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Last year, I went on the podcast House of Pod. The show is hosted by Dr. Kaveh Hoda, a gastroenterologist and good friend of mine, and the other guest was Robert Evans of the Behind the Bastards podcast. The three of us came together to discuss someone who fell into the middle of our Venn diagram: Lucy Letby, the British nurse who was convicted of murdering seven babies in a neonatal unit at Countess of Chester Hospital and trying to murder many more over the course of just one year.
In the show, Kaveh described the horrific details of the case while Robert and I sat there disgusted and occasionally making really, really dark jokes. Like, vantablack jokes. Seriously, listen at your own risk.
If you didn’t hear that episode, let me give you the basic rundown of what Letby was accused of doing.
In 2015, she began working with babies in the neonatal intensive care unit of Countess of Chester Hospital, where they typically saw 2 to 3 deaths per year. Shortly after she joined, though, four infants crashed and three died in a single month. All of them had been under Letby’s care, all had been expected to survive, and all of the deaths were ruled as unexplained (which, to be fair, is quite common in infant deaths).
Over the following year, several more unexplained deaths occurred during Letby’s shifts, and eventually some staff members thought it more than coincidental and asked that she be investigated. An internal investigation insisted it WAS a coincidence. In April of 2016 Letby was moved to the night shift, and the time of deaths seemed to switch as well. As deaths continued to happen above and beyond what was expected, eventually the police stepped in to investigate. They found that in addition to the “coincidence” of Letby being present for so many suspicious deaths, Letby had also falsified some documents to make it appear she wasn’t on shift when she was, that she had taken home confidential documents related to the babies, that she had repeatedly searched Facebook for the victims’ families, especially on holidays and birthdays, that she had handwritten concerning notes on post-its and in her diary with fragments like “I am evil, I did this,” that her diary also contained the initials of the dead babies along with the dates they were born, when she attacked them, and they died, and that at least one consultant had said he walked in on Letby standing over a baby who was crashing, without her doing anything to help.
Post-mortem investigation of the dead babies revealed evidence that some had been injected with air in their stomachs and/or bloodstream to cause embolism, and tests indicated that others were unnecessarily injected with insulin.
Letby was tried in October 2022, and late last year she was convicted of seven counts of murder and eight counts of attempted murder, and sentenced to life in prison.
Pretty cut and dry, right? Letby would hardly be the first “angel of death” masquerading as a medical professional, killing unwitting patients out of a need for attention, or sympathy, or just because they’re sociopaths who love killing. I honestly did not second guess the evidence or the resulting verdict.
But back in May, I saw this New Yorker article suggesting that maybe Letby was, in fact, innocent. It’s very long and a lot of inches were devoted to discussing how delicate and nice and sweet Lucy Letby is. So at the time I just skimmed it, dismissed it as clickbait cherry picking, and forgot about it.
But following Letby’s guilty verdict in a retrial a few weeks ago, the Guardian published a similar piece with a bit more detail and a bit less “sad white ladies don’t kill anyone, do they???”
So I read it, and then I went back and read the New Yorker piece, and I found several points to be salient.
First there’s Letby’s “confession” in her diary: writing things like “I AM EVIL I DID THIS” could be the product of someone having a complete mental breakdown due to the investigation she was under. Nurses are under a lot of pressure, even when they’re not being accused of murder, and as someone who journals I DO get how it might be cathartic to write down the things you’re accused of. And “I killed them on purpose because I am not good enough” could actually be read two ways: did she murder the babies because she felt that she wasn’t good enough to care for them, or did they die for other reasons for which she blames herself, making it “on purpose?” People journal in different ways, and thoughts can be expressed in ways that might be confusing to outsiders.
The articles point out that often left out of the discussion on Letby is that the neonatal unit where she worked was understaffed, underfunded, and full of quality control issues. She was hired at the worst of their problems, and they stopped accepting critically ill babies after she was fired, which is why deaths went down when she left. The understaffing meant that she was one of only two qualified junior nurses in her unit so of course she would be present at many of the deaths.
That brings us to the statistics, which seem to be some of the most important evidence that led to Letby’s conviction. FIrst of all, the prosecution ignored several equally “unexplained” deaths, or those possibly attributable to insulin injection, that Letby could not have possibly been around for. This unnaturally strenghthened the statistical anomaly of Letby being present at the other deaths.
Also, some statisticians say that it’s way more possible than you think for a nurse to coincidentally be on call during a sudden uptick in deaths. Mathematician Richard Gill at Leiden University in the Netherlands has been vocal about how much Letby’s case resembles that of Lucia de Berk, who he helped exonerate in 2010 after she was convicted of murdering or attempting to murder seven patients under her care by injecting them with drugs or increasing their medication. Her conviction was also based on the improbability of her being present when so many healthy patients crashed under mysterious circumstances, but after she spent seven years in prison she was exonerated and her case is now considered one of the worst miscarriages of justice in the history of the Netherlands.
