Speaker 1: Before we begin, please be aware this series contains discussions
Speaker 1: around infant deaths and other difficult topics. Please take care
Speaker 1: while listening.
Speaker 2: We want to bring you this very urgent breaking news
Speaker 2: because the neonatal nurse Lucy let Bee has been found guilty.
Speaker 3: The nurse Lucy let Be has been found guilty of
Speaker 3: murdering seven babies and attempting to murder six others while
Speaker 3: they were in her care at a hospital in Cheshire.
Speaker 4: The nurse who should have been in charge of caring
Speaker 4: the tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer
Speaker 4: in modern British history.
Speaker 1: In August twenty twenty three, Lucy let Be, a young
Speaker 1: neonatal nurse, was convicted in England of murdering seven tiny
Speaker 1: babies and attempting to kill six more.
Speaker 5: The case shocked the nation. A year later, she.
Speaker 1: Would be convicted again for the attempted murder of a
Speaker 1: seventh baby.
Speaker 5: She's been handed fifteen.
Speaker 1: Life sentences, all without the possibility of parole, meaning as
Speaker 1: this case stands, she will never see the outside of
Speaker 1: a prison again. Case closed, right, well.
Speaker 5: Maybe not.
Speaker 1: Lucy Letby's convictions are now being contested. In the nearly
Speaker 1: three years since her conviction. There's been a re examination
Speaker 1: of evidence and an outpouring of revelations, prompting many to
Speaker 1: reevaluate the case for her guilt, not just members of
Speaker 1: the public, but lawyers, politicians, and some of the most
Speaker 1: eminent doctors in the world. Today, this case is like
Speaker 1: an open wound that has divided England, with opposite views
Speaker 1: competing with one another across the media.
Speaker 6: This was a cruel, calculated and cynical campaign of child murder,
Speaker 6: involving the smallest and most vulnerable of children.
Speaker 7: We did not find any murders.
Speaker 8: In all cases, death or injury were due to natural causes.
Speaker 8: Are just bad medical case.
Speaker 5: They can't both be right, can they?
Speaker 1: And yet we are now in a situation where there
Speaker 1: are two parallel worlds. When Lucy let Be was first convicted,
Speaker 1: there were news headlines that flickered and vanished in the US.
Speaker 1: But I couldn't get this story out of my head.
Speaker 1: A young, attractive woman accused of some of the worst
Speaker 1: crimes imaginable, A story the tabloid newspapers fed on with glee,
Speaker 1: A cold, calculating killer, the unexpected face of evil.
Speaker 5: I had headlines like that and the.
Speaker 1: Back of my neck prickled for the British media said
Speaker 1: the same things about me, Foxy Noxie, sex lies and
Speaker 1: murder killer abroad she devil. My wrongful conviction in Italy
Speaker 1: played out fifteen years prior. That experience taught me a
Speaker 1: lot about how law enforcement can get it wrong, how
Speaker 1: judgment can set in, and how stories can shape and
Speaker 1: obscure the truth. Soon, a steady flow of messages came
Speaker 1: into my inbox, my DMS, friends, journalists, strangers, and the
Speaker 1: refrain was.
Speaker 5: You need to look.
Speaker 1: At this one. The evidence doesn't stack up. The more
Speaker 1: I looked into this case, the more clear it was
Speaker 1: to me that inside this complicated story worry the police investigation,
Speaker 1: the ten month long trial one of the longest in
Speaker 1: British history, there were still many unanswered questions. Was Lucy
Speaker 1: let be evil? If not, why did these infants die?
Speaker 1: And how could a justice system and a nation become
Speaker 1: so convinced that they locked away the most prolific child
Speaker 1: killer in British history. I've sat in a cell, condemned
Speaker 1: as a monster, while the world moved on, certain it
Speaker 1: knew the truth, satisfied with easy answers. I'm allergic to
Speaker 1: easy answers. I wanted to understand what had happened in
Speaker 1: this hospital in the north of England, and so I
Speaker 1: started asking questions. I'm Amanda Knox and from Vespucci and
Speaker 1: iHeart podcasts. This is Doubt The Case of Lucy let
Speaker 1: Be Episode one.
Speaker 5: The verdict.
Speaker 2: Pira tucks for a complete betrayal of the trust placed in.
