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Episode 8: Free Lucy My Fella!
106 Plays29 days ago
In this episode, Biccy makes the case that Lucy Letby - Britain's most reviled prisoner - might be innocent. He walks Q through the missing forensic evidence, the expert witness with an IMDB page, and the email that changes everything.
Content warning: This episode discusses neonatal death
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Transcript
Intro & Season Update
00:00:20
Speaker
Hi, Twinkies. I don't even know what episode this is, so I'm not even going to list what episode it is, but we're still in season two. i' Haven't been here for a while. i How are you doing, Q? I'm doing good good. It hasn't been that long. It's been like six weeks.
00:00:35
Speaker
It's been six weeks since we... released an episode, I think, but it's been longer since we recorded because that one we kind of had in the bank a little bit, but. Well, we're committing to, we're trying to average out to at least 12 a year, Isn't that what you said? Well, I think, I think originally we were going to two a month, but now we're scaling it back to like 12 a year, which I think is fine and we're definitely still on track, so.
00:01:00
Speaker
We're going to get better at it, but yeah, no, I'm doing good.
Personal Anecdotes & Lottery Fantasies
00:01:03
Speaker
i'm um, I'm in the South, uh, but it's cold and I'm vaping again. and Same.
00:01:13
Speaker
um I slept poorly last night, which we'll see if that helps the podcast or that hurts it. We'll find out. It's still morning for you, right? Yeah, it's still pretty early.
00:01:25
Speaker
It's like afternoon here, but it still kind of feels like morning because I haven't really dressed. um But yeah. I've also like regressed a little bit because um i'm like with my family and I always start acting like a teenager again a little bit when I'm around them.
00:01:42
Speaker
a little meaner. Yeah. I think I'm also a little bit like that. Maybe not meaner, but definitely more childish. Yeah. I'm more annoyed with him. I wonder if the dog, come here, will you come here? No. Okay. Well, there's a dog in here too. So I rarely have a dog. with wait You're not a dog person. You like cats. I like dogs too. i i used to have a dog growing up, so I do like them, but yeah.
00:02:03
Speaker
This one's very funny because he's like a very emotionally complex. like He has to be like near my sister at all times, or he gets like really stressed out. And like, I don't know, he just has a very like moody face for a dog.
00:02:19
Speaker
Yeah. My cat is kind of a bitch to be honest. Like, I dunno, she's, she's very sweet with me, but whenever I have friends around, she will like ah go up to them and like sort of head, but then like she wants them to like pet her. And then as soon as they pet she bites them or like claws, claws their arm off.
00:02:37
Speaker
um So yeah, she she likes the tease, but um she's cute. Yeah, I'm mostly just looking forward to summer. i feel like the drudgery of like, just work right now is so horrible. And um I'm having a lot of fantasies where I win the lottery. Do you guys have the lottery in Britain?
00:02:55
Speaker
Yeah, we do have the lottery. i also have these fantasies. I actually, I used to do the lottery like every week. And now I do it like, I don't know, every once in a while, but every time I do it, I'm like it's mentally spending all of the money in my head and then I'm genuinely surprised when I don't win.
00:03:15
Speaker
I think it's actually like a healthy thing to do. Like I think buying a lottery ticket is actually like an optimistic, like I think, I think like optimists buy lottery tickets. I don't think you should get overly, and like i don't think you should get, like the people who are like doing the like 12 scratch offs at the counter seem like they have gambling problems. Yeah.
00:03:34
Speaker
I think like buying like, when there's a mega powerball or whatever i think like buying a ticket is like ah an optimist's move yeah i i got like kind of into scratch cards during covid because like you weren't allowed to go anywhere except the shop um and remember i i bought like i bought like one five pound scratch card and i won i think 10 pound or something on it. And then I sort of said, right, okay.
00:04:02
Speaker
I'll never like put more money in, but any money that I win, i can spend on more scratch cards. And I did. I mine is just sort of keep a bit of a streak going for like a couple of weeks and it was entertaining. But, um, but yeah, those people who like ah don't even scratch them off, they just get the guy at the car, it's like scan them, see if it's a winner. I'm just like, no, no. Do you know anyone who's won the lottery? Um,
00:04:25
Speaker
Not the lottery. I know someone who won like 25k on scratch cards and then like blew it all. And I'm sort of like, if I won 25k, I mean, I know that's not like a crazy amount of money, but that would like solve so many of my problems. I'm just like, how could you just waste it?
00:04:42
Speaker
Well, it would be life changing for me. I mean, yeah. like and Um, Yeah, I mean, I could like quit one of my jobs with 25K. No, i am i know one person whose dad won the lottery, but it was a million, which still seems like an insane amount to me, know. Yeah.
00:05:03
Speaker
I mean, it worked out for them. I mean, it seems like from what I gathered, they bought like a house in Brooklyn, which, um you know, this was like a long time ago, like the 90s, but they still have that. And that has to have gone up in value a lot. Having a house in anywhere in New York City is obviously very difficult.
00:05:23
Speaker
so Yeah, I can't even imagine how expensive it is. like I feel being like London's so diffused, like it's so spread out that there's like parts of it that aren't that expensive, but like every everywhere in New York is extremely expensive. I think in London, like to buy everywhere is crazy expensive, but like, I don't know, there are there are areas where you can like at least get away with like renting, but I don't know.
00:05:48
Speaker
Could you buy a like a house, like a real house for like 800,000 pounds? In London. Yeah. No. Okay. No, no absolutely not. No, you'd be looking you'd be looking at like a million for like a nice apartment.
00:06:05
Speaker
Okay. So house is like more than that. There are people there are people that who are not rich who own property, but they they've just owned it for a long time and passed it down to their kids and stuff. Like I don't think...
00:06:17
Speaker
I don't think most like normal people are buying property in London. Yes, I i hear that. Anyway, well, what are we talking about today?
Lucy Letby Case Introduction
00:06:27
Speaker
Okay, so I want you to imagine that you're a nurse.
00:06:33
Speaker
Maybe you've wanted to be one since you were little. You've got that thing where you find other people's pain really upsetting and you want to fix it. You've done the degree, you've gone to university, you've done all of the training and you're working a neonatal unit, which means you're looking after babies who are born too early. So sometimes like 24, 25 weeks, barely the size of your hand.
00:06:56
Speaker
And you're a good nurse, like you're really good at it. You do extra shifts. You're the person that they call when it's really bad. And somewhere along the way, babies start dying on your ward more than usual.
00:07:08
Speaker
And your consultant colleagues decide that you must be the one killing them. There's no CCTV, there are no witnesses, there's no forensic evidence of any kind.
00:07:19
Speaker
There's a chart that we'll go into that someone made on a computer. There's testimony from a retired doctor who stopped practicing medicine 14 years ago. And there are some notes that you wrote during a really stressful period that your lawyers describe as a complete mental breakdown.
00:07:34
Speaker
And they give you 15 life sentences. Today we're going to be talking about Lucy Letby. Do you know anything about Lucy Letby before we start? like What's your sort of experience? of the i know like I know like a very base based level, as in like I did see some of the Daily Mail headlines, um and I know that she was a nurse that allegedly killed babies. That's about it.
00:08:03
Speaker
I wouldn't say you know any other... de I don't know, but like her age or... anything, but it did sort of flash across my like scrolling feed at some point. Do you know, you know like what she looks like?
00:08:16
Speaker
I feel like I have a sort of an image of like, maybe like an early thirties white woman. ok I'm going to send you a picture just to kind of like paint a better picture of her. Cause I think it's important visualize these people. Okay. I just sent you one on WhatsApp.
