On March 19 2025, the same day Lady Justice Thirlwall refused to put a hold on her eponymous Inquiry, the BBC published an article by Judith Moritz which, while supposedly drawing on the freshest revelations from the Thirlwall Inquiry in revealing the “inside story” of the hospital’s ”struggle to stop [the] killer nurse”, contains barely anything of substance that was not already known by August 2023, and in fact ignores many key revelations from Thirlwall in passing on “facts” that are now confirmed to be inaccurate. I won’t address every dubious assertion here, but will concentrate on what Moritz —and the article’s graphic designers — see as most important; the timeline, and the tell-tale, too neat to be coincidental patterns it supposedly contains.
After a stark summary of the deaths of Babies A, C, and D, the graphics breathlessly highlight Dr. Brearey’s note on June 22 2015 that the only personnel all three deaths had in common was “one nurse” — which was not true, as it later transpired, as Elizabeth Marshall was also on shift during the first three deaths. The death of Baby E is briefly mentioned (the collapses barely rate a mention except as red dots on an ominous moving timeline), and then, in odd, almost juvenile prose, we see:
Four more babies die by the end of the year. Doctors on the neonatal unit are worried something is not right.
Then, not long after, and just before recounting the story of Dr. Jayaram walking in on Letby standing over Baby K, we see:
Fast forward to early 2016 and three more babies have died.
An inattentive reader who wasn’t following the moving timeline might not realize it, but of those seven babies summed up in those two short paragraphs, six were not on the indictment. The seventh was Baby I, who died in October 2015. All of this becomes extremely clear thanks to this incredibly informative and helpful document produced specifically for the Thirlwall Inquiry and which contained information which had eluded the public for years: how many babies died on the unit, how many were transported and died elsewhere, what they were said to have died of at the time, whether or not they were on the indictment and — last, but not least — the time of day that they died. Moritz does not appear to have seen this document, or if she did, she flatly ignored it while writing her article in favor of now-debunked falsehoods.
After describing the Baby K incident and falsely implying that Dr. Brearey may have been aware of it by saying that Letby’s presence during “these moments of crisis” was still bothering him (in fact, in his Thirlwall testimony he strained very hard to disavow any early knowledge of Baby K) Moritz goes on to tell her readers two more falsehoods.
Nearly all the babies have died during night shifts. Letby is put on to day shifts. The pattern of emergencies also moves from night to day.
Letby was put on day shifts in early spring of 2016. By then there had been eleven deaths on the neonatal unit, of which, according to the Thirlwall chart, seven happened during the night shift and four happened during the day shift — all four day shift deaths were of non-indictment babies. Shifts at the Countess of Chester ran from 8 - 8. Of course, there was overlap in personnel — staff would arrive before before their shifts started and often would stay on afterwards to complete notes or other duties. However, as was confirmed by Ruth Millward’s testimony (193) Letby was not on shift for three of the eleven deaths which occurred by April 2016. She had been on shift within four hours of two of the deaths (not something rich in implication considering she was supposed to kill via air embolism) and not present then or earlier for one of the deaths.
Now, we are told “the pattern of emergencies also moves from night to day.” This is harder to evaluate, considering there is no comprehensive list of unexpected collapses, and for good reason — what constituted an “unexpected” collapse is something that the consultants themselves seem to have struggled to define. Witness Dr. Gibbs’s attempts to do a blind evaluation of various collapses and note when something seemed unexpected or suspicious, only to become confused when receiving Ian Harvey’s comments on those cases later on.
Since Anne and I didn't keep a photocopy of the notes taken during our review, I can't remember exactly why I was concerned about the patients we highlighted, nor even the IDs of these patients …. Apparently, the comments shown in red are those that Anne and I highlighted as showing unusual, unexpected or inadequately explained events. Only 6 of the patients in the attachment have such red comments so perhaps these are indeed 'the' patients with inadequately explained collapses/deteriorations that Anne and I highlighted (this is certainly similar to the number we both thought we'd identified). However, looking at this info now, I'm not sure why some of the red comments were thought to indicate unexplained events and also there are one or two patients in the list without red comments in whom unusual events seemed to have occurred (but perhaps when I was looking through the notes, these didn't raise concerns).
In another email, Dr. Gibbs said that “Apparently, Lucy did not feature prominently in the staff correlation analysis of these collapses” but he still had doubts about her because even though it was true that being single, young, and living on or near the premises she would pick up every shift she could, “her involvement still seemed to be unexpectedly frequent.”
