It is the afternoon of Monday, August 21, 2023 and Britain’s worst-ever serial child killer has just been sentenced to a record 14 whole life sentences.
Lucy Letby’s face – a haunting police mugshot – is on every television channel.
In Chester, where she committed her dreadful crimes, one bewildered seven-year-old boy sees the image and asks his tearful parents: ‘Is that the naughty nurse who tried to kill me?’
It wasn’t just childish imagination running wild. The boy had been born at the Countess of Chester Hospital, in 2015, during the middle of the neo-natal nurse’s killing spree.
He’d been delivered at full-term, following a healthy pregnancy, but soon after birth he’d been whisked away to the special care baby unit for a ‘little bit of help’ with his breathing.
There, he’d inexplicably collapsed and had to be resuscitated three times. Doctors could find no medical cause for his decline. An episode during this frightening time only compounded his parents’ distress.
For as they nervously waited for news of his condition, a nurse came and presented them with a memory box, with their son’s name band, a woolly hat and blanket inside. When they began to panic that it meant he had died, inexplicably the nurse began to laugh.
‘I just saw the box and I burst into tears, I remember saying, “Oh my God is he dead?” and she just laughed,’ the boy’s mother recalls.
Lucy Letby ’s face – a haunting police mugshot – was on every television channel when she was sentenced in 2023 to a record 14 whole life sentences
Later, when the investigation into deaths at the hospital began to home in on one individual, they realised the nurse they’d encountered was Letby.
The boy’s parents, filmed for a new Channel 4 documentary, say they now believe their son would have been murdered had he not been transferred to another hospital.
‘Personally, I think if he’d stayed at Chester he would have died,’ his father says, speaking for the first time about the ordeal.
Unbeknown to them, concerns had already been raised about a spike in deaths on the unit and Dr Stephen Brearey, the lead clinician, had privately begun to air his suspicions about Letby, who seemed to be on duty every time a baby died.
He suggested to the couple that their son should be moved to Liverpool Women’s Hospital, in the city, and, as became the pattern with so many other children harmed by the 35-year-old nurse, there the baby boy quickly recovered.
‘That decision is what saved him,’ the boy’s mother says, her voice steady and deliberate. ‘He was full term, he was fine, there’d been no problems.
‘To go from that, to suddenly being at death’s door… I remember looking at the doctor and all the other people thinking, “These are only human beings, they can’t work magic, I don’t know if they can help him”.
‘Especially when they were telling us they didn’t know the reason or know what was wrong.’
The anonymous parents, filmed as part of a new Channel 4 documentary
Yet, just a few days after being transferred out of the Countess, their baby was well enough to go home. ‘Liverpool Women’s didn’t do anything that Chester couldn’t have done,’ his mother adds.
‘They treated him for jaundice. He was in an incubator and picked up really quickly. I’d love to ask him [Dr Brearey], did you know or have a feeling something was going on with her [Letby]?
‘We will forever be so grateful to him.’ These parents, who have never spoken publicly about their experience before, are among those interviewed in the documentary.
Entitled Conviction, it is directed by three-time Emmy award winner Daniel Bogado and follows the main protagonists involved in Letby’s long-running case.
The film begins in the aftermath of her convictions for murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven more, over two trials, in 2023 and 2024, and follows the doubts that subsequently emerged about the juries’ verdicts.
It also covers the noisy campaign launched by the new legal team Letby appointed to try to set her free.
Mark McDonald, Letby’s new barrister, and a series of medics who are now convinced she is innocent, feature heavily, but so does Dr Dewi Evans, the lead prosecution expert, who has been the subject of criticism but remains steadfast in his belief in her guilt.
As a journalist who covered the former neo-natal nurse’s trials at Manchester Crown Court, I too was interviewed at length by Bogado about my knowledge of the case. But by far the most powerful contributors to the film are the couple, whose son’s case was investigated by police but not taken forward to trial.
A memory box given to the parents by Lucy Letby. They believe had their baby not been transferred to another hospital, he would have been murdered
I understand there are up to 100 sets of parents across Cheshire and North Wales in the same boat as them.
Parents whose children were born at the Countess, who also received that dreaded knock on the door from officers telling them experts had looked at their baby’s medical notes and decided something wasn’t quite right – only to be told later that there wasn’t quite enough evidence to prosecute Letby in connection with their son or daughter’s care.
Like all the parents of babies harmed by Letby, the couple’s identity is protected by the documentary makers. They are filmed from behind frosted glass, which somehow serves to make their story even more haunting.
They corroborate the testimony of parents who gave evidence about Letby’s strange and intrusive behaviour at her trial, describing their fleeting interaction with her on the ward as simply ‘not normal’. Recalling the memory box incident, the boy’s mother says: ‘A nurse came in with the box, she came straight up to us. I just saw the box and I burst into tears, I remember saying to her, “Oh my God is he dead?” and she just laughed.
‘She said “No, we just give these boxes out to the parents of babies who’ve been really poorly”.
‘Three times he’d been resuscitated, they couldn’t explain why. I was very upset, I was frightened.
‘It was only when we saw her face in the newspaper later on that we both recognised her. The nurse that gave us the box was Lucy Letby.’
