knox and her boyfriend at the time, Raffaele Sollecito, were convicted in their first trial of killing Kercher but were ultimately exonerated by Italy’s highest court in 2015. Meredith’s killer, Ivorian immigrant Rudy Guede, was jailed in 2008 and released 13 years later in 2021.
Ms Knox, now a global campaigner for the wrongly convicted, is currently in the UK for the first time to attend a friend’s wedding and was seen posing for selfies at London landmarks such as London Bridge this week.
But during the trip she has also taken the time to promote her film ‘Mouth of the Wolf’ – which sees her revisiting Meredith’s murder – and her new podcast series ‘Doubt: The Case of Lucy Letby’, , sparking criticism from the Kercher family’s lawyer that she is ‘cashing in on Meredith Kercher’s memory’.
Speaking on GMB on Monday, Knox said people had reached out to her after Letby’s conviction for the murder of seven babies and attempted murder of seven others between 2015 and 2016 at the Countess of Chester Hospital.
‘I wasn’t looking for the Lucy Letby case, it found me. People reached out to me after her conviction to say they had not seen the unprecedented vilification of a woman based on circumstantial evidence since my own case had hit the tabloids here in Great Britain,’ she said.
Ms Knox explained that what ‘stuck’ with her about the case was how a ‘a young woman with no history of mental illness, no history of violence, no apparent motive’ was ‘suddenly accused of being a serial killer’.
‘That caught my attention, as someone who is very invested especially in the way that women are vilified through character assassination, through intense scrutiny of their behaviour,’ she said, adding that she initially noticed how Letby’s written notes were ‘viewed as a confession’.
The notes handwritten on papers recovered by officers when Letby was first arrested on 3 July 2018 contained phrases including ‘I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them’, ‘I am a horrible evil person’, ‘help me’ and, in capital letters, ‘I am evil I did this’.
On one of the sheets of paper, she wrote: ‘I killed them. I don’t know if I killed them. Maybe I did. Maybe this is down to me.’
Letby’s lawyers at the time told jurors the notes were the ‘anguished outpouring of a young woman’, adding that she was ‘in fear and despair’ at the time as she realised the ‘enormity’ of what was being said ‘about her, in the moment, to herself’.
Ms Knox said being a mother herself and understanding that the parents of the victims want to know how and why their babies died was something that ‘deeply resonated’ with her.
She insisted she had approached her investigation for her podcast with sensitivity for ‘protecting the privacy and the dignity of the families and the victims, while pursuing a course of investigation that is very, very focused on the facts’.
She added: ‘It’s not about the personality of the person accused, it’s about what do we know about this hospital, what do we know about these cases and what can we say we know for sure as opposed to what is speculation.
‘I think that a lot of this case really rests on speculation about ambiguous evidence.
‘As time has gone on, more and more people who are informed, who are experts in these kinds of cases have brought to light information that the jury never had access to when they came to their decision.’
When Ed Balls asked her for an example, she said the international panel she worked with found ‘evidence of pre-existing conditions and actual plausible and probable explanations for these losses that could have been avoided had different things been going on at this hospital’.
Challenging Ms Knox on her theory, Ed asked her what the alternative explanation would be for the deaths of so many babies in one hospital.
However, she did not give one overarching cause responsible for all of the deaths and instead explained how the experts on the international panel gave opinions which she found ‘incredibly convincing’.
‘We lay out individual cases and say, well in this case the mother had pre-existing conditions that would have led to there being a high risk of blood clotting in this one specific case.
‘And in this other specific case there’s a different explanation, because, of course, Lucy Letby was accused of mass murdering infants through a lot of different means depending on the cases.’
When Ed referred to the incidents that led to the deaths as ‘random’, she replied: ‘There’s random and then there’s also systemic issues like how well were these children being cared for?
‘How prepared were the staff at this hospital to deal with these very sensitive and highly fragile cases?
‘Because we are not talking about infants that are born, you know, in good condition, we’re talking about very tiny babies, twins, triplets, who are born prematurely, the most vulnerable of cases.
‘I think this hospital has proven itself to have not been up to the task.’
Susanna carefully asked Ms Knox if she feels she may have gone into her investigation with a bias because she herself was convicted and then acquitted and therefore might think Letby is similar to her.
‘Because, you know, she has been convicted and many people watching will think she’s guilty,’ she said.
But Ms Knox batted the idea away, saying: ‘Well I think many people watching will be thinking “Of course Amanda Knox thinks Lucy Letby is innocent”.