00:08:34
Speaker
Okay, I'll look at it because I don't want to get any. Oh boy, that's actually like, the okay, I must have seen a picture in some sort of news source because that's basically what I imagined. she has a very British face. I'm not trying to be offensive.
00:08:46
Speaker
yeah Yeah. No, she's's she's like she's not like unattractive, but she's just kind of like normal looking. She looks like a standard British woman, is what I would describe her as. Yeah, she looks nice.
00:09:00
Speaker
So just to give bit her background before we get into any of the crime stuff.
Timeline & Evidence Overview
00:09:05
Speaker
So she was born of January 1990 in Haribo, makes her...
00:09:10
Speaker
36. So she's kind of the same age as us. She's an only child, middle class. Her dad managed a furniture shop and her mom did accounts. So she had a very normal upbringing.
00:09:21
Speaker
She went to Hereford Sixth Form College, which is the same one as Ellie Goulding for what it's worth. Do you know who Ellie Goulding is? do know who Ellie Goulding is, yeah. Okay, that's fine. um And then she did her nursing degree at the University of Chester.
00:09:33
Speaker
In terms of her sort of qualifications, she was a band five nurse. So she's one of the very few staff qualified to care for the most critical babies in intensive care. So it's actually quite a specific sort of specialism within nursing. And she worked at the Countess of Chester Hospital full time on the neonatal ward from January 2012 until eventually she was arrested. In terms of what she was actually like, colleagues have called her dedicated and warm. She was always the person who would sort of volunteer to do extra shifts.
00:10:07
Speaker
She did salsa classes in their spare time. she wanted to settle down and have a family. um so in terms of a private life, it's ah completely unremarkable. She's never had any complaints, no disciplinary record, nothing, over a decade of nursing with no red flags at all.
00:10:24
Speaker
And now she's only one of four women in British history to receive a whole life order. She sounds to me like the sort of least threatening person alive, which of course is exactly what you say if you were guilty, but it also seems like that's just what the evidence suggests.
00:10:40
Speaker
If we like think about... Some of the previous sort of serial killers that we talked about, We've gone into before like their backgrounds and I don't know how, how do you feel like Lucy's background compares to like the previous ones that we've spoken about?
00:10:55
Speaker
Well, I've only gotten like some minor details. Like I have no idea if her home life was like abusive or ah if there was any addiction or anything in her family, but based on like the details, it sounds like, you know, a pretty average upbringing.
00:11:13
Speaker
Yeah. um In terms of her relationship with her parents, she still has a close relationship with them now, even though she's in jail. um I think she was like living her parents when she was arrested.
00:11:24
Speaker
The police actually released footage of her arrest. it's if you If you can find it online, it's actually quite upsetting to watch it because you can hear a mom in the background sort of like screaming hysterical. and oh Yeah, it's it's not very nice, but... And just to clarify, you're coming down, before we even talk about any of the details, you're coming down in a firm, in innocent stance.
00:11:45
Speaker
yeah Yeah. Because I know none of the details, so we're going to... you're going to teach me, but that's where you end. I'm going to teach you, and I will give like i will give the other side it's like it's due, um because obviously she she is in jail, so she was found guilty of this, and I do think it's important to sort of explain both sides, but I think, I don't know, you can decide from yourself when we get through that. I do know from the UK legal system, it's very rare to get a whole life sentence.
00:12:18
Speaker
Yeah, it's extremely rare. Just in terms of like a bit of a timeline of events. So in 2014, which is a couple of years before this all started, there were four neonatal deaths at the Countess of Chester Hospital, which is within the sort of normal range for a unit of that size.
00:12:38
Speaker
The kind of Chester Hospital, it's in, um well, it's in Chester, obviously. Chester is quite a upmarket kind of city. It's a lot nicer than Manchester. It's got a lot of like really nice sort Tudor architecture. Okay, I'm looking at it. It does look very cute. Yeah, is cute. I think if I was going to live in another city in England, I'd probably live in Chester.
00:12:58
Speaker
But the the hospital is Kind of a sort of old, like 1960s, the sort of gray concrete building. Um, and it's, yeah, it's not sort of reflective of like Chester as a whole. Um, we'll go into a little bit more detail about the hospital later, but just in terms of like the timeline.
00:13:19
Speaker
So 2014, there were four neonatal deaths at the hospital. In June 2015, everything changes. So deaths spike to nine that year, which is the highest rate in the entire UK for a unit of that size.
00:13:33
Speaker
They had four collapses in one month, three of them fatal. And the normal baseline is two or three deaths a year, like sort of as a national average. In June 2015, lead consultant Stephen Breary starts an informal review into the deaths.
00:13:50
Speaker
Deaths are reported up to the Trust's Serious Incident Committee and they classify them as medication errors and move on. Between 2015 and 2016, this is the period the prosecution says Lucy letpi was killing the babies.
00:14:05
Speaker
In June 2016, let be removed from clinical duties after consultants push to sort of get removed from the unit. Why do they zero in on her at this point? We'll get to that. Okay, okay, okay right, I know you have this mapped out. I'll let you, I'll let you. I'm going to give you a brief, like, rundown of the events, and then I'm going to give you a rundown of the prosecution's argument, and then we're going to kind of pick it apart from there. Okay, so June 2016, Lepby's removed from clinical duties and then between July 2016 and July 2018, she's under internal investigation. She has been taken off the ward and she's isolated from most of her colleagues.
00:14:46
Speaker
This is when the notes, which will become an important part of the case later, were written. In July 2018, that was her first arrest. But i'm going to skip forward to November 2020 when she's formally charged seven murders, 15 accounts of attempted murder across 17 babies.
00:15:05
Speaker
In 2022, the trial starts. at Manchester Crown Court, very close to me. And then on the 10th of July, 2023, the jury is sent out after nine months.
00:15:16
Speaker
On the 18th of August, the verdict is reached. She's found guilty on seven counts of murder, seven counts of attempted murder. She's acquitted on two charges and the jury are hung on six.
00:15:27
Speaker
30th of August 2023, she receives a whole life sentence. She actually refuses to attend when the sentence is read out and Parliament subsequently passes a law enforcing convicted murderers to attend their sentences.
00:15:41
Speaker
And in 2024, we have a retrial on one of the hung counts. So they name all the babies sort of baby A, baby B, baby C, et cetera. And one of the hung counts was related to a baby called baby K. She ends up going back to trial and she's again convicted this time of attempting to kill baby K. So in total, she has 15 whole life sentences.
00:16:03
Speaker
In terms of what the prosecution said she did, her alleged methods for killing the babies were injecting air into the baby's bloodstreams to cause what's called an air embolism.
Prosecution's Claims & Evidence Analysis
00:16:15
Speaker
poisoning the babies with insulin, overfeeding them, so force feeding milk via a nasogastric tube, and physically manipulating the breathing tubes. So these are like tiny babies who are hooked up to lots of different machines, but it's unusual for somebody who is committing like a number of murders to have like so many different methods of ah of killing their victims.
00:16:38
Speaker
In terms of the evidence that was presented at trial, The first piece is a presence chart. So this is a table that would show all of the babies along one side and then members of staff that were on shift during the time that the babies like died.
00:16:56
Speaker
And there were like X's next to Lucy's name, like all the way along the chart. So for every baby that she was charged for, she was present on shift. And they sort of used that as kind of proof that like she must've been involved in some way.
00:17:10
Speaker
So alongside the present shot, um the jury were also shown two abnormal blood test results, which were interpreted as evidence of insulin poisoning. Also, there was skin discoloration on some of the babies, which was interpreted as a sign of air embolism.
