Why the Letby case isn’t closed Damning new evidence has emerged

Dewi Evans isn’t shy about his role in the conviction of Lucy Letby. After offering his services to the police in May 2017, the retired paediatrician claims it took him 10 minutes to work out that murder had taken place at the Countess of Chester Hospital. The rest, as they say, is history. It was Evans’s analysis that led to a damning chart being shown at Letby’s 10-month trial three years ago, supposedly demonstrating that she had been present whenever a baby died or collapsed in suspicious circumstances at the hospital’s neonatal unit between June 2015 and June 2016.

But did the chart tell the whole story?

Today, I can reveal evidence that casts fresh doubt. Derived from unpublished notes taken by a police officer at the time, it shows that, when Evans first detailed his findings to senior detectives from Cheshire Police and National Crime Agency experts over two days in October 2017, a number of his conclusions were strikingly different from those presented in court. And yet, the jury was never told about them.

Some of the discrepancies were relatively minor. For example, during Letby’s trial, the court was told by one of her colleagues that the health of a victim known as “Baby K” began to deteriorate after Letby deliberately dislodged her breathing tube. Reviewing the evidence in 2017, however, Evans originally told the police he believed Baby K died from natural causes and had “no suspicions” about the case. She had been born prematurely and simply “deteriorated”. In an earlier email to police, he pointed out that the health of such infants was often “unstable”. Letby was convicted of attempting to murder Baby K after a retrial last year, after the first jury could not reach a verdict on her case.

Other discrepancies contained within the official notes, written by Detective Sergeant Janet Moore, are more serious. In fact, according to Evans’s initial analysis, and as the below chart illustrates, Letby was not in the hospital when 10 of the 28 incidents he described as “suspicious” took place — more than a third of them. In other words, if Evans’s initial analysis suggested there had been multiple murders, Letby could not have committed all of them.

The inconsistencies began with the very first case — that of “Baby A”, who died on 8 June 2015, supposedly from having air injected into his stomach. The jury convicted Letby of murdering him after hearing that, after being born nine weeks premature, his condition deteriorated after Letby came on shift at 7.30pm. According to Moore’s meeting notes, however, Evans regarded the entire period after 5pm as “relevant” — i.e. the baby could have started to deteriorate before Letby arrived.

Another case Evans thought “suspicious” was that of Baby A’s twin, “Baby B”. The trial was told she collapsed and almost died at about 12.30am on 10 June, when Letby was on duty, and the nurse was later convicted of attempted murder. But when Evans met the police in 2017, he suggested the child had been subjected to a further attack on 19 June, when at 10.50pm she was either injected with “intravenous air” or smothered by a “hand over [her] face”. Evans said the police should focus their inquiries on the period that started at 9.30pm. However, nothing was said about this second incident at Letby’s trial, probably because she clocked off that day at 8pm.

The next child Letby was convicted of murdering was “Baby C”. It is already known that Evans altered his account of his death at the trial. He had claimed in a report written a few weeks before the trial started that x-ray evidence demonstrated that Baby C had been fatally injured on 12 June, 2015, when air was injected into his stomach via a nasogastric tube.

However, by the time Evans gave evidence, it had emerged that Letby had not been at work on 12 June — prompting him to change his story, and claim she must have administered the fatal injection the following day. Cross-examining Evans, Letby’s barrister, Ben Myers KC, accused him of massaging his evidence to avoid inconvenient truths. Evans said he “disagreed”, and it seems the jury believed him.

Yet concealed altogether from the trial was Evans’s account to police in October 2017. Then, Moore’s notes say, he thought the critical event was the discovery at 7am on 12 June that Baby C’s “UV line” — an umbilical catheter used to administer fluids and medicine to sick newborn babies — had “come out”. “Can this be explained?” Evans asked. “If the UV line being out is suspicious, then death is suspicious.” Again, there was no mention of the fact that Letby was not on duty on 12 June. In fact, she had not been at work at all since the baby’s birth on 10 June.

