Pro-Letby campaigners seek to discredit Welsh doctor whose evidence convicted her

Martin Shipton

Campaigners who believe convicted baby killer Lucy Letby is innocent have held a public meeting at which they strongly criticised the Welsh doctor whose evidence was crucial in convincing jury members of her guilt.

Letby was convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven more when she worked as a nurse at the Countess of Chester Hospital in Chester. It is understood that five of the babies were from Wales.

Consultant paediatrician

Dr Dewi Evans, a retired consultant paediatrician from Carmarthen gave expert evidence at Letby’s trial, the accuracy of which has since been questioned by an international medical panel.

A public meeting in Hereford was organised by the group Nineteen Nurses, which is calling for an independent review of the evidence used to convict Letby, which it says has the support of 279 health professionals.

The meeting was addressed by Lucy Letby’s best friend, who didn’t want to be named. She said: “The media had already fabricated the most abhorrent monster that they could conjure before Lucy was even found guilty. A monster assembled from sensationalist snippets from the trial. They used out of context anecdotes, misremembered historical interactions hazed by the passage of time, and pure conjecture that was pitifully masqueraded as science.

“They had created a completely fictional picture of the world’s most horrific serial killer of babies, and they had created that monster in Lucy’s image with the face of my friend who I grew up with through those formative years of our lives when you go from child to adolescent to suddenly realising you’re a fledgling adult, fresh out of university, starting out on your new career, and thinking about buying your first house. I know who Lucy is as she knows who I am. I know what she is capable of and what is completely alien to her character and nature based on every interaction and experience I have ever shared with Lucy.

And what the world saw as a story of a killer nurse on the ward unfolding, I knew was in reality one of the worst miscarriages of justice in the UK today. My conscience and everything I knew and lived by told me Lucy was innocent right from the moment of her first arrest. However, the media frenzy around Lucy and anyone connected to her was absolutely terrifying. There was such a relentless outpouring of hate and anger towards her and so by proxy anyone who supported her.

“Just going about our daily lives, we were being approached without warning through every channel by phone, social media, in person, emails, letters, by reporters and journalists, and random strangers who believed Lucy to be guilty. We felt targeted and vulnerable as friends of the monster. During the trial, everyone who knew Lucy was silenced by fear from recrimination if we spoke out in her defense. Fear for our reputations, fear for our livelihoods, fear for the safety of ourselves and our families. People connected to Lucy were categorically told to stay quiet as it would be in theirs and Lucy’s best interests.

“And so the media was allowed to run rampant with their killer nurse story. Left unchecked and unchallenged in the absence of any opposition to the mainstream headlines, Lucy had already been found guilty by public opinion.

“But the tide of public opinion has finally turned and it is entirely thanks to individuals like you. Now there is a tsunami of voices demanding that justice is done. For the sake of restoring faith in our legal system, for the sake of protecting every nurse who goes to work each day to face the most difficult situations, for the sake of ensuring an innocent woman does not spend the best years of her life until her final days behind bars, for the sake of justice, we will be heard.”

Discredited

Dr Roger Norwich, a former locum consultant who lives in Sark, one of the Channel Islands, told the meeting that Dr Evans’ testimony had been discredited by the international panel and that Letby’s case should be referred back to the Court of Appeal.

After the meeting, Dr Evans told Nation.Cymru: “The case against Letby is stronger now than it was when she was convicted.

“I had never heard of Roger Norwich until recently, which suggests he hasn’t played a prominent role in cases of this kind. I don’t know what expertise he has.

“The international panel, which claimed none of the babies had been murdered, did not include a pathologist, a haemotologist, a radiologist, an endocrinologist or an obstetrician. All of the panel’s conclusions are wrong.

“Mark McDonald, the barrister now representing and campaigning for Letby has been a barrister for 28 years, but he’s not a KC, which makes him an ageing junior.

“If these people are the best the pro-Letby camp can come up with, it’s pretty pathetic.”