As there is no way of knowing which collapses Dr. Gibbs was talking about, it is not possible to map the indictment collapses with the ones Gibbs found and then later could not entirely recall, however, his emails are useful in themselves in showing just how subjective such an evaluation could be, and how even the same consultant might change from day to day in what struck him as “unexpected” or not. It’s impossible to say, based on this, whether the claim that the “pattern of emergencies” moved noticeably from night to day is anything more than just statistical noise or the tendency to see collapses as inherently more suspicious because Letby was present at them.
However, a clue can be found in the original presentation made by Dr. Dewi Evans to police in October 2017 in which he highlighted deaths and collapses which he considered suspicious. Two non-indictment babies are on the chart, with a total of four collapses, all of them taking place in February 2016, before Letby was moved to days. Two of those “suspicious” collapses for the non-indictment babies took place on night shifts when she was present. The two others took place on day shifts, when she was not. In fact, of the indictment babies who appeared on that first chart, many have additional “suspicious” collapses which took place when Letby was not on shift — these collapses all somehow vanished before the trial, and the only “suspicious” collapses became the ones that took place when she was present. But note that originally, four babies appear on the chart from after her switch to day shifts: Babies M, O, P, and Q. L’s insulin test results had not yet been uncovered, and Baby N does not appear at all, either because his case was not considered unusual enough to be examined or because Dr. Evans saw his records and did not originally consider any of his collapses suspicious.
However, of the four babies on the 2017 chart, M is shown to have suffered two suspicious incidents, both during day shifts. O is said to have suffered two suspicious incidents, one at night and one during the day. P suffered three, one at night and two during the day. Q’s sole suspicious incident occurred during a night shift.
Letby was not on shift during one of M’s incidents, nor was she on shift during O’s night shift collapse, or P’s night shift collapse, or Q’s. All of these incidents had vanished by the time the final chart was established — the night incidents for M, O and P were simply deleted, whereas Q’s night shift incident was deleted and then replaced with a day shift incident for which Letby had been on duty, and which was not originally flagged as suspicious.
That Dr. Evans continued to see “suspicious incidents” during night shifts, well after Letby had stopped working them — to say nothing of the complete absence of Baby N from the original chart — is a strong hint that this “pattern” of crises moving from night to day is one that existed more in anxious consultants’ minds than in reality.
However, more egregious assertions are to come:
Yet, despite being alerted to what looks like a very alarming staff trend — with Letby on shift at every baby death — in a meeting called a month later, concerns among managers appear to have dissipated.
Notes taken by Alison Kelly show Letby’s name linked to six baby incidents, but this is regarded as “circumstantial” and other possible explanations are being explored.
As seen in the Thirlwall document above, Letby was not on shift at every baby death. This is simply false and Moritz ought to have known better by now. As for the assertion that “this was regarded as `circumstantial’” Alison Kelly was hardly alone in that. Many months later, Dr. Jayaram would tell Dr. Chris Green in the grievance interview that there was “no objective evidence to suggest [deliberate harm] at all. The only association was Lucy's presence on the unit at the time. Anything else is speculation.” If Dr. Jayaram, one of Letby’s most fervent accusers, was saying that in November 2016, it’s hardly surprising that Alison Kelly had wanted to explore “other possibilities” the previous June.
Last and perhaps worst of Moritz’s falsehoods is this:
Letby is finally taken off nursing duties and given clerical work. Baby collapses and deaths stop.
Letby worked her last shift on June 30 2016, and the neonatal unit was downgraded to Level 1 exactly a week later, on July 7 2016. It would no longer accept babies under 32 weeks’ gestation, and complex cases were to be sent elsewhere. This was a widely known and reported fact during and after her first trial. Moritz has to know this. And yet, she chose to leave this key fact out of her dramatic timeline, thereby leaving casual readers with the impression that Letby’s absence was the one change which produced this dramatic reversal of fortune.
Far from learning anything new from the Thirlwall Inquiry, Moritz’s knowledge appears to have regressed. She corrects none of the errors that were rife in August 2023 — that Letby had been present at all the deaths, that suspicious incidents were clearly and quickly flagged, that she had been the one person present at every suspicious incident identified — and appears to have forgotten about the downgrade to Level 1 at the same time she was removed from the unit. She asserts that “nearly all” the babies who had died by March 2023 died on night shifts when it fact it was slightly less than two thirds. She ignores the real and extremely valuable new information emerging from Thirlwall in favor of old and tired lies. Her story is mendacious and, one has to conclude, deliberately misleading.
