In 2015 and 2016, an unusually large number of babies died in neonatal units in northern England. In two trials, one lasting 10 months in 2022 and 2023 and the other ending in July 2024, a young nurse on the ward named Lucy Letby was convicted of murdering or attempting to murder the children.
The case has made international headlines, and Letby has become a household name here in the UK. The case has captured the public imagination in Britain for a number of reasons. Letby’s alleged crimes are of a highly emotional nature. The potential murder of so many young children by someone entrusted with their care is chilling. There’s also the superficial presence of Letby as an unforgettable young woman who, in the mind of someone who doesn’t fit the stereotypical image, could be a cold-blooded killer of children. But had the inquest into their deaths and Latby’s subsequent trials gone differently, this incredibly dark event might now be put out of mind, leaving the perpetrator behind bars for the rest of his life for a crime he indisputably committed. That did not happen.
After Letby’s initial indictment in 2023, several international medical experts have come forward that there is “no medical evidence” that Letby killed the children by injecting insulin or air embolism, adding significant mud to the waters of public opinion about the case. Just last week, a headline in the Sun, which ran stories about Letby under headlines like last week’s “Poison nurse kills 7 children,” read, “Letby: This century’s biggest miscarriage of justice,” citing a retired police detective reviewing the files. Despite facing life in Letby Prison and currently serving 15 whole life orders, these children are not put to death in bed. So, as the sun rises, there’s now a Netflix documentary about it, which was released yesterday under the title. Research by Lucy Latby.
There was an odd period, starting about two years ago, when two separate, very long journalistic pieces were published in the US about this issue. The first was by Rachel Aviv for The New Yorker and the second by William Ralston in Vanity Fair. In both cases, the pieces were available online or in print in the U.S. but were blocked for readers in the U.K. because a jury was pending a retrial on one of the murder counts, and the U.K. has restrictive laws about media coverage of unresolved legal cases going before a jury. The UK edition of Vanity Fair ran, leaving the pages blank. But of course, the Internet exists, and here people interested in the matter – of which there are many, many – were able to find and read the articles if they wanted to. The stories reached opposite conclusions, leaning toward Aviv Letby’s innocence, and Ralston toward his guilt. It’s a case that has divided opinion even among those who have spent significant time reviewing it.
And so I didn’t expect this documentary to offer much in the way of clarity as to whether Letby was rightly convicted. In such a complex situation, in the absence of concrete, smoking-gun evidence, that clarity may never come. It is almost a two-part film, the first laying out the prosecution’s case, and the second outlining the arguments put forward to point to his innocence. It covers all the bases already covered in the press: that Letby was on duty as a nurse at the time of all the children’s deaths, that, on the advice of a doctor to help her face the charges against her, she wrote a note saying “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough,” that she maintains her innocence, that there are those who die under the NHS and those who believe. Errors in their care.
Protecting the identities of those involved was at the forefront of the filmmakers’ minds. Producers have made the controversial decision to “digitally anonymize” the only one of the dead children’s mothers to appear in the production, and a university friend who believes in Letby’s innocence. This was done in the name of privacy, though why weird AI representations with out-of-sync lip movements were deemed appropriate for your standard silhouette interview under these circumstances, I can’t say I understand. But the film is an interesting and uncomfortable document whose confidentiality is important in such cases.
The documentary presents some glaring privacy violations, which Netflix accidentally didn’t publicize in the lead up to the film. The footage, provided to the filmmakers by Cheshire Police, was body camera recording Latby being arrested on three separate occasions. The footage of the officers entering Letby’s family home is the first thing we see in the documentary. His mother can be heard shouting, “Please, no, not again, no, no!” Then, as Letby is taken down by the police in her dressing gown, she hugs her cat and tells her parents, “You know I didn’t do it,” and her mother cries again, “I know you didn’t! We know!”, then we hear her mother cry as Letby is handcuffed to their door. “Just go in, Mom, don’t look, Mom, just go.”
Letby’s parents told the press this week that they had no idea the footage had been given to Netflix for use in a documentary. Footage shot inside their home of the worst moments of their lives. Even though Lucy Letby was guilty of the terrible crime she was convicted of, her parents certainly weren’t. And yet, against their will or knowledge, these clips of their suffering are packaged to be viewed as entertainment for strangers around the world. The only justification for including this footage is that it is shocking and therefore more eye-catching for the show. When retelling a famous event, journalists must often ask themselves how their contribution advances the story. This footage may be the documentarians’ answer to that question. But their answer here feels thin, masquerading as a very tempting true crime as a morally elevated effort to “spread awareness” or whatever.
