Medea Walks the Wards

Lucy Letby and the preponderance of evidence

Trial of a New Medea

An ironclad case: That Lucy Letby did, willfully and with malice aforethought, in the 13 months between June 2015 and June 2016, murder seven babies and attempt to murder a further seven while on duty in her profession as a nurse. The fact that her victims were newborns, of the weakest members of society, makes these horrors seem almost inconceivable; especially so, as they were perpetrated by a member of the gentle sex whose maternal vocation is always to conserve life and alleviate pain. Given the overwhelming evidence of guilt and apropos to the magnitude of the crimes committed, the required sentence was handed down on August 21, 2023.

Lucy Letby stared blankly ahead. Said Justice Goss, outraged yet grave: "This was a cruel, calculated and cynical campaign of child murder involving the smallest and most vulnerable of children, knowing that your actions were causing significant physical suffering and untold mental suffering… There was a deep malevolence bordering on sadism in your actions. During the course of this trial you have coldly denied any responsibility for your wrongdoing and sought to attribute some fault to others… You have shown no remorse. There are no mitigating factors… Lucy Letby, on each of the seven offences of murder and the seven offences of attempted murder I sentence you to imprisonment for life.”

Though court trials deal necessarily in speculation—in this case, there was only one witness to the crimes but many experts—the ultimate speculation, her motive, remains buried in the darkest sociopathology. A motive is not required for a guilty verdict by law, and none was offered in court. But there were suggestions that Ms. Letby was playing God, that it was revenge on a colleague who jilted her, or that she just did it out of boredom (!). Perhaps such horrific cases might even constitute a new mass pathology, where women now take on the mantle of destroyer of children as men have taken on the burden of childkilling war. No matter. Let us try to summarize the major evidence in the state’s prosecution: During Letby’s time at the Countess of Chester Hospital, there was a significant spike in infant mortality (17 deaths in 12 months, as opposed to an average of 3 deaths per year¹); Letby was present on the wards of the Neonatal Unit for every incident; she professed her guilt in handwritten notes discovered at her apartment; doctors had suspected her involvement in the deaths, though no real steps were taken until July 2016; Letby and another nurse were suspended in 2013 for administering morphine to an infant at ten times the correct dosage; Dr Stephen Brearey, lead consultant to Letby’s unit, kept a ‘drawer of doom’ full of evidence once he thought she might be involved. This then is the portrait of Nurse Death, ‘the UK’s most prolific child serial killer in modern times.’

But there are doubts and more doubts. Richard Gill, a Dutch mathematician and statistician, questions the veracity of Letby’s guilty verdict. In a comparable case in 2003, Lucia de Berk was sentenced to life for the murders of four of her patients. On 14 April 2010, the sentence was overturned. In 2021, thanks to Gill’s testimony, Daniela Poggiali was exonerated of the crime of killing 38 of her patients by Italy’s Supreme Court, another case eerily similar to Letby’s. In both of these situations, unhygienic work conditions, medical malpractice, and critical missteps had lead to the apparent formation of fatal clusters of mortality around a single worker who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There are also discrepancies: The coroner initially ruled natural causes in 6 of the deaths in 2015. A total of 61 cases leading to collapse or death on Letby’s ward were narrowed down to 22, 14 of them dubious enough to charge her with. Lucy was indeed on duty for all of the deaths for which she was charged, but not on duty for six other natal deaths during the same time period, for which she obviously could not be held responsible. So Letby was implicated in a subset of the total fatalities, but was not charged with a further 10 occurring during the same period. She initially professed her innocence, pointing to bad hygiene and lack of proper staffing as the factors responsible. This was a common complaint, along with constant appeals for help from the crisis unit. There was a lack of adequate transport for babies to specialist hospitals; the Neonatal unit was severely overburdened by lack of doctor and nursing coverage (Letby herself took on additional shifts, ironically placing her at the scenes of the deaths); there was also an outbreak of Pseudomonas in the unit in May 2015, a bacterium that can prove fatal for premature or immune-deficiency impaired babies.

