Lucy Letby and the Handover Sheets

trophies of terrible crimes or innocent mistakes?

Not that long ago I wrote about the Lucy Letby case for The Independent, reflecting on the content of the Netflix documentary The Investigation of Lucy Letby. The film contained clips from Letby’s police interviews and, among other things, dealt with the discovery of medical handover sheets during searches of her home in Chester and the home of her parents in Hereford.

Some of the handover sheet information contained in the Netflix documentary has since been contested, and so, with welcome assistance from others, I resolved to try and produce a detailed and accurate account of the position in relation to the handover sheets, as the evidence of them unfolded at the main trial, which ran for ten months between October 2022 and August 2023.

Those proceedings concluded with Letby convicted of seven murders and seven attempted murders. Two of the attempts were on the same baby, which has created some confusion about the number of convictions in the first trial – 14 from 13 babies. She received 14 whole life sentences, one for each guilty verdict. A 15^th whole life sentence was added, after her conviction at retrial for a further attempted murder involving a different baby, in July 2024.

It is unlikely to have escaped many people’s attention that there is a growing clamour of doubt about the safety of her convictions. It has been generated in part by a PR effort on Letby’s behalf, involving her post-trial barrister Mark McDonald, in collaboration with Maltin PR a public relations firm with a legal focus that specialises, among other things, in “crisis communications”.

Has a convicted serial killer in England & Wales - or any convicted murderer, for that matter - ever previously been represented by a pr company? I think not, which, unless I can be corrected, sets an intriguing precedent in the world of reputation management. (I do recall a pr company circulating among journalists during the “honour killing” trial of Shafilea Ahmed’s parents, at Chester Crown Court in 2012, but I don’t think their involvement, lobbying on the parents’ behalf, survived the parents’ conviction, and there is no suggestion the couple were wrongly convicted).

Maltin helped organise the Letby press conference in Westminster in February 2025 at which Dr Shoo Lee pronounced on behalf of his 14 strong expert panel that it had not found any evidence of murder.

You could - if you chose - contrast that pronouncement with the closing submissions made to the Thirlwall Inquiry by lawyers on behalf of “Family Groups 2 and 3”, led by Richard Baker KC, which make a detailed and powerful case that Letby was and remains properly convicted.

Those two polar opposite positions are irreconcilable - they both can’t be right - and have led to some hostile debate on X and elsewhere. The campaign on her behalf suggests that those acting for Letby and those supporting her believe that public opinion and media pressure can influence the decisions that will later be made, not only by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), but also the Court of Appeal Criminal Division (CACD) if or when the CCRC makes a referral.

I am quite sure that both institutions have regard to their own reputations - especially the Commission which remains beleaguered after the damage done by its multiple errors in the case of Andrew Malkinson and the ham-fisted attempts at damage limitation by its previous leadership team, along with other baffling decisions which appear to have been designed to corporatise the CCRC and defeat its core purpose. It now has a far more able and adept chair, in Vera Baird, and a new Chief Exec, although both appointments are currently temporary.

Whether the CCRC or the CACD will ever allow concerns over their reputations to influence their decisions, in this or any other case, is hard to know. Let’s hope not. The stakes are high - especially so for the Commission, whose very existence was surely threatened by it calamitous recent history.

During my own tenure as a CCRC Commissioner, leading a high profile review in a murder case which was being promoted as a wrongful conviction by a national newspaper campaign, I was always mindful of the potential for adverse publicity. I tried to drive the review forward and maintain momentum (some reviews take years) to forestall criticism over delays, but I certainly would never have allowed that external pressure to influence the decision that was made (not by me alone but by three Commissioners sitting in committee to decide whether a referral back to the CACD was justified. It was, in that case).

I do not know if Lucy Letby is (a) innocent or (b) the victim of a miscarriage of justice, but I do believe it will not be as easy to overturn her convictions as a lot of pro-Letby Twitter/X posters and others seem to think. The hurdles are high and many. Not least, the fact of her convictions. A jury heard all the evidence and reached its verdicts. Convictions can of course be quashed, but that is not meant to be - and indeed, is not - an easy process.

I hope here in notes on crime to try and bring some clarity, reliable information and informed comment, to this case and others.

