Lucy Letby documentary reveals first admission of ‘tiny’ doubt from doctors who accused her | Lucy Letby
Shortly after Lucy Letby was sentenced to 15 life sentences for murdering seven babies and attempting to kill seven more between June 2015 and June 2016 (a conviction that made her Britain’s worst-ever child serial killer), Cheshire police agreed to give “unique and exclusive access” to the producers of a Netflix film about the case.
The completed documentary The Investigation of Lucy Letby, which will be released on Wednesday, must be very different from what the filmmakers envisaged when they first started work on the project, given the unexpected turns in the story. Since the two trials, the prosecution’s evidence and the police’s handling of the case have faced criticism from an unprecedented number of eminent British and international medical experts. Dr. Canadian neonatologist, who said in the feature-length Netflix documentary that his research was misused to convict the nurse. Most experts, led by Shoo Lee, believe Letby is innocent, the victim of a catastrophic miscarriage of justice.
Their work was now pitted against experts trusted by Cheshire police and later the Crown Prosecution Service, and from an early stage retired paediatrician Dr. Directed by Dewi Evans.
In the film, Evans tells the now-familiar story of reading the Guardian report in May 2017 that Cheshire police had launched a criminal investigation into the deaths of babies at the Countess of Chester hospital in 2015 and 2016. Evans put this forward and emailed a police official, remarking with delight: “Sounds like a case like mine.”
The film leaves out the context necessary to understand how exceptional Evans’s theories about how babies die are. There had been a coroner’s process: hospital post-mortems, inquests and internal examinations; A review by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health; and reviews by outside consultants. None found any evidence of intentional harm to any babies. Evans looked at the same medical evidence and quickly came to a different conclusion.
There is no indication that officers returned to the original pathologists at that stage or sought further expert opinion on Evans’ new diagnoses. They were later supported by other prosecution experts. Det Supt Paul Hughes says in the film: “It was a sickening reality that this could have been the murder of a baby. The next question we had to answer was: by whom?”
As well as access, Cheshire police had promised the filmmakers “never-before-seen” footage, but as all evidence deemed important would be used in the trials, they could not withhold anything that would add anything material. So it turns out that most of this footage is extended scenes of the three times officers arrested Letby.
The use of these images has already been criticized for being intrusive and an invasion of privacy, including from Letby’s parents. Letby is shown bursting into tears for the first time in her own home; She was later arrested twice more at her parents’ home in Hereford, the first time she was found in bed in her dressing gown and at the next arrest she was found in an ashen nightgown, her teddy bear visible on a ledge next to her bed.
The evidence against him is now familiar, but it is still instructive to see the police lay it all out, including the shift chart that matches Evans’ 25 findings of “suspicious incidents” with Letby, a hard-working young nurse who often works the shift.
Little context is given to malicious comments, such as Letby keeping nurse handover charts or calling some babies’ parents on Facebook. The filmmakers pay more attention to the infamous private notes Letby wrote, such as “I’m evil, I did this” and “I killed them on purpose.” The CPS asked the jury to read it as a confession, but the notes were contradictory, painful and filled with objections of innocence. Letby also wrote: “I didn’t do anything wrong” and “I felt so alone and scared”.
Her lawyer, Mark McDonald, says, as first reported by Felicity Lawrence in the Guardian, that Letby wrote the personal notes in mental distress after being laid off from her job and during hospital-arranged counseling, where she was advised to write down her thoughts. Letby never confessed and in police interviews he is seen repeatedly denying the accusations and saying he loved his job.
Seeing the first felling logs on his vast wheat farm in Alberta, Lee flew to London for a landmark press conference in February 2025, ending the conference with the words: “Ladies and gentlemen, we did not find any foul play.”
His presentation included a reiteration of the expert panel’s findings that all the babies died of medical causes and a catalog of inadequate care. The film features an unnamed mother of a baby and talks about her terrible ordeal and pain. Lee said doctors did not give her antibiotics for hours after her waters broke, and the baby died of pneumonia and sepsis, as stated in the original autopsy report.
The mother admits the hospital failed her and her baby. But in response to Lee’s analysis, he adds: “Every doctor, nurse, specialist, they’ve all said it openly. [the baby] He was getting better. “He was getting better, he was getting stronger.”
Hughes expresses no doubt about the convictions and is not shown to agree with the expert criticism. The most notable statement came not from the police but from a Chester hospital consultant, Dr. It came from John Gibbs.
“I live with two feelings of guilt,” he says. “Guilt for letting the babies down, and a tiny, tiny, tiny guilt: Did we have the wrong person? You know, just in case: a miscarriage of justice. I don’t think it’s a miscarriage of justice, but you’re worried no one saw him do it.”
Although minor, this appears to be the first public admission by one of the doctors that he has doubts about what was going on since babies died on their unit and they went to Cheshire police to blame the nurse.
