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Details being released about the inquests into the deaths of babies, nurse Lucy Letby was convicted of murdering, highlight the strong Welsh aspect to this extraordinary case (with one Welsh expert witness claiming that her supporters were motivated by a sexual attraction to “pretty young blonde females”), and how the police in Wales have been responsible for a string of miscarriages which WERE definite miscarriages of justice.
Proceedings at Cheshire Coroner’s Court (CCC) were due to concern babies C, E, I, O and P, who all died at the Countess of Chester Hospital (CCH) in 2015 and 2016 when Ms Letby was employed as a nurse in the neonatal unit there.
Dates for the full inquests have been provisionally set for September, pending the outcome of the Thirlwall Inquiry (TI) report into the bizarre episode, which is due to be published after Easter.
She was convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting the murder of seven others between June 2015 and June 2016, falling under suspicion because a high number of infant deaths had occurred at the Cheshire hospital shortly after she began working with children in the intensive care unit.
Yet nobody saw her attack the seven babies she was convicted of murdering, nor did anyone witness the attempted murder of seven others.
Instead, prosecutors had to draw on technical medical evidence – along with statistical data and other troubling details about Ms Letby’s life – in order to prove their case.
In a police interview she appeared evasive, and confidential hospital documents relating to some of the babies were discovered in her house.
Officers found post-it notes Ms Letby had apparently disposed of, where it was written: “I did this” and “I am evil”, but when she was asked about these she declared: “No comment”.
Others, however, are unconvinced of her guilt.
The Tory MP Sir David Davis has claimed that Dr Ravi Jayaram, a consultant paediatrician at CCH, may have committed perjury at Ms Letby’s trial in 2023, as well as at her retrial.
Among the 400 health care workers calling for a review of this disturbing incident is Nineteen Nurses, a campaigning coalition of current and former NHS workers, which has urged unions to “stand with us” and protect the nursing profession, as well as others, from the “weaponisation of blame” in the NHS.
Others however, including ‘experts’ from Wales, insist that Ms Letby is guilty.
Dr Dewi Evans from Carmarthen, the prosecution’s chief expert witness, responding to another expert, who has critiqued the evidence against her on the triedbystats.com website, declared: ‘You seem very intense, and it’s not unusual for men to have the hots for pretty young blonde females. A nursing uniform is a turn-on for some by all accounts”.
“I would suggest you need to get out more, find yourself an available pretty young blonde female, with/without nursing credentials. But one who doesn’t go to work intent on murdering her patients”.
A leading toxicologist called Alan Wayne Jones, who was born in Pontypridd, but worked for most of his career in Sweden, was also central to the prosecution case.
This occurrence is not provably a miscarriage of justice, yet others, notably in Wales, ARE.
Across England and Wales the public’s confidence in the police is at an all time low. A YouGov poll found that only 49 per cent of Britons thought the police were “doing a good job”, down from 77 per cent four years before. In his assessment of policing, Andy Cooke, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary (HMCIC), described this as one of policing’s “biggest crises in living memory”. He could not remember, he said, “when the relationship between the police and the public was more strained than it is now”.
What has taken place shines the spotlight on Wales’ largest police organisation (South Wales Police [SWP]), amid mounting concern that the small country has FOUR forces. SWP was responsible for a string of miscarriage of justice cases in the 1980s, ’90s, as well as 2000s, and now there is a growing campaign to highlight what happened. They include: The Cardiff Three (Five), The Cardiff Newsagent Three, The Darvell Brothers, Jonathan Jones (The Tooze Murders), as well as Annette Hewins. Protest action is planned by The Cardiff Five support group over the coming weeks to draw attention to these cases.
This shameful list, though, does NOT have on it all those innocent people, who were convicted of less important crimes than murder, yet who now have a record which will affect them for the rest of their lives, and there is a powerful argument for getting rid of SWP completely.
Tony Paris, Yusef Abdullahi, and Stephen Miller were wrongly found guilty in 1990 of the murder of Lynette White, and spent more than two years serving prison sentences having endured the same time on remand, while cousins John and Ronnie Actie were acquitted after being in custody since their arrests.
False eyewitness statements, coerced confessions, and more were used in the police ‘investigation’. However on appeal in 1992 the taped interviews with Mr Miller, who had a mental age of 11, were deemed an example of inappropriate interrogation for reference in future cases, such was their intimidating and coercive nature. It exposes the failings by SWP investigating officers, and bolsters demands for a judicial inquiry.
Three BLACK men had been convicted of the murder (although FIVE, including the Acties, were put on trial), when one WHITE man (Jeffrey Gafoor) was finally caught years later through DNA analysis. He confessed to carrying out the terrible murder, and even apologised, through his barrister, to the others who had been incorrectly jailed.
The five innocent men, were arrested in December 1988 after detectives had been on the case for 10 months, and were pursuing a suspect seen nearby (who looked EXACTLY like Gafoor), minutes following the murder. But when SWP changed the investigating team, and pressure mounted to make an arrest, attention turned to locals. Despite no forensic evidence connecting the five to Ms White’s murder they were taken in.
At around the same time as this appalling case there was another one (The Cardiff Newsagent Three), and a Media Conference (MC) was organised by one of those wrongly convicted, Mike O’Brien, to emphasise what he and others endured. He spent 11 years in jail after being jailed wrongly in 1988 for the killing of Cardiff newsagent, Phillip Saunders. Mr O’Brien talked movingly about how his health had been badly affected. He told The Eye: “My health has been ruined, and there has been long-lasting damage. My miscarriage of justice case has caused a huge family rift”. Another who spoke emotionally at the MC of what had happened to him, was John Actie.