00:17:26
Speaker
There were alleged inconsistencies in medical records, nursing handover sheets that Lucy had taken home with her, which the defense said there was common practice, and handwritten notes found at a house, which the prosecution called a confession.
00:17:39
Speaker
In terms of like a motive, no motive was ever really established. In the UK law, you don't need one for a conviction, but when you're putting someone away forever on purely circumstantial evidence, I think it matters that nobody could ever really explain why she would do this. In terms of what the the prosecution put forward, they they said sort of maybe boredom or thrill-seeking, the idea of like playing God.
00:18:01
Speaker
They also talked about some kind of inappropriate emotional attachment to a married doctor, and they used texts and note at a house that said things like, I trusted you with everything, to kind of back up that theory.
00:18:15
Speaker
Before I start taking apart this evidence, on the face of it, does it sound convincing to you, or...? Okay. I mean, i guess what I'm hearing is they didn't quite prove... I mean, like, I guess that what I would want to know as a jury member, and I have sat on a jury before, so I have experienced this. I've always wanted to do that. I'm so jealous. I have done it. um My question for an extremely much more boring case than this, um but but my question would be, like, did you... um
00:18:50
Speaker
Like, are you certain that these babies were killed would be my ultimate question. Like, you know what i mean? Like, that's what I would ask a pathologist or whatever. I mean, like, were these babies killed or could this like skin discoloration and other things like...
00:19:07
Speaker
could that potentially happen other ways? that Yeah, well, we'll kind of get into that a little bit later because there was only one neonatal expert at the trial and he kind of came at it like adamant pretty much that these babies were murdered. So I think that had a big effect in terms of like convincing the jury of their guilt. But I'm going to kind of pick apart like some of the evidence sort of step by step.
00:19:29
Speaker
So first of all, there's literally no direct evidence. So her barrister said, and I think it bears just saying out loud, there's no forensic evidence, there's no CCCB, and there are no eyewitness accounts.
00:19:42
Speaker
Nobody saw her attack a single baby. No one saw her do anything that could constitute an attempted murder. And the whole case, all 15 life sentences, is circumstantial.
00:19:53
Speaker
In any other context, if someone told you a person was the worst child serial killer in modern British history and then said there's no CCTV, no forensics, and nobody saw anything, you'd find that insane, i think. I don't know. I think it's crazy.
00:20:08
Speaker
Is this surprising to you? Because I think a lot of people assume there must have been something more concrete when they sort of hear about the case. Well, it is surprising to me. I mean, I guess I have another follow-up question, which you're probably going to answer, is like, Britain seems like a place that's like deeply CCTV'd out.
00:20:26
Speaker
um Basically live in a surveillance state. U.S. is not far behind, but I feel like Britain really, Britain and China are the two countries where like basically everything's filmed. Are there not cameras inside in the ah inside the hospital?
00:20:40
Speaker
I think inside wards to protect people's privacy, it's probably accurate that there aren't CCTV cameras. They definitely have them in like the corridors and stuff like that. But um yeah, I think on the actual wards where you've got like the sick people, I think to but protect people's privacy, they probably don't have cameras.
00:20:56
Speaker
i mean, there must not be because they would have produced videos, you know? yeah, so yeah it so so bottom line, it's surprising to me that she would be convicted off just that. Yeah. The second thing I want to talk about, so the presence chart.
00:21:10
Speaker
So this is the bit I really want you to listen to because it sounds a lot more damning than it is. They showed the jury a table with Letby's name with an X next to every single incident. No other nurse had Xs across all the same incidents, just Lucy.
00:21:24
Speaker
So on the face of it, that sounds like obviously she did it. She's the only common factor, except you only charge someone with an incident if they were present. So of course, she's the only one on the char every incident she was charged with.
00:21:37
Speaker
So at the time that these babies are sort of collapsing and dying, there were six more deaths at the hospital that she wasn't present for and she wasn't charged for.
00:21:48
Speaker
Okay. so They've only they've they've kind of like worked backwards to sort of produce this They've chosen situations where she was present and then they said, look, she was present in all of these situations. It's like, of course she was because she wouldn't be charging her otherwise.
00:22:04
Speaker
um But I think that the jury kind of like seeing that that visual of the like staffing chart with an X next to every single name, they think, oh my God, like that that's crazy coincidence that she was there. But um but the the jury were never informed about the other deaths on the ward.
00:22:20
Speaker
I'm not the smartest person alive, but that would have gotten me. I would have been like, oh yeah, that makes sense. She was the comment. Well, it takes a little bit of mental gymnastics to kind of like figure it out. Like even I kind of struggled with that little bit.
00:22:34
Speaker
Yeah. um When I was doing sort of like the research for this, like, because I've listened to a few different podcasts and like watched a few documentaries and like i've I've seen that kind of explained to me before and not got it like several times. So yeah,
00:22:50
Speaker
But yeah, it it does make sense that you you wouldn't charge somebody for an incident that they weren't present for because that doesn't make sense. So Professor Jane Hutton, who's a medical statistics at the University of Warwick, she put it like this. If you want to find out what went wrong, you need to consider all of the deaths, not just a subset of them.
00:23:09
Speaker
This is a logical error so common in courtrooms that actually has a name. It's called prosecutor's fallacy, where you start from the assumption of guilt and then construct the evidence to match it. Have you heard of the idea of like the Texas sharpshooter fallacy? No. So that's kind of the idea of like, I don't know, if you shot a rifle at like a barn wall and then drew a target around it and then said that you had bullseye.
00:23:32
Speaker
So this is the part where it gets really interesting. um So on the 4th of February, 2025, Dr. shu Lee, who is a retired neonatologist, Professor Emeritz at the University of Toronto and president of the Canadian Neonatal Foundation, one of the most respected people in his field globally, he sort of comes out and has some criticisms in terms of like the evidence that was presented to the trial.
Expert Critique of Medical Evidence
00:23:58
Speaker
The absolute exquisite irony here is that the prosecution's own expert, a man called Dewey Evans, who we'll go into get to later in the podcast, he cited 1989 paper written by Shuley to support his air embolism diagnosis at the trial. Shuley didn't know his research had been used and he found out after the verdict and he wasn't happy about it.
00:24:20
Speaker
So basically the paper that was cited at the trial that was used as evidence of ambulism, it describes this slight discoloration of the baby's skin. But the actual doctor who wrote the paper, when he found out that it was used as evidence in the trial, he basically came out and said, like, no, you've miss you misread this paper and you've misread the evidence that we're presenting.
00:24:41
Speaker
So Lee puts together a panel of 14 independent experts from six countries They review all of the cases, they accept no payment, and they agree upfront to publish whatever they find, whether it helps their case or not.
00:24:53
Speaker
Their conclusion is that no medical evidence that any infant was deliberately harmed. Every death and collapse could be explained by natural causes, substandard care or both. On air embolism specifically, he said the notion that these babies can be diagnosed with air embolism because they collapsed and had these skin discolorations has no evidence in fact.
00:25:14
Speaker
On the insulin evidence, um the type of blood test that was used is prone to interference and multiple specialists have said that it's not suitable for use in a criminal case. And the guidance from the laboratory that ran the test also said as much.
00:25:29
Speaker
So the man whose paper was cited to put her away is standing at a podium saying this was misapplied and yet that's what she was convicted on. So I want to talk a little bit about Dowie Evans because he he's the neonatologist who spoke at the trial. um And if you...