Finally, some experts argue that there is no solid evidence that any of the babies had actually been injected with air OR insulin. Two babies were supposedly injected with insulin but survived, but the tests used to detect the insulin were not, in fact, the appropriate tests to use for that purpose. The more accurate tests were never performed. However, the defense failed to bring that up and challenge the results.
The jury were told that if they found Letby guilty of those two attempted murders, they could use that as evidence that would weight how they found on the other murder charges, in which Letby was said to have injected air.
For the deaths by injection of air, the prosecution’s expert witness testified that there was a telltale discoloration on the babies’ skin, which was shown in a study on this rare phenomenon in 1989. But the sole remaining living author on that paper later said that none of the babies’ skin discolorations matched the findings from his paper. He was not called by the defense to testify, and when he offered to testify in the appeal, the judges said the defense should have considered that in the first trial and denied the appeal, which…seems a bit unfair? In the US you can appeal if your attorney is that incompetent but apparently that’s not how UK courts work.
For additional and more specific criticism of the science used in the trial, the mathematician, Gill, and the New Yorker cite “Sarrita Adams, a scientific consultant in California,” who launched “Science on Trial” last year to “(work) towards a more equitable legal system” by offering better scientific consultancy to lawyers. That sent me to an article on that site, presumably written by Adams, that delves into deeper problems with the insulin tests.
Adams makes a very technical argument and as a layperson, I’d have to rely upon her expertise, so I poked around on the site to see what her credentials were. And friends, that’s when I fell down another giant rabbit hole.
Before I continue, let me just summarize what I’d learned thus far: there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence against Letby, including her possibly falsifying two records, taking home a lot of private documents, being present during many deaths, and being seen by a pediatrician standing over a baby who was crashing and doing nothing.
On the other hand, the hard evidence is lacking, including post-mortem exams that found no malicious wrongdoing, problematic tests for insulin and air embolism that may have thrown false positives, diary “confessions” that appear alongside similar statements of innocence that may be explained by severe distress, and cherrypicking of data that exaggerates the statistical impossibility of her being present at so many deaths.
At this point, my own opinion was that the counter evidence doesn’t prove Letby is innocent, but it does make a compelling case that maybe she deserves a retrial because the proof of guilt no longer reaches “beyond reasonable doubt.” I’m including a lot of weasel words here because I am not a lawyer nor am I a doctor nor am I a statistician and so I could very well be totally wrong. I know, it’s so unfun when I can’t take a solid stance. I can feel the algorithm demoting me as I speak.
And just to be clear that before I go on, that is still my opinion now. Is Lucy Letby guilty? I think she probably is, but I don’t know. Did she get a fair trial? I think she probably didn’t, but I don’t know.
Okay. Back to Sarrita Adams and “Science on Trial,” which weren’t just cited by the New Yorker and often championed by Gill, but were also mentioned glowingly in several other articles I saw about the push back on the Letby prosecution.
I couldn’t find Sarrita Adams’ credentials on her website, so I Googled her. Easy enough, right? The top result is her LinkedIn, which just says she did a PhD at Cambridge and is a “visiting scholar” at the UC Davis M.I.N.D Institute, which “provides comprehensive evidence-based assessments and intervention recommendations for children with possible neurodevelopmental conditions at our Massie Family Clinic.”
Not super helpful, so let’s check out the 2nd result: a subreddit dedicated to investigating and criticizing Sarrita Adams and “Science on Trial.” Google’s preview was enticing but sadly the subreddit was set to private and I was unable to get in, even after messaging the moderators asking for permission. Luckily, the Wayback machine exists, and the posts there claimed that Adams admitted she does NOT have a PhD. The images were missing, so I tried to find the website they mentioned on archive.org but got the message that “(rexvlucyletby2023.com) has been excluded from the Wayback Machine,” something I have never seen before. The site that is currently live is branded Science on Trial and reads “This website, along with all the scientific detail it contains, has been produced and compiled by a scientist with expertise in rare paediatric diseases…We have now limited access to the material on this website to prevent ongoing copyright violations.”
Hmmmmmm!
Further down the Google results, I got some more information from Reason Magazine, which wrote about a legal battle between Sarrita Adams and the Redditors criticizing her. According to Reason, Adams filed a restraining order against the subreddit moderator, telling the courts that the mod and users of the subreddit were stalking and harassing her and that their comments are defamatory, which led a judge to grant an injunction demanding that the Redditors remove all their online criticism.
