A sensational documentary about the case of Lucy Letby will air tomorrow courtesy of ITN and Netflix.
According to the trailer, The Investigation Of Lucy Letby will bring us the first on-screen interview with the mother of a tiny alleged victim. There is also never-before-seen ‘bodycam’ footage of the bewildered young nurse as she is arrested at the home of her elderly parents, where she is seen in bed and in her nightwear.
In my view this footage is salacious and degrading.
The new documentary also shines a light on an aspect of the Letby case that very much needs exposing: A distasteful, money-grabbing industry that has grown up at a time when Letby’s guilt seems increasingly in doubt.
Lucy Letby, to recap, is the former neonatal nurse now serving 15 whole-life sentences after being found guilty of the murders of seven premature babies in her care at the Countess of Chester Hospital in Cheshire, and eight attempted murders.
Yet, as I and others have argued on these pages, there is an ever-more compelling case – backed by scientists, doctors and legal experts – to say the conviction is unsafe and that the 36-year-old should be granted, at the very least, a retrial. Her case has been referred to the Criminal Cases Review Commission.
Letby’s case and the controversy surrounding it remain a matter of the greatest sensitivity – weighing, on the one hand, the huge distress of grieving parents with, on the other, a potential miscarriage of justice which could rank among the worst in history.
Yet, amid the turmoil, it appears some people have an interest in making the most of the guilty verdict while efforts are still being made on Letby’s behalf for the conviction to be overturned.
Questions need asking of Cheshire Police, who conducted the original Letby investigation. We now know they opened a bidding process in which at least six production companies competed for the right to work with the force in making the Netflix documentary.
The winner was ITN, which gained rare access to the police and prosecutors. We will see the results on screen tomorrow.
Cheshire Police also handed over body-cam footage showing the moment Letby was arrested in her bedroom in 2019 – footage not even the jury at Letby’s trial saw.
The release of that video has left Susan and John Letby, Lucy’s parents, in despair. In a public statement at the weekend – their first since their daughter was jailed – they said seeing the footage would be so traumatic it might ‘kill’ them.
They know Lucy is innocent.
We should remember that this elderly couple lost a daughter and have themselves become prisoners, rarely leaving their quiet cul-de-sac in Hereford – except to undertake the journey to HMP Bronzefield in Surrey to see Lucy.
This very private, very normal couple are appalled that footage of the home they have lived in for more than 40 years was given by the police to ITN and Netflix without them being given any warning. They cannot understand why the police have done this.
Perhaps I can help them. I believe that, as the case against Lucy Letby crumbles and calls for a retrial gather pace, the police are becoming desperate to bolster the conviction. The police have spent vast amounts of money – taxpayers’ money – not just in bringing Letby to trial, but since she was convicted – despite the fact that she is already condemned to spend the rest of her life in jail.
Cheshire’s dedicated multi-million-pound Letby department has employed more than 100 officers, some of whom have spent many months trawling through Letby’s nursing career, apparently in an attempt to bring new charges against her.
Fresh claims of murder and attempted murder – which I am sure the police hoped would scupper any chance of a retrial –were recently rejected by the Crown Prosecution Service.
We should be told how much public money has been spent by the police since Letby was convicted and for what purpose.
And let’s not forget the expert witnesses whose testimony helped convict her. We do not know exactly how much chief prosecution witness, the now-retired Dr Dewi Evans – who had never practised as a neonatologist and had not been responsible for the care of a premature baby for more than 15 years – was paid for his work.
Famously, he couldn’t identify basic equipment used in a modern neonatal unit when it was presented to him in court.
My understanding is that, given the time it took Dr Evans to write his reports, we are talking about sums running into seven figures – which is to say £1million or more.
Then comes a very difficult issue: The question of compensation to the grieving parents.
If Letby is indeed guilty – despite the mounting doubts – the families of course have every right to financial recompense. They have suffered grievously.
Yet things are moving rapidly behind the scenes in a way that leaves me ill at ease.
In pursuit of compensation, the parents’ lawyers have recently applied to Cheshire Coroner’s Court to have the causes of the babies’ deaths changed from various natural and medical reasons to ‘unlawful killing’. This would be listed on the death certificates.
Their application to do this was initially made without the knowledge of Letby’s legal team.
Although they vary in size, compensation payments can be vast, ranging from thousands to tens of millions of pounds. Of course no amount of money can erase the agony of losing a child.
Neither should we forget the long-running Thirlwall Inquiry into the Letby case.
Thirlwall, which is expected to issue its final report after Easter, is estimated to have cost some £10million in the nearly two-and-a-half years since it began work.
The original case against Letby is now under sustained scrutiny.
As Susan and John Letby point out in their statement, more than 30 neonatologists have read the relevant medical notes and reports.
Each one of them has concluded that the tiny premature and poorly babies in question – all with complex medical needs, some weighing only one-and-a-half pounds – died as a result of natural causes and sub-optimal hospital care. Not one neonatologist who has read the notes has reached any other conclusion.
Dr Shoo Lee, an eminent neonatologist from the University of Toronto, whose research was incorrectly cited by the prosecution during Letby’s trial, has concluded that no murder had been committed.
This is, of course, an extraordinary and complicated case.
Yet I am increasingly concerned that the sheer scale of the money now involved is colouring the public debate in a way that runs counter to the interests of justice.
Can it be right that we are allowing Letby’s guilt to be cemented as established fact when so much doubt about the safety of the conviction exists?
Because I believe there is a very real possibility that the young nurse arrested in her nightwear – and soon to be displayed on screen for viewers’ entertainment – was innocent of these terrible charges all along.
If so, what’s happened is nothing less than monstrous.
