Back in February, between the end of Lucy Letby’s first trial and the start of her second, a series of messages hit the inbox of the prosecution’s main expert witness, Dr Dewi Evans.
They came from one Richard Gill, a professor of statistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He’d been following Letby’s case, was convinced she’d been falsely convicted of murder and attempted murder and reckoned Evans was at least partly to blame.
Evans responded politely but firmly. He’d be perfectly happy to have a proper chat about Lucy Letby in due course, he said, but reporting restrictions designed to ensure fair trials meant they’d need to wait until court proceedings had concluded.
Professor Gill didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer, however. Over the ensuing weeks, he fired off around 20 further messages to Evans, via his account on the social network LinkedIn.
Most of them argued that the case against Letby was fatally flawed, and sought to convince the doctor that he ought to change sides and start advocating for the defence.
Gill told him: ‘Fortunately many investigative reporters are working on the case and many scientists are working on the case. The dam is starting to crack and it won’t be long before it crashes down.’
The correspondence represents Evans’s first proper encounter with what we might call the Lucy Letby ‘truther’ movement. Members of this increasingly vocal group believe that the salsa-dancing former nurse, a convicted serial killer of seven premature babies, has fallen victim to a great miscarriage of justice.
Their sincerely held belief is, in other words, that two separate juries, along with a Court of Appeal panel containing three of the country’s most senior judges, got the case badly wrong.
Some argue that Letby’s defence, in one of the longest criminal trials of modern times, was botched. Others say that important pieces of evidence were fatally flawed. A few have even claimed that Letby was somehow framed by senior NHS doctors seeking to cover up failures at the Countess of Chester Hospital, where she worked.
All believe the ‘whole life’ jail sentence she’s currently serving is unjust.
This week the debate returned to our news pages thanks to BBC Radio 4’s File On 4 programme, in which Evans admitted that he’d changed his mind about how one of Letby’s victims, Baby C, had died.
Listeners were told that, in court, Evans claimed that the child was harmed by an injection of air to the stomach, revealed via an X-ray taken two days prior to his death.
However, as the jury later heard, Letby was not actually on duty on the day that X-ray had been taken (although she had been there when he suffered a later, fatal collapse).
Evans conceded during the radio programme that later evidence about shift patterns had caused him to perform a volte–face regarding the cause of death. However, he claimed this would have been of little consequence to the verdict. Several critics who were interviewed on the programme argued otherwise. Intriguingly, many of them spoke with cut-glass accents.
For while the ‘truthers’ include in their ranks a fair number of cranks and contrarians, they also boast a notable array of distinguished professionals.
Examples include MPs such as Sir David Davis, the Tory grandee, a smattering of academics and expert statisticians such as Professor Gill, plus several senior doctors and nurses. In July, some 24 experts – from Warwick University statistician Jane Hutton to Dr Tariq Ali, a former head of the paediatric critical care unit at Oxford University Hospitals – wrote to Health Secretary Wes Streeting voicing concerns about Letby’s conviction.
But the respectable nature of some such professionals hasn’t stopped the ongoing debate turning very ugly. Many seem increasingly happy to direct grotesque smears towards those on the opposite side.
Professor Gill is a case in point. On a single day this week, he uploaded no fewer than 30 posts to social media platform X, arguing that Letby is innocent and seeking to attack those responsible for her conviction.
Ten of them targeted Dr Evans, about whom Gill has written 87 astonishingly hostile posts, dubbing him everything from a ‘well-known charlatan and a narcissist’ with a ‘sick brain’ to a ‘fantasist’ who ‘makes up most things on the fly’, a ‘fool’, and a ‘cowboy’.
Other supporters of Letby have made even uglier contributions to X. Recent weeks have seen critics use the platform to call Evans, among other things, a ‘coin-operated whore of an expert’, ‘a nonce who lies and commits perjury’ and a ‘sociopath’.
Some have even tried to get Evans struck off, bombarding the General Medical Council (GMC) with complaints about him.