00:25:44
Speaker
If you ever a like hear him in conversation, he's like a Welsh guy. He's very old. He seems kind of cute. um And he stopped practicing clinical medicine in 2009. And by the time he was reviewing Lucy Letby's case, he hadn't actually worked as a neonatologist for over 14 years.
00:26:02
Speaker
After he retired, he became a professional expert witness. So essentially exclusively for prosecutions. And they're paid, right? They are paid pretty handsomely, yeah. um At some point, he apparently boasted publicly that he'd only lost one court case in 35 years as an expert witness. But like...
00:26:20
Speaker
the idea the The idea that an expert witness like even views a case as a win-lose situation when they're only there to sort of provide medical evidence, just like, I don't know, that doesn't sit right with me. No, it doesn't sit right with me either. I mean, like the whole idea of, it should be that like you give accurate, like you're you're paid to give accurate information and you shouldn't care at all about the outcome of the case.
00:26:45
Speaker
Yeah, you would think so. um So a court appeal judge called lord judge Lord Justice Jackson, he personally wrote a letter to the trial judge, um Justice Goss, in December 2022, which was before the trial had even finished.
00:27:03
Speaker
He warned him that in a previous case, Dowie Evans' evidence had been found to be worthless and tendentious and partisan. Jackson had been so troubled by evan Evans' conduct that he took the extraordinary step of writing to another judge about it. So Goss receives this letter, reads it, and allows him to testify anyway.
00:27:24
Speaker
In a separate Northern Ireland case, Evans had initially said that a child's injuries were non-accidental and then under cross-examination, He shifted his position after being shown photographs he hadn't properly reviewed. The judge in that case also criticized his evidence.
00:27:40
Speaker
There was also a problem with a chest x-ray for one of the babies in the LePB case, baby C, where Evans cited the x-ray as suspicious evidence and then it later emerged that LePB wasn't even on duty when that x-ray was taken.
00:27:52
Speaker
Evans said that it was due to mixed up dates. So I've got a situation here where a senior appeal court judge wrote a letter to the trial judge saying this man's evidence has previously been declared worthless.
00:28:06
Speaker
The trial judge has then read it, filed it away, and let him take the standard anyway at the trial of a woman who's now serving like 15 life sentences, so she'll never be released from jail.
00:28:17
Speaker
That's crazy to me. I don't know what you think. of course it's crazy. And I mean, just thinking about a someone my age who potentially has, you know, even a even someone who's not that healthy in the West would have 40 more years, maybe 50 more years of life, and that entire time is in a prison is is horrifying.
00:28:43
Speaker
um i do, though, ah want to, I mean, ah let me just say, like, generally speaking, i I don't have like prison reform mentality. Like i'm not I'm definitely not a prison abolitionist. Like I think we need prisons, but just the idea of a life sentence I think should be reserved for like the most severe cases of which I guess people would consider killing babies a super severe case. But I do want to hear the prosecution's statements side of things because i i you have mentioned these like, quote unquote confession letters and stuff. So I'm curious like what the most, like what is the damning evidence against her? That's that's what we're going to get to now. um Because I would say the notes were sort of the most damning evidence in the case.
00:29:31
Speaker
um So these notes, they're the thing that I think more than anything else convinced the jury. And I could kind of understand why because they are like genuinely upsetting to read if you see them. um So they were found in a home during a police search and they were handwritten on post-it notes and scraps of paper.
00:29:47
Speaker
um The prosecution showed them to the jury first thing. So when the trial starts, this the first thing that the jury is shown and it kind of sets the tone for the rest of the proceedings because they've got this one piece of evidence sort in their head the whole time. They basically had phrases like, I am evil, i did this, um i killed them on purpose because I'm not good enough to care for them I'm a horrible evil person, i don't deserve to live. Here's what want you to hold in your head though, because I think
00:30:19
Speaker
On the face of it, I can kind of see why somebody would see that and be convinced. But these notes were written between July 2016 and July 2018. And that is the period when Lucy had been removed from the ward she's worked on for years. She's been placed under internal investigation, told not to speak to most of her colleagues. And according to people close to the case, was being encouraged by occupational health professionals to write down her feelings as like a therapeutic exercise.
00:30:47
Speaker
I should state as well, the exact same notes also contain things like, I haven't done anything wrong, references to her feeling victimized, slandered, discriminated against. There was one note that the prosecution really picked up on where she'd just written like tiny boy and people found that sort of sinister and actually turned out that was a nickname for her, Yorkshire Terrier dog.
00:31:09
Speaker
The name Catherine de Berger also appears repeatedly throughout the notes and she was the head of occupational health at the hospital, someone Lucy was seeing for mental health support. Well, can i can I just say, like, as someone with who has had period period who does have obsessive-compulsive disorder and has had period, extremely dark um thoughts and has written them out um in journals and stuff before as part of a therapeutic practice, like, you know, first off, that's a common therapeutic um thing you're asked to do with with any sort of, like,
00:31:46
Speaker
And it sounds like she was going through a particularly hard time, but like, I can't, for me and my, and my personal, like the way I would view things, if I was accused of something like this, I do think my mind would go to a place of like,
00:32:03
Speaker
is there any evidence I did do it? like i do think that yeah I do think that that would like cross any like ah someone's mind, especially if there's someone who's like prone to like any sort of compulsive or anxious behavior in general. So it doesn't feel at all damning to me, to be honest, that if she was being accused of all this stuff and she was in therapy, some of her thoughts that she was having were like, did I do this? Because you would it imagine how...
00:32:31
Speaker
incredibly unimaginable it would be to be accused of such a heinous crime. I mean, ah for me, that doesn't feel, odd maybe for some people that doesn't, that feels like insane. But for me, like someone who like suffers from like intrusive thoughts and obsessive compulsive disorder, I do think like one of my initial thoughts would be like, did I do this? Or did I do something to deserve this? And I would absolutely have, ah you know, ideation like that.
00:32:55
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. And I, that was kind of my initial thoughts on that as well. And I also kind of hypothetically, like say she is this like horrible, evil baby killer, like,
00:33:08
Speaker
would you really be writing that down like sort of expressions of like guilt over the situation? like i I don't know. like I feel like the kind of people who who kill, they're not experiencing that same level of remorse. like that they if you're If you're killing like multiple people, i don't think you would. I feel like the notes like when you think about them like outside of the context that they presented in court, like they make her seem like more innocent to me, not less.
00:33:38
Speaker
I agree. i also think that it's a very particular type of killing, this like nurse slash like doctor, like angel of death type killing that we think of. And I usually think that those people, and you haven't shown me anything like this yet, you at least, and i have i don I'm not an expert on this, but typically when you hear those stories, you hear that the person almost had a kind of savior complex. So they actually feel the exact opposite. Like when you hear these angel of death stories, it's like the person feels like they're the best type of person. Like they're yeah they're making the correct choice. You know what i mean? And they're almost like, they do a lot of displays of...
00:34:19
Speaker
heroism and like, you know, they, they kind of want to cause emergencies in the hospital so that they can theoretically be the ones to fix them. And then when one of their victims does die, they're the most devastated. And they're the most, do you see what I'm saying? Like there's, yeah it's like, they wouldn't be saying which the type of stuff she's saying, they would actually be saying, I'm like, cause that's how they justify it. Right.
