The media circus around Lucy Letby, hopes for a new tram line, and a miserable weekend for Merseyside football
Your weekly roundup
Dear readers — A warm welcome to your Monday briefing, especially to those of you who’ve just joined following our big story from over the weekend.
In case you missed it: in speaking with more than 16 sources, investigative reporter Abi Whistance uncovered how National Museums Liverpool — the biggest cultural institution in the city — ignored allegations of sexual and domestic violence against its resident historian, Laurence Westgaph, prompting the organisation to launch an internal investigation.
“Brave and careful journalism,” one reader wrote in the comments. “Brilliant, honest, fearless, unbiased reporting, just like it should be,” another wrote. “MSM take note.”
The Post
Abi is currently taking an extremely well-deserved holiday, but in the meantime the Post team will be working tirelessly on the follow-up to her investigation. Are you a National Museums Liverpool member, or current or former staffer, with thoughts or information to share? Have you been personally affected by any of the subjects raised in Abi’s story? Please get in touch (and you can let us know if you’d prefer to remain anonymous): editor@livpost.co.uk.
Editor’s note: If you’re new here, here’s a quick overview of how we work. Every Monday, all 30,000+ of our subscribers receive a deep-dive look into a single news story (today’s edition is dedicated to the media circus around the Lucy Letby case – can it help or hurt?), plus other news updates from around Merseyside, as well as our recommendations for great things to do around town. During the week, The Post’s paid subscribers receive two exclusive stories (one that’s paywalled, and another that’s sent directly to the paid list), before the big, typically free-to-all weekend read.
Our newsroom doesn’t run on tons of junky pop-up ads or funding from tech billionaires; we rely on a reader-supported model. And we are so deeply thankful to all of our paid subscribers, old and new, for directly funding the kinds of investigations that hold power to account in our city – as well as fantastic culture essays, political analysis, profiles of fascinating Liverpudlians, and much more.
We’re now less than 150 paid subscribers away from hitting a huge milestone: 2,000 supporters. Want to help us get over the line and make sure that Merseyside can rely on quality, in-depth journalism for many years to come? Just hit that button below.
Big story: The battlefield over Lucy Letby’s guilt is now playing out in the press
Top line: A panel of international medical experts has cast fresh doubt on child murderer Lucy Letby’s conviction. Will the fierce media battle over the case make sure justice is served – or further obscure it?
Context: Neonatal nurse Lucy Letby was arrested and charged in November 2020 following an investigation into the high number of unexpected infant deaths in the neonatal unit where she worked at the Countess of Chester hospital. In August 2023, the then-33-year-old was convicted of the murders of seven infants and the attempted murders of seven others between June 2015 and June 2016, making her the worst child serial killer in British legal history. She became only the fourth woman in that history to receive a whole-life prison sentence. Even then, many feared her chilling death toll could rise even further.
As The Post reported at the time of her conviction, Letby had also had training placements at the Liverpool Women’s hospital in 2012 and 2015. During these placements, BBC’s Panorama reported that potentially life-threatening incidents involving infants occurred on almost a third of Letby’s 33 shifts. After Letby’s conviction, police told at least one family that the birth of their child at the Women’s was part of their inquiry. All in all, Cheshire constabulary asked neonatologists to examine the medical records of more than 4,000 babies born at the two hospitals between 2012 and 2016.
But Letby has always maintained her innocence. Her legal team, then led by Ben Myers KC, made an application to the Court of Appeal, which was rejected by judge Sir Robin Spencer. Letby tried again, at an oral hearing in front of three other judges. She was again unsuccessful.
However, in May 2024, the narrative around her guilt began to change. The New Yorker published a 13,000-word article that questioned her conviction. Drawing on texts, police interviews, hospital records, and interviews with Letby’s colleagues and experts, staff writer Rachel Aviv concluded “there has been almost no room for critical reflection” in the UK about Letby’s guilt.
Part of the reason it was left up to an American paper to question the court’s decision has to do with the cost of obtaining court documents. Aviv said obtaining a transcription of a single day in court cost her around $100, and she needed the judge’s approval – which took six months. But as freelance journalist Samira Shackle pointed out, the US also just has a stronger culture of questioning court judgements, which are more credulously accepted in the UK.
Aviv’s article was not available to read online in this country, due to a court order restricting coverage. Nevertheless, once those restrictions were lifted in July ’24 – following Letby’s retrial finding her guilty of the attempted murder of one of the babies on which the previous jury could not agree – that critical reflection Aviv had called for began. Pro-defence pieces appeared in Private Eye, the Independent, the Guardian, and the Telegraph.