Speaker 3: Her role of Britain's most notorious killers.
Speaker 8: She's been found guilty.
Speaker 4: Now she has no rights.
Speaker 2: She got rid ofosed when she killed people's babies.
Speaker 1: When I first started looking at the media coverage of
Speaker 1: the Lucy let Be case, what struck me wasn't just
Speaker 1: the evidence, it was the narrative. How quickly the headlines
Speaker 1: seemed to agree on who she was and what the
Speaker 1: story meant. That kind of consensus doesn't happen by accident.
Speaker 1: In November nineteen seventy two, two researchers Maxwell McCombs and
Speaker 1: Donald Shaw were studying how people decide what matters. Their
Speaker 1: work suggested something powerful that the mass media tells us
Speaker 1: what to think about. That idea became known as agenda
Speaker 1: setting theory. When a story dominates the headlines, it can
Speaker 1: take on a life of its own. And feel impossible
Speaker 1: to challenge. Believe me, I've been trying to undo the
Speaker 1: damage the media did to my reputation for eighteen years
Speaker 1: in counting. August eighteenth, twenty twenty three. This was the
Speaker 1: day Britain stopped the end of the trial of neonatal
Speaker 1: nurse Lucy Lutby in the northern city of Manchester, one
Speaker 1: of the longest in British history, having run for over
Speaker 1: ten months. British and international media, we're waiting for the verdicts.
Speaker 9: You've got to have material ready to go all the
Speaker 9: TV stations outlets, So when we get the verdicts, whatever
Speaker 9: they are, we've got to have news ready to roll.
Speaker 1: Kim Pilling was one of only a handful of reporters
Speaker 1: who had been inside the actual courtroom every day of
Speaker 1: the long drawn out trial. He had to prepare two
Speaker 1: versions of the story, one for guilty, one for innocent,
Speaker 1: two completely different realities, one of which would become the
Speaker 1: accepted truth, the other discarded as a lie.
Speaker 8: And maybe breaching magic circle things here.
Speaker 9: But to be adult about it, that's the way the world,
Speaker 9: because otherwise, which used to happen, you could be waiting
Speaker 9: for hours on end for a reaction to two verdicts
Speaker 9: and the media pressures now are so great, that's too late.
Speaker 8: The one things more instantly.
Speaker 1: A seasoned reporter for the Press Association, Kim has covered
Speaker 1: many trials in England. He understands the weight of a
Speaker 1: lay jury's decision and how it can define a narrative.
Speaker 8: Two things was going to happen.
Speaker 9: One if she was not guilty, then she, I have
Speaker 9: no doubt, would have gone out of that dock and then,
Speaker 9: you know, not very long after, and she would have
Speaker 9: gone out onto the courtsteps at Manchester Crown and she
Speaker 9: would have told the world media that you know, my
Speaker 9: life has been destroyed by the Crown Prosecutor Service, Cheshire
Speaker 9: place and certain people at the count of Cheship Hospital
Speaker 9: who have heaped all the blame this unto me, who
Speaker 9: I have never done anything wrong. I've no doubt that
Speaker 9: would have happened if she'd have been cleared. If she
Speaker 9: was going to be found guilty then and so it followed,
Speaker 9: it was going to.
Speaker 8: Be in the headlines. They were all going to be there.
Speaker 9: Angel of death, flat bear, evil lat Bear, montelat BET's
Speaker 9: told two completely different realities there.
Speaker 1: When the verdict finally came the alternate reality Kim had
Speaker 1: already drafted. The one where Lucy let be walked free
Speaker 1: was instantly erased. The other version, the one labeled guilty,
Speaker 1: became the only story anyone heard. Within minutes, every major outlet,
Speaker 1: from local radio stations to national news outlets to ministers
Speaker 1: in the houses of Parliament, echoed the same headline, this
Speaker 1: is what it sounded like.
Speaker 6: She's guilty.
Speaker 2: The juries found Lucy Let be guilty of murdering seven
Speaker 2: babies and attempting to murder another sixth.
Speaker 1: That moment of certainty one narrative takes hold and the
Speaker 1: other vanishes wasn't lost on journalists Clucy De Olivera and
Speaker 1: Rachel Levive, who followed the trial from a distance from
Speaker 1: this side of the Atlantic.
