Nowadays no high-profile serial killer is complete without their own deluded fan base. Even Britain’s most notorious baby murderer is no exception. 34-year-old Lucy Letby, an ex-neonatal nurse at the Countess of Chester Hospital was last year convicted of murdering seven infants and attempting the murder of seven others between June 2015 and June 2016. This summer she was retried for the attempted murder of one infant, of which she was found guilty. The renewed proceedings prompted nine-month-long reporting restrictions in the UK, lifted this July. 

In May the ranks of Letby defenders steadily began to swell after The New Yorker published a 13,000-word opinion piece — elements of which have since been retracted — which questioned some statistical elements of the trial. While this piece was penned during the UK media blackout, since the lifting of these restrictions, a flurry of pundits, including several former Cabinet Ministers, have adopted its misguided approach. 

Letby truthism is now a viral phenomenon, and anyone who dares suggest that she is guilty can expect a barrage of vitriol from her supporters. In the UK at least, the issue is fast becoming a proxy conflict for grievances about NHS shortcomings, and institutional degradation more broadly. Namely, there is a theory that Letby is the victim of a stitch-up by her colleagues to blame her for a spike in infant deaths, due to wider incompetence on the unit.

Questionable commentary on this case has not been limited to the American media. Take for instance, the Guardian’s 3rd September piece: “‘I am evil I did this’: Lucy Letby’s so-called confessions were written on advice of counsellors”. The counsellors in question were alleged to be the Countess’ own head of occupational health and wellbeing, Kathryn de Beger and Letby’s personal GP. This article has been seized on by the Letby truthers as (a) yet more evidence of her innocence and (b) “proof” she was stitched up by those around her. 

Yet Letby’s “confession” note, while making many headlines for its shocking content, took up a mere 7 minutes of court time across her 10-month 2023 trial. These disturbed scribbles, which included claims as contradictory to the neurotypical mind as “I haven’t done anything wrong” and “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them and I am a horrible evil person”, were not the crux of the prosecution’s case by any stretch of the imagination.

As the YouTuber Crime Scene 2 Courtroom (who was present for part of Letby’s 2023 trial) points out, there are more than 500 pages of police interviews with Letby. Almost 60 pages contain conversations in which the ex-nurse is quizzed over these disturbing notes. Not once throughout these interviews did she allege that her GP or de Beger suggested she write them, nevermind claiming they malignly influenced their content. Nor did she ever state this in court. While many of Letby’s supporters argue that she received a shoddy defence, having a subpar legal team would hardly explain her failure to mention this. It simply does not add up, perhaps because it did not happen. 

Anyhow, such complaints about her team are unjustified. Letby’s barrister, Ben Myers KC, has won scores of high-profile cases in his 30-year career, for which he has garnered numerous accolades. While Letby’s fans attempt to make mileage out of his decision to arrange just one expert witness for the defence, the only reason someone as skilled as Myers would do so is that anyone else would have likely risked damaging his client’s case. Letby’s team were not out of their depth, but failed simply because there was enough evidence to prove her guilt.

Letby truthers’ sweeping complaints about the justice system’s incompetence also sidestep the details. The main problems with the justice system are vast backlogs, court closures, legal aid shortages and some instances of incompetent solicitors and barristers. None of these are relevant to Letby’s case, nor would they explain a concerted conspiracy to frame her or prove jury incompetence in this instance.

Moreover, a GP or Therapist, even if they have asked someone to write down what they are feeling — apart from in cases of severe professional misconduct — would not force someone to write certain things down. Nor is this likely if these notes were written at one’s home, as was the case with Letby.

Conveniently, this Guardian story relies on so-called “unnamed sources close to the case” who have suddenly chosen to rear their heads months after Letby’s convictions. Who are they in relation to the case and how can their “revelations” be verified? Is this flimsy piece just another case of editors desperate to print far-fetched stories for the sake of chasing clicks?

Reporting on issues with sewage and a bacterial outbreak at the hospital has provoked similarly misguided apologias for Letby, despite the fact that the trial evidenced how the infant deaths were the result of deliberate attacks. The bacterial outbreak was not cited as the cause of death for any of the infants involved in the trial, nor was it mentioned by the prosecution or defence. None of the babies died from sepsis, nor were their collapses or recoveries consistent with infection

How does looking as if you were too inept to detect a serial killer improve your hospital’s image?

The implication of this and much of the pro-Letby commentary is that some of the hospital staff wanted to use her as a scapegoat for its wider failings. But why would they do this? How does looking as if you were too inept to detect a serial killer improve your hospital’s image? Indeed, that the NHS, including the hospital where Letby’s murders took place, has serious failings, hardly makes it less likely that something insidious could go undetected. Moreover, is it believable that the stressed medical staff — who the Letby truthers slam as inadequate — managed to pull off a calculated conspiracy to frame an innocent nurse to cover up spikes in baby deaths?

Indeed, if the “plan” was simply to blame Letby for any suspect deaths, why was she not charged over the deaths of multiple other babies that occurred when she was present? Moreover, the same truthers simultaneously complain that there was “zero evidence” to convict Letby. Either she was “framed”, or there was no evidence, but both cannot be true. 

There is plainly an effort by Letby’s supporters to home in on minor scraps of information and irrelevancies in a bid to “prove” her innocence, while completely ignoring the consistent coincidences and Letby’s bizarre behaviour, which ranged from being caught red-handed by a doctor as she stood over a desaturating baby, writing up erroneous medical notes to try and make babies appear more ill in order to cover her own tracks, altering time stamps, lying about her attire when she was arrested, and taking a photograph of a baby with its oxygen line and mask removed, telling parents it was “being cleaned”. In one instance, 3 babies unexpectedly died in the space of just a month — the usual annual total, with Letby being around during each death. When she was finally removed from the unit the death rate fell.

The Letby truthers also routinely ignore the extraordinarily grim evidence of the physical attacks on the murdered infants. Someone on the unit, it seems clear, was deliberately doing these things to murder these babies — and there was more than enough circumstantial evidence to prove that Letby was the person responsible.

Some of Letby’s backers may be enjoying the ego boost of being contrarian on such a sensitive issue. Do they earn a sense of superiority by presenting themselves as on a different wavelength to the rest of us brainless sheeple? Others will simply have been duped by sensationalist reporting — and perhaps by Letby’s wholesome image. Yet the ex-nurse’s outwardly inoffensive demeanour might well have been what allowed her crimes to go undetected for so long, and are not a reason to suspect her innocence.