Unmasking Lucy Letby: What if there was NO child killer…?

Unmasking Lucy Letby by Judith Moritz and Jonathan Coffey (Seven Dials £20, 448pp)

What exactly has been happening to former nurse Lucy Letby since she vanished into the bowels of the prison system in November 2020? She lost her liberty 23 months before her trial even began and 32 months before she was convicted. Does it matter? Yes, it does.

Something had clearly gone badly wrong while she was held in custody. I know some people think that convicted prisoners deserve everything they get in jail from the other inmates. I don’t think this. But even they should bear this in mind: Ms Letby spent nearly two years in prison when she was still presumed innocent under law – not convicted but on remand.

When her trial at last opened in October 2022, her barrister, Benjamin Myers KC, said Letby was so shaken by her recent jail experiences that she was disoriented. He said she was ‘incoherent, she can’t speak properly’.

In the witness box, a reporter in court described her as ‘on edge. Her eyes darted nervously towards any unexpected noise – a cough, a dropped pen, or when the female prison guard beside her shuffled in her seat’. She had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and prescribed medication for depression and anxiety.

Those convinced of Letby’s guilt make much of her conduct while giving evidence. One of the authors of this new book, BBC reporter Judith Moritz, told ITV’s Loose Women she found Letby’s behaviour in court an essential part of her assessment. The book describes the nurse as ‘dispassionate, aloof – even cold’.

Well, I have a little knowledge of prisons and what happens in them, and I wonder how Moritz herself would cope if she ever fell into the hands of the English justice system, especially if she were innocent but nobody believed she was.

Did the state, the police, the prosecution service or the media really presume Letby’s innocence before she was judged? In which case, is there any solid basis for her conviction, or have we just witnessed a spasm of establishment groupthink and a nasty piece of injustice?

There is much to admire in this book by Moritz and her BBC colleague Jonathan Coffey. I confess that I had expected to find a pretty standard condemnation of a wicked mass-killer. But it is no such thing.

At Work: Lucy Letby pictured at the Countess of Chester Hospital

The only really awful thing about the book, in fact, is its title ‘Unmasking Lucy Letby’. For it does not do so. It does not show that she ever wore any kind of mask, let alone rip such a mask off. Her life is a plain, uncomplicated story of a well-liked and dutiful young woman who worked hard, and whose friends remain touchingly loyal.

There is some long-distance amateur psychiatry about her love life or lack of it, plus some sniffy remarks about her clothes and hair (‘mousy, ‘prim’, ‘polyester’).

Her testimony is described as ‘robotic, rehearsed, formulaic’. But I suspect these are leftovers from an earlier, simpler draft prepared before a small army of experts rose in revolt against the guilty verdict.

Again and again the authors stress the absence of any hard evidence that Letby did anything wrong.

They record that the doctors who first accused her of wrongdoing ‘hadn’t a shred of proof’. It is not even clear that anybody did anything wrong. They note that not long before Ms Letby’s first arrest there was still no direct evidence against her. ‘Not one of her colleagues could say they had seen her harming a baby’.

On the famous text messages which the prosecution sought to make appear suspicious, the

authors conclude ‘Odd, maybe. Obsessive, perhaps. But on their own they didn’t establish she was a murderer’.

One example of the supposedly weird texts is: ‘I just feel sad that [the parents] are thanking me when they have lost him & for something that any of us would have done. But it’s really nice to know that I got it right for them. That’s all I want.’ Remove the presumption of guilt from your mind, and what is wrong with that?

Well into the police investigation ‘the case against Letby was entirely circumstantial’. They stress that the evidence against her is all theoretical, which it is. They admit that at times, it ‘felt like a teetering pack of cards’.

One of the book’s most powerful sections is a rare and superbly thorough interview with Mike Hall, the expert who mysteriously did not testify on behalf of Lucy Letby. To this day, nobody knows why he did not. The theory that the defence thought he might make things worse does not really stack up, as what could be worse than being convicted and sent to prison until you die?

In Court: Sketch of Lucy Letby during her trial for the the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of another ten

He believes there are non-criminal explanations for the deaths. And he says: ‘I don’t think [Letby] got a fair trial’. The authors ask: ‘Is it possible that, in fact, there was no baby killer and the case against Lucy Letby was hollow? Faulty science has led to numerous miscarriages of justice.’

They also give an amusing description of the prosecution expert who did the most to convict Letby, Dewi Evans. Evans is by all accounts a likeable and engaging man, but

they say: ‘Sometimes we left our conversations with him unable to decide whether he was a medical genius with a natural intuition for the truth honed by long experience, or a dogmatist whose many years as a sought-after expert had left him with slightly too much bullish self-belief’.

It is, in the end, on such judgments that this whole case hangs.