Speaker 10: Her conviction was front page news everywhere, absolutely everywhere, and
Speaker 10: then subsequently her sendencing a couple of days later. You know,
Speaker 10: like this was how many many people first learned about
Speaker 10: the case. They learned about that it happened by seeing
Speaker 10: the picture of this woman on the front pages, described
Speaker 10: as the most evil woman in Britain and the worst
Speaker 10: serial killer of babies in modern times.
Speaker 7: That was the first impression.
Speaker 10: That was what people knew about Lucy Leffie.
Speaker 11: I mean it was everywhere. It was in the Daily
Speaker 11: Mail for sure. I think I counted more than one
Speaker 11: hundred stories about the case in the Guardian. It was
Speaker 11: a course sort of national fixation of a level that
Speaker 11: felt like, you know, the equivalent of the O. J.
Speaker 11: Simpson trial. It was a huge media phenomenon.
Speaker 1: The police, then the law courts and the jury set
Speaker 1: the narrative which was then taken on and reinforced by
Speaker 1: the media. I want to ask what your reaction was
Speaker 1: when you first heard the news about the verdict in
Speaker 1: Lucy's case.
Speaker 4: I guess I wasn't that surprised, and if I was
Speaker 4: in the courtroom on that jury, I probably would have
Speaker 4: found her guilty.
Speaker 1: A family doctor for twenty years, doctor Phil Hammond is
Speaker 1: a columnist for Private Eye, the much vaunted magazine famous
Speaker 1: for its biting satire, where he writes about medicine under
Speaker 1: the pseudonym MD.
Speaker 4: The media had been running with their burn the witch
Speaker 4: headlines for a long time. So what's interesting, and again
Speaker 4: you will know this from your own experience, is that
Speaker 4: they take a quation and they stick it intoverted commas,
Speaker 4: evil murdering which deserves to rot in hell or whatever,
Speaker 4: and so there'd been a plea endless barrage of that.
Speaker 1: Yep, he's not wrong. The stakes for me almost felt personal.
Speaker 1: Most people had accepted my guilty verdict when it was
Speaker 1: first announced to the world, and now they were doing
Speaker 1: the same for Lucy let Be wholesale. But just as
Speaker 1: in my case, there were a handful of people, just
Speaker 1: a few at first, who weren't convinced, and they started
Speaker 1: to ask questions. It's a horrifying thing to imagine that
Speaker 1: a nurse, someone trusted to care for babies and save
Speaker 1: their lives, could instead deliberately harm them. But in court,
Speaker 1: the prosecution's case was supported by the doctors who worked
Speaker 1: with Lucy let Be and the evidence of seven medical experts.
Speaker 5: The defense didn't call any.
Speaker 1: Experts to counter that narrative, perhaps because there was no
Speaker 1: hard evidence, a lot of smoke but no fire. As
Speaker 1: it were, no one actually witnessed let Be harming any babies,
Speaker 1: and as my lawyers initially argued, zero plus zero plus
Speaker 1: zero still equals zero.
Speaker 5: But that argument didn't work in my first trial.
Speaker 4: So there was layer upon layer of gosh, how can
Speaker 4: she possibly be innocent amongst all this, So I did write.
Speaker 4: My first piece in Private Eye was actually to say,
Speaker 4: let be lessons. Why don't we listen to whistleberwers? Isn't
Speaker 4: this appalling? Seven experts appeared for the prosecution, none appeared
Speaker 4: for the defense, and seven doctors who worked at the
Speaker 4: hospital stood up and said we think she's guilty. So
Speaker 4: there were fourteen medical experts who said she was guilty.
Speaker 4: Not a single doctor or medical expert appeared so purely
Speaker 4: on the numbers, you know, as sometimes in a jury,
Speaker 4: or baffled by all the science.
Speaker 8: And it was complicated.
Speaker 4: But if you think this is fourteen zero, you got
Speaker 4: forty experts up here thinks she's guilty, zero speaking out
Speaker 4: for Therefore I think on the balance of probability, she's guilty.
Speaker 1: Phil Hammond's logic was the same as most of Britain's.
Speaker 1: Few people would be bold enough to question the testimony
Speaker 1: of so many doctors.
Speaker 12: On the day she was convicted, I tweeted, sometimes the
Speaker 12: law gets it wrong.
