Among the papers police took from Lucy Letby's house in Chester were sheets of handwriting on hospital notepaper and Post-it notes. "I am evil I did this," one read. "I killed them on purpose because I'm not good enough to care for them." On the same pages, in the same hand: "I haven't done anything wrong." The prosecution put those notes before a jury in Manchester as something close to a confession. Her defense said they were the scrawl of a young woman who had been pulled off the unit she loved, accused of killing babies without any evidence being shown to her, and who was writing out her panic. The jury convicted her. Whether it was right to do so has become one of the most bitterly argued questions in modern English criminal law, and the notes sit at the center of it, the way they sat at the center of the trial: one document, read two ways.
In August 2023, Letby, a neonatal nurse at the Countess of Chester Hospital, was convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder six others, on seven counts, between June 2015 and June 2016. A retrial in July 2024 added a conviction for the attempted murder of a seventh. She is serving fifteen whole-life orders, the most severe sentence in English law, and she has never stopped saying she is innocent. The Court of Appeal has twice refused her permission to appeal. A body that reviews possible miscarriages of justice has been examining the case since February 2025, and a public inquiry that took her guilt as settled published its findings in September 2026.
The babies cannot be named. A court order made before the trial protects the identities of the survivors until they are adults, and the children were known in court only as Baby A through Baby Q. What the record does allow is the shape of their lives, which were short. Baby A, a twin born at thirty-one weeks, died on June 8, 2015, about a day old; the prosecution said Letby had injected air into his bloodstream, and his twin sister, Baby B, collapsed the following night and survived. Baby C, born at thirty weeks and weighing about 1.8 pounds, died on June 14. Baby D, born at term at seven pounds, died on June 22, about thirty-six hours old. Four collapses, three of them fatal, in a fortnight, on a unit that normally lost two or three babies a year.
Baby E was a twin born at twenty-nine weeks. On the night of August 3, 2015, his mother came to the unit and heard him crying. She told the jury she found blood around his mouth, and that Letby, who was there, put it down to his feeding tube. Baby E died in the early hours of August 4, six days old. Letby later sent the family a sympathy card, and a photograph of that card was found on her phone. The next day his twin brother, Baby F, suffered a sudden drop in blood sugar; a blood sample showed high insulin and very little C-peptide, which the prosecution said meant he had been given insulin that was not prescribed. Baby F survived. So did Baby G, born at twenty-three weeks and just over a pound, whom the jury found Letby had tried to kill twice in September 2015 by overfeeding her with milk. Baby I, born at twenty-seven weeks, died on October 23, 2015 at seventy-seven days old.
The pattern the consultants began to see ran through the spring of 2016. On April 9, twin boys, Baby L and Baby M, collapsed on the same day. L's blood showed insulin readings the prosecution said were proof of poisoning; M, it said, had been injected with air. Both lived. Baby N collapsed in June. Then on June 23 and 24, 2016, two of a set of triplets died on consecutive days, Baby O, whose autopsy found an injury to the liver, and Baby P. Letby was moved off the unit on June 30. The unit then stopped taking the sickest babies and took on more consultants, and the run of unexpected deaths ended. The prosecution treated that as the clearest evidence in the case. Her supporters argue it proves nothing, since the unit had stopped caring for the babies most likely to die.
The doctors who suspected her spent a year getting nowhere. The lead neonatologist, Dr. Stephen Brearey, noticed in 2015 that Letby had been on duty for each of the early deaths and at first put it down to coincidence on a small, understaffed unit. By June 2016, after the triplets, he and his colleagues were asking hospital management to take her off clinical work. They were told she was safe. The trust's executives discussed calling the police and instead commissioned a review from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, which found inadequate staffing and senior cover, described Letby as "enthusiastic, capable and committed," and called the suspicions against her "a subjective view with no other evidence." Letby filed a grievance, and in January 2017 it was upheld. The chief executive apologized to her and her parents and told the consultants to apologize to her in writing. In March 2017 four of them went back to management anyway, and on April 27 they met Cheshire police. The investigation was called Operation Hummingbird.
Letby was arrested on July 3, 2018, rearrested in June 2019, and charged in November 2020 with seven murders and fifteen attempted murders involving seventeen babies. She was held in custody from then on. The police had started with a retired pediatrician, Dr. Dewi Evans, who had read about the investigation and offered to help. He reviewed sixty-one deaths and collapses, other experts checked his findings, and the police narrowed the case to twenty-two counts.
Her trial opened at Manchester Crown Court on October 10, 2022, before Mr. Justice Goss, and ran for ten months. The prosecution's case was circumstantial and cumulative. It had a chart of staff rotas and door-swipe records that placed Letby on duty for every one of twenty-five incidents. It had the medical evidence: air injected into veins or pushed down feeding tubes, milk forced into stomachs, trauma to Baby N's throat and Baby O's liver, and insulin in the blood of Babies F and L, which the prosecution's lead expert called the key evidence. There were the notes. There were 257 nursing handover sheets found in her home, 21 of them concerning babies she was accused of harming, which she said she had forgotten to take out of her pockets and could not bring herself to throw away, although there was a shredder in the house. There were text messages in which she volunteered for intensive-care shifts after deaths, and Facebook searches for the parents of babies who had died, some on anniversaries. And there was a married doctor on the unit with whom, the prosecution said, she had formed an attachment. She denied it.
