Lucy Letby has been convicted of seven murders, yet the prosecution offered no evidence for a single one.
Lucy Letby has inevitably caught the public’s imagination. The press are calling her 'pure evil', and ‘the biggest child serial killer in British history’ with today's sentencing generating even more salacious headlines for tomorrows papers. ‘Experts’, always clever after the event, have been wheeled out to give a supposed ‘insight’ into the mind of Letby, all describing her as .manipulative, cunning, and above all dangerous. Conveniently the same conclusion the press have arrived at. Whilst an online mob is calling for the baby-killer to hang for her crimes.
And yet, Lucy Letby has been convicted of seven murders without a single piece of evidence against her for any of them. Letby is the first serial killer to be convicted on circumstantial evidence alone.
The entire conviction is based on one thing; that Lucy Letby was working on the ward the same days as all seven babies died. Lucy Letby has been convicted of seven murders entirely on the strength of a staff rosta showing that she was working on the days the babies died.
The trial went on for several weeks and yet not a shred of solid evidence could be produced against her. No CCTV evidence; no witness statements; no post-mortems; no fingerprints; no DNA; no forged documents. Nothing. No evidence for a single murder would be unusual but for SEVEN it's astonishing. To put the case into perspective, no serial killer in history has ever been convicted on circumstantial evidence alone, making Letby the first.
Letby was painted as a cold, manipulative killer by the prosecution, suggesting she created a friendly and affable persona only to hide her evil-intentions. The friendly persona was the only part of that scenario ever witnessed tough, the evil intentions merely supposition. The prosecution creating a confirmation-loop that nobody seems to have questioned.
The evidence appears to be incredibly flakey to say the least. Letby was indeed on duty on all seven days that a baby died. But she wasn’t always in the room when they died, and for one baby, (Baby no.5) Letby wasn’t even in the building, she had gone off shift, the prosecution suggesting that Letby had tampered with the child’s feeding tube moments before going home with the express intention of ‘making someone else take the blame'.
This may well be true, or it may be a misrepresentation of the facts. Confirmation bias.
So, Letby wasn't in fact on the ward when all seven babies died, only six, destroying the only piece of 'evidence' they did have for her conviction.
Other things don't add up either. There was no pattern to the murders which is another first for a serial killer. The vast majority of serial killers have a modus operandi, they commit each murder in much the same way, using the same implements, and cover-up their crimes in a set pattern as well. It is this that often convicts them. Take Harold Shipman for example, he murdered almost all of his victims in the same way, using lethal injection (after getting his victims to change their Will) and then doctoring the computer records afterwards with false times, dates and diagnoses to cover his tracks.
Letby in contrast is a supposed serial killer with no modus operandi. Every one of the babies appeared to be murdered in entirely different ways. One had ‘air’ injected into their veins, another got a dose of insulin, whilst another allegedly had her feeding tube ‘tampered’ with. The Judge later framed this as Letby cunningly throwing investigators off the scent by changing her methods for each murder, but that too is supposition with a huge dollop of confirmation bias thrown in for good measure. It is possible Letby was experimenting with techniques, but again that is not backed-up by any real world evidence.
In summing up the Judge claimed that Lucy Letby had kept 'mementos' of her crimes in the form of the 'hand over' notes found at her home by detectives. A glorious soundbite that the MSM are now ghoulishly repeating even if it's not actually true. Letby never had any such momentos for over half of all the babies she supposedly murdered. She kept handover notes for only three out of the seven murders, in other words she didn't keep mementos for the majority of her alleged victims.
What of the written confession Letby wrote? Some media outlets have claimed letby 'confessed' to the murders in a secret diary, but this is again something of an exaggeration. Letby had scrawled: "I'm evil i did this" on a page in a notebook but this sentence was among a load of other incoherent ramblings. On another page she'd written "maybe this is down to me?" but even out of context it suggests soul searching not guilt. The page also contains the sentences "I haven't done anything wrong" and "I feel so very alone and scared". Sounding less like a 'confession' with every word. The prosecution, however, cherry-picked the lines that sounded a bit like a confession, if you said it quick and didn't read the rest.
Despite the shocking lack of any solid evidence Lucy Letby has been sentenced to life in prison, something that should actually concern us all regardless of our feelings about the nurse.
Given that the evidence is almost entirely absent this is unlikely to be the last we hear of Lucy Letby.