They didnt think it appropriate to go the police at that stage. Instead, the hospital asked the Royal College of paediatrics and child health to look at what had been going on in the unit. In november, the college called for the hospital to conduct a thorough external, independent review of each unexpected neonatal death. But the deaths werent investigated fully. Was this a cover up . I dont know how youd define a cover up but to us the. The evidence in front of us was quite clear it felt that they were trying to engineer some sort of narrative or way out of this that didnt involve going to the police. And if you want to call that a cover up then, thats a cover up. There were deaths and near deaths, which could not be explained, and were unexpected. And thatjust does not happen on a neonatal unit. But unfortunately, there was a concern about how it would look. So the reputation of the organisation and protecting that reputation was a big factor in how people responded to the concerns r
There were seven consultant paediatricians working on the unit. all of them now thought something was badly wrong. this is the first time the lead consultant has spoken publicly about their concerns. some of the babies didn t respond to resuscitation quite how we would have expected them to. most babies, you d get a heart rate back and they d start. their breathing would get better. but that didn t happen in these cases like you d expect, which was unusual. a hospital boss who took over after the baby deaths has also agreed to talk. she s now suing the hospital for constructive dismissal. i had described to me a horrifying realisation on the part of the pediatricians.
Being taken from a prison van. the stakes in this case couldn t be more extreme at both ends of the scale. so if she s convicted, lucy letby becomes britain s most prolific child killer. if she is acquitted, then i don t know what s happened here. you know, this has been a very, very long prosecution, involving many years of investigative work, and there s a nurse at the middle of it who will have been found to have done nothing wrong. we re talking about vulnerable babies, in a hospital, no less. it s unprecedented. it s something which you.you would never believe could be possible, the potential that there could be a serial killer in their local hospital. ajudge has ordered the babies and their families
Because of course, that s the ultimate power for god. does lucy letby fit the profile of what you d say is a health care serial killer? no, she doesn t. she is very social. she s very socialised, she has friendship groups. she has people in the hospital who, um, befriended her, mentored her. she is somebody that s seen not suspiciously. there s no evidence that she s fascinated by serial killers. i read the prosecution s opening account of the evidence and i thought, is that it? and i say that because i kept thinking there would be more. clearly it s circumstantial, and often murder cases are often solved by circumstantial evidence, but there was no smoking gun in the letby case.
It s really hard to believe that anybody would be harming tiny babies, and that was the general feeling at that point, and it wasn t until we got further on in the investigation, where we d established that a crime had occurred, that really, the size of this investigation and what we were about to embark on really kind of hit home for people. one case convinced the police there was a killer in the hospital. it involved the family with twins, whose son died back in august 2015. 2a hours later, his twin brother also became very unwell. so, one of the nurses had come and knocked on our doorand said,