What all of the Lucy Letby documentaries reveal

Netflix has revealed preview footage of the 90-minute film, which shows police arresting her in bed in her parents’ house in Hereford - a police record which had not been seen before.

Read also: Baby killer nurse Lucy Letby will not face further criminal charges

The Investigation of Lucy Letby, which will be released in February, also has contributions from prosecution members for the first time, as well as an interview with a victim’s mother.

Neonatal nurse Letby, 36, has been sentenced to spend the rest of her life behind bars, having been found guilty of the offences committed within the Countess of Chester Hospital in 2015 and 2016. She was first arrested in 2018 after the conclusion of Operation Hummingbird.

Letby has been held at HM Prison Bronzefield since January 2024, having been convicted of seven counts of murder and eight counts of attempted murder.

The high-profile case continues to intrigue the public and several documentaries have been released in the years since her 2023 conviction.

Letby had always maintained her innocence but a retrial also found against her.

Here is the information that was released in each of the documentaries.

Lucy Letby: The Nurse Who Killed (2023) - BBC

For the BBC’s Panorama series, Judith Moritz investigated whether different practices could have stopped some of the babies’ lives from being lost.

She spoke to a family whose child died, a friend who stood by Letby and a doctor who tried to raise the alarm.

The BBC went on to allege that warnings were ignored by the hospital while the hospital’s top manager had asked for doctors to stop making allegations against Letby.

It also published a chart showing that Letby was on duty for the death of every baby she was convicted of killing or trying to kill.

Lucy Letby: Did She Really Do It? (2024) - Channel 5 Lucy Letby: The New Evidence (2024) - Channel 5

Channel 5 broadcast a pair of documentaries in 2024, using all of the latest evidence available following her retrial that year, which did not see the sentence overturned. Letby was sentenced to a second whole life order in July 2024.

Lucy Letby: Beyond Reasonable Doubt? (2025) - ITV

Last summer’s documentary re-examined the prosecution’s case against Letby, with a team of international scientists considering that the case against her did not stand up to scrutiny.

Evidence put forward included that:

• Letby arrived at a time when much sicker babies arrived at the hospital than it had dealt with before and it was not equipped to cope,
• A plumber presented evidence of possible hygiene problems on the ward,
• Dr Dewi Evans, the health practitioner who had played a role in the prosecution, had later altered his version of events of how one of the babies died,
• A shift chart that showed Letby to be on duty for all of the shifts when babies died did not show that she was not on duty when other babies died on the unit,
• Notes written in Letby’s journal, where she appeared to confess, were used as evidence against her - but a friend of the former nurse said that writing out one’s own worst thoughts was part of a therapeutic exercise that Letby had been recommended.

“The makers do not dwell on why Letby’s team put forward such a minimal defence,” the Guardian’s Lucy Mangan aded in what was a five star review of the documentary.

Conviction: The Case of Lucy Letby (2025) - Channel 4 / Lucy Letby: Murder or Mistake (2025) - Channel 4

Shown in September, Channel 4’s documentary continued a more recent trend of following Letby’s counsel as they tried to overturn her conviction.

It is understood that the same documentary was broadcast under two different names, or that the name changed in post-production.

Those who contributed included investigative journalist Dr Phil Hammond and the neonatal expert Dr Shoo Lee, as well as Dr Evans once more.

The programme also included interviews with parents whose children were transferred away from Chester, thereby escaping Letby.

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw wrote: “It certainly presents a very coherent argument in the case of each infant death that what could well have happened was incompetence and mishap; the all-important pattern of mysterious and questionable deaths, so easily attributable to a single malign person, could as easily be the result of systemic underfunding, understaffing or mismanagement.”

He added: “None of this solves the issue of guilt; the argument merely addresses the onus of proof.”

A number of offerings of evidence were put forward in the documentary, according to Manchester Evening News.

Dr Evans defends changing his mind about the death of Baby C, and said in the documentary "I did not change my view after the trial, I amended my report while giving evidence in the trial."