Police decided Lucy Letby was guilty from the start, former top officer says as he slams investigation
Cheshire Police officers failed to pursue alternative lines of inquiry, a former assistant chief constable has claimed
A top police officer has slammed the Lucy Letby investigation, raising concerns that procedure was not being followed in the case of the convicted baby killer.
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The force, who conducted the investigation which saw the nurse jailed for life, has been accused by a former top officer of fixating on Letby instead of looking into other explanations for a spate of baby deaths at the Countess of Chester Hospital.
Dr Steve Watts, Hampshire's former assistant chief constable, has slammed the force for not challenging the narrative of consultants at the hospital.
The College of Policing's core investigative directive, drawn up by Dr Watts, tells forces across the country to keep an open mind to avoid verification bias.
Dr Watts, who is also a former vice-chair of the national homicide working group of the Association of Chief Police Officers, told the Telegraph: "I followed the Letby trial on a daily basis and I remember thinking, ‘When are they going to get to the evidence?’ and it never arrived. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever.
“The material before the court, in my view, was obtained by an investigation that was unconsciously skewed by confirmation bias.
“At a very early stage, it appears that Cheshire Police decided these children had been injured deliberately, and that Lucy Letby had done it. I find it difficult to call it an investigation; it seemed that it was more an information-gathering exercise to prove that Lucy Letby did it.”
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He added: “I’m not a Lucy Letby supporter. I think the issue is wider and there has been an egregious miscarriage of justice. I thought policing was better than that.”
The Thirlwall Inquiry into the deaths saw Detective Chief Superintendent Nigel Wenham gave evidence to the hearing about a meeting with the consultants Dr Ravi Jayaram and Dr Stephen Brearey on May 15, 2017.
“The meeting... I can’t describe how powerful it was,” he told the hearing last November.
“[The consultants] were knowledgeable, they spoke from the points of view whereby they were dealing with these things in real time, and they have lived and breathed these events for the last several years, and I just felt, for those professionals there, they had an opportunity now to just speak to someone and be listened to, and believed.
“They were just very powerful in what they were saying and committed and, you know, I think we all owe them a great deal for coming forward and speaking out the way they did.”
Letby, 35, was found guilty of targeting infants at the Countess of Chester Hospital and given a whole life order after being convicted of seven murders and seven attempted murders in 2023.
She got a 15th life term after being convicted of trying to kill a premature baby after a retrial.
Her trial at Manchester Crown Court had been told the babies were attacked between 2015 and 2016 while she worked at the Countess of Chester Hospital's neonatal unit.
One method was injecting air into the bloodstream which was said to have caused an air embolism that blocked blood supply and led to sudden and unexpected collapses.
Letby also used various other ways to harm babies, including injecting air into the stomach, overfeeding with milk, physical assaults and poisoning with insulin.
And jurors heard she wrote a note saying: "I don't deserve to live. I killed them on purpose because I'm not good enough to care for them."
Despite her convictions, the neonatal nurse has continued to maintain she is innocent and her case is being considered by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which deals with potential miscarriages of justice.
In a statement to the Telegraph, Cheshire Police said the six-year investigation codenamed Operation Hummingbird had been “like no other in scope, complexity and magnitude”.
A spokesman added: “It was a detailed and painstaking process by a team of almost 70 police officers and no stone was left unturned. Around 2,000 people were spoken to and almost 250 were identified as potential witnesses at trial.
“As the case unfolded, multiple medical experts – specialising in areas of paediatric radiology, paediatric pathology, haematology, paediatric neurology and paediatric endocrinology, and two main medical experts [consultant paediatricians] – were enlisted to ensure that we carried out as thorough an investigation as possible.”