When we met the other day, Evans, a 74-year-old grandfather, told how his critics – people he calls ‘Poundshop Poirots’ – had been trying to place a series of false stories about him in sympathetic newspapers.
‘A journalist rang me up saying that some guy from Ludlow had done a search on me, couldn’t find me on the GMC register and thought I was a fraud,’ Evans said. ‘They’d not realised that I’m registered under the name I was christened with, which is David Richard Evans.
‘Then the Guardian messaged to ask about a nonsense rumour I was being done for perverting the course of justice.
‘People behind this stuff can be obsessive and dangerous, so I’m very fortunate in that I’ve had CCTV on my property since 2002.’
His involvement in this increasingly surreal affair originally dates back to 2015, six years after he’d retired from the NHS frontline following a 30-year career as one of the most senior neo-natal paediatricians in Wales.
For much of his professional life, which saw him design and lead the neo-natal intensive care unit at Swansea’s Singleton Hospital, he devoted time to legal work, acting as an expert medical witness in delicate abuse and clinical negligence cases.
And in 2013, he began working on a regular basis for the National Crime Agency (NCA).
Detectives there typically used Dr Evans on serious investigations, for example hiring him to scour medical records to work out whether a child had been unlawfully harmed.
In more than 250 cases heard by the family courts, he says he never had a single decision against him (‘save for one that was later overturned on appeal’), and he helped convict a series of notorious child abusers, including the killers of babies Finley Boden, Alfie Steele and Jacob Crouch, who were killed by parents or step-parents.
In May 2017, while discussing a different investigation, he mentioned in an email to the NCA that he’d read that police were looking into unexpected deaths of newborn babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital, and ‘told them it sounded like my kind of case’.
Cheshire police then called him in for a chat. At a meeting, it was decided that he should independently review the clinical notes of all 30 children who’d either died or suffered sudden unexplained collapses there during a two-year window. Officers could then reach a view as to whether any crime might have been committed.
Evans recalled: ‘I said I wanted the clinical records of all the babies who died and all the babies who had experienced sudden collapses or deteriorations, not just the suspicious ones. And I made sure to tell them: ‘If you suspect criminality, or think somebody particular was responsible, I don’t want to know.’ It was crucial that I looked only at the evidence.’
Dr Evans reviewed tens of thousands of pages of records and submitted a report that November.
He concluded that seven of the children had been murdered and another seven deliberately harmed in 25 separate incidents.
Some had been harmed by overfeeding, he reported, via excessive quantities of milk pumped into their stomach, while others had air injected into their stomachs or arteries. Two seemed to have been given excessive quantities of insulin.
‘I then told police that if you harm a baby, it will deteriorate there and then. Not the following day. So I also identified a time and date when each had probably been harmed and told them they needed to find out who was on duty,’ he recalled.
‘If they found the same person was there during lots of incidents, they’d have a suspect.’
It emerged that one of the unit’s 39 nurses was there on all 25 of the suspicious occasions Evans had highlighted.
And one day in July 2018 a detective rang him and said they’d arrested her.
‘It was,’ he recalled, ‘the first time that I’d heard the name Lucy Letby.’
The work Evans had carried out for the police was then peer reviewed by six other experts, several of whom gave evidence during Letby’s first, ten‑month trial. Dr Evans attended almost every day of that case, and was cross-examined on 17 occasions.
Letby was convicted in August 2023. And that, Evans initially assumed, would be that.
Then came the messages from Professor Gill. Followed, in May, by the publication of a lengthy article in the New Yorker magazine critiquing various aspects of Letby’s conviction. Evans, who was interviewed by the writer, calls it ‘highly partisan’.
‘Firstly, it claimed the prosecution had misused statistics. As I’d told their reporter, they didn’t use any statistics. They simply used shift records to prove she was present when crimes were committed.
‘Then it argued that Letby came from a respectable background and had no previous record of behaving oddly. As I’d told the author, that was also untrue.