The qualms around the prosecution’s evidence broadly fall under three categories:
1. Questioning the shift-pattern evidence. The fact that so many unexplained deaths and declines coincided with Letby being on duty was central to the prosecution’s case. But probability is not synonymous with proving guilt beyond reasonable doubt, which is the conventional threshold for conviction in English criminal law. Lucia de Berk, a Dutch neonatal nurse convicted of seven murders and three attempted murders in 2003 and 2004, was exonerated in 2010 after it was shown that she had been convicted based on a statistical fallacy that it was simply too improbable that an innocent person could have been present at every single one of those deaths. Peter Green, a statistician at Bristol University who co-authored a Royal Statistical Society report about the use of statistics in cases of suspected medical misconduct, told The Times in August 2024 that “the investigation and prosecution [in Letby’s case] did not follow the good practice laid out in our report […] It’s easy to over-interpret this kind of data. People are very good at seeing patterns.”
2. An absence of “direct forensic evidence”. In the 2023 trial, Dr Anna Milan, a biochemist at the Royal Liverpool Hospital, testified that test results showed insulin had been administered to two of the babies Letby was accused of attempting to kill. However, secondary testing on the victims that would have further confirmed this was not conducted, as both babies recovered.
3. Criticism of Dr Dewi Evans, the lead expert witness called by the prosecution. It was Evans’s analysis that led to a chart being shown at Letby’s 2023 trial, demonstrating that she had been present whenever a baby died or collapsed in suspicious circumstances. But evidence derived from unpublished notes taken by a police officer at the time now show that many of his conclusions were notably different from those he detailed to senior detectives in 2017. (For his part, Evans said in December he was "surprised how little he changed his mind" during the investigation.)
During the trial, Evans, a paediatric consultant with more than 30 years’ experience, also cited a paper written in 1989 by Dr Shoo Lee, a Canadian neonatologist, which detailed 53 cases of air embolism in newborn babies, some of whom had also shown signs of skin discolouration.
Letby has since changed her legal representation to Mark McDonald. Her new lawyer assembled the panel led, remarkably, by none other than Dr Shoo Lee himself. Lee, who was not called to give evidence at the original trial, had told the Court of Appeal that, based on witness statements, none of the babies’ skin discolourations matched those he had recorded in his paper. In last week’s press conference, Lee went on to say that "in all cases death or injury were due to natural causes or just bad medical care", not murder.
Dr Phil Hammond, writing in Private Eye, gives a statistic that may throw the probabilistic elements of the prosecution’s evidence into sharper relief: in a review of more than 1,000 cases of infant death in south-east London, “the cause of mortality was unexplained for about half of the newborns who had died unexpectedly, even after post-mortem examinations”.
Evans has fired back, saying McDonald’s observations concerning his evidence are “unsubstantiated, unfounded, inaccurate”, and his claims "remarkable, baseless, and incorrect". Speaking to the Sunday Times, Evans also denied Lee’s 1989 paper was a major factor in the prosecution case. The mother of one of the babies Letby was convicted of attempting to murder has told the Daily Mail that "every aspect of what [Lee’s panel] are doing is so disrespectful, it is very upsetting," adding that “we've had the truth. We believe in the British justice system, we believe the jury made the right decision.”
As for the other facts that helped convict Letby, such as the 257 stolen nursing handover sheets recovered from Letby's home address, or her handwritten notes saying things like “I AM EVIL I DID THIS” and “I killed them on purpose”, McDonald has been dismissive, saying that circumstantial evidence is of "lesser" importance versus medical evidence. In Spiked magazine’s typical editorial style, Christopher Snowden was furiously irreverent about McDonald and his “Letbyist” supporters in the press over the weekend, calling them “the devil’s advocates”.
McDonald hopes the panel’s evidence will lead to Letby's case being sent back to the Court of Appeal. The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which investigates potential miscarriages of justice, has begun to assess the case. Currently in complete disarray itself, the CCRC cannot currently advise how long such an assessment might take.
Analysis: Trials – or retrials – by the media can be sensationalist, unedifying affairs. But miscarriages of justice do happen. Spencer, the judge that turned down Letby’s appeal, was in 1999 the prosecuting barrister of Sally Clark, who was wrongly convicted of killing two of her young children. Adam King, a criminal barrister at QEB Hollis Whiteman, pointed out recently that Clark, as well as Angela Cannings and Donna Anthony, were wrongly sent down based on flawed statistical evidence about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. The echoes with Letby’s case, should her conviction be quashed, would be deafening.