The mother says she ‘hates’ the blue-lidded memory box, which is decorated with stars, while her husband says looking at it gives him a ‘horrible feeling’ in his stomach.
Lucy Letby being interviewed by police. The boy’s parents only realised the nurse who gave them the memory box was Letby when they saw her face in the news
But they can’t bring themselves to throw it away in case it’s needed in the future as evidence.
They claim police told them they’d spoken to other parents who remembered Letby bringing a memory box to them in a similar way and that it was a ‘pattern’ of her behaviour. So they keep the box ‘shoved’ away in a cupboard, but it sits on a table in front of them for the duration of the film.
The mother says that, after they saw the picture of Letby in the media after her first arrest, in July 2018, they almost rang the police to say: ‘This is what happened to us. Is there a connection?’
But she adds: ‘You don’t really believe that something like that’s going to happen, so we didn’t. And then of course, when they knocked on the door, we were like: “Okay, maybe we should have rung”.’
She says they both cried tears of relief and felt overcome with emotion when the guilty verdicts came in following the first trial, in August 2023.
‘The day she was given her sentence, obviously it was all over the news,’ she recalls.
‘He [their son] saw our reactions and wanted to know why mummy and daddy were upset. [He said], “Is that the naughty nurse that tried to kill me?”’
They had been forced to explain what happened to him when he overheard them discussing the case with close relatives earlier during the trial.
Determined to protect their son, they haven’t shared their experience widely but realised they could not lie and that he deserved to know the truth.
‘I didn’t want to upset him, but obviously I also didn’t want to lie to him,’ his mother says.
‘I really had to think about what I was saying, to try and put it in a way that wouldn’t scare him too much. Because he deserves to know, when he’s asking questions, that I’m going to tell him the truth about things. The easiest way to explain it is, he is kind of like Harry Potter, and she is Voldemort, and he survived just like Harry did. That’s the way that I decided to explain it to him because he can understand, he knows the story.’
The couple sympathise with parents involved in the trial, who have been angered by Letby’s new barrister Mark McDonald.
The families are critical of him for calling press conferences and speaking about their children in public, instead of quietly following legal process.
For his part, the lawyer insists he genuinely believes Letby is innocent and should not be allowed to die in jail.
He claims to have compassion for the families of the babies but, by the same token, refuses to apologise for courting publicity for his client’s case.
‘I’m not doing it to be on telly,’ he protests in the documentary. ‘It’s not about me.’
Despite this, in April, to much fanfare, he hand-delivered reports from his new panel of experts to the Birmingham offices of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the body which handles potential miscarriages of justice.
Afterwards, he explained that the reports proved Letby’s convictions were unsafe and that her case must be referred to the Court of Appeal without delay.
But the film also casts doubt on the independence of those experts, who say Letby is not a killer and rather babies died or collapsed because of natural causes or poor hospital care.
It reveals they were recruited by panel lead Dr Shoo Lee, a neonatologist from Canada, who wrote to them in an e-mail which said ‘We might be her [Letby’s] last hope’, implying he had an agenda from the start.
The couple also talk about how hard it has been to get on with their lives with Letby’s case constantly in the news.
‘It’s bad enough for us but at least we’ve still got him [their son],’ the mother says.
‘If it triggers such a visceral reaction in me, I can’t even begin to imagine how they [the parents of the murdered children] must feel.
‘I can understand maybe her family or close friends campaigning to help get her out, but most of these people are not going to have ever had any dealings with her or know anything more than what’s been on the news.
‘All these experts, they weren’t there. The doctors, like Dr Brearey, the nurses, they dealt with it on a day-to-day basis. They know what’s not normal.
‘They’re used to dealing with that situation and they picked up on things and the hospital just didn’t want to deal with it, which is very strange for such a serious accusation.
‘They kind of brushed it under the carpet.’
Managers at the Countess were alerted to the spike in deaths and knew about the doctors’ suspicions about Letby. But they delayed calling police and have since been accused of deliberately ignoring the concerns to protect the hospital’s reputation.
Three of those former executives are now facing possible prosecution having been arrested, in July, on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter by officers from Cheshire Constabulary.
While the couple’s little boy’s early years were largely healthy, behavioural problems emerged soon after he started school and, aged seven, he began suffering ‘horrific’ seizures.
Distressingly, they say, he sometimes asks if he is going to die when he has a fit. Now aged nine, he also attends a special school because he has learning difficulties.
Inevitably, the couple wonder if his ongoing medical problems were caused by what happened after his birth.
While the boy’s father says he is convinced of Letby’s guilt, his mother says the conflicting voices around the case sometimes give her doubts.
‘I definitely feel something went on at the hospital but… I like to see the best in people, and I find it so hard to believe that somebody would do something so horrible, and then gain satisfaction from that.
‘Gain satisfaction from thinking that you’ve hurt somebody or upset somebody.
‘I don’t know how she [Letby] would sleep at night because I certainly wouldn’t.’
- Conviction: The Case of Lucy Letby is in cinemas and will be screened as Lucy Letby: Murder or Mistake on Channel 4 on September 29.