Speaker 1: But to understand how doubt begins, you have to meet
Speaker 1: the people who won't stop asking questions. One of them
Speaker 1: is John Sweeney, a bear of a man, a decorated
Speaker 1: reporter who has directly confronted Vladimir Putin and others, A
Speaker 1: self confessed professional troublemaker.
Speaker 12: On the day she was convicted, I was in Ukraine. Well,
Speaker 12: I've got a flat jacket a helmet, and I thought,
Speaker 12: I I'll tweet this.
Speaker 7: I'll put my flatjack at the helmet.
Speaker 12: And the first person to call me was my agent, Humphrey,
Speaker 12: and he said, put that fucking tweet.
Speaker 7: Down now, and I said, no, I'm in Ukraine and
Speaker 7: you can't get me.
Speaker 5: When we talk.
Speaker 1: It's summer and John is sitting in his retreat, his caravan.
Speaker 1: He has a big mug of tea in his hand,
Speaker 1: his laptop balanced on a low table. John tells stories
Speaker 1: inside stories. Most start with an investigation he's chasing, or
Speaker 1: his beloved Liverpool football club, and they all take the
Speaker 1: long way round, but they usually start or end with
Speaker 1: a fight for justice. He knows my story too, the
Speaker 1: hell that played out in my life in a city
Speaker 1: in central Italy in two thousand.
Speaker 12: And nine, by the way, weirdly fast in Peruja, I
Speaker 12: heard I heard this.
Speaker 1: As we talk about Italy and his friends there, John
Speaker 1: suddenly leaps up as his neighbor shouts his dog is
Speaker 1: on the loose.
Speaker 8: Do oh shit, lo is he gone?
Speaker 1: Then a minute later he appears at the door with
Speaker 1: his sheepish dog.
Speaker 7: Sorry, my dog run away, and.
Speaker 1: The conversation picks up exactly where it left off. This
Speaker 1: is John unstoppable, always chasing something, be that a dog
Speaker 1: or a story.
Speaker 5: On the day of let.
Speaker 1: Be's conviction, he tweeted out a link to a blog
Speaker 1: post whose author we'll hear from later in this episode,
Speaker 1: and he wrote, this piece by a statistician sets out
Speaker 1: the evidence that Lucy let Be may well be the
Speaker 1: victim of a miscarriage of justice, that the Crown has
Speaker 1: taken a cluster of accidental or natural deaths and pointed
Speaker 1: the finger at let Be. There is no compelling evidence
Speaker 1: of a single murder. The law sometimes gets it wrong.
Speaker 7: And I got a ton of abuse.
Speaker 12: From that tweet, and so serve my literary agent, my
Speaker 12: book agent, Humphrey is a good bloke. So take that
Speaker 12: tweet down. You're getting slaughtered. You'll lose your stunning in
Speaker 12: the public. And I'm a war reporter. Kind of use
Speaker 12: for people shooting at me and being nasty to me.
Speaker 12: It's it's kind of what I do for a living.
Speaker 12: But it did not feel good being abused, and people
Speaker 12: were saying, how dare you?
Speaker 8: You're disgusting? What about the children?
Speaker 1: John's tweet set off a firestorm. He was accused of cruelty,
Speaker 1: of disrespecting the victim's families, and worse, because at the
Speaker 1: heart of the story are unimaginable losses, brand new lives
Speaker 1: gone too soon, and parents living with pain that words
Speaker 1: can't hold.
Speaker 5: When a story touches.
Speaker 1: That kind of grief, questioning it becomes taboo. Even asking
Speaker 1: what if can sound like heresy, and so anyone who
Speaker 1: raised doubts about the verdicts was branded a conspiracy theorist.
Speaker 4: John delete, I'll follow you, but this is ridiculous and
Speaker 4: a gross judgment.
Speaker 8: To post today.
Speaker 2: Imagine if the bereaf families read this, They've sat through
Speaker 2: harrowing evidence of how their child died and came.
Speaker 8: Face to face with the person guilty of their murders.
Speaker 6: There I like you love the stuff you did from Ukraine,
Speaker 6: But my god, what an insensitive bastard posting this on
Speaker 6: the day of the burger.
Speaker 1: But John was no stranger to medical murder cases gone wrong.
