The prison holding killer nurse Lucy Letby is set to treat its inmates to a night of opera – cons will be given the chance to get involved with the musical workshops
The prison where killer nurse Lucy Letby is serving her sentence is treating its inmates to a night of opera.
At HMP Bronzefield, cons will be given the chance to get involved with the musical workshops. The inmates then put on a performance.
Letby, 35, is currently behind bars at the prison. The ex-neonatal nurse who was convicted of killing seven infants. She was found guilty on seven counts each of murder and also attempted murder in 2023. In January 2024, she was handed a life sentence for her crimes.
Pimlico Opera is an opera company and registered charity founded in 1987. It has been operating in prisons since the 1990s and will now be putting in the hours for its next performance.
It will take place at Bronzefield, in Ashford, Surrey, on March 6. The performance will be a rendition of Made in Dagenham, a true story about women machinists working for Ford in 1968. The workers staged a huge strike for equal pay and their struggle led to the TUC making equal pay a core policy for the future.
Made in Dagenham was made into a film in 2010 starring Sally Hawkins and Rosamund Pike. In 2014, it was turned into a musical and put on at the Adelphi Theatre in the West End.
The charity runs the series of workshops which ends with the prisoners putting together a performance before an audience.
On Tuesday, a panel of medical experts working with Letby’s defence team said they believe the 35-year-old did not commit the murders.
This week, the mum a baby boy who Letby tried to murder says the families of the former nurse’s 14 victims “already have the truth” about what happened to their children at a hospital neonatal unit.
The furious parent, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, branded a two-hour press conference that claimed Letby had not murdered any babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital as a “publicity stunt”.
On Tuesday, Dr Shoo Lee said his international panel of neonatologists and paediatric specialists had found that deaths or injuries of babies said to have been at the hands of the former neonatal nurse were due either to bad medical care or natural causes.
Dr Lee, who co-authored a 1989 academic paper on air embolism in babies which featured prominently at Letby’s first 10-month trial, went on tell reporters that his team’s work was “not meant to cause more distress” to the affected families.
He said: “Rather, it is meant to give them comfort and assurance in knowing the truth about what really happened.
“We know that they want to know the truth and that is why we are here to tell the truth.”
But the mother of one of Letby’s victims told the Daily Mail: “Every aspect of what they are doing is so disrespectful, it is very upsetting.
“They said the parents want to know the truth, but we’ve had the truth. We believe in the British justice system, we believe the jury made the right decision.
“We already have the truth and this panel of so-called experts don’t speak for us.”
She added it was “misleading” to suggest new evidence had been uncovered when such themes had already been examined at length before jurors.
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