00:34:42
Speaker
It's like Munchausen by proxy or something. It's like, I'm the most good, you know? Yeah. I will to give the um the prosecution their due. One of the other things like pieces of evidence that they found compelling was that um when the police were searching her flat, they found like hundreds and hundreds of like handover notes, like paperwork and stuff that had been taken home from the hospital. um And they argued that... like I think like 24 or 25 of them related to the babies that were involved in the case. But that's like 24, 25 out of like 200 or something. Like, I don't know. I don't feel like that
00:35:22
Speaker
she She sort of describes this as like she just forgets, like she'd put a piece of paper into her pocket and then like take it home and then get it home. and um obviously because it's sort of confidential, she didn't want to throw it away. So they would just kind of build up in these piles. And having worked in ah jobs where you are dealing with sensitive data like that, I've definitely done that. I think that's quite a common thing for somebody who isn't ah thinking too much about it, to like go home with something in your pocket that maybe you should have shredded at work. like I don't know. course. I mean, i i currently, one of my jobs that I do now is I work a job where I'm often handed like various sheets of paper throughout the day, and I can completely see a scenario where it like ends up in my bag in some way, and I kind of forget about it. and Actually, I literally, at this point my life, do have piles of papers in my house. um Yeah.
Character Insight & Key Witness
00:36:19
Speaker
When she was asked, like um
00:36:21
Speaker
why she didn't get rid of them. she she told the court that she didn't have a way of disposing of them. And that was actually debunked because it turned out that she actually did have a shredder in her home. But like, I don't know. That's kind of ah a flimsy thing to sort go off.
00:36:37
Speaker
um I mean, i just people are lazy. People sometimes, I mean, I'm lazy. I sometimes just accumulate crap on the tables in my apartment and stuff. Yeah. and i don't even And I don't even think she was lazy. She was like clearly a very busy woman. Like she's she's constantly...
00:36:54
Speaker
um going in and doing like extra shifts and stuff when they need her. that even i listened to like another podcast talking about this and they were saying that like there are even situations where she'd be like going on a night out with the girls and then she would get a text because somebody doesn't know how to use a particular piece of equipment in the hospital and she would like leave her friends and like go and help them. Like she she seemed like she was genuinely like passionate about a job.
00:37:19
Speaker
um and about the care of these babies. And just a hardworking person, you know? Like, I feel like if you, like, I mean, taking extra shifts and stuff like that, I mean, that to me is not necessarily indicative of someone who's, like, such a good person, but it's indicative of someone who's a hard worker, cares about their job, wants to make extra money, which I think are, like, good qualities you would want in a worker. You know what I mean? Yeah. Someone who kind is motivated.
00:37:47
Speaker
Yeah. We're gonna talk um now about the the only real witness, um I guess, that took part in both of the trials. So he was involved in the original trial and he was involved in the retrial related to baby Kay. I've sent you a picture of him just so you can have a look at him. So this is Dr. Ravi J. Ram.
00:38:07
Speaker
So here's something that I find like genuinely incredible about this case. In the entire trial, so seven murder convictions, seven attempted murder convictions, There was only one member of hospital staff who claimed to have actually seen Lucy Letby behave suspiciously in person. And that's this guy, Rabi J. Rim.
00:38:24
Speaker
He is, and I say this without any like malice, he's a bit of a character. So he was the consultant pediatrician at the Countess of Chester Hospital. He's also a bit of a sort of TV doctor. So he'd made appearances on a TV show called Born Naughty on Channel 4 in 2015, which is a series about children with behavioral problems. He also appeared on Channel 4's How to Stay Well. He's been a guest on The One Show, which is kind of like a um sort of tea time BBC like um talk show type thing. and He's also been on This Morning, and Sunday Morning Live on the BBC.
00:39:04
Speaker
So he's kind of um one of those sort of consultant doctors that becomes kind of a familiar face if you watch a lot of like daytime tally. He also hosted his own podcast called Accelerating Health and he was a regular contributor to the BBC Asian Network Radio.
00:39:20
Speaker
He has an id IMDB page. He's listed with the talent management agency. and And on a live television show, he once described himself as, and I'm quoting directly, a mediocre triathlete and a wannabe rock star. So he also plays in a band. interested um ah He's interested in a some sort of fame or whatever.
00:39:43
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not saying that any of this stuff makes him a liar. I'm just saying it's worth having a bit of an idea who we're dealing bit with before we get to the the email evidence. So after the conviction in August 2023, this guy was everywhere. So he was on ITB News. He gave a tearful interview where he was saying, like, I genuinely believe that there are four or five babies who could be coming to school now who aren't.
00:40:07
Speaker
Sky News described him as the doctor who caught Lucy Letby virtually red-handed. And he was doing sort of interview after interview, called a hero, a whistleblower, the man who wouldn't give up.
00:40:18
Speaker
And to be fair to him, the hospital management did treat the consultants appallingly. um That part is true and well-documented, but there is a real difference between being a genuine whistleblower and positioning yourself as the protagonist of a sort of true crime story while a woman is serving 15 life sentences as in prison.
00:40:37
Speaker
So in terms of what he said under oath, This relates to the Baby K incident. So Baby K was born at 25 weeks on the 17th of February 2016. And this is the case that went to retrial after the first jury couldn't agree.
00:40:51
Speaker
um It's the case where J.R.M.' 's testimony was the most central and it's the case that his email directly concerns. So here's what told the court at the time of both the original trial and the retrial.
00:41:02
Speaker
He says he became uneasy when he heard another nurse was about to leave baby K alone with let B to go and speak to the parents. So this is around the time where some of the consultants in the hospital are starting to have concerns about let B. He said he felt very uncomfortable because he'd noticed that let B tended to be present when bad things happened on the ward.
00:41:22
Speaker
That discomfort, entirely his own and unprompted, was why he went to check on the baby. When he walked in, baby K was desaturating and Letby was standing next to the incubator. She didn't have her hands in it. She wasn't looking at him and she wasn't doing anything to help.
00:41:37
Speaker
When the prosecutor asked him directly, did you hear any call for help from Lucy Letby? He says, no, not at all. The prosecution said he'd caught her virtually red handed. He repeats this version to police in court at the trial, in court at the retrial and at the third wall inquiry. And every single time he went in, cause he was suspicious, nobody called him. Letby was just standing there. So he's arguing that he walks in to the ward where Letby is sort working.
00:42:04
Speaker
And there's a baby in an incubator struggling for breath and she's just standing there doing it. Except that's not what he wrote in May 2017. So on the 4th of May 2017, he sent an email to seven of his consultant colleagues.
00:42:20
Speaker
The timing matters because the doctors were preparing a report to try and push the police into launching a formal investigation. and he was setting out his recollection of the baby K incident as part of that.
00:42:30
Speaker
So in that email, which is written closest in time to the actual event when his memory was freshest, he wrote that the reason he went to see baby K was that Letby herself had raised the alarm and called him for help.
00:42:42
Speaker
Not that he wandered in because he was suspicious. This email was not disclosed to Letby's defense team for either trial. Cheshire police and the CPS said they only became aware of it in August 2024, one month after Letby had already been convicted of the baby K attempted murder at the retrial.
00:43:00
Speaker
The email was apparently given to the Thirlwall Inquiry, but was not discussed in hearings and was not published on its website. Letby's former defense team received it in late September 2024, and it was sent to the police investigation into possible corporate manslaughter at the hospital.
00:43:16
Speaker
a Lots of things sort of go on at the hospital after the Lucy Letby trial, and I will get into that a little bit later. um But basically, he's gone to the trial, he's given this testimony about what happened with baby Kay, and then email evidence that wasn't submitted has emerged that sort of contradicts his story.
00:43:33
Speaker
Like either Lucy noticed that the baby was deteriorating and called a doctor, which is basically... her doing her job um or she was standing there doing nothing. like Both things can't be true at the same time.