No motive was proved, and English law does not require one. Letby gave evidence in May 2023. She wept, said she had been made to feel incompetent, and said she had "meant no harm." Her defense called no medical expert of its own. The only witness besides Letby was a plumber, who described sewage backing up into the unit's sinks. The defense argued that the case against her came down to her being present and to the assumption that someone was harming the babies, on a unit where staffing and care were so poor that no one person could fairly be blamed.
The verdicts came on August 18, 2023. The jury convicted her of seven murders and seven counts of attempted murder, most of them by a majority of ten to one, and acquitted her on two counts. It could not agree on six more. On August 21 Goss imposed whole-life orders, calling what she had done "a cruel, calculated and cynical campaign of child murder," and saying there had been "a deep malevolence bordering on sadism." She refused to come up from the cells to hear it, and her absence led the government to promise legislation allowing courts to compel defendants to attend. The prosecution retried one of the undecided counts, the attempted murder of Baby K, a baby girl whose breathing tube it said Letby had dislodged in February 2016. On July 2, 2024, a second jury convicted her. The Nursing and Midwifery Council struck her off in December 2023; she told it she did not accept guilt but would not contest removal.
The Court of Appeal refused her permission to appeal in May 2024. It rejected four grounds, including an attack on Evans as biased and a challenge to the air-embolism evidence as weak, and called the trial "thoughtful, fair, comprehensive and correct." Once the second trial was over and reporting restrictions lifted, the doubts that had been building went public. Statisticians, including members of the Royal Statistical Society, criticized the duty chart on the grounds that the rules for which incidents went into it were unclear and that it left out deaths when Letby was not there. The police admitted in 2024 that swipe data for one door had been labeled with entries and exits reversed. Specialists questioned the insulin evidence: the tests were done with a type of assay that the laboratory's own guidance says should be confirmed by a second method when deliberate insulin poisoning is suspected, and no confirmation was done. Dr. Shoo Lee, whose 1989 paper on air embolism the prosecution had relied on for the skin discoloration it said marked some of the babies, said his work had been misread.
In February 2025 Letby's new barrister, Mark McDonald, filed an application with the Criminal Cases Review Commission, and the same week a panel of fourteen neonatologists from six countries, convened by Lee and working without pay, announced that it had found no medical evidence of deliberate harm in any of the cases. It attributed the deaths and collapses to natural causes and poor care. Evans himself has since said he no longer believes any of the babies died as a direct result of air pushed into the stomach, and that he no longer agrees with the prosecution's account of Baby C. Other doctors, including a pediatric endocrinologist, have backed the prosecution's reading of the insulin results. In February 2026 the commission confirmed a review was underway, noting that material had kept arriving since the first filing and that guilt and innocence were for the courts, not for it. In July 2026 a new hundred-page report challenging the trial's insulin evidence went to the commission, and a Netflix documentary, The Investigation of Lucy Letby, had by then carried the dispute to an audience far beyond Britain. In September 2026, two experts withdrew from the defense team, writing to the commission that some arguments now being put forward had "fundamental unresolvable problems." McDonald answered that new insulin evidence from leading specialists had strengthened the application.
The police kept looking. Neonatologists reviewed some four thousand admissions at the Countess of Chester and at Liverpool Women's Hospital, where Letby had trained, and Cheshire police sent files on further cases to prosecutors in July 2025. On January 20, 2026, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that no further charges would be brought. Families asked for that decision to be reviewed, and it was upheld later in 2026. Three members of the hospital's former senior leadership were arrested in July 2025 on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter and released on bail; that investigation continues. Inquests into five of the deaths opened in February 2026 and have been listed for 2027.
Lady Justice Thirlwall's statutory inquiry heard sixty days of evidence between September 2024 and March 2025 and published its report in Liverpool on September 15, 2026. It did not reexamine the verdicts; its task was to examine what the hospital did with the warnings. It found "a complete failure to protect babies" on the neonatal unit, described a profound failure of management, governance and safeguarding, and concluded that some of the collapses and deaths could have been avoided had safeguarding practice been followed. Doctors and nurses had not taken their concerns to the hospital's safeguarding leads in late 2015; when the concerns reached senior managers, including the safeguarding lead, in May 2016, no safeguarding action was taken; and after Baby P died, with Letby already off the unit, managers delayed for months before calling the police. It made seventeen recommendations, among them monitors on every cot and incubator in neonatal units and cameras on the fridges where insulin is stored. The Health Secretary, Yvette Cooper, told Parliament she accepted the need to regulate NHS managers and to install video cameras. In July 2026 the government had declined calls to widen the inquiry's terms to take in the convictions themselves.
Letby was born on January 4, 1990, in Hereford, the only child of a furniture salesman and an accounts clerk. She trained as a children's nurse at the University of Chester, failing one assessed placement in her final year and passing the retake with a different assessor, and began work on the Countess of Chester neonatal unit on January 2, 2012. She was held at HMP Low Newton after her conviction and was later reported to be at HMP Bronzefield. Beverley Allitt, convicted in 1993 of killing four children on a ward in Lincolnshire, has been compared with her more than any other case. Stuart Clifton, the detective who caught Allitt, has suggested that Letby may have copied her. The difference is that Allitt eventually admitted some of what she had done. Letby has admitted nothing, and the argument over her convictions is still going on.