Inquiry into crimes of child serial killer Lucy Letby gets underway

A public inquiry set up to examine the events surrounding the crimes of child serial killer nurse Lucy Letby is underway.

The inquiry will be led by Lady Justice Thirlwall at Liverpool Town Hall and will investigate how Letby was able to carry out the murders of babies on the neonatal unit in 2015 and 2016.

The Thirlwall Inquiry, which is expected to last until the end of the year, will also look at how the Countess of Chester Hospital bosses handled concerns about her.

Letby, 34, from Hereford, is serving 15 whole-life orders after she was convicted at Manchester Crown Court of murdering seven infants and attempting to murder seven others, with two attempts on one of her victims.

The inquiry will cover three broad areas.

Firstly, the experiences of the parents of the babies who featured on the criminal indictment that Letby faced.

Secondly, the conduct of those working at the Countess of Chester and how Letby was able repeatedly to kill and harm babies.

Despite mounting concerns raised to bosses by some consultants, she was not removed from the unit until after the deaths of two triplet boys and the suspected collapse of another baby boy on three successive days in June 2016 and police were not called in until the following year.

Thirdly, a focus on the wider NHS in examining relationships between the various groups of professionals, the culture within hospitals and how these affect the safety of newborns in neonatal units.

In Lady Justice Thirlwall’s opening statement in November 2023, the senior Court of Appeal judge said she would also probe what recommendations had been made from previous inquiries into events in hospitals and other healthcare settings, and what difference they made.

She referred to the case of another child killer nurse, Beverley Allitt, who murdered four infants and caused grievous bodily harm or attempted to murder a total of nine other children in Lincolnshire in 1991.

She said: “Everyone was determined that it would not happen again. It has happened again. This is utterly unacceptable.”

Letby protested to the court “I’m innocent” as she was led from the dock when she was sentenced in July to her 15th whole-life order after a jury convicted her at retrial of the attempted murder of a baby girl.

In May, she lost her Court of Appeal bid to challenge her convictions from the first trial which took place between October 2022 and August 2023.

Her new lawyer, Mark McDonald, has claimed that new medical evidence and expert opinion had revealed “flaws” in the prosecution case and that he plans to apply to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) to ask it to return the case to the Court of Appeal for consideration.

In recent months, a number of doctors, scientists and statisticians have publicly challenged how the evidence was presented to jurors.

A letter to Government ministers from 24 signatories including neonatal experts and professors of statistics called for a rethink over the terms of the public inquiry and warned that important lessons could be missed from a “failure in understanding and examining alternative, potentially complex causes for the deaths”.

Speculation about Letby’s case in the media and possible future appeals had been “upsetting” for her clients, said solicitor Tamlin Bolton who is representing the families of six victims.

The first week of the inquiry will hear opening statements from the counsel to the inquiry, along with legal representatives from “core participants” including the families of Letby’s victims.

Evidence is scheduled to begin the following week and will continue until at least December.

A court order prohibits reporting of the identities of the surviving and dead children involved in the case.