A crowd of spectators and an elephant in the room at Lucy Letby retrial

OOn that sweltering summer morning when Lucy Letby began giving evidence at Manchester Crown Court, the scene outside courtroom number seven looked more like the queue for Centre Court at Wimbledon than a criminal trial for the alleged attempted murder of a newborn baby girl.

Two dozen spectators gathered outside the doors to secure a seat in the cramped courtroom where Letby would speak in public for the first time since she was convicted last year of killing seven babies and the attempted murder of six others.

Unlike the usual band of true crime fans who often attend such trials, the crowd at Letby’s trial was almost unanimous in their view that the woman convicted of being the worst child killer in modern British history was innocent.

Several wore yellow butterfly badges similar to the one the defendant wore on her blue nurse’s coat. One person was escorted out of court for disrupting the trial. Another had his vest searched for hidden recording devices. One woman said she walked a long distance “just to see inside the courtroom.”

Amidst this melee walked two broken and haunted parents. Their daughter, who can only be identified as Baby K, was born 15 weeks premature at the Countess of Chester Hospital in northwest England at 2:12 a.m. on February 17, 2016. She weighed just 692g and was no bigger than an adult hand.

The parents sat at the back of the public gallery as jurors listened to how their daughter had teetered between life and death before they made the heartbreaking decision to stop treatment. Three days of “punching and beating” had left her small frame swollen and covered in bruises.

Wrapped in a blanket, wearing the smallest knit hat the nurses could find, Baby K took her last breath in her father’s arms shortly after 5 a.m. on February 20, 2016. She was three days old.

Prosecutors have not alleged that Letby, 34, caused Baby K’s death. She was originally charged with causing the infant’s death, but prosecutors later dropped that charge after deciding there was insufficient evidence.

Instead, she was accused of trying to kill the baby just 90 minutes after she was born. Prosecutors said she manipulated the girl’s breathing tube twice in the hours that followed, to make it appear as if the tiny baby, sedated with morphine, was moving the tube himself. Baby K hadn’t even been named yet.

The defendant was allegedly caught “virtually red-handed” when a senior doctor, Dr Ravi Jayaram, caught her alone next to Baby K’s incubator, doing nothing as the child’s blood oxygen levels dropped to life-threatening levels. The alarm that should have sounded went off.

Jayaram, a consultant paediatrician, said he met the nurse because he was “very uncomfortable” about leaving her alone with babies after he and other colleagues linked her to a number of “unusual incidents”. But this was the first time he had witnessed an untoward event.

Letby was convicted last year of murdering five babies and attempting to murder three others before Baby K arrived in the neonatal unit. She then murdered two more babies – triplet brothers – and attempted to kill three more before being removed from her role as a frontline nurse in July 2016.

While Letby’s first trial involved complex areas of medical science, this case hinged largely on a single question: Who did the jury believe: Jayaram or Letby?

The Category A prisoner looked tired and exhausted behind the glass-fronted dock in the courtroom, where she was brought each morning from HMP New Hall in Wakefield, West Yorkshire.

Flanked by three female prison guards, she glanced furtively toward the public gallery where two of her friends sat in the front row. Her parents, John and Susan, had attended her first trial every day, but this time they hadn’t shown up.

If Letby felt somewhat defeated, she had every reason to feel so. Her lawyer, Benjamin Myers KC, had argued that she would not receive a fair trial given the notoriety of the case. The judge disagreed.

It was clear that Letby had been shielded in prison from the publicity that followed her conviction when, on her fifth day, she began to cry as she listened to an ITV News interview with Jayaram in court. In the seconds-long video, the doctor said that coming across Letby with Baby K was “etched in my nightmares forever”. At that point, she burst into tears, her only emotion the entire time.

On the witness stand, Letby kept his answers to a minimum. Most of the prosecutor’s questions were met with “I don’t remember” or “I have no recollection of the event.”

Her defense was simple: she had no recollection of anything that happened that morning. She had no recollection of Jayaram surprising her as Baby K’s condition deteriorated, nor of two subsequent incidents in which she was placed with the baby, according to medical records and staff testimony.

Letby’s only memory of Baby K, she said, was that she was so small – born at 25 weeks gestation – and that it was “unusual” for the countess to care for such babies. The baby was only in the neonatal unit for half a day and Letby was never her regular nurse.

Letby was unable to say why she searched for the baby’s family on Facebook more than two years later. “I’m not sure. I don’t remember then, or now, why I did that,” she told jurors.

“Were you looking to find evidence of grief?” asked the prosecutor, Nick Johnson KC. “I don’t understand the question,” Letby replied. “The parents, on their Facebook. Were you hoping to find evidence of grief?” he asked. “No,” Letby replied.

The jury, made up of six women and six men, was told of Letby’s conviction. They were also told that the original jury had been unable to determine whether Letby had tried to kill Baby K, who would now be eight and in primary school if she had lived.

Jurors were not told, however, that the former nurse had been acquitted of two counts of attempted murder. Judge James Goss KC ruled that the two acquittals had “no relevance or probative value” in the trial because the evidence relating to each of the babies was “factual”.

Goss said Letby’s convictions could be used as evidence because they demonstrated “a propensity” to kill. But acquittals fall into a different category. There would be “no injustice” to Letby as a result, he said in a decision that can only now be released.

Throughout the three-week trial, an elephant remained in the courtroom. A 13,000-word New Yorker article published just weeks earlier had raised questions about the safety of Letby’s convictions and fueled the campaigns of those who believe he is innocent.

Cheshire Police reportedly reported the publication to the UK Attorney General’s office, considering it a breach of strict contempt of court laws that have bound the British press since last September, when prosecutors decided to seek a retrial.

Although the New Yorker’s American publisher, Advance Publications, officially banned the article from publication in the UK, it was widely available online. Some branches of WH Smith newsagents, which carry the same print copy of the magazine as American stores, even sold copies containing the article.

As debates over the case raged on social media, Letby’s bid to overturn his convictions was dealt a blow by the appeals court, which dismissed his legal challenge after a three-day hearing in April.

The Court of Appeal judges dismissed Letby’s appeal on all grounds, effectively ending his legal challenge in the absence of significant new evidence. The judges have not yet released their decision and details of the hearing cannot be reported at this stage as media restrictions remain in place.

Meanwhile, at a police station near Chester Racecourse, dozens of detectives are poring over the files of 4,000 babies linked to Letby during her short nursing career. Other investigators are looking into possible manslaughter charges against the hospital.

A public inquiry will begin at Liverpool City Hall in September to determine how the hospital responded to concerns raised by doctors and whether Letby could have been stopped sooner. For the families of babies who died in her care, the wait for answers continues.