You guys know by now that using the court system to silence critics is a big red flag for me, by which I mean it’s usually a shitty thing that quacks do because they are unable to mount an adequate defense of their quackery. Is that what was happening here?
I kept digging, and was surprised to find that not only did Adams start Science on Trial to defend Letby late last year, but she also launched a fundraiser for Letby around the same time, according to media reports. Which is weird? Because Adams is a concerned scientist in California with no formal connection to Letby or her case, and according to MSN, who describes Adams as “a scientific consultant for biotech startups,” she started raising money supposedly to fund the appeal in British courts. But after a lot of digging, I couldn’t find any evidence of the fundraiser, how much it raised, or whether or not any money was given to Letby or her legal counsel.
But I did find several other court cases Sarrita Adams has apparently been involved in. There was a divorce that didn’t seem relevant so I didn’t read those papers, and in 2021 she was part of a group of defendants in a breach of contract case that was eventually dismissed, and it seems as though she is currently being sued by American Express for failure to pay $26,000.
Next, I found a Facebook group dedicated to discussing the Letby case that noticed Adams’ fundraiser when it was launched. They were intrigued by the Science on Trial website stating that the group had “retained the barrister, Mark McDonald to act as counsel for the application to intervene” in the Letby appeal. McDonald is the founder of the Innocence Project, London, and when the Facebook users contacted him, he apparently replied that he had had conversations with Science on Trial but was NOT representing them, or Letby, in any appeal or intervention and had no plans to. A few days after that Facebook post, the reference to McDonald was deleted from the Science on Trial website.
They also posted a screenshot apparently showing Adams saying that she had thus far raised over 3,000 pounds, or just under $4,000.
Finally, they pointed out this incredible exchange between someone claiming to be Adams and a lawyer in the comments of that Reason article:
First, a user called ShinyHappyPeople with a suspiciously large amount of knowledge and a lot of anger about defending Adams writes that the Reddit moderator is a “vicious stalker of a mixed race autistic woman who was a victim of domestic abuse.” Oh yeah, that divorce I saw earlier.
In a reply, a lawyer looks up Adams’ public divorce documents and finds that this:
“And while both parties accused the other of domestic violence, the trial court found Billings’s testimony “more credible” based on pictures showing Dr. Adams “painting on the walls (‘I hate you’), damaging [Billings’s] property, causing injuries to [Billings’s] body and kneeling on the floor with a can of gasoline and two knives [which] presented a disturbing picture.” The court did not credit Dr. Adams’s insistence that Billings was “‘gas lighting’” her or that she was the abused party. The court stated it was not convinced by Dr. Adams’s explanations as to how she obtained her injuries and expressed its opinion that Dr. Adams was “the primary aggressor.””
This is the point where I had to pause and reevaluate how I was spending my time. I was so deep in I was learning things I never wanted to know about the contentious divorce of a woman I had never even heard of last week.
And this is the thing: Sarrita Adams and her now-disappeared fundraising absolutely set off my grift detector. But at the same time, while digging through all these Facebook groups, subreddits, Twitter accounts, and blog comments, I can see how she feels like she’s being harassed. Because on the “other side” are a bunch of people who are, right or wrong, obsessed with the people who are obsessed with Letby’s presumed innocence. When I was first trying to gauge how people reacted to the New Yorker and Guardian articles on social media, it was like I was trying to read Esperanto. Several days of obsessive research later, I now know that the mathematician Richard Gill, who has also been retweeting pseudoscientific “body language” examinations that claim the doctors in the Letby case are lying, also posted on Twitter that, essentially, if some of Letby’s murders were to ease the suffering of the babies than that’s okay, and someone else found a Facebook comment where he said he felt like going to the courthouse with an AK-47, and that was all posted by a user called “Go and have a wash LuLu” so named because it is actually an anonymous parody account to mock another user named “Sarah-Lou” who is a true crime fan who posts about how she thinks Letby is not guilty.
In other words, this case of a woman accused of serial killing babies has become an intercontinental troll meme fight with lore so deep that the average normie can only throw their hands in the air and hope the jury made the correct decision.
The push back against the Letby conviction reminds me a lot of the “lab leak” hypothesis for the origins of COVID, which I most recently discussed last month. It starts with real scientists raising valid concerns about an issue, and engaging in good faith scientific back-and-forth. And then as time goes on and laypeople get involved, it actively morphs into a conspiracy theory, where proponents dig in and make their position their entire personality. And while you can debate a scientific issue like the evolution of a virus or the signs of a rare embolism, you can’t debate who you are as a person.
I suppose the moral of the story is to please, please, try to be normal. Base your personality on something good for your mental health, like gardening or swimming or…making YouTube videos about not normal people.