And journalism has also been an important mechanism in overturning wrongful convictions. Investigative journalist Paul Foot was credited for helping free the so-called Birmingham Six; the BBC’s investigative programme, Rough Justice, was responsible for overturning 18 convictions between 1980 and 2007. The resulting collapse of public faith in the British justice system is what led to the creation of the CCRC in the first place.
Unfortunately, the press’s appetite for such investigations has waned. Foot died in 2004, and Rough Justice was axed as part of budget costs in 2007. Research shows that even while they were active, national press coverage of miscarriages of justice fell – between 1992 and 2007, it dropped by as much as 18%. Shackle’s observation about journalistic reticence to challenge judgements in the UK versus the US is pertinent.
Bottom line: Blackstone’s formulation, one of the cornerstone principles of English criminal law, says that the threshold for conviction should be so high that “it is better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man be hanged”. (As the UK has one of the largest prison populations in western Europe, it’s arguable whether this formulation is truly being followed anymore.) The ratio implies that Letby may well have committed these offences, but for our system to function in its proper spirit, “the devil” must be given the benefit of law.
It’s beyond the remit of this – or any other – paper to say definitively whether that threshold was met in Letby’s case. But if the case must be reopened to establish that, then so be it, even though doing so will cause further pain to the families of the victims. If there’s a chance Letby’s malevolence did not cause these deaths, it’s vital to discover what did.
Your Post briefing
Liberal Democrat councillors have called for a new tram line to be built from the city centre to Everton’s new stadium. In a press release over the weekend, the Lib Dem’s leader, Carl Cashman, was critical of the ‘fan zone’ unveiled by Labour’s metro mayor Steve Rotheram at Sandhills railway station, saying “we really need a tram line.” In the early 20th century, Liverpool had an extensive tram network, both horse-drawn and motorised, in addition to the famous Overhead Railway. An attempt at refitting the city with a modern system, “Merseytram”, was abandoned in the 2000s. This would be a far more modest proposal, aimed at alleviating parking around the new Bramley-Moore Dock football ground. Labour’s current plans include a “glider”, sometimes called a “trackless tram”, which the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority revealed last year. The articulated vehicle can carry around 30% more passengers than an average double decker bus.
An outbreak of bird flu has been confirmed on the Wirral peninsula. Last night, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) revealed that the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 was identified in commercial poultry at a premises near Bromborough, and a 3km protection zone and 10km surveillance zone declared around the area. All poultry at the premises are being humanely slaughtered. An Avian Influenza Prevention Zone (AIPZ) was already in place to cover the whole of England from 25th January following an escalated number of cases, as well as risk levels in wild birds.
And both Everton and Liverpool have been dumped out of the FA Cup. In the last ever cup tie at Goodison Park, Bournemouth were gifted two first-half goals from defensive mistakes by James Tarkowski and will go through to the next round. More remarkably, on Sunday, Liverpool were stunned away from home by Championship strugglers Plymouth Argyle. Only the goalkeeper Caoimhin Kelleher remained from Liverpool’s 4-0 win over Spurs in Thursday's Carabao Cup semi-final, but the result will nevertheless go down as a famous example of FA Cup giant-killing. Meanwhile, Everton’s loss means the five-time FA Cup winners will complete 30 seasons since their last piece of major silverware, an unprecedented barren period for the once proud club. In the Premier League, where Liverpool sit six points clear at the top and Everton are nine points free of the relegation zone, both teams will meet in the final Goodison Park derby this week. (Here’s Laurence’s lovely eulogy to the Grand Old Lady if you haven’t read it yet.) To complete a miserable weekend for Merseyside football, Tranmere Rovers also lost 2-0 to Salford City, meaning the Wirral club continues to sit 90th out of 92nd teams currently competing in the English football league.
Photo of the week
On 25th January 1907, motor car enthusiasts got into fancy dress to celebrate the Liverpool Motor Show. They look smashing, don’t you think?
Post Picks
🎷On Thursday, LA musical and performance art acts Geneva Jacuzzi and RIKI are coming to Rough Trade. Tickets are £17 and you can grab them here.
💃 On Friday, if you’re looking for a fun time with your friends as an alternative to couples-heavy Valentine’s activities, check out Drag Bingo hosted by Liverpool’s FunnyBoyz. Tickets start at £3 – get one here.
🪩Another Friday option for Galentine’s: Dirty Little Disco at Paradiso – all girls get free entry before midnight! Tickets here.
💖 On Saturday, over 25s can enjoy a daytime rave at 24 Kitchen Street. Tickets starting from £11.25 here.