00:43:47
Speaker
I don't know. like What's your reaction to that being sort of the only kind of witness testimony that they receive at the trial of someone seeing her doing something suspicious? I mean, it's nothing. I mean, it's literally nothing.
00:44:01
Speaker
If she called a doctor, I would assume that's exactly what she was supposed to do. Yeah, I don't know. i kind of i kind of got the impression, like, I i don't want to sort of, like, badmouth this guy, because I don't know whether he, like, is genuinely convinced that she's guilty. um That's one of the things that's kind of tricky to wrap your head around with this, is whether, because i I genuinely do think she was innocent, but I don't know whether I think that it was some kind of, um, conspiracy.
00:44:30
Speaker
Yeah. Um, but I don't know. I, I do think that when you have a doctor like that, who like clearly likes being this amount of attention and going on TV and he suddenly sort of painted as the hero who catches the sort of baby killing nurse, like,
00:44:46
Speaker
he's definitely going to be sort of reluctant to want to like give that up. Well, I also think, you know, there's a sub, there's like a kind of middle ground between conspiracy and, um outright belief in her guilt, which is sort of just two things i would point out. One,
00:45:02
Speaker
um there was a higher incidence of neonatal deaths at this hospital. And, you know, that is stressful, I would assume, for the hospital and all the staff because, you know, some sort of, something is going wrong, clearly.
00:45:17
Speaker
um And so it could just be a combination of, like, a little bit of anxiety or fear for, like, where the blame will land if it's not on Lucy Leffy and also just, like,
00:45:30
Speaker
kind of like I think it can be sort of subconscious right like this is like a much easier explanation like that this woman was evil and that's what was happening then just maybe what the kind of sad truth is that like the hospital was sort of inept and there was problems there Yeah, here's the thing as well. like Obviously, if Lucy Leppi didn't kill the babies, then something else did. and i think you kind of need to look at the state of the hospital in order to sort understand that a
Systemic Issues in the Hospital
00:46:02
Speaker
little bit. so I do want to go through like a few of the issues that that were going on at the time in the hospital. 2014, they had like four neonatal deaths.
00:46:12
Speaker
That's fairly normal. In 2015, that jumps up to nine deaths, which is the highest rate in the country. The spike predates any confirmed let-be incidents by the prosecution's own timeline. So before she was even charged with anything, um before before any of the deaths that she was eventually charged with, there's already a spike in deaths at this hospital.
00:46:33
Speaker
um There was a CQC inspection in February 2016 that found concerns about staff raising issues with management, but incredibly nobody told them at the time about the elevated mortality rate.
00:46:46
Speaker
There were inadequate staffing issues at the hospital, low mandatory training compliance, infection prevention failures, equipment not clean or fit for purpose, and poor governance.
00:46:57
Speaker
There was raw sewage leaks in the sluice rooms of the neonatal unit during the period when the babies were dying. This kind of is a real eye-opener. I've heard reports that they were actually like stuffing sort of ceiling tiles where sewage was leaking with like nappies and stuff to try and keep like sewage out of the unit. And this is where like the most premature like babies, uh, sort of being kept. I like, I don't know.
00:47:27
Speaker
In August 2025, the CQC issued another warning notice and claiming there were critical gaps in sepsis treatment in the hospital and patients were routinely being cared for in corridors. um The NHS, a long time ago, they used to do league tables and they actually started doing it again sort of a couple of years ago. and this hospital was ranked second to last out of 134 acute hospital trusts. So this is not a...
00:47:55
Speaker
a great hospital. They've got a lot of issues going on. Also in August 2024, there was a leaked internal report that revealed the unit had experienced an outbreak of dangerous bacterium during the exact period that the babies were dying. This outbreak was never mentioned at either of the trials. and Medical microbiologist Professor David Livermore said it offered a simpler explanation for the rise of deaths than deliberate harm.
00:48:21
Speaker
Also in August, 2024, the CPS confirmed that door swipe data, which was used at the trial to establish Lepby's presence on the unit had been mislabeled and for one of the unit's doors. So basically they submitted data of her sort of swiping in and off the ward. Um, and the, the dates were mislabeled, so they were switched around. So the time that they were saying she was entering some of these wards, she was actually leaving and vice versa. I also want to mention this. This is kind of a separate case, but it happens at the same hospital. And I think it gives you a good idea about the sort of culture at the hospital. So John Creighton and Thomas Jones were two hospital porters that worked there. And they blew the whistle in early 2024 on the alleged mistreatment of deceased patients.
00:49:08
Speaker
and Bodies left without dignity, moved without proper PPE, and treated in ways that they described as disrespectful and deeply distressing. So these are two porters that work at the hospital. and There were like reports of flight people um sort of removing things from the bodies inappropriately, straddling bodies during training for things, and um Their reward for kind of trying to whistleblow these issues that were going on was basically a witch hunt, derogatory comments and jokes from management. and One of them was like sent a text message sort of accusing them of um like necrophilia. And these guys take it to an employment tribunal and they were found to be credible witnesses who'd suffered workplace detriment for making protected disclosures and they were awarded compensation.
00:49:58
Speaker
So this there are lots of issues in this hospital in terms of like things going wrong and people not being able to report them without it being detrimental to their working environment in the hospital.
00:50:11
Speaker
Before we go any further, I do want to give some credit where it's due because I do think that this episode doesn't exist without a couple of things happening first. I kind of wanted to give a little bit of a shout out to Nanny because he was sort of the one who really got me interested in this. And this was back in sort of 2024.
00:50:28
Speaker
I didn't really know anything about this other than the sort of mainstream narrative. And i can't remember whether he sent it to me or made me aware of it, but there was a New Yorker article written by Rachel Aviv that really kind of blew the lid on a lot of the um issues with this trial.
00:50:45
Speaker
This came out in May 2024 while the baby K retrial was approaching. They published a 13,000 word feature um titled, a British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies, Did She Do It?
00:50:58
Speaker
Aviv had reviewed more than 7,000 pages of court transcripts, police interviews, text messages, plus internal hospital records that were leaked to her. The piece highlighted chronic staffing shortages, the sewage draining problems, the fact that only one specialist neonatalist was available at key times, and a 2016 Royal College of Pediatrics review that found the rise mortality 2015 was not confined to the neonatal unit, meaning it wasn't just where Lucy Leppi worked. There were spikes in deaths all across the hospital.
00:51:28
Speaker
It also reported that in an unrelated earlier case, a court of appeal judge had described Derry Evans' expert report as worthless, which was the first time that detail got any wide attention. It's interesting because this article was um like geo-blocked in the UK, like you couldn't read it.
00:51:45
Speaker
This New Yorker article was was not available in the UK. No. So the, the, the Braves media weren't allowed to write about Lucy Letby after the retrial started into the baby K incident. Um, so you could, you could still access this article, but you would have to use like a VPN or like get somebody sent it to you. I think you could still buy a paper copy. Like if you went out to a store and bought a copy of the New Yorker, you could like read it that way. But I think whenever you have a ah situation where people like can't easily read something I think they naturally just want to read it more and I think that that kind of made a lot more people sort of seek it out and that was really sort of the first time that people started looking at the the case a lot more critically so I do think like without that article I don't think we'd even be in a situation where we're having this conversation I think people would have just sort of forgotten about it
00:52:41
Speaker
As a result of the article coming out, and a conservative MP, David Davis, also used parliamentary privilege to raise it in the House of Commons, calling it a defiance of open justice and questioning the statistical evidence. The Justice Secretary basically told him to go through the courts.
