The science and statistics around Letby’s case are brilliantly unpacked by this considered programme. By its end, you are filled with questions
W
hen three times more babies than expected die on a neonatal ward and one nurse is on duty during those deaths, it’s got to be pretty much an open-and-shut case, hasn’t it? Especially when breathing tubes have been clearly deliberately dislodged by someone from their tiny bodies and blood tests show spikes in insulin that can only be explained by the stuff being injected. And if you find someone who has written notes to herself about her guilt, then the way forward is clear. Lock the perpetrator up. Throw away the key.
Such was the initial and still persisting narrative in the case of Lucy Letby, the neonatal nurse at the Countess of Chester hospital in Cheshire who became, in tabloid parlance, “Britain’s worst child serial killer”, when she was convicted in 2023 of seven murders and seven attempted murders of the infants in her care.
Since then, there has been growing disquiet about the quality of the evidence against her and the reliability of her conviction. Lucy Letby: Beyond Reasonable Doubt sets itself the formidable task of forcing passion and sentiment aside and unpacking the science and statistics around the most contended pieces of evidence so that, perhaps, facts – buried, missed, distorted or otherwise – can be examined by a newly informed mass audience.
