Why the Lucy Letby conspiracy theorists are wrong: The New Yorker article that stoked toxic theories contains errors and cherry-picks evidence, writes LIZ HULL - who watched every hour of her trial

The corridors of Manchester Crown Court are a pretty unremarkable place. Sometimes there's the odd commotion — an angry defendant or tearful relative unhappy at the punishment handed down — but in the main they are quiet areas through which barristers, solicitors and police officers pass on their way to the next case.

However, on the morning of June 10 this year — the first day of Lucy Letby's retrial — the corridor outside court seven was anything but. In a scene more akin to a gaggle of fans at a theatre stage door, around 30 people crowded outside the courtroom, jostling for a seat.

Their aim? To catch a glimpse of the newest 'celebrity' criminal — Britain's most prolific child killer, who was appearing in public for the first time since being convicted of murdering and harming 13 babies last year.

A few, there's no doubt, were ghouls. People there just to see the 34-year-old former neo-natal nurse, who has been found guilty of some of the worst crimes in modern British history, in person for themselves. The majority, however, were present because they shared the same astonishing belief: that Letby is innocent, the victim of an NHS stitch up.

Many have even taken to wearing yellow butterfly badges in her honour — similar to the butterfly on the name badge Letby wore on her nurse's scrubs.

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Incredibly, I discovered that several are retired or ex-NHS nurses — including one who worked at the same hospital as Letby for 40 years before retiring.

Although notably absent during Letby's original ten-month trial, these now devoted 'supporters' have decided the jury got it wrong when the guilty verdicts were handed down last August.

They announced in online forums that the pretty, blonde-haired nurse, who was the face of the Countess of Chester Hospital's Babygrow fundraising appeal, simply couldn't be to blame for poisoning helpless babies with insulin, overfeeding them milk, inflicting painful deaths by injecting them with air to cause an embolism, or ramming medical instruments into their mouths and assaulting them.

Letby must have been the victim of a witch hunt, they concluded. A convenient scapegoat for a failing unit, where it was easier for senior doctors to blame a junior colleague than admit babies were dying on their watch.

The science surrounding air embolism and insulin testing which helped convict her was also flawed, they claimed, or, most laughable, that her defence team was poor and had let her down.

On Tuesday Letby received another guilty verdict following a three-week retrial — this time for attempting to murder a very premature baby girl, known as Baby K, and sentenced to another whole-life term.

This case centred on whether the jury believed the evidence of Dr Ravi Jayaram, the hospital's senior paediatrician, who told them he caught Letby 'virtually red-handed' after she dislodged the infant's breathing tube.

In the event, though, yet another guilty verdict this week did little to sway Letby's eccentric band of followers. 'This sick, disgusting, loathsome British justice system has delivered again,' said one.

A case like Letby's, where much of the evidence was circumstantial — remember nobody saw her injecting the babies (or if they did, had no reason to suspect she was doing so to cause them harm) — was always going to be difficult to prove.

As I've written before, at first I too was unconvinced. I didn't want to believe the young blue-eyed nurse, who worked at the hospital where my own children were born a few years earlier, was responsible for such heinous crimes.

But as the months rolled on, and I sat in the courtroom for almost every day of the first trial, it became clear that Letby's presence on the neo-natal ward when babies collapsed or died was no coincidence.

Today, though, she has this diverse band of fanatics and pseudo-scientists in her corner, who appear to come from all walks of society: well-to-do pensioners, middle-aged women, and the unemployed.

As well as turning up in court, they haunt corners of the internet, making impassioned arguments for her innocence.

Indeed, in all the cases I've covered in my 25-year career, I've never come across one which has attracted so much interest from conspiracy theorists, who spend hours debating her case online.

Their comments are often laden with vitriol against the 'mainstream media' and personal attacks on professional journalists like myself.

The first clue some of them were prepared to emerge from the shadows and show public support came during Letby's appeal hearing in April. Messages posted on Facebook suggested a protest was being organised for outside London's Royal Courts of Justice.

In the end, it was a damp squib. Five protesters turned up outside the Court of Appeal, with two banners declaring: 'Justice for Lucy Letby'. However it seems the prospect of her physical presence in the dock — delivered every day from her cell at New Hall prison, in Wakefield, where she'd been moved in preparation for the retrial — was enough to attract a bigger circus.

Of them, only Janet Cox, 58, the polite and bespectacled former nursery nurse who worked at the neo-natal unit at the Countess of Chester, and who attended both trials almost every day, knows Letby personally.

She remains in touch with Letby's parents, John, 78, and Sue, 64, who are understood to be reluctant to speak publicly in their daughter's defence.

Mrs Cox regularly writes to Letby and has visited her in prison. She describes her former colleague as a 'private person' who would never court such support.

She also told me she initially felt panicked by this sudden influx of new spectators — although admitted taking heart that people 'out there' believed her friend wasn't a killer.

So devoted are these followers that they're happy to give up their time, spending their own money travelling to court from all over the country.

One, a bespectacled elderly gentleman in smart cords and a plaid shirt, told me he'd come from London and was staying overnight to watch the case this week.

