Lucy Letby was born on January 4, 1990, in Hereford, an only child, and qualified as a children's nurse at the University of Chester in 2011. She went to work on the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital, which cared for premature and sick newborns, and trained for a period at Liverpool Women's Hospital.
Between June 2015 and June 2016 the Countess of Chester unit had an unexplained rise in deaths and sudden collapses. Consultants noticed that Letby had been on duty for them, raised it with hospital management repeatedly through 2016, and were told to stop; two of them were made to apologise to her. She was moved to clerical work in July 2016. The hospital referred the matter to the police in May 2017.
She was tried at Manchester Crown Court over ten months and convicted in August 2023 of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder six others. The prosecution case was that she injected air into their bloodstreams and stomachs, overfed some with milk, and poisoned two with insulin, and it rested on a staffing chart showing her present at every event, on medical opinion about the mechanism of each collapse, and on handwritten notes found at her home, one of which read that she was evil and had done this. She was convicted at a retrial in June 2024 of attempting to murder a seventh baby. She received fifteen whole-life orders, meaning she will never be released, and did not attend her sentencing.
Since the verdicts the case has come under sustained challenge, and it is now among the most contested convictions in modern English law. Two applications to the Court of Appeal have been refused. In February 2025 her barrister Mark McDonald lodged a preliminary application with the Criminal Cases Review Commission, and a panel of international neonatologists convened by the Canadian specialist Dr Shoo Lee, whose own research paper had been used by the prosecution to explain air embolism, publicly stated that the medical evidence had been misread and that the collapses were explicable by natural causes and by failures of care. Statisticians have separately criticised the use of the duty chart. The CCRC confirmed in 2026 that a review of the convictions is underway; it has not referred the case, and it has said plainly that innocence and guilt are matters for the courts, not for it.
Two other processes have run alongside. The Thirlwall Inquiry, chaired by Lady Justice Thirlwall, examined how the hospital responded to the consultants' warnings. And in January 2026 the Crown Prosecution Service decided that no further charges would be brought over nine more babies at the Countess of Chester and at Liverpool Women's, having concluded the evidential test was not met; six families asked for that to be reviewed under the Victims' Right to Review scheme, and in August 2026 an independent prosecutor upheld the original decision.
As matters stand the convictions are good and she remains at HMP Low Newton. The Criminal Cases Review Commission received a preliminary application on her behalf on February 3, 2025 and has been receiving expert material since; it has said publicly that it cannot say how long the review will take, and that it does not determine guilt or innocence but decides whether to refer a case back to the Court of Appeal. Separately, Cheshire police submitted files in July 2025 seeking charges over nine further babies; in January 2026 the Crown Prosecution Service decided no further charges should be brought, and that decision was upheld on review later in 2026. So the position is that no new charges have followed, no referral has yet been made, and the dispute about whether the convictions are safe is unresolved and being conducted in public by people with far better access to the evidence than this archive has.