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Europe|Former Hospital Managers Call for Halt to Inquiry Into Lucy Letby Murders
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/world/europe/lucy-letby-inquiry-thirlwall.html
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Former executives at the British hospital where Ms. Letby was a nurse requested that a judge’s inquiry into the killings there be suspended amid new evidence.
March 18, 2025, 8:47 a.m. ET
Lawyers for former senior executives at the Countess of Chester Hospital in northern England have asked for a halt to the public inquiry into the murders of babies by Lucy Letby, a former nurse, citing new evidence that they said called her guilt into question.
Speaking in front of the inquiry on Tuesday, Kate Blackwell, a lawyer representing those executives, said that new evidence that has emerged in recent months suggested that the babies that died or collapsed unexpectedly in 2015 and 2016 had not been intentionally harmed but had died of other causes.
“There now appears to be a real likelihood that there are alternative explanations for these deaths and unexplained collapses, namely poor clinical management and care and natural causes,” Ms. Blackwell said. To continue the inquiry without considering these alternative explanations, she argued, “defeats the very purpose of any public inquiry which must be to fully and fearlessly understand the circumstances in which these babies came to die.”
Ms. Letby, 35, a former nurse in a neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital in northern England, was found guilty in two trials in 2023 and 2024 of the murder and attempted murder of 14 babies in her care. She has always maintained her innocence. After Ms. Letby was found guilty, Britain’s health secretary announced a public inquiry — an official investigation conducted by a judge, with hearings in public — to discover how a serial killer could get away with such crimes for so long.
Crucially, the inquiry was predicated on Ms. Letby’s guilt, even as serious questions began to be raised last year over the validity of her convictions, first in a 13,000-word New Yorker article in May, then by dozens of statisticians and medical experts.
Last month, an independent panel of neonatal experts said that it had found no evidence that Ms. Letby had murdered or attempted to kill any of the infants in her care. Instead, “in all cases death or injury were due to natural causes or just bad medical care,” the head of the panel, Dr. Shoo Lee, told a news conference.