Even before this awful information emerged, Sky documentaries were broadcast, called ‘Murder in the Valleys’ (MITV), looking into the horrific Clydach murders in 1999, when four people (Mandy Power her elderly disabled mother Doris, and two young children) were brutally beaten to death. They were nominated for two awards at the BAFTA Cymru ceremony, including one for best Factual Series.
This, too, (as with the Lucy Letby case) puts centre stage a key headline-grabbing event, as well as the recent reports of police actions, despite the fact it is not (in theory) a miscarriage of justice, although the man convicted of them (David ‘Dai’ Morris) died in jail still protesting his innocence.
A website his sister Debra Morris (now Thomas) helped set up, along with her niece, questions Morris’ guilt and has almost 31,000 members. On it she published a reply from Channel 5 to her complaint about another programme, but above the letter she wrote: “What research did they do????”.
The successful prosecution of Mr Morris was that he had gone to Ms Power’s looking for sex, high on drink and drugs, been spurned and beat the entire family to death, leaving his chain there in the process. Yet the evidence suggested Doris had been killed first, NOT her daughter, when presumably it would have been the person doing the spurning who would have died FIRST!
Mr O’Brien appears on MITV saying that he believes the conviction of Mr Morris IS in fact another miscarriage of justice. He told the MITV documentary-makers: “When I was released from prison I remember…saying ‘I’m going to be South Wales Police’s worst nightmare for what they did to me’, and I meant every word of it”.
In a formal interview for MITV (they wouldn’t do one with Phil), Assistant Chief Constable (ACC) of SWP, David Thorne, made a startling admission, about the mistakes that were made by the police in the earlier miscarriages of justice. During filming for the programme Mr Thorne appeared on, a forensic review found traces of DNA on a sock which it is believed was used to hold the murder weapon, that were “more likely than not” to have come from Mr Morris, and SWP trumpeted the finding.
They effectively said: ‘We know we got it wrong in the past, but this time is different. Trust us’. Yet a long-running campaign has been launched to establish his innocence, and after the first trial when Morris was convicted, his sister Debra gave a tearful press conference with her parents when she stressed her belief that he was NOT guilty. She said: “He just didn’t do these things…they’ve got the wrong man”.
ACC Thorne, though, insisted on MITV, that Morris was the RIGHT man, but acknowledged that mistakes had been made in previous police inquiries. He proclaimed: “It’s safe to say we got it wrong (in the past). We absolutely got it wrong. (There were) HUGE errors in the way investigations were conducted (but) we HAVEN’T found that in this case. This is not a miscarriage of justice”.
However Phil had made a BBC Panorama television programme about the shocking Clydach Murders a few years after they had been committed, and he was the first to question the police actions during THIS investigation too. As he said in the opening of the programme: “One police force in Britain has a disturbing record of locking up the wrong people in murder cases”.
During MITV, the Senior Investigating Officer (SIO) at the time, Detective Superintendent (DS) (Retd.) of SWP Martyn Lloyd–Evans (who used the word ‘sublime’ when he meant ‘subdued’!), is questioned about the apparent mistake of not releasing to the public a witnesses E-Fit constructed soon after the murders, which, it said, had a 90 per cent likeness. He replies that because the man seen was carrying a bag, and it was believed the killer did not have one, it was not put out.
Mr Evans said: “I didn’t think it was relevant”, but the E-Fit matched almost exactly the face of the first senior police officer on the scene, Inspector (at the time) Stuart Lewis, who (against all procedure) had only stayed there a matter of minutes, or that of his identical twin brother (another police officer, Sergeant [also at the time] Stephen Lewis, whose wife was having a gay affair with one of the victims). Inspector Stuart Lewis, had changed his shift to be on that night, yet at crucial hours during the murders his whereabouts were unknown. He was driving a red Peugeot diesel, and a car similar to this was spotted near the murder scene. So to say the E-Fit was ‘not relevant’, appeared bizarre in the extreme, to critics of the police.
Yet Mr Evans’ record was considered so exemplary he was later chosen to examine cold cases in the Major Crime Review unit. In 2009, he said: “What we do is use today’s technology on yesterday’s cases which means that offenders who may think that they are safe 20 years after a crime has been committed aren’t any more and could receive a knock on the door any day”.
In the MITV films Mr Evans’ boss as the then head of SWP CID, Wynne Phillips, also said something incredible: “We can’t manufacture evidence”. But events before the murders, showed that SWP have done EXACTLY that.
To take just one of those cases (in which Phil was intimately involved, because he had made ANOTHER programme questioning THAT conviction [The Cardiff Newsagent Three]), the police MANUFACTURED (as Mr Phillips said they DIDN’T do) an overheard ‘confession’ between two of the young men they had arrested, when an admission was effectively made to the murder of the newsagent, and they presented before the court ‘EVIDENCE’ that the group had run from the scene, but one of the three had bad legs and couldn’t run at all.
Unfortunately this story may run and run – along with news coming out of the inquests into the sad deaths of babies, as well as campaigners protesting the innocence of Lucy Letby.
The memories of Phil’s astonishing 42 year award-winning career in journalism (when crime, alleged or otherwise was in a different league!) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition, Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order the book now!