Describing himself as 'an interested member of the public, who wanted to know more details about the case,' he said his interest was piqued when he saw a documentary in which one of Letby's school friends said she supported her.

'Do you believe she's innocent then?' I asked.

'Only Letby and God will ever know that,' the retired IT worker replied.

He, like many spectators, made copious notes during the hearings.

Pat, a 71-year-old woman from Newcastle, said she was spending her weekly pension on the 150-mile journey to Manchester from her home in the North East every day.

Others, such as a 51-year-old father-of-two involved in a long running grievance with Cheshire police, have their own agendas. Although unemployed, he said he was happy to spend £50 a week travelling from his home in Warrington to observe the case. 'Cheshire police are corrupt, they fabricated and doctored evidence in my case and are maliciously prosecuting Lucy Letby,' he said.

'I'm not really interested in her case per se, I just wanted to see if the cops were doing the same with her as they've done with me, and they have.'

Some who came to the trial also 'reported' on the case on X or Facebook. The presence of these 'citizen' journalists prompted the court clerk to warn people it is an offence to record any part of a hearing in courts in England and Wales.

One man in his 60s wearing a bodywarmer was searched for recording devices while others risked jail by posting information on legal arguments online, in breach of strict contempt of court rules.

Now, worryingly, there appear to be signs that, as with so many internet conspiracies, people you might expect to know better are being drawn in.

Indeed the Letby devotees have been recently emboldened by a 13,000-word-long article published in The New Yorker magazine shortly before the re-trial began, which raised the notion she had been wrongly convicted.

The piece — available in copies of the magazine sold in WH Smith — was blocked from being read online in the UK and was reported to the Attorney General for potentially breaching contempt laws which banned UK media from writing about the case ahead of the re-trial.

There's nothing sinister about this, as the conspiracy theorists would have us believe, rather it was intended to ensure Letby received as fair a trial as possible with a new jury.

I've read the article and now the retrial is over I can write about it. And while there's no doubting the author, who says she obtained full transcripts of the ten-month trial at huge cost, has researched the case thoroughly, it contains errors and cherry-picks evidence, omitting large parts of the prosecution case which was pivotal in reaching a conviction.

For example, it makes no mention of the 250 confidential 'trophy' handover notes, blood test results and resuscitation notes relating to the babies police found at Letby's home; it does not try to explain the Facebook searches that she made for the parents of her victims, years after she harmed their children.

Letby's abnormal, animated behaviour in front of grieving parents after a baby died and pictures of cards she sent or received from parents of babies she murdered that were stored on her mobile phone, are also ignored, as is her obsession with a married doctor and her deliberate editing of nursing notes to make it seem like a baby was on the verge of collapse to cover her tracks.

Regardless, the article had Letby's supporters rubbing their hands with glee.

With open credence given to their conspiracies by a 'proper' publication, they claim that frankly outlandish theories hinted at in the article — from the babies' deaths being somehow linked to a nurse having a heavy cold to mysterious 'infections' spreading like a plague-miasma from the hospital's plumbing — should be looked at again.

Chief among the conspiracy theorists are members of the 'butterfly' gang, half a dozen or so middle-aged women who wear their yellow badges with pride.

One nurse — who didn't know Letby and didn't want to be named for fear of reprisals — told me she'd attended five days of the re-trial, and that the butterfly group counted scientists, neo-natal nurses, doctors and statisticians among their members.

As our conversation progressed, it became clear she had swallowed those outlandish theories at least in part, talking about poor drains in the neo-natal unit and 'undetectable' bacteria from sewage infecting the babies causing sepsis being the real reason for their deaths and collapses. 

She also speculated that consultants had been out to get Letby, as suggested by her defence, after they were forced to apologise to the nurse when she won a formal grievance process, lodged after she was removed from working in the summer of 2016.

NHS austerity, too, was cited by the nurse.

'From the day Lucy was arrested it's been plainly obvious to me she was being used as a scapegoat to disguise poor practice due to underfunding,' she claimed, before saying she had no faith in the justice system or the upcoming inquiry, which will examine how Letby was able to kill in an NHS hospital and is due to start in September.

'Lucy's case should never have been tried in this way, the medical evidence was so complex she could never have got a fair trial with a prosecution, defence and jury that had no medical background.

Another former NHS nurse — a grey-haired woman calling herself Sue, who visited the court ten times and now works in a private hospital, insisted only those who worked in the medical profession could judge Letby.

'Many of us believe the British justice system has got it wrong,' she said. 'The lawyers don't get how busy a nurse's job is.'

One struggles to imagine how bereaved parents, whose children were murdered, will feel reading comments like these.

Indeed, at the first hearing of the Thirlwall Inquiry in May, barristers representing those parents said the 'proliferation of conspiracy theories' relating to Letby's crimes were 'grossly offensive and distressing'.

Describing the theories as 'toxic' Richard Baker KC said: 'The more light that we put on this Inquiry, the less space there is for speculation and conspiracy.'

For now, these misguided supporters are placing their hopes on Letby's defence team unearthing new evidence so her case can be examined by the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

Without this, she will spend the rest of her life in jail — a prospect they simply refuse to accept.

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