Speaker 1: In the early odds, he'd been one of just a
Speaker 1: handful of reporters doggedly pursuing answers in the case of
Speaker 1: Sally Clark, a mother convicted of murdering two of her sons.
Speaker 1: The case against Sally Clark was held together by a
Speaker 1: deeply flawed statistical argument, which was picked apart after her conviction.
Speaker 1: When the evidence for one son's murder fell apart, the
Speaker 1: evidence for the other one did too. John's reporting helped
Speaker 1: to eventually overturn Sally's conviction. She was freed, and her
Speaker 1: exonerations set off a public reckoning that saw the wrongful
Speaker 1: convictions of other mothers overturned as well. In the summer
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty three, for John and others, the Lucy
Speaker 1: let Be case felt an awful lot. Like Sally Clark's,
Speaker 1: doubt has a way of spreading. Doctor Phil Hammond initially
Speaker 1: accepted the verdicts, but he would soon shift position after
Speaker 1: he received a letter from a neo natologist who'd been
Speaker 1: lined up to give evidence for Lucy let Bey's defense team.
Speaker 1: For reasons that are still unclear, the expert was never
Speaker 1: called to speak in court.
Speaker 4: Professor Michael Hall, who was the most senior neonatology expert
Speaker 4: in the whole trial, far more so than the prosecution experts.
Speaker 4: He'd retired intoenty eighteen, whereas one prosecution expert had stopped
Speaker 4: seeing baby and retired in two thousand and nine, another
Speaker 4: had stopped being a top level in the anatologies in
Speaker 4: two thousand and eight. So he was the most expert person.
Speaker 4: And he wrote to private that great length, and he said,
Speaker 4: I read your piece. I think you're wrong. I think
Speaker 4: at the very least she had an unfair trial. I
Speaker 4: sat through the entire trial. I read all the net records.
Speaker 4: I prepared reports on most of the babies. I think
Speaker 4: they were sicker than the prosecution portrayed.
Speaker 1: The letter was enough to start to change Phil's perspective.
Speaker 5: On the case.
Speaker 1: Quietly privately, over the coming months, he began to dig deeper.
Speaker 1: In the weeks that followed the verdicts, only one newspaper
Speaker 1: ran a piece countering the established narrative the jury's verdict.
Speaker 1: Veteran British journalist Peter Hutchins wrote in his opinion column
Speaker 1: in the Mail On Sunday newspaper, I wish somebody else
Speaker 1: would ask this, what if Lucy let Be is not guilty,
Speaker 1: and he added, horror can make us blind to doubt.
Speaker 1: When Lucy let Be was convicted, a single version of
Speaker 1: events took hold, the one the public saw on front
Speaker 1: pages and breaking news banners.
Speaker 5: But outside that.
Speaker 1: Spotlight, another story was forming, as yet untold, quietly hesitantly
Speaker 1: among journalists, scientists, and people who felt something didn't add up.
Speaker 1: You could call it a split narrative, one dominant and loud,
Speaker 1: one almost whispered. While the country absorbed the story of
Speaker 1: the nurse turned monster, a handful of journalists were already
Speaker 1: beginning to look again, to ask if the story everyone
Speaker 1: thought they knew might not be the whole story.
Speaker 2: We had a month after the trial where there was
Speaker 2: really extensive reporting about the convictions, and the headlines were
Speaker 2: very much Britain's worst child serial killer in modern history.
Speaker 2: One headline proof there is the devil among us.
Speaker 1: Annook Curry is an investigative journalist and documentary maker who
Speaker 1: started examining the case towards the end of the trial.
Speaker 2: There was a very very powerful narrative off the back
Speaker 2: of the convictions, which is understandable in many ways. I
Speaker 2: don't think we can underestimate the impact that the media
Speaker 2: coverage in the immediate aftermath of the convictions had But
Speaker 2: what are I noticed happened was that two of the
Speaker 2: consultants who had been instrumental in Lucy let be being
Speaker 2: investigated in the first place. They were vocal. One of
Speaker 2: them spoke at length to ITV News, another to BBC Panorama,
Speaker 2: and they gave their narratives. So the general public believed
Speaker 2: that doctors had been screaming and shouting about this nurse
Speaker 2: and believed that she had been harming babies, when in
Speaker 2: natural fact, the reality when you look at the documentation
Speaker 2: is much more nuanced, and that was definitely a narrative
Speaker 2: that somehow or other became quite cemented in people's minds.