00:52:57
Speaker
Did you know anything about this like article, the New York Rottical, or no? I don't think so. I mean, like I said, I was like vaguely familiar of the case. I guess I'm curious, like... did this shift anything? Like, it sounds like it at least shifted some public sentiment, but like, do you have any sense of like, is there like any sort of like movement around like people calling for a retrial or is there like any sort of sense that like it has shifted like public perception in some way? Or do you think the majority of like people in the UK still just believe that she did it? Yeah.
00:53:33
Speaker
I think that more and more people are starting to become aware of the situation are starting to sort of like question the evidence. I do think sort of this belief that she's like innocent is still kind of niche. I think maybe like, like i did you watch like the Netflix thing? that Netflix did like ah I think an hour or so long documentary about it. and I don't know. They do kind of go into some of this stuff towards the end of the documentary, but like I felt like for the most part, they were kind of just selling the the kind of mainstream narrative about it. They also did this really weird thing where they used like AI people to give like witness testimony, and it was the first time I'd seen like
00:54:18
Speaker
like actual like fake humans like reading like people's words in a documentary before I find it really creepy. they were So they'd have like like the parents of some of the babies that had died but they'd be like voiced and like depicted as like AI humans. It was it was creepy. I don't know.
Media Influence & Public Perception
00:54:35
Speaker
Because the New Yorker article existed as um a corrective to something, I think it's important that we talk a little bit about the British tabloid press. So from the moment of the verdict in August 2023, the British tabloids went absolutely feral. They were describing Lucy as a baby poisoner, evil, monster, angel of death.
00:54:55
Speaker
um The Sun, the Mirror, of the Mail, the coverage was wall to wall and pretty unanimous and vicious. There was essentially no room in the mainstream press for any note of skepticism in the immediate aftermath. She was compared to Myra Hindley within days. um Are you familiar with Myra Hindley? ah We should do an episode on her because she's quite interesting. she I think it was in like the 70s or 80s. She's like a serial killer of boys in the Moors, and the Yorkshire Moors. um But yeah.
00:55:23
Speaker
There were Facebook groups dedicated to hating Lucy that had tens of thousands of members. She received death threats, harassment of her family. When Lucy refused to attend her own sentencing, it was reported as further proof of her evil nature rather than the response of somebody in extreme psychological distress who knew she was going to spend the rest of her life in prison. and All of this stuff, I think, does matter because it created a climate in which questioning the verdict became like socially unspeakable. and I think that's important to the story of how long it took for serious scrutiny to arrive. um
00:55:57
Speaker
i in research for this podcast, I spent quite a lot of time listening to amanda Knox's podcast on the Lucy Lightby story. Do you know who Amanda Knox is? Yes, I'm aware of her, for sure.
00:56:08
Speaker
Yeah, so for anyone listening who isn't aware, Amanda Knox, um she was convicted in Italy in the early 2000s of killing her roommate who was a British girl. And she she was wrongfully convicted and eventually let out of prison. But she had a really horrible time with the British press. um they They really sort of leapt on this idea of her as this sort of like psychotic monster. And I don't think that's necessarily true at all. It was interesting listening to her podcast. it's It kind of has that super like overproduced quality that you get with a lot of like really big budget podcasts. And I did find it funny that within so of the first episode, she was kind of making the argument that like the media had done all of that to her because she was an attractive female and they were only doing this to Lucy because she's an attractive female and it kind of, I don't know. It reminded me of that like Dasha tweet of like, don't objectify my tight, wet pussy. Like that was a sort of, I don't know. Cause I don't even think that Lucy's like hot.
00:57:16
Speaker
Um, and I don't even think that cases are particularly comparable, but, but yeah, I think as somebody else who has been accused and convicted of trying a trial crime that they didn't commit, she feels like she has sort of a interesting perspective on it. And it's, it's worth listening to it, even if it seems mildly narcissistic.
00:57:36
Speaker
I mean, you've convinced me that like there absolutely should be some sort of you know um retrial at the very least. like I mean, at bare minimum, I think they have to establish like how these babies died. um and it doesn't sound like there's enough evidence to convict her no matter what. I mean, just kind of like, you know, that seems like, it seems like she should not be in jail.
00:58:01
Speaker
regardless of whatever the truth of the situation is. I don't know. It is like the idea of like being put in jail for like something that you didn't do is like a fear that I've, I think everyone is obviously scared of that. Like it's a horrible idea, but I think like on a personal level, like that's like my biggest fear in the world. I like have nightmares about it all the time. um and i think Oh, me too.
00:58:26
Speaker
I think as soon as I sort of became like convinced that she wasn't innocent, I've been sort of super hyper fixated on I don't know, like like to spend your entire life in prison with like no chance of getting out for like something that you didn't do, that's like, I don't know. Yeah, it's horrible. I mean, at at the very least, like, all I would say is, like, she is in prison in the UK and she's a woman. i would imagine, like, the US, men's prisons are significantly scarier and more awful than women's prisons. So, i don't know.
00:59:01
Speaker
I mean, at least that's like but that's a very small silver lining, but... Yeah, I don't know. Like, and apparently she's the um she's been working in the library at the prison as the librarian, which, like...
00:59:14
Speaker
I don't know what that tells you about the type of person that she is, but she doesn't sound like a fucking baby killer. um I've pretty much gone through all of my notes, um but yeah. Yeah, I mean, no, I mean, it's very interesting. You've definitely convinced me to look more into it. i um you know, i it it does freak me out too.
00:59:35
Speaker
um There's something about, i will say, this is just like an off top off a little bit off topic, but there's something about like, I Amanda Knox that I find ah sort of sinister, despite the fact that it's like obviously clear that she was innocent. Like, it's just I think it's like the piercing blue eye situation. yeah Like, yeah like the way like when I look at her and I i know that that's unfair, of course, like I'm i'm kind of I'm like ascribing i don't know i mean to me it just seems like like what she went through was horrible and unimaginable but i'm also kind of like she does seem sort of a little bit like bpd if i have to be honest yeah it's interesting as well because i i do remember that case quite well and like i didn't think that she did it even at the time and everybody here pretty much did think that she did it um and she she did get a really really really rough time in the british press i mean the british press
01:00:32
Speaker
a kind of known worldwide for being like particularly sort of ruthless in the way that they treat people that like a dog with a bone. I think it's, I think when you have a, like a small country, like with like a relatively small population, but you've got like so many different tabloid newspapers. They, they will literally do anything to sort of get a good scoop.
01:00:54
Speaker
Um, and I do think that they all just kind of like leapt on it with these like crazy headlines and stuff. But yeah, I don't know. It's, I do think like with the kind of advent of like the internet as a ah separate sort of way of people like getting their news, like a lot of that has kind of like died down a little bit. But and in the case of like Lucy Let Be, even it definitely has affected a lot of like people's opinions in public on it. It's only really sort of the last so maybe a year or so that you can criticize it openly without people being like, oh my God, no, she's a baby killer. Yeah.
01:01:30
Speaker
Yeah, the only thing I could compare um the British tabloids to in the U.S., which I think both of these are owned by Rupert Murdoch. Yeah. It's like the the New York City-specific tabloids. um Like the... oh my gosh. Why am I b blanking on like the most famous one?
01:01:49
Speaker
um What is it called? Like the New York Daily News? Why am i I see it every single day. Yeah.
