Shortly after Lucy Letby was sentenced to 15 life terms for killing seven infants and attempting to kill seven others between June 2015 and June 2016 – a conviction that made her Britain’s worst child serial killer – Cheshire police agreed to give “unprecedented and exclusive access” to the makers of a Netflix film about the case.
The finished documentary, The Investigation Of Lucy Letby, which was released on Wednesday, must have been very different from what the producers imagined when they first started working on the project, given the series of unexpected turns in the story. Since the two trials, the prosecution’s evidence and the police’s handling of the case have faced criticism from an unprecedented number of prominent British and international medical experts. Led by the Canadian neonatologist, Dr Shoo Lee – who says again in the feature-length documentary on Netflix that his research was abused to convict the nurse – many of the experts are convinced that Letby is innocent, the victim of a catastrophic miscarriage of justice.
Their work now spanned against Cheshire police experts and was later entrusted to the Crown Prosecution Service, led from an early stage by retired paediatrician, Dr Dewi Evans.
In the film, Evans tells the now familiar story, that in May 2017 he read the report in the Guardian that the police in Cheshire launched a criminal investigation into the deaths of children at the Countess of Chester hospital in 2015 and 2016. Evans put himself for this, emailing a police contact, as he says with some relish: “Like my kind of cases”.
The film leaves out the context necessary to understand just how outlandish Evans’ earlier theories were about how the children died. There is a coroner’s process: postmortem, inquest and hospital internal review; an inspection by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health; and reviews by external consultants. No evidence was found that any child had suffered any intentional harm. Evans looked at the same medical evidence and quickly decided otherwise.
There is no indication that the police officers went back to the original pathologists or sought additional expert opinion at that stage regarding Evans’ novel diagnoses. They were later supported by other prosecution experts. Det Supt Paul Hughes says in the film: “This is the painful truth, that this could be the killing of a child. The next question we have to answer is: by whom?”
With access, the police in Cheshire promised the filmmakers “never before seen” footage, but it is unlikely that there will be anything to add any material, because all the evidence considered substantive would have been used in the trials. So, much of the footage ended up being extended scenes of the three times officers arrested Letby.
The use of this footage has been criticized, including by Letby’s parents, for being intrusive and violating privacy. Letby is shown crying for the first time, in his own home; he was then arrested two more times at his parents’ home in Hereford, found in bed in his dressing gown the first time, and then wearing a red nightie the next time he was arrested, his teddy bear was seen by the bedside.
The evidence advanced against him is now familiar, but it’s still instructive to see the police set it all up, including the shift chart, which matched Evans’ identification of 25 “suspicious incidents” to Letby, a hardworking young nurse who was always on shift.
Little context is provided for Letby’s sinister interpretations of the nurse’s shift charts, or his search for some of the children’s parents on Facebook. The filmmakers pay more attention to the famous private notes written by Letby, which include “I’m bad, I did it” and “I killed them on purpose”. The CPS asked the jury to read it as a confession, but the notes were contradictory, sad, with protestations of innocence. Letby also wrote: “I have done nothing wrong” and “I feel alone and scared”.
His lawyer, Mark McDonald, recounted that – as Felicity Lawrence first reported in the Guardian – Letby wrote personal notes of mental difficulties after he was removed from his job, and in the counseling organized by the hospital, where he was advised to write down his thoughts. Letby never confessed, and was shown in police interviews to consistently deny the accusations and say he loved his job.
Lee, who was shown cutting logs on his sprawling Alberta wheat farm for the first time, flew to London for a landmark press conference in February 2025, which he concluded with the line: “Ladies and gentlemen, we did not find any murder.”
His presentation included a recitation of his expert panel’s findings that all the children died of medical causes and a catalog of poor care. The mother of a child is anonymously featured in the film, speaking of her terrible ordeal and grief. Lee said doctors failed to give him antibiotics in the hours after his water broke, and the baby died of pneumonia and sepsis – as the original postmortem found.
The mother agreed that the hospital had failed her and her son. But he added, in response to Lee’s analysis: “Every doctor, nurse, expert, everyone clearly says that [the baby] progressing. He’s getting better, he’s getting stronger.
Hughes expressed no doubts about the convictions and was not shown engaging in expert criticism. The most famous revelation came not from the police, but from one of Chester’s hospital consultants, Dr John Gibbs.
“I live with two sins,” he said. “The guilt that we let the kids down, and a little, a little, a little guilt: did we get the wrong guy? You know, just in case: a miscarriage of justice. I don’t think there was a miscarriage of justice, but you worry that no one actually saw him do it.”
Little as he said, this is the first public admission of doubt from one of the doctors in everything that happened since the children died in their unit and they went to the Cheshire police to accuse the nurse.