‘To that I would like to point out that the story around me a lot of people were certain I did it as well until the evidence played out and I think that speaks to how profoundly impactful narratives are, especially when there’s one prevailing narrative, and an alternative narrative is not allowed to voice itself and when people are even afraid to voice an alternative narrative because of how toxic this conversation is just publicly.’
She added she ‘did not approach this with a presumption of innocence’ and has already ‘learned from mistakes’ she made in advocating for people who she ‘came to understand were actually very likely guilty’ in her many years of advocacy work.
Instead, she admitted she approached it with ‘an attuned understanding’ of how women in particular are vilified publicly and what that reaction says about our ability to interpret evidence with a ‘clear and rational mind instead of an emotionally charged one’.
The podcaster and filmmaker said it ‘ultimately’ comes down to the evidence, adding: ‘I was not just concerned about what I found, I became disturbed by some of the things we uncovered.’
Ed asked if the disturbing nature of Letby’s trial and the evidence ever made her want to leave it alone and do something else instead, to which she replied: ‘You know what, there were a lot of people who stuck their head above the parapet for me and I don’t know if I would have been found innocent and allowed to go on with my life and allowed to go on to have children of my own were it not for people who were willing to take the risk to look for the truth and to do what was right, and so for me I’ve learned so much from my own experience and I want to pay it forward however I can.’
When she announced her podcast ‘Doubt: The Case of Lucy Letby’ in February, Ms Knox said she had been working on the series for two years which would take an ‘unflinching look at a case that stunned the United Kingdom and the world’.
She said: ‘When I saw how Letby was being cast as evil by the British press, I felt that uncomfortable shock of recognition. The trial, conviction, and unprecedented sentencing ignited a national firestorm.
‘Headlines branded Letby a monster. Public anger was swift and fierce. The story seemed to resolve into certainty. But I know personally how fragile that kind of certainty can be.
‘And how factors beyond the evidence can distort our thinking and incentivize people to look for scapegoats instead of the truth.
‘Doubt examines a difficult and essential question: is this case truly as clear-cut as public consensus suggests? Or are there unresolved issues that merit deeper examination?’
She said the podcast is about ‘this crazy case of a young nurse who has been accused of being Great Britain’s most prolific serial killer of children’.
Knox continued: ‘And it is a wild case that has taken over the public imagination and has even reached our attention in the US.
‘I really recommend listening to this. I kind of got pulled into this case because of how the character of Lucy Letby was appearing in the British tabloids.
‘And I was amazed to discover what kind of evidence was being presented in court and how the narrative of guilt really formed in the public imagination.’
Letby is currently serving 15 whole-life sentences for the murder of seven babies and attempted murder of seven others between 2015 and 2016.
Knox’s decision to start a podcast has caused fury, with some accusing her of ‘profiting from misery’ yet again.
One person wrote: ‘Knox cashing in again. When will she ever stop?’
Another said: ‘I can’t believe people are making money out of this. Wonder what you would have done about Beverley Allitt if there had been social media at that time. It doesn’t bear thinking about.’
Knox, who produced Disney series The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, was criticised by Kercher’s sister when the show aired in August.
She said: ‘Meredith will always be remembered for her own fight for life, and yet in her absence, her love and personality continue to shine.
‘Our family has been through so much and it is difficult to understand how this serves any purpose.’
The Kercher family lawyer Francesco Maresca has previously accused Knox of repeatedly profiting from her murder.
He said: ‘On the one hand, Amanda says the trial created so much suffering for her but then she tries to have it all – the fame and the money.
‘She continues to make money from it. This time she has no qualms about doing it in Perugia, one of the least appropriate places to return to 17 years since Meredith’s death.
‘Knox is only interested in the profits she continues to make from an affair on which she should be silent.’
The American also released a book ‘Free’, shared her experiences in a memoir, and has been the focus of a Netflix documentary and another film.
At the time of Kercher’s murder, Knox blamed a boss at a local bar she worked at, Patrick Lumumba, who had a solid alibi, increasing police suspicions.
After an investigation and trial, Amanda, who was 20 years old at the time, was convicted for the crime in 2009.
She was sentenced to 26 years in prison for faking a break-in, defamation, sexual violence, and murder.
Rudy Hermann Guede, from the Ivory Coast, was eventually convicted of murder after his DNA was found at the crime scene.
Guede was freed in 2021, after serving most of his 16-year sentence.
Knox returned to the US in 2011 after being freed and has established herself as a global campaigner for the wrongly convicted.