01:01:59
Speaker
I'm forgetting it. Whatever. the You guys know what I'm talking about. The crazy... The one with all the crazy headlines. But anyway, like, I could see... it it would have to be, like a like, a regional... Like, in New York City, there are, like, specific scandals that, like, the rest of the country doesn't even give a shit about that are, like, the tabloids are as crazy as they are in the British. You know what I mean?
01:02:19
Speaker
Yeah. Where they're, like, crazy incendiary headlines and, you know, they really do shape the narrative. Like, there's that whole... thing right now on Twitter about the let them whatever, the the fake sex scandal with the banker lady and stuff. like That's a very like New York... Anyway, I can see how in a small regional area, and I do think Britain is very small, it could seem... yeah it could and they could have a a bigger sway. Also, the British tabloids are just like notoriously brutal.
01:02:52
Speaker
Why do you think like, um okay, so I feel like I've kind of convinced you that like, there's at least a good chance that she didn't do it. But like, why do you think that the the doctors even kind of like suspected somebody of this? So like, do you think there's some kind of conspiracy element to it? Or do you think it's just a case of like, they've got an idea in their head and they're like a dog with a bone about it?
01:03:17
Speaker
No, I just think that like it's kind of what I said. I think there's like a middle road between the two, which is just like this subconscious desire to like assign blame for this horrible thing. And like probably also a subconscious fear that like if it ultimately gets blamed on like systematic failures at the hospital, then it's kind of like everyone sort of shares the blame.
01:03:39
Speaker
um that's And that and thats that, I'm sure, would be very like stigmatizing. like if you try to go from that like If you're a nurse or someone at that hospital and you try to go work at another hospital and you were at the hospital where these issues were happening, it's like, you know, um not to mention, like, it's all obviously horrifying whenever a baby dies and these are particularly vulnerable babies. And I don't know, there's there's just a lot of elements to it.
01:04:06
Speaker
I can, none of the, um, none of the parents of the babies have like come out and sort of like criticized the conviction. I can completely understand, like as a parent who's like lost a child, like wanting to have like something concrete sort of blame their death on. But I do think a lot of it as well, like relates to sort of the culture in the UK surrounding the NHS, like,
01:04:31
Speaker
it's kind of hard to describe to people who don't live here, but the NHS is kind of like the sacred cow. Like people basically like worship it.
01:04:41
Speaker
And I think nobody wants to, like, like if you mentioned like any kind of sort of reform to the NHS or like wanting to sort of privatize certain sections, like people just go apeshit. They don't want to hear about it. Like they, they view it as this, um, like source of incredible pride. And I think like There is something sort of prideful about like being able to offer healthcare to everybody for free, but people's sort of obsession with it kind of makes them blind to its failings, and it has been failing for a long time in a lot of different ways, and you're just not able to
01:05:20
Speaker
and talk about that with people in public. So I think it's a lot easier for a hospital to sort of say like, oh, this evil woman is the problem than to sort of acknowledge that actually the problem is much bigger and there are all these horrible factors and a lot of them are probably going on in different hospitals as well and they need to be looked at. um I just think it's it's easier for them to have a sort of boogeyman to kind of pin it on, whether that's ah comes from a place of malice or not, or just sort of wanting to protect their own skins. I don't know. UK also seems like this sort of like middle, like I always think of it weirdly, like culturally as this country that's like half American, half European. I know that that's ridiculous because the UK literally made America. No, I do know what you mean. But it's like it's like it's like culturally speaking, like halfway between the two. And I think that like if you look at what's happening in America right now where...
01:06:17
Speaker
you know, the privatized healthcare system is so bad in America that when someone murdered healthcare insurance CEO, there was a significant portion of the population that cheered it on.
01:06:31
Speaker
Like, that's how bad it that's how bad it is here. And then you look at, like, the rest of Europe where, like, you don't really hear a lot about socialized medicine. you just You kind of assume it's just sort of, like, working well, which I think in i think in very small countries, like,
01:06:46
Speaker
The Nordic countries, which only have populations of like four to six million, like it is working fairly well. And then you have the UK, which like does have a big population, um huge, like compared to those countries, um where obviously socialized medicine is going to be more difficult to achieve well. And then you look at like people in the UK, i could imagine, look at the situation in America, which is like very bad. And they're just like, they want to at all costs kind of protect the system that like they have, even though of course a country of whatever you guys are, like 70 million or something is going to have...
01:07:23
Speaker
you know, bigger issues than a country of 6 million. Yeah. I think it's one of those things, like, because people are always complaining that, like, the NHS is, like, underfunded, but it's not. It's the, like, funding for the and NHS has increased with, like, every, like, every sort of progressive, like, government over the last sort of like, 15, 20 years. Like,
01:07:46
Speaker
we're spending huge amounts of money on it, but like things are just not getting any better because that money's not being managed properly. And I don't know, I'm not like a fucking ah genius in terms of like, how do we fix like the problems that we're having? But like,
01:08:04
Speaker
there has to be some kind of alternative to like the American healthcare hellscape and the the one that we're of could currently dealing with. And I don't really know what that is, but um but we should at least be able to have conversations about that. And I think that the fact that we can't have open conversations like that is like one of the reasons why you end up with situations like this where people are being...
01:08:27
Speaker
um unfairly sort of scapegoated, whether knowingly or not. so Of course. and I mean, like mayor you know conservative American politicians always point to like problems with the and NHS as reasons why like we would never want to go in that direction. So there's there's just a lot going on where I could see why something like this kind of like ends up being like the center of um kind of a lot of different anxieties. But...
01:08:55
Speaker
I mean, from an American's perspective, and we have, I think you guys, I know your legal system's a little different than ours, but from an American perspective where it's like beyond a reasonable doubt, there's no way that they could ever prove this woman um committed these murders beyond a reasonable doubt. So there's um there's no way she could she should be in prison. No, i do like i do kind of...
Retrial Possibility & Podcasting Challenges
01:09:20
Speaker
just before we finish, want to finish on like a slightly like optimistic note, which is like in February of this year, lawyers submitted 31 expert reports, um, from 26 international specialists to the CCRC. So the CCRC, they're the people who will decide whether it goes to the court of appeals and she'll get like a retrial. Um,
01:09:44
Speaker
She's obviously currently serving time in prison, but that that CCRC review is ongoing. And a lot of the stuff that I've mentioned in this podcast and more has gone into those reports that have been sent to the CCRC. So I do...
01:09:59
Speaker
I do feel optimistic that there could be a situation where this goes to a retrial and like all of the charges are dropped. Or it might not even go to retrial. They they might decide that their convictions were unsafe and like drop all of the charges and she gets loud. and so So yeah, it's not it's not a completely hopeless scenario.
01:10:21
Speaker
um I do want to mention as well, like um so usually when I spoke to you a little bit about this yesterday, but I found it really interesting. like When I'm like preparing for these podcasts, um I tend to like write all of my notes into like a Word document and then I'll like give it to ChatGPT and be like, can you organize this into like st structured show notes so I have something to refer back to. And ChatGPT was just like, I'm not doing this for you. I don't want to touch this with a barge pole. And I just, i found it so interesting that they had no problem helping me with like ah my Harvey Weinstein is innocent episode, but Lucy Letby is innocent was like a step too far. It was crazy. Yeah. I wonder if that has something to do with maybe like specific UK laws, like you said. Yeah. I don't know. do you feel like UK has like, you guys have very intense like libel laws and stuff.
01:11:11
Speaker
So. Yeah. i'm I could probably get sued for like a million of the things that I've said in this episode, but I don't think anyone in porn is listening. So yeah not but I was going to say on that note, I think we can end it there. So thank you for listening.
01:11:27
Speaker
Bye, Twinkies.