Consultant paediatrician Dr John Gibbs spoke in a new Netflix documentary about the evil killer nurse who was banged up in 2023 for the callous murder of seven babies
A doctor who helped convict child serial killer Lucy Letby has admitted that he lives with a tiny bit of guilt they may have caught the “wrong person”. Consultant paediatrician Dr John Gibbs believes the 36-year-old did kill the seven innocent babies.
But he told a new Netflix doc about the nurse: “I live with two guilts. Guilt that we let the babies down, and tiny tiny tiny guilt – did we get the wrong person?”
In the new Netflix documentary, ‘The Investigation of Lucy Letby’, he added: “There’s guilt you know just in case, miscarriage of justice. I don’t think there was a miscarriage of justice, but you worry that no one actually saw her do it.”
Letby, from Hereford, is serving 15 whole-life orders after she was convicted of murdering seven infants and attempting to murder seven others, with two attempts on one of her victims, between June 2015 and June 2016.
Dr Gibbs, part of the consultant team at Countess of Chester Hospital, described Letby as a “quiet nurse” who seemed “conscientious”, but said a string of unexpected collapses and deaths raised alarm bells and Letby that had played a “central role” in each case.
Speaking at the Thirlwall Inquiry, due to be published this year, Dr Gibbs admitted he felt “ashamed” for failing to protect babies and said he and colleagues were “at fault” for not bypassing hospital management and going straight to the police in 2016. It was almost a year before the contacted Cheshire Constabulary.
The documentary goes behind the scenes of the investigation into Letby, taking viewers through the entire process from arrest to conviction. The film shows the dramatic moment she was arrested at home, with scenes even filmed inside her own house.
It also features new testimony from police and contributions from the mum of one of the victims. This is the first time a family member involved in the prosecution has spoken in a documentary.
While the documentary also gives a platform to those questioning her conviction, including her new barrister Mark McDonald and a panel of international experts. Canadian neonatal care specialist Dr Shoo Lee argued there were other explanations for the deaths: “In all cases, death or injury were due to natural causes or just bad medical care.”
But Dr Gibbs responded: “Professor Lee was very clear that harm had not been deliberately inflicted on any of the babies and it was substandard care that had led to the babies collapsing. In some of them, their death.
“It’s frustrating because in some of their criticisms, there’s a kernel of truth. We were understaffed. That’s generally true in most departments or most wards in the NHS but we’d had those same staffing pressures before 2015 and we’d not had these deaths.”
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