Speaker 1: The pediatricians who worked on the neonatal unit with Lucy
Speaker 1: ledbe since her convictions had emerged as the heroes of
Speaker 1: this tragedy. The media reported that they had put everything
Speaker 1: on the line to stop her, they said, but were
Speaker 1: thwarted every.
Speaker 5: Step of the way.
Speaker 1: You can hear the toll this took on one of
Speaker 1: the doctors, doctor Robb Jayram, in an interview he gave
Speaker 1: to ITV News in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 13: The families and the police have both said to us
Speaker 13: that they consider you to be a hero. Do you
Speaker 13: think the enormity of the part you played in all
Speaker 13: of this has sunk Kenya.
Speaker 14: I'm not here, I pull.
Speaker 8: I was just doing my job.
Speaker 1: Just over a month after this interview from September twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three, everything went silent. The police and Crown Prosecution
Speaker 1: Service or CPS as it's known in the UK, decided
Speaker 1: to retry Lucy Ledby for one count of attempted murder
Speaker 1: that the jury had failed to reach a decision on
Speaker 1: in the first trial, and in the UK, if a
Speaker 1: trial is pending, all reporting is banned. The idea is
Speaker 1: to prevent anything being published that might prejudice the case.
Speaker 1: But given that a narrative of guilt had already firmly
Speaker 1: taken hold, the press blackout served to silence the emerging
Speaker 1: voices of investigative journalists who were concerned about the safety
Speaker 1: of Letb's convictions.
Speaker 2: Then you have a long pause where nothing can be challenged.
Speaker 2: And I think that was really unusual, and that was
Speaker 2: because of the reporting restrictions that were in place. Because
Speaker 2: the Ground Prosecution Service decided that they would retry Lucy
Speaker 2: let Be on one count it meant that there was
Speaker 2: one narrative been put out there after the trial, and
Speaker 2: then there was avoid.
Speaker 1: Anook and others had started to connect with experts in
Speaker 1: the fields of science and medicine who were using social
Speaker 1: media to raise concerns about the safety of convictions. Unable
Speaker 1: to report, they continued to work on the case quietly
Speaker 1: behind the scenes.
Speaker 2: What people would do was to engage with journalists that
Speaker 2: they trusted and talk to them and that's what went on.
Speaker 8: And it wasn't just me.
Speaker 2: There were other people like Felicity Lawrence at The Guardian
Speaker 2: and later Sarah Napton at the Daily Telegraph, John Sweeney
Speaker 2: who's known for his coverage of these kind of cases,
Speaker 2: and so it was an unusual experience as a journalist
Speaker 2: where you were gathering information quietly and following as things evolved.
Speaker 2: And it started with a few experts who had concerns
Speaker 2: and then.
Speaker 1: Snowboard writers, scientists and doctors based outside of the UK
Speaker 1: were able to publish and share their opinions and analysis
Speaker 1: safely online being out side of UK jurisdiction. Despite the
Speaker 1: UK restrictions, there was plenty of debate on social media
Speaker 1: where people took risks, some bloggers tried to protect themselves
Speaker 1: using international domains. A number of these people reached out
Speaker 1: to me here in the US saying they thought the
Speaker 1: let Be case had echoes of my own. I recorded
Speaker 1: some of these early conversations as I became increasingly aware
Speaker 1: that there was more to this case than most people
Speaker 1: realized that the developments would be worth charting.
Speaker 15: I'm interestate position, and I'm not a journalist.
Speaker 7: I'm just a blogger.
Speaker 15: Hmm.
Speaker 1: Remember John Sweeney, the Journalists and the Helmet and flack jacket,
Speaker 1: who tweeted on the day of Lucy Letbe's conviction. Well,
Speaker 1: when he tweeted, he shared the blog of a statistician
Speaker 1: called Peter Elston, who would be come consumed by the
Speaker 1: case during the trial. Here he is talking to me
Speaker 1: back in February twenty twenty four.
