Weighing up the facts. Getty.
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 Derived from unpublished notes taken by a police officer at the time, it shows that, when Evans first detailed his findings to senior detectives from Cheshire Police and National Crime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.
Most of us aren’t obsessing over it Tom. It is only the wretched BBC that is obsessing over it in their vicious and demented desire to discredit the government in any way they can.
I agree that as usual, journalists are being unhelpful. But there is nothing wrong with a stretch target, a very common and normal business tactic. Whether you get there or not, it makes the workforce try hard..
I agree with the sentiment behind the points made in this article but politicians and governments should be held to account when they make pledges of any kind.
Even in the case of the arbitrary 100,000 number, Hancock pledged that this would be the number of tests carried out daily by now, and has since changed his statement and spoken in terms of capacity. He offers no rationale for the change of phrasing and thus should be pressed to provide one.
Although this particular case of moving the goalposts is ultimately irrelevant in real terms, the principle of politicians promising things only to go back on them at later date without acknowledging that they have done so, is a habit that needs to be booted out of politics.
The minute journalists cease to press politicians to explain their u-turns or subtle rephrasing of explicit pledges, we encourage the cycle of dishonesty and ambiguity, and hand more power from the people over to the politicians.
The Government has been very clear, the target is for tests carried out, not for testing capacity.
That’s what they initially said, yes. Then in the last week of April, Hancock et al switched and started talking in terms of capacity rather than tests carried out. They moved the goalposts without explanation or acknowledgement. Not very clear at all…
And today (1st May) we find out that the government is claiming to have met (and exceeded) its target. However, when looking at the numbers, “people tested” falls well below the 100k threshold. They topped up the numbers with “number of tests sent out to people”. Even if we take your comment as correct (which it isn’t), they have still fudged the numbers without explanation or acknowledgement. It’s shady, dishonest, and should be queried.
Absolutely 100% agree. It has just become another foil for bloviating TV and Radio 4 pundits to gibber about.
The German testing success, which the media and government keep referring to has nothing to do with testing. On Marr on Sunday the next German Ambassador to the UK (Andreas Michaelis) distanced himself from the assertion. How can it have? The best guesstimate for the number of Germasn having had the virus is 7.5 – 10 million. Their test program has found 160,000, That represents circa 2% of the cases that are beleived to have occurred. What difference does that make? The German success is the death rate not the case rate. They must have wrapped up their old and vulnerable exceptionally well. We need to ask them how they did it.
Hancock set himself up to fail, he panicked pulled out a figure to satisfy press scrutiny and then crossed his fingers that it could be done, it wasn’t a goal it was a wish.Clearly he’s never been in business, if he had been he would have known that this situation was crying out for the classic under promise over deliver. As a result Hancock, I am afraid, is serving on borrowed time.
I hope so. Another chancer in a cohort of charlatans.
Tom Chivers identified the system which the TV Leftwing political hacks used to try to get a GOTCHA over a Tory government minister. This was just a political ploy to rubbish the government.
The trap the Luvies failed to see: Criticism of the governments efforts over their COVID-19 campaign have now brought calls for a review, which will bring the beloved NHS into the spotlight. NHS Quangoes may not be able to dodge.
But he did not fail. He smashed his target. Obviously he had to pull a number of stokes to do it, but it was important to show the immense challenges could be overcome and thereby give confidence that the even bigger challenge which is to get out of this mess and get our economy back in some semblance of order can also be met.
Hear hear
A program to avoid
Don’t you mean progrom? Or have you resorted to American spelling as a means of stressing your Celtic identity?
All pogroms should be avoided. They’re beyond the Pale of Settlement.
Having bee sexually active since the early 1970s, I believe I have the experience to state that sex between brain-functioning men and women need not be continually punctuated by requests for permission, apologies, self-doubt, etc. A truly “normal” person can sense how far to go, what to do or not to do, and just enjoy him or herself and get on with it.
It was certainly foolish of Hancock to pluck an arbitrary figure out of the air and then commit to reaching it by a specific date. However, Tom, I can tell you that, now it looks like – amazingly – the target might be met, the media have already stopped obsessing about it and changed the goalposts.
See the BBC website yesterday: “Is who we test more important than how many?”
But .. an independent review of a global pandemic is impossible, unless Star Trek is real and you have some Vulcans handy
Meantime, here is an alternative point of view. It makes for difficult reading, but an uncomfortable amount of it rings true: https://medium.com/@indica/…
“Judge Wilson believes that if a living thing is not a person, then one has the right to end its life. She also believes that a foetus is a person. Therefore, Judge Wilson concludes that no one has the right to end the life of a foetus.” This is the logically unsound argument (I think).