‘In fact, she’d collected medical records under her bed for 250 children, including the ones she’d harmed; she’d done Facebook searches for their parents, including for the mother of a dead baby at 11.30pm on Christmas night; and would get very animated after the death of a baby, which was also highly abnormal. The New Yorker ignored all of it.’
Due to ongoing restrictions, designed to ensure fairness in Letby’s forthcoming second trial for attempted murder, the
New Yorker article was blocked from publication in the UK, where it remains impossible to access online.
To critics, that amounts to censorship. The aforementioned MP, David Davis, claimed in Parliament that the situation was ‘in defiance of open justice’.
It was at this point that talk of conspiracy began, at first in online chatrooms.
Much was initially fuelled by onerous restrictions placed on coverage of the trial, including an unprecedented court order that the names of victims (and their parents) should remain secret.
So obsessed were authorities with protecting them that, in one surreal episode, the Crown Prosecution Service refused to make public a key X-ray showing harm to a murdered baby in case it intruded on the dead infant’s privacy.
When Letby was convicted for the second time, in July this year, it finally became legal to express scepticism about her guilt.
Because the case hinged on an array of circumstantial evidence – rather than a single key fact – there were plenty of avenues for supporters of Letby to attack.
A selection of neonatologists took issue with the conclusions that expert witnesses (including Dr Evans) had drawn about the way various children had died.
This irks Evans. He points out that none of those individuals had access to the medical records that underpinned the reports used in the trial. Neither did they attend court to see how that evidence was tested.
He is particularly critical of one Dr Svilena Dimitrova, who works at a hospital in Brighton and is an adviser to the ongoing Ockenden Review into maternity care.
She recently filed a formal complaint with the GMC about Evans, telling the Guardian: ‘The theories proposed in court were not plausible and the prosecution was full of medical inaccuracies.’ Evans tells me: ‘Dimitrova said I was not fit to be a medical expert witness and should be removed from that position.
‘It’s a disgraceful way to attack a member of your profession and shows incredibly poor judgment. Quite frankly, I think she should be chucked off the Ockenden Review.’
Dimitrova could not be reached for comment. But the chair of the review, Donna Ockenden, is happy for a public advocate of a convicted serial killer of babies to remain as one of her inquiry’s advisers, telling me: ‘I have been aware of Dr Dimitrova’s views about the evidence in the Lucy Letby trial, and I see no connection with the work she has been doing for the Ockenden Review.’
Evans reserves his greatest contempt for various professional statisticians, who have publicly insisted that Letby’s conviction is unsafe because of the aforementioned chart, shown to the jury, showing that Letby was present at 25 suspicious incidents highlighted by Evans.
Their criticism is that the table didn’t include data covering various other deaths that occurred during the period in question. Evans says that’s because he did not regard them as suspicious.
‘They have behaved abominably,’ he says. ‘I would be ashamed of expressing an opinion, even off the record, on a medical issue without making sure I have all the facts.
‘It may well be that doctors and lawyers don’t know enough about statistics, but statisticians don’t know anything about law and medicine. The ladders in my garage are not long enough to reach their ivory tower. They have no understanding of this case at all. Statistics had no part in it.’
As for the aforementioned statistician Richard Gill, author of various aggressive and highly personal social attacks, Evans describes him as ‘an idiot who should stay in Holland, preferably in bed, with the curtains drawn’.
Asked if he wishes to respond, Gill sends me nine emails running to no fewer 8,000 words. Their contents can be summed up as follows: Evans is wrong, Letby is innocent and Gill doesn’t regret a thing.
‘Yes, I am emotional about the case,’ he says. ‘ The purpose of my more vitriolic comments is to give encouragement to the silent majority who haven’t dared to speak their fears [about Letby] even to friends and family… My wife’s a historian. She says it’s fascism.’
And so, with a leading figure on one side suggesting that those who disagree with him are comparable to Hitler, the great war of words over Lucy Letby continues.