Speaker 15: And until very recently, I was just a boring old
Speaker 15: fund manager who had a bit of an amateur interest
Speaker 15: in the justice system and miscarriages of justice. And then
Speaker 15: because of my blog I'd written about well, up until
Speaker 15: the verdicts were announced, I've probably written about ten pieces
Speaker 15: about the Lucy Letbe case. And then when the verdicts
Speaker 15: were announced, all of a sudden, the traffic to my
Speaker 15: blog just rocketed.
Speaker 1: Peter was concerned that a young nurse was in prison
Speaker 1: for life for crimes she didn't commit. His blog became
Speaker 1: a refuge for others who had doubt, Others who had
Speaker 1: followed the case and felt something about it all didn't
Speaker 1: add up, and they wanted somewhere anywhere to talk about.
Speaker 15: It because obviously a lot of people who were quite
Speaker 15: shocked by the verdicts, and the mainstream media were report
Speaker 15: saying that Lucy was a serial killer. To get an
Speaker 15: alternative view, you've had to look outside of that, and
Speaker 15: my blog with a place where people could get a
Speaker 15: slightly alternative view of these.
Speaker 1: And numerous people have reached out to me about this
Speaker 1: case because they said that it reminded them of what
Speaker 1: happened to me. What similarities you see between this case
Speaker 1: and what I went through, Well.
Speaker 15: You're talking about scapegating. It seems to be systemic within
Speaker 15: the NHS that there is this very toxic culture of
Speaker 15: scapegoating that has emerged in recent decades. But yeah, it's
Speaker 15: certainly something that I've heard quite a lot about.
Speaker 1: The NHS is the UK's national health service, funded by
Speaker 1: the taxpayer. And free for all. You're likely to hear
Speaker 1: it reference to throughout this series. In recent years, it's
Speaker 1: been roundly criticized. What about the media's involvement in this case?
Speaker 1: How has that impacted it at all?
Speaker 15: There was no reporting by the mainstream of an alternative hypothesis,
Speaker 15: namely that Lucy wasn't a serial killer, and I suppose
Speaker 15: if you think about that from the media's perspective, we're
Speaker 15: now in a situation where I know there are very
Speaker 15: serious journalists out there who are absolutely convinced that Lucy
Speaker 15: is not a serial killer, and they're champing at the
Speaker 15: bit to write the story about the miscarriage. The British journalists,
Speaker 15: who I'm particularly in touch with, they can't write the
Speaker 15: story because of the reporting restrictions.
Speaker 1: In the silence that followed, something unexpected happened. Yes, the
Speaker 1: loudest voices went quiet, but the smaller, quieter ones found
Speaker 1: each other. If agenda setting is about who controls the
Speaker 1: storytelling spotlight, what was happening now was the opposite, a
Speaker 1: story growing in the dark. So thank you so much
Speaker 1: for reaching out about this case. You are one of
Speaker 1: many people who have reached out to me. By autumn
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three, another key voice was saying what many
Speaker 1: were afraid to say. Richard Gill, a retired professor of statistics.
Speaker 1: Richard is British but moved to the Netherlands decades ago
Speaker 1: after falling in love with a Dutch girl. It occurs
Speaker 1: to me, is that just a coincidence or is this
Speaker 1: a coordinated effort among advocates to reach out to people
Speaker 1: who might be.
Speaker 14: In It's not coordinated, but advocates do have contact with
Speaker 14: one another. And I'm like the spider in the middle
Speaker 14: of the spiders, were people come to me and I
Speaker 14: connect them.
Speaker 5: To all the excellent.
Speaker 1: Richard was one of the first to publicly question the
Speaker 1: evidence tweeting, writing, connecting experts across continents.
Speaker 5: Back in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 1: In the UK, many who shared his doubts stayed hidden
Speaker 1: in private Facebook groups. They were nurses, people afraid to speak,
Speaker 1: afraid to be seen as defending a baby killer.
Speaker 14: I'm a member of a couple of closed Facebook groups,
Speaker 14: bigger one of eighty or so people in a smaller
Speaker 14: one of twenty, and many of them are nurses, and
Speaker 14: many of them are people who have quite close in
Speaker 14: sight into what goes on there. One of them is
Speaker 14: a former police inspector. And these people do not dare
Speaker 14: to come out in public. They are carefully, sort of
Speaker 14: one by one talking to their best friends, and they're
Speaker 14: very happy when one of their best friends agrees to sort.