It’s a similar story with the case of “Baby I” who, according to Evans at the trial, Letby murdered by injecting air into her bloodstream on 22 October 2015. But in 2017, he told the police about an earlier “suspicious” incident, when Baby I went into respiratory arrest at 10pm on 30 September and began to struggle to breathe. Her abdomen was “distended”, Evans said in his initial report to police, suggesting she had been attacked with “air into stomach”, which might have been injected through her “milk line”. The jury did hear that her condition worsened that night, but no evidence that this was Letby’s fault. After all, her roster record makes clear she was not at work that night.

And then there’s the death of Baby O — the case that persuaded Evans that there was a murderer at the Countess of Chester within 10 minutes of starting to review the hospital’s medical records he was shown by police. At the trial, the jury was told Baby O had been “stable” until the afternoon of 23 June 2016, when he suffered a “remarkable deterioration”. But when Evans met the police in 2017, he said there were already “problems before collapse”, and that by 5am, his heart rate was “climbing” — a sure sign he was not in good health. This was, he concluded, “suspicious”, and what had happened “overnight 22–23 [June]” was “relevant”.

He may well have been correct. But on the night in question, Letby was not at work. Indeed, last month, MP David Davis revealed in Parliament that an assessment of Baby O’s medical notes by two eminent neonatal consultants had found that the “impact injury” to her liver that triggered severe internal bleeding was inflicted not by Letby but by a consultant paediatrician, who inadvertently stabbed the organ with a needle. The same doctor, Davis said, went on to become one of Letby’s principal accusers, and gave evidence at her trial.

Suffice it to say that none of this featured during Letby’s trial — though other doubts about Evans did surface. It emerged, for instance, that the Court of Appeal’s Lord Justice Jackson had taken the extraordinary step of writing to the trial judge, Mr Justice Goss, detailing how a report drawn up by Evans in an unrelated family case had been dismissed as “worthless”. Evans, he claimed, had breached his duty as an expert by deciding on the outcome he wanted, then “working out an explanation” to achieve it. “Of greatest concern”, Jackson wrote, “Dr Evans makes no effort to provide a balanced opinion,” suggesting this might amount to “a breach of proper professional conduct”.

This warning was not taken lightly. I have seen a further unpublished document that suggests that Jackson’s email to the judge produced alarm in the prosecution camp. It shows that on 9 January 2023, Crown Prosecution Service lawyers held a meeting with Evans in which they posed scripted questions about Jackson’s criticisms. He appeared untroubled, saying: “I stand by my report.”

Next week, a panel of international experts is set to offer further challenges to the prosecution case, and is expected to produce a report based on close analysis of the babies’ records, saying Letby’s “victims” were not deliberately harmed or murdered. Meanwhile, the Court of Appeal has refused her permission to appeal her convictions and found that there could have been “no arguable basis” for excluding the evidence given by Evans from the trial.

As for Evans, in October last year, he submitted yet another report on the babies’ deaths to Cheshire Police — which has, thus far, refused to disclose it to Letby’s new lawyer, Mark McDonald, who is fighting to get the case reopened. Beyond this, Evans is reluctant to be drawn on his initial report. When I put detailed, written questions about the issues raised in this article to Evans, he declined to respond, saying only: “I decided, as of mid-December last year, to make no comment pending the completion of Lady Thirlwall’s [public] Inquiry (summing up in March I understand) and Cheshire Police completing their investigation.”

I also put detailed questions to the Cheshire police but they also declined to answer them. Their spokesperson said the force was still investigating deaths at the Countess of Chester Hospital and at a hospital in Liverpool, adding: “Cheshire Constabulary has declined to be involved in much of the ongoing commentary within the media… There is a significant public interest in the reporting of these matters, however, every story that is published, statement made, or comment posted online that refers to the specific details of a live investigation can impede the course of justice and cause further distress to the families concerned. It is these families and the ongoing investigations that remain our primary focus.”

The late Appeal Court judge Lord Denning once commented that if it were true that the Birmingham Six, the men convicted of killing 21 people by bombing pubs in 1974, were innocent, this would constitute a “an appalling vista” that he found impossible to contemplate. In 1991, fresh evidence made it clear that they were victims of one of the worst miscarriages of justice in English legal history, and they all walked free.

In the wake of her convictions, Letby, like the Six, was portrayed as an evil monster, a woman who fully deserved to rot in prison for the rest of her life. What an appalling vista if she were revealed to be a victim, not a perpetrator.

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