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As in many murder convictions, the prosecution case against Letby was short on direct evidence and instead was supported by multiple strands of circumstantial evidence which included aspects of Letby’s conduct at the time of and subsequent to the deaths and collapses of the babies she was alleged to have harmed.

It was for the jury to listen to the cases put by the prosecution and the defence, to take account of the judge’s guidance on the law, and assess the evidence of Letby’s behaviour, such as her lies, her proximity to the events, the way she inserted herself into the grief of some of the victims’ families, her online searches for some of them, her handwritten notes of brutal self-reflection - and her hoarding of confidential hospital papers…

The uncontested evidence in the main trial was that Letby had retained 257 handover sheets. They were found in a variety of places.

An Ibiza Bag for Life was found under Letby’s bed and this contained various documents, Letby’s NHS name badge, and four handover sheets relating to babies she was accused of attacking. In a Morrisons Bag for Life also under her bed there were 31 handover sheets and 17 of them related to babies on the indictment.

That meant she had kept a total of 21 (out of 257) sheets relating to the babies featured in the case. Only four of the babies on the indictment did not feature in any of the sheets. Further papers were found in a bin bag in her garage.

The court was shown sheets related to significant incident dates in June 2016. Others included handwritten notes and observations made by Letby about babies she was accused of harming.

A packaging box for a shredder found in her bedroom at her parents’ home, marked “keep”, contained five further sheets which were not directly related to the charges.

In the Netflix documentary sequences dealing with the arrests and interviews, it is said that some of the papers were found in date order, implying some deliberate filing by Letby, relating to papers in the “keep” box, but that claim does not appear to have been made again, throughout the trial.

She is seen in the film telling police in interview that she did not dispose of the sheets because she did not have a shredder - the film then reveals a photograph of a shredder found during searches of her home (as well an the image of the “keep” box it apparently came in). The shredder had actually been in use, but the shredded fragments were of bank statements.

Letby admitted at trial she had recently bought a shredder, but she denied trying to hide the fact – and denied that she had deliberately kept the handover sheets. She said she used the Morrisons and Ibiza bags to take her uniform to work and the sheets had simply come home in the pockets of her uniform, inadvertently.

She accepted it was not ‘normal’ practice to keep hold of the sheets and that she should have destroyed them in the confidential waste at work. She also agreed it was her responsibility, as a medical professional, to keep the information on them confidential.

In his cross examination of Lucy Letby, the prosecutor, Nick Johnson KC, claimed that she had taken sheets with her as she moved homes and had not been “bothered” about keeping them private.

(I want to remind readers here that defendants do not always tell the truth in trial evidence, even though they are on oath, or in police interview, even though they are under caution. It is the prosecutor’s job to probe the defendant’s account and expose or highlight potential lies. The prosecutor has a case to prove. That’s their job and KCs should be as skilled as they come at what they do. They are not there to mollycoddle the defendant, although there may be times when that is a useful tactic. As any judge in any trial always tells the jury, they are the judges of facts - it is for the jury to decide what the truth is and whether the defendant is giving a truthful account).

LL: It’s not that I’m not bothered. I know they are at my home address, but they are still held in confidence.

NJ: Held in confidence? In a bin bag in your garage?

LL: I am the only one who lives at that property, so yes.

NJ: What about the ones at your parents’ home? Who lives there?

LL: My parents, but they don’t enter my room.

NJ: They are not held in confidence?

LL: I don’t believe anybody would have looked at them.

Johnson suggested she only obeyed the rules when it suited her.

NJ: You like telling people what to do, but you don’t live up to those standards yourself?

LL: No (she disagreed).

The prosecutor continued to press her about the handover sheets.

NJ: Why don’t you want to tell the truth?

LL: That is the truth. They have no meaning to me at all. They’re just pieces of paper to me. I didn’t know I had handover sheets. They weren’t significant.

NJ: They were in your workbag.

Then this:

NJ: Are you really asking the jury to accept that pieces of paper with sensitive information on them about dead children were insignificant?

LL: Yes

He then produced one of the sheets and asked her to pick it up asking how it was different to all the others that had been found. He said it was because it had no fold in it. She asked if it was the original and he said it was.

NJ: You’ve not been prepared to tell the truth about these handover sheets, have you?

LL: The truth is what I’ve told you.