When police raided her flat, they found the walls littered with damning Post-it notes in Letby’s hand: I killed them on purpose because I'm not good enough to care for them; I don't know if I killed them. Maybe I did. Maybe this is all down to me. Also: Help; I'm sorry that you couldn't have a chance at life; not good enough; why me? I haven't done anything wrong, and we tried our best and it wasn't enough. Thus did she speak to the small dead, and to her coworkers, accusing herself and questioning her own competence and interrogating Fate. This desperate choir was enlisted by the prosecutors to help condemn her.

Despite the lack of forensic evidence and eyewitness accounts, it is said that Letby used several methods to harm or kill the infants. She contaminated their feeds with insulin or simply overfed them. She injected milk and air into their veins. Prosecutors cited a 1989 paper by the renowned Canadian Neonatologist, Dr Shoo Lee, concerning a rare complication in newborns, pulmonary vascular air embolism, as proof that Letby must have committed the crimes. But this was a distortion of the research. Dr Lee himself, working pro bono, assembled a board of 14 specialists worldwide, whose report concluded that “there was no medical evidence to support malfeasance causing death or injury in any (my italics) of the 17 cases in the trial… Death or injury of affected infants were due to natural causes or errors in medical care.”

Which brings up the analysis of death clusters, the upward tick in mortality which constitutes the major evidence of her guilt. What at first looks incontrovertible—a suspiciously large number of fatalities occurring during her shifts—may have other explanations. Initially, the number, 10% higher than the national average of the 150 natal units operative at the time in the UK, was not considered extreme enough to launch an internal investigation though it did trigger an alert. The fact that the deaths slowed down after Letby was removed from her position has also been attributed to a change in policy at the Countess of Chester: it was deemed that the hospital could not adequately treat severely compromised cases, so they were now moved offsite to specialist units as soon as possible. Finally, statistics are deceptive. What appears to be evident can actually carry great nuance. The Royal Statistical Society wrote a formal letter to Lady Justice Thirlwell on the Letby inquiry, citing an earlier RSS report detailing the problems in distinguishing between healthcare killers and coincidence, stating that “it is far from straightforward to draw conclusions from suspicious clusters of deaths in a hospital setting – it is a statistical challenge to distinguish event clusters that arise from criminal acts from those that arise coincidentally from other factors, even if the data in question was collected with rigour.”

Opinions on her personality and professional abilities differ far more than the press let on. Though there was testimony from several doctors who found Letby strange and detached, many of her colleagues admired her passion and dedication and continue to believe in her innocence. They too attribute the deaths in 2015-16 to patient acuity, poor staffing, and poor hospital upkeep due to government cuts, calling Letby ‘hardworking and efficient’ especially under such trying circumstances. The former head of nursing at the hospital, Karen Rees, believes Letby has been wrongly accused. The hospital’s ex-chief executive, Tony Chambers, has said there is a ‘real likelihood’ she did not commit any of the murders. Even Dr. Brearey, who is convinced of Letby’s guilt, remembered at first being taken aback: No, not nice Lucy.

However, the chair of the public inquiry, Lady Justice Thirlwell, has so far rejected calls to pause the investigation, stating that “It is not the actions of Lucy Letby that I am scrutinizing. It is the actions of all those who were in the hospital within the terms of reference whose actions I am reviewing: what they did at the time, in light of what they knew at the time and in light of what they should have known at the time.” Which means that the inquiry now includes several senior executives who claim Letby is innocent or have severe doubts as to her guilt. Prosecutors and attorneys for the children’s families have denounced these assertions as attempts to cover-up the administrators’ own incompetence, including the handling of on-site accusations against Letby during her employment. Yet, as the barrister for the executives, Kate Blackwell KC, reminds us, if she is found innocent and the case overturned, then the former senior officials will be seen as responsible for the catastrophic conditions which actually lead to the fatalities. Subsequent legal action may be taken against them. This hardly sounds like a ‘cynical ploy’ to suicidally exchange part of their culpability for the whole of it, all in order to save a girl who was once their scapegoat.