If I’m right then an initial reaction might be to pat myself on the back and tell myself how rational and logical my thinking is. I would, however, also do well to notice that the focus of that particular syllogism (i.e. abortion) is a topic that I am uncertain of and have yet to formulate a strong opinion about…
Following the idea that partisanship blinds in the face of confirmation, my indecisiveness and non-partisanship on the topic of abortion meant that the syllogism stuck out to me like a sore thumb as logically unsound, whereas this may not have been so glaring if I was strictly “pro-life” or “pro-choice”. In other words, my opinion that “I don’t yet have a firm opinion on the topic of abortion” may have meant that syllogism stuck out to me immediately as logically unsound because it does contain “firm opinions” on the topic of abortion – effectively the opposing stance to mine.
Or I’m over-thinking things and it’s simply just the one that is logically unsound and not actually that difficult to spot in any case. But at least I was right…
Unfortunately the government and the various supporting quangos have shown themselves to be repeatedly wrong and easy targets. The testing is just one area, the others insufficient and inadequate PPE, ventilators, beds, general preparedness when they have even run scenario exercises, centralisation, logistics (only worked with support from the military). The bloated ineffective quangos such as PHE who nobody is tackling. They should thank themselves lucky the news system is not more thorough.
This comments system is glitching, replacing about half a dozen comments with just one.
Great opinion piece from Sarah. On a minor point, “recherche theories” might be better written as “recherché theories”. The English language gets along quite well without any diacritical marks for homegrown words, and there is a temptation to omit them all from all words borrowed from foreign borrowings as well. In Canada, my country, where French is an official language, one is more likely to see the diacritical marks included, but usage varies in English-language publications, so one will find, for example, both Rivière-du-Loup (it means “Wolf River”) and Riviere-du-Loup being used for the city in Eastern Quebec, but no Anglophone would ever pronounce “Riviere” with two syllables instead of three. The word “recherché” poses a particular problem, because unlike “rivière”, the unaccented word is a noun with a meaning, “research” or “search”, quite different from the adjective, “exotic” or “pretentious”. It would seem to me that hear the danger may be, not so much that the use of the diacritical mark may be seen as an affectation by an anglophone reader as its omission may be misleading to a francophone reader with imperfect grasp of English, who might misleadingly think that the idea that girls’ eyes are specially adapted to spotting berries is one of the most carefully researched theories of sexual differences, which is not what Sarah is saying. I presume Sarah is already reaching an international audience; I am reading her after all. To my mind, even if the diacritical mark is generally omitted, it should always be included where the omission implies a difference in meaning, and therefore a chance of misunderstanding. Incidentally, the great Henry Fowler, who was opposed to the pretentious use of French in English, seemed to have no objection to diacritics as such, and lists “recherché” as a French word in common use in his “Modern English Usage”.
To eradicate the virus we’ll need the capability to test millions a day and get more or less instant results. I’d like to see journo’s sticking that on the table and challenging the government to say it’s unnecessary or unachievable.
Yawn. UnHerd is losing it with this sort of sub-women”s page filler (which is sexist in itself). More generally, UnHerd seems to have moved to too much in quantity, too little in quality. Time to get back to the basics that made it so refreshing as a start-up.
Developers looking to buy up hotel blocks at quiet spots in the UK e.g. Heathrow.
“
What sort of sexist are you?
The superficial niceness of benevolent sexism allows boys to hang onto it more easily”
Isn’t your headline sexist?
Well said, Peter. I hope all the people who read Giles Fraser’s condescending column, “What Peterson Shares with Pelagius” read yours, which almost appears to be written as a rebuttal.
I didn’t know anything about Claire Lehmann before I read this, so I watched an interview of her with John Anderson, and she is simply marvelous. Thank you so much, Peter, for getting me interested in her work. The “intellectual dark web” sounds like something Doctor Strange will have to defeat if there is a movie sequel, and it is just some NYT journo’s pejorative term for a gaggle of conservative thinkers who can be found on the internet. It shows how the woke left seeks to demonize conservatives rather than to understand them. By the way, Peter makes no mention of Debra Soh, the brilliant Ontario sex researcher who is an ally of Jordan Peterson, although she is mentioned as a member of the intellectual dark web in the NYT article. Peter may have inadvertently given the impression that the so-called IDW intellectuals are all Caucasian, or even worse, that one must be a Caucasian to be a member of the club. That’s not the case.