Letby denied keeping the sheets as souvenirs, but the uncreased sheet (ie it had not been folded into her uniform pocket) turned out to be dated June 1, 2010, which reportedly marked her first day of work as a student nurse at the hospital’s neonatal unit. She again insisted she wasn’t lying about the reasons she had kept the sheets.

LL: They have no meaning to me at all. I have copious pieces of paper and cards that I have not thrown away my whole life.

Among the documents in the Morrisons Bag for Life was a paper towel with handwritten notes for resuscitation of one of the babies in the trial and a printout of a blood gas reading for another baby that she was accused of attempting to murder. The prosecutor reminded her that the nursing colleague who conducted the blood gas test had told the court she would have disposed of the printout in the confidential waste bin.

NJ: When did you fish it out of the bin?

LL: I never fished anything out of the confidential bin.

She said she could not recall how she came by the printout.

NJ: It was for your little collection wasn’t it, Lucy Letby?

LL: No

The Court of Appeal later picked up on the issue when refusing Letby leave to appeal for the first 14 of her 15 convictions. Incidentally, many people appear to believe that refusal of leave means Letby has not had an appeal, but for the purposes of the appeal process an application for leave, even if refused, is taken to be a completed appeal, and in this case, leave was considered over a three-day hearing (in late April 2024) as a full appeal might be. Very often, the leave application and the full hearing are heard together. And although that did not happen here, she certainly had a good opportunity to make her case.

The Appeal judgment, handed down in July 2024, put the handover sheets in the context of the prosecution’s case against Letby stating that, “The prosecution maintained that the applicant’s responsibility for the deaths and sudden collapses of the babies could be inferred from a raft of circumstantial evidence.”

It listed the key elements of the prosecution’s circumstantial case:

- The applicant alone was present on the unit at the time of all of the deteriorations and deaths and was the common factor in all of the cases.

- She appeared to be fixated with being involved in events in the intensive care nursery and involved herself unnecessarily with babies who had been designated to other nurses.

- She created, it was alleged, false entries on certain documents to hide her activities, to provide her with an alibi or lay the ground for invented explanations.

- She retained and took home a large number of handover sheets as “trophies” of her crimes. These handover sheets were confidential documents and should not have been removed from the unit. Over 200 were found hidden under the applicant’s bed. (my emphasis)

- After the collapse or death, she searched for the names of some of the babies on the indictment and searched out their families on Facebook.

- Various handwritten notes were found at her home. One of those notes concluded with the words: “I am evil, I did this.” The prosecution relied upon this evidence as amounting to a confession.

Over a 58-page decision the Appeal also endorsed the role of the prosecution’s lead expert Dr Dewi Evans and rejected the submission of Letby’s barrister (she was still at this stage represented by trial counsel, Ben Myers KC) that Dr Evans’ trial evidence should have been disregarded. The appeal judges said it was “unarguably the case” that Dr Evans was suitably qualified “or to put it another way, it is not arguable that he lacked the necessary expertise to give evidence.”

The Appeal also heard the live evidence, by video link from Canada, of Dr Shoo Lee, who has since assumed great prominence in the case, with his unchallenged assertion, at the unusual Letby press conference in February 2025, and in subsequent media interviews, in The Sun newspaper and elsewhere that his expert panel did not find any evidence of murder.

Dr Lee’s appearance at the Court of Appeal, ten months before the press conference, to elaborate on the fresh evidence he might give was not such an easy ride. The court concluded that his proposed fresh evidence was “irrelevant and inadmissible”.

The appeal court’s endorsement of Dr Evans, and its rejection of Dr Lee, are no small obstacles to Letby’s further progress, in her attempts to win a new appeal with her new barrister Mark McDonald.

The case is now at the Criminal Cases Review Commission, where I served a term of office as a Commissioner, between 2013-2018, and is likely to be there for some time to come, while the CCRC evaluates all the new material that has been submitted and makes its own inquiries.

Then the CCRC will make its decision. A single Commissioner could reject it, but it is more likely the case will go through to a case committee, where three Commissioners will sit to determine whether the application meets the CCRC’s statutory test for referral (see Criminal Appeal Act, 1995) on the basis that there is a real possibility the convictions will not be upheld.

They may not make a decision straightaway – they could decide they need more information to help them – and I would only say that a decision to refer may be possible, but it is not a foregone conclusion.

Thank you for reading notes on crime. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Next week: Jeremy Bamber’s prospects for appeal.