‘Why Are They Doing This to Me?’

I am haunted by the image of Lucy Letby, quite early on in the sequence of events that led to her receiving – with no hard evidence nor discernable motive for her alleged crimes – the severest sentence ever handed down to a woman since the abolition of capital punishment, sobbing in her supervisor’s arms, asking plaintively, ‘Why are they doing this to me?’ Well, the answer to that is not very pretty…

Dr Stephen Brearey, the consultant whose accusations started the snowball rolling and whose determination to see them vindicated kept it going, as head clinician of the Countess of Chester Neonatal Unit must have been aware of the catastrophic shortfalls in hygiene, staffing and supervision there. Otherwise he must have either been a fool or blinding himself to reality. He must also have realised that sooner or later he was likely to be held at least partly responsible for those sub-standard conditions and the elevated mortality rate among the unit’s patients that ensued.

Only he knows whether he was clutching at straws in an attempt to divert blame or whether he was deliberately and cynically seeking a scapegoat. Or perhaps he’d managed to convince himself of Letby’s guilt – though with no evidence beyond his ‘gut feeling’ – and truly believed in it, but I suspect that we can add another motive. And that is vindictiveness.

After Lucy Letby was removed from the neonatal unit she submitted an official grievance. The subsequent investigation exonerated her completely and resulted in Brearey and the other consultants he had recruited to his cause being threatened with disciplinary action and ordered to apologise to her in writing. Brearey is known to have taken this very hard. I believe the word ‘furious’ was used. It was at this point that he decided to go to the police.

Whatever Brearey’s motives were, an impartial search for the truth does not seem to have had a high place in his priorities. And that applies even more to the prosecution’s star witness, Dr Dewi Evans.

It is the job, and duty, of an expert witness to supply impartial, factual evidence, not to act as a hired gun for the prosecution, but that is how Evans seems to have regarded his role. Arrogant and conceited, he is given to bragging about how many court cases he has been an expert witness in, and how he has nearly always been on the winning side – omitting to mention that Lucy Letby’s trial is not the first time his impartiality and the validity of his evidence have been called into question.

Evans’ involvement came about in a highly irregular way. After reading about the case and deciding it was ‘my kind of case,’ he walked into a police station in Cheshire and offered to help with the investigation. The offer was eagerly accepted, without any apparent consideration of whether he was actually the best-qualified person for the job – he was not: he is a long-retired paediatrician with no training in the highly specialised field of neonatal care. Having jumped to the conclusion ‘within ten minutes’ (his own words) that foul play was involved, he focussed his investigations on trying to justify that supposition, cherry-picking the incidents that seemed most likely to result in a conviction. He then used his own skewed investigations as a basis for his ‘expert’ testimony in court – a clear breach of impartiality, a lack of independent scrutiny, that should never have been allowed.

This does not look to me like a man in search of the truth. It looks like a man in pursuit of another notch on his gun-butt, another boost to his ego. Oh, and let’s not forget the substantial fee he got for his trouble.

There is a great deal else that is flawed about this case – if you ask me, the whole sorry business stinks from start to finish as badly as the raw sewage on the floor of the neonatal unit – but the fact remains that these two doctors, Brearey and Evans, were the prime movers behind it, and without their actions it is almost certain that Lucy Letby would never have come near a courtroom. And the tragedy is that their pursuit of their self-serving agendas resulted in a young woman, who was happy and fulfilled in the job she loved and had dreamed of doing ever since her childhood, having it all taken away from her and her life irrevocably destroyed – for even if the verdict is overturned I cannot imagine how she can not be scarred for life by what she has been through.

I realise that I am laying myself open to charges of bias on my own part here. Well yes, too bloody right I am biased. I am convinced there has been a monstrous miscarriage of justice, and my heart goes out to that unfortunate woman who has been been subjected to prolonged mental anguish of an intensity I can only begin to imagine – the trial had to be postponed because on the day it was due to start Lucy Letby was suffering from a breakdown so severe that she was incapable of coherent speech. A cold-blooded murderer?

I find it tempting to fantasise about confronting Brearey and Evans with the question ‘How does it feel to have destroyed an innocent person’s life?’ In one case I already know the answer. When it was put to Stephen Brearey that his persecution might drive Lucy Letby to suicide his answer was, ‘I don’t care.’