Reaction to the alleged crimes and the clear possibility of Letby’s innocence has been openly political. It is darkly ironic that many of the loudest voices in her favor are from the Right, using the case as corroboration that the NHS is fatally inept and should be abolished in favor of total privatization (which is naturally less inept, due to the invisible hand of Neoliberalism). Entranced by a very different woman—the immaterial shade of Margaret Thatcher—they help tighten a medieval vicegrip around the besieged national healthcare services of old Albion. Their cure is the very reason for the infant deaths at Countess of Chester Hospital. Deregulation and defunding will ensure more death clusters, more understaffing, more shut doors and assets stripped. Fingers are pointed, stiffening as the long day closes with the evening news. Closing too, are the South West London Hospital, St Helier, Ealing Hospital, Leicestershire, Royal Bournemouth, Poole Hospital, Alston, Maryport, Wigton, Hinkley and District Hospital, Rutland Memorial Hospital, Bolsover Community Hospital, Newholme Hospital, St Leonards, Alderney, Westhaven, Ashburton, Bovey Tracey, Dartmouth, Paignton…

Fata Morgana

Along with the Letby case, rags like The Daily Mail are obsessed with illicit relationships between women teachers and their young male students ². As with Mary Kay Letourneau, vilified in our Stateside Murdoch organs, the Mail offers salacious stories, true or false, as undeniable proof that women are the new predators. You cannot trust them with your children. Sex and murder, hysterical, uncontrollable women, harlots of the classroom, clinical medusas. It is notable that two professions in which women are equal if not predominant—nursing and teaching—have always been the butt of male jokes and cheap erotic fantasies. It is even more notable that two professions where men unquestionably predominate—rape and serial killing—are now being painted as almost exclusively the work of Woman. Her powers of sorcery have not be forgotten, either. In the shitsheet press, Letby is commonly called a witch. Miss Mrs. Robinson wields a kind of sorcery over her young students; Marxism and hedonism are the main extracurricular activities in British grammar schools; women are enlisting the help of ‘Asian grooming gangs’ and so on. Their message is that masculinity itself is embattled, threatened to its core by superscientific and occult forces issuing from Ishtar, summoned up by a sacred pyre of old copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves. So the reborn Patriarch must dress his wound, arise and wake from his sleep in the hills, and shield the once and future kings from their sex-crazed mothers, midwives, and sisters. The rush to judgment over Lucy Letby is nothing more than another symptom of this woman-hating, childkilling reactionary force which rages against a ‘Feminized’ society and believes that a subject gender is secretly in charge, engineering the decay of a country that was once fit for heroes. A crusading press sounds the first trumpet blast against the monstrous regiment of women. And so the immemorial matriarchal bonds between woman and child—between her and all children—must be obliterated like all ancient fertility idols. When these are gone, the woman will be out.

In her cell, as pale and cold as love, Lucy Letby mourns children she neither killed nor could deliver, sitting in impassive space like a stone. Who is it that scrapes the walls softly, sounding the testimony of experts, expert witnesses, masters at law? This lawful master is a master from the England which educated Peter Sutcliffe and secreted Jimmy Saville, which gleefully sold munitions and birthed the infanticide machines of Baghdad and Gaza, which gutted its own health services so that the Empire itself might resemble the ghettos of the old Raj, whose blue remembered hills thicken with black flies and whose crystal palaces ring with Mau-Mau corpse and Ireland corpse, these dark ruling class missions that populate its museums and sing Britannia over motheaten poppy memorials—the jewel in the sea which decided instantly upon the guilt of a girl of its own conqueror stock, described as icy and anxious and average and beige, whose supposed crimes elicited blasts of sanctimonious Crohnic fury from the tabloids and the elite, expressions of the postmortem rigidity of a burnt-out little skerry long sick on its selfsame substances and skulking in the free market of its own marathon demise. In a small room, a voice whispers a gaoling whisper: Why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. Learned in Hereford Sixth Form College English, along with her required classes in Chemistry, Biology, Issues and Ethics. Enjoys salsa dancing and loves her cats. BSc (Hons) in Child Nursing. Only child of John and Susan. What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a God! So to judge like God, making woman from a rib, testing her with serpents, turning her to granite. Ending, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals; and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dusk? Man delights not me, no, nor women neither, nor women neither…

For CW

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Note: Among many excellent articles, this Special Report by the UK’s legendary magazine, Private Eye is invaluable: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/lucy-letby

1. This figure does not include stillborns, miscarriages, and other anomalies.

2. Google ‘the daily mail teacher’ and find countless article such as this couragous expose: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14511475/married-teacher-excuse-arrested-abuse-boy-tutor.html