If she didn't do it...

How will reporters and columnists reflect on their words if it turns out Lucy Letby is innocent?

Previously: The greatest trick… [August 20, 2023]

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Dr Shoo Lee, the retired Canadian neonatologist whose 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolisms in newborns was used as a key piece of prosecution evidence in the trial of Lucy Letby, told a press conference today that the former nurse was not responsible for murder. Presenting the findings of a “blue riband committee” of experts, he went on to say that all the deaths for which she was blamed were “due to natural causes or just bad medical care”. Letby is currently serving 15 life orders after being found guilty of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder eight more.

The group’s full report — which was produced by having two experts independently review each case before submitting their findings to the chairman for comparison — will be presented to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which examines potential miscarriages of justice, by the end of this month.

At the press conference, Dr Shoo Lee put forward a series of alleged failings by the Countess of Chester Hospital, where Letby worked. It painted a picture of institutional neglect rather than the murderous intentions of an individual. He claimed there was a lack of trust between healthcare professionals at the hospital, a shortage of properly qualified personnel, inadequate training for nurses, and evidence of poor skills in basic medical procedures. Lee told reporters that “if this was a hospital in Canada, it would be shut down. It would not be happening.”

Back in August 2023, when Letby was first convicted, reporters and columnists alike strained to find reasons for her crimes. As I wrote then, thousands upon thousands of words were dedicated to pondering how a “middle-class”, “well-educated”, “church-going”, Disney fan who was close to her parents and lived in a “suburban semi” could possibly be a killer. The implication was that killers should look like killers and that they shouldn’t really be white (most bluntly expressed by the Daily Mail dubbing her “the vanilla killer”).

If Letby is innocent, it won’t be because of how she looks but what she did and didn’t do. That sounds facile, but it needs saying when you read through the reactions published after her conviction. In The Daily Telegraph, Allison Pearson delivered a sermon on evil:

The post-religious, modern mind struggles with the concept of “evil”. Personalities are “damaged” by childhood “trauma”, criminal behaviour always has an explanation. Well, perhaps it doesn’t. Lucy Letby’s childhood as an adored, hard-working daughter – bit of a church-going goody two-shoes – living in the blameless pebble-dashed semi so many of us grew up in contains no clues. Colleagues found her a bit of a stickler, cold with a superiority complex, quick to criticise others for failing to meet her own high standards. But there is nothing there to suggest she would become Britain’s most prolific child serial killer.

Writing on the villain of Othello, Samuel Taylor Coleridge talked about Iago’s motiveless malignity. Iago has no motive, Coleridge suggests, he does evil because he is evil. A young woman returns from a girls’ holiday in Ibiza and, the very next day, goes into work and injects a baby with insulin, killing him. Evil really can be that banal.

Iago is fictional, but Letby may as well have been a character in the columnist’s eyes. Just look at these lines from the opening of that piece:

With her big, candid blue eyes, neat blonde ponytail and broad smile, Letby is exactly the kind of sweet, capable young nurse any exhausted new mother would be delighted to hand the baby to. Even the alliterative name (those two chiming L’s) has a kind of sing-song nursery quality. Lucies should be characters in children’s picture books (a Lucy came to tea in Mrs Tiggywinkle) not monsters.

From the complexities of a case that rested on reams of (now-contested) medical testimony, Pearson boiled everything down to fairytales. It was no longer a story of nursing in an extreme, high-pressure environment, but the simplicity of good and evil in a nursery rhyme. The woman had a “sing-song” name, after all.

That same focus on the alliterative qualities of Letby’s name also appeared in the conclusion of BBC Special Correspondent Judith Moritz’s article on attending the trial:

The smiling nurse with the sing-song name who went to salsa classes is now Britain's most prolific child murderer. Can anyone make sense of that? I know I can't.

Perhaps it wasn’t possible to make sense of it because it simply didn’t make sense and salsa classes had nothing to do with it.

There’s a passage in Moritz’s piece that reads very differently following the expert panel’s claims:

The prosecutor picked holes in her testimony, pointing out the differences between what she'd told the police after her arrest, and what she was saying in court. He found examples of her disagreeing with herself - highlighting evidence she had previously agreed and was now disputing.

"You're lying aren't you, Lucy Letby?" he'd ask her. "You enjoyed what was going on didn't you, Lucy Letby?"

"No," she'd answer, meekly. It was clear he was getting to her.

The defendant's delivery started to change. She became staccato and monosyllabic. Her voice level dropped to a whisper, and even though I was just a few metres away, it was becoming harder and harder to hear her.

And then, for the first time, Letby asked to stop.

[The prosecutor Nick Johnson KC] had been asking her about each baby in the order they appeared on the charge sheet. We were only four babies in - I remember wondering how on earth she was going to manage to get through the remaining 13.

The jury was asked to leave the room, and we were told Letby's welfare officer had visited her. The court finished early for the day and the prosecution team walked out looking jubilant.

They had her on the ropes.

If she didn’t do it, what looked in the light of her conviction as the moment the real Letby was revealed becomes simply a woman understandably struggling under the sustained pressure of an experienced barrister. In a later piece, published to coincide with Moritz’s Panorama episode on doubts around Letby’s conviction, she and her co-presenter Jonathan Coffey write:

Letby’s time in the witness box was revealing for those who were there. During her original trial, she spent 14 days being questioned. Several observers noted that she seemed aloof and indifferent. At times, she squirmed, and seemed to tie herself in knots. She claimed she could not remember things - like the death of a baby she had texted colleagues about, or searching repeatedly for the parents of dead babies online.

An accused person in a witness box becomes sort of like a human Rorschach test; what might be seen as normal behaviour from someone under significant stress can be reinterpreted as incontrovertible proof of guilt or innocence.

Another Daily Telegraph article, this time by ITV News Reporter Sangita Lal, summed up how that perception can change to fit the verdict:

[Letby] said “my job was my life” and I really believed her. In whatever way she meant that, I believed she was obsessed with her job and obsessed with some of these babies. But I just couldn’t match the crimes she was accused of with the person I was watching. She was so hard to read. She seemed so ordinary… 

… It was difficult for me to accept at that stage in the trial that this educated woman, who – before the allegations – had her whole life ahead of her, could do what the prosecution said she did.

… At the end of her defence, I knew I wasn’t looking at the caring, conscientious nurse that Letby claimed to be.

I knew I was looking at a murderer, who committed the worst of crimes against the most vulnerable children.

Lal, like many of the other reporters and columnists who wrote about the case, made sure to tell readers that she had spotted when Letby’s “calm facade slipped”.

If she didn’t do it, will those who wrote about what they saw in Letby’s behaviour go back to their words and reconsider them? As I’m sitting here writing this edition, I’m mulling over my response to that conviction, how I picked at the newspapers’ obsession with saying Letby didn’t look like a killer. But I stand by this line: “If you could spot a killer by looking, the homicide clear-up rates would be much better and the world would be much safer.”

If she didn’t do it, will the press shy away from evoking Manichaean rhetoric of good and evil or fairytale imagery of witches the next time a woman is sat in the dock accused of terrible crimes? I doubt it.

If she didn’t do it, there’ll be many more words but very few of them will be about the role the media itself played in the whole affair.

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