AAfter the baby known as Baby C died, his mother made small handprints and prints on the pendants she wore around his neck. He comforted her by keeping her close, he told the court. But even that was taken away Lucy Letbythe nurse was condemned because the boy was caught in Britain’s worst serial killer: it was Letby who made the unwary mother of the prisoners.
She was one of several parents whose victim’s statements to the court were bitter and eventually cited in Jonathan Coffey and Judith Moritz’s painstakingly absorbing book. The mother of the triplets, two of whom died so soon after birth, had only one photograph of them together; he drove his father to death; the parents, whose now seven-year-old son Letby had tried to kill, was so scarred and distrustful that he wanted to have him domesticated so that he would never again be placed in the care of another.
However, it feels a little dissonant that these accounts appear over 200 pages into the book. Of course, the primary subject is the murderer and the controversy over his guilt, not the victim, and of course the author’s arguments are marked by stress. But there is something uncomfortable about opening with a breathless description of how it felt to watch the trial – how the reporters “missed the color and flew into the details”, how Letby “broke the fourth wall” when he testified, as if everything had been done. -for a Netflix drama – rather than how it feels to lose your child.
But that being so, Letby’s case has been treated from the start: as a drama, a show, a true crime-watching crowd (the Daily Mail has also turned its trial into a podcast). Like the police investigation last year for Nicola Bulley, or the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in 2007, it unleashed an army of amateur sleuths who thought they knew better than the jurors who sat through months of testimony.
But while this nurturing cottage industry is incredibly distressing for families, Facebook’s #justiceForlucy Legion isn’t the only one upset by the decision. Some leading clinicians not involved in the trial have expressed doubts about the newspaper and others about its safety conviction, while former colleagues at the Countess of Chester hospital remain divided. So it appears, the authors of this book. Moritz, who covered the trial for the BBC, proved his case for the prosecution; Coffey, who produced the documentary Panorama Moritz on it, has questions.
In some ways, who doesn’t? “Nice Lucy” seemed so blandly ordinary when she piled up her dirty clothes and toys on her bed: as criminologist professor David Wilson tells the authors, she doesn’t fit the usual profile of a killer on the health show. Maybe that doesn’t matter if the arguments are overwhelming. But no one redeemed her – although she was strangely seen working around the baby on at least two occasions – or established a motive for the murder. And while the pediatricians fought for the unit to seriously reduce the suspicions about it, they may have missed the valuable post-mortem information because no one had taken care of the immediate investigation of the infant deaths. Even now the infamous “I’M MADE OF EVIL” note that remains ambiguous on his blog. Confession, or a conscious nurse beating herself up for imaginary inconveniences after being taken away from her job?
But if she is not a typical murderer, then the events that follow are curiously immovable. The one who left the other staff insane does not seem like a typical nurse, nor does she behave like a typical victim of abortion justice. None of his family, and one old friend, speaks to Coffey and Moritz. The author of Letby’s most painful testimony was the one who interposed expert witnesses for his defense. (A big mystery of the trial was that, when his lawyers found the neonatologist incredulous, he didn’t ask to testify.) He doesn’t add anything, which makes the titular promise to reveal all the real Letby. more ambitious.
The book is commendably lay-friendly, but it is a detailed dissection of both the evidence given to the doctor in court, and the subsequent attacks on him from the outside. It also helpfully explains how police and prosecutors built the case against Letby following an unusual number of infant deaths at the unit between the summers of 2015 and 2016.
The authors tackle in detail the arguments of the supporters: the accusation was based on the statistical oddity of the spike in deaths more seriously, or that death seemed to follow this one nurse around (a mistake in how the case was constructed. their analysis suggests). What about the argument of the defense to show that these children, already weak in one care, perished under the pressure of unity? Unusually, Coffey and Maurice argue, these deaths are often wrapped up like stable babies suddenly rushing without explanation: if careless care was at fault, you’d think it could identify a significant mistake. Nor can staff shortages explain why tests on the three children indicated dangerously high levels of insulin, which cannot occur naturally, and were therefore injected. That shows in the witch’s work. (Although Letby’s supporters say that those tests are not considered reliable enough, they seem to be able to produce false negatives: if anything they can err in favor of poisoning.
However, the book does not shy away from the fact that the case against Letby remains annoyingly circumstantial and theoretical, boiling down to precise scientific judgments that have sometimes (including in the case of Baby C) changed over time. Aside from the insulin cases, the prosecution claimed that several of the babies were injured by air embolisms – essentially from someone injecting air into them – the authors note that Letby received a training course warning of the dangers of accidentally causing embolisms shortly before Baby A died. But the embolism theory is contested, and Coffey and Moritz admit the science often “feels like a fog.” In one case, where the original pathologist and the prosecuting pathologist disagreed on the cause of the child’s death, a third pathologist was asked by the authorities to review the notes and resolve the matter – but ended up disagreeing with both.
If qualified experts can honestly disagree, how is science authoritative? What does “beyond a reasonable doubt” mean in relying on what Coffey and Moritz call the constellation of evidence, which looks at superimposition taken together, but less so in parts? “The more one learns about Luci Letby,” they write, “the more difficult the matter is to understand.” It’s a frustrating admission in some ways – what happened to the great infamy? — but it has the ring of truth. Like the murder of GP Harold Shipman, who died without confession or explanation, Letby fascinates because he remains so elusive; a blank page on which anyone can write. Rigid as it is, I suspect this book will not be the last word.