Speaker 7: Of listen to them for a little while.
Speaker 14: But yes, the tabloid media and social media have created
Speaker 14: an atmosphere where people do not dare to say that
Speaker 14: they think that Lucy let Me is innocent. Now I'm
Speaker 14: sort of famous, and I stand up and say that,
Speaker 14: and lots of people email me that they are so
Speaker 14: grateful that somebody else is saying this out loud. And
Speaker 14: they tell me all kinds of things, and they tell
Speaker 14: me really interesting things. They find out things, and I
Speaker 14: put them onto Twitter. And I do think that the
Speaker 14: atmosphere is slowly, slowly, slowly, but it's very very slow.
Speaker 1: In that silence, a second story began to take shape,
Speaker 1: one built quietly in emails enclosed forums in midnight Phone
Speaker 1: calls the story of a health system under strain and
Speaker 1: a woman at its center, a story we will hear
Speaker 1: much more about in future episodes. It's been two and
Speaker 1: a half years since the trial of Lucy let be ended,
Speaker 1: she has exhausted her appeals. She remains in prison, Yet
Speaker 1: her case never became yesterday's news. It's as fresh today
Speaker 1: as it was on the day Judge Goss, choking back tears,
Speaker 1: described the violent acts Lucy let Be had been found
Speaker 1: guilty of inflicting on the babies. Let Be still dominates
Speaker 1: headlines and will continue to do so for who knows
Speaker 1: how long. The discourse around her now couldn't be more
Speaker 1: different than the one that greeted her verdict. Gone is
Speaker 1: the mainstream certainty that this is a story about a
Speaker 1: serial killer brought to justice, and its stead is an
Speaker 1: all out war fought in the public square between two
Speaker 1: sides that can't agree on a shared version of reality.
Speaker 1: On one police, the prosecution experts, and the grieving families
Speaker 1: pleading with the public to accept her guilt. On the other,
Speaker 1: an ever growing number of prominent voices, among them some
Speaker 1: of the most eminent doctors in the world, shouting from
Speaker 1: the rooftops that the evidence doesn't add up, that there
Speaker 1: were probably never any murders at all.
Speaker 5: Over the course of this.
Speaker 1: Series, we won't just be cutting through the tangle that
Speaker 1: has sprung up around this case. We'll be hearing from
Speaker 1: people directly involved in it, and will be uncovering vital
Speaker 1: evidence that has never been made public before, not even
Speaker 1: to the jurors who convicted Lucy Letpee.
Speaker 5: And if we want to.
Speaker 1: Understand what happened inside the UK hospital where a nurse
Speaker 1: was accused and babies died, we have to go there.
Speaker 1: Next time, we go back to the start of this story,
Speaker 1: to twenty fifteen, to the neonatal unit at the Countess
Speaker 1: of Chester Hospital where too many babies were dying and
Speaker 1: the fingers of two doctors began to point at one
Speaker 1: young nurse. In later interviews broadcast on ITV and BBC,
Speaker 1: they would describe the moment their suspicions turned toward one
Speaker 1: of their own staff nurses.
Speaker 8: Could she be doing something deliberate? Oh no, it can't be, Lucy,
Speaker 8: Look nice, Lucy.
Speaker 1: That's next on Doubt The Case of Lucy let Bee.
Speaker 1: Doubt the Case of Lucy let Be is brought to
Speaker 1: you by Vespucci, iHeart Podcasts and Knox Robinson Productions. I've
Speaker 1: been your host, Amanda Knox. The co producers were Joe
Speaker 1: Meek and Lucy Ditchmont. The assisted producers Reclusy de OLIVERA
Speaker 1: and Lammy Gill. Senior producer and production manager was Natalia Rodriguez.
Speaker 1: This episode was written by Joe Meek with help from
Speaker 1: a Knook Curry audio mix by Tom Biddle. The theme
Speaker 1: music was written by Tom Biddle, story editing by Kathleen Goldhar.
Speaker 1: Legal advice was provided by Jack Browning. The producers at
Speaker 1: iHeart Podcasts are Chandler Mays and Katrina Norville. The executive
Speaker 1: producers were Joe Meek, Amanda Knox, Christopher Robinson, Daniel Turkin,
Speaker 1: and Johnny Galvin.
Speaker 5: Thank you for listening.