Letby: the movie

A review of 'Conviction'/'Murder or Mistake'

Lucy Letby: Murder or Mistake will be broadcast on Monday night on Channel 4. It is at least the sixth documentary about the Letby case since she was convicted barely two years ago. It has been shown in a few cinemas under the superior title Conviction and I was kindly invited to a screening on Monday night which was followed by an interesting Q & A with the director, Danny Bogado. You may have seen his previous films such as Killer Ratings and 9/11: One Day in America.

Conviction, as I shall call it, is different from the previous documentaries. It doesn’t have an obvious pro-Letby agenda like the last Channel 5 doc (associate producer: Cleuci de Oliveira). Nor does it dig deeply into the scientific claims and counter-claims like the last Panorama. It is not trying to be the definitive account. Instead it follows her lawyer Mark McDonald and expert witness Dewi Evans for an eight month period in 2024-25 when the Free Letby campaign was becoming mainstream. Bogado was, I believe, genuinely interested in making an interesting film rather than picking sides.

Since it was filmed in real time and started after the trials had ended, most of the action comes from the pro-Letby camp and so, in that sense, the film is unbalanced (as Bogado acknowledges). It covers a period in which there were two press conferences organised by McDonald. The other side gets the chance to rebut some of the claims via journalist Liz Hull, who attended the trial and co-hosts The Trial podcast, and Dewi Evans himself. Private Eye’s Phil Hammond does most of the legwork making the opposite case.

Conviction is a film about uncertainty, starring two people who are very certain about their diametrically opposed positions, with Hammond and Hull acting as wingmen to provide the detail. This is satisfying from a dramatic perspective and there is lots of footage of Evans and McDonald in their homes, making coffee, staring out of the window and so on (perhaps a bit too much, tbh).

There is no narration. Bogado says he wants people to make up their own minds about what they are seeing. He said on Monday night that some scenes are like a Rorschach test in that people from both sides interpret them as confirmation of what they believe. I suspect that one example of this is the scene where Dewi Evans is filmed watching the Shoo Lee press conference for the first time. John Sweeney is (wrongly and irrelevantly) claiming that Evans has never published a peer-reviewed study and Shoo Lee is posing three questions to Evans directly. Sat in front of the TV, a weary Evans is silently taking notes and quietly sighing. Depending on your perspective on Letby’s guilt, his body language is either that of a man who has been exposed or that of a man who can scarcely believe that people can be so ignorant.

I have a fairly good idea of which bits of the film Letbyists will find comforting or triggering because there were a good number of them in the audience on Monday night and a lot of them couldn’t help braying like Americans at the Ryder Cup. Screaming “rubbish!”, “nonsense!” and “liar!” at a screen is “perverse – or possibly performative”, as one audience member noted, or it may simply be a sign of poor mental health. Some Letbyists are now talking about protesting outside a medical conference in November because one of the doctors who testified against Letby will be speaking at it.

This is why so few people involved in the prosecution case are willing to appear in documentaries like this. Apart from Evans, none of the doctors, nurses, parents or expert witnesses involved in the case appear in Conviction although I understand that they were approached. Her previous lawyer, Ben Myers, couldn’t speak out even if he wanted to because Letby has not waived privilege. None of these people have anything to gain from putting a target on their back for crazed Letbyists.

Whilst it is understandable that those who accept the verdict want to keep their heads down and let the wheels of justice turn, their absence from Conviction tends to reinforce the Letbyist’s false narrative that the prosecution case turned on the opinion of Dewi Evans alone. Evans already has a target on his back and, as this documentary confirms, he is a combative character, so he was prepared to be interviewed, but while he only had Liz Hull to help debunk the Letbyist claims, a cast of characters appeared, albeit mostly briefly, to criticise the prosecution. Some of them looked happy just to be on television.

If I had to guess what impression a general audience would have of the two protagonists after seeing this film, it would be that Evans is stubborn and has a chip on his shoulder while Mark McDonald is a media tart who loves the limelight. There is an element of truth to this. In the film, Evans expresses the peculiar opinion that resistance to the verdict has been driven by the “metropolitan elite” in the south of England while McDonald’s insistence that “it’s not about me!” seems like a case of protesting too much.

As for being stubborn, Evans has been criticised for being too confident about Letby’s guilt. But he worked on the case for eight years. Almost nobody knows more about it than he does. If he isn’t sure that Letby is guilty, how could any jury be sure? He can’t win. Imagine the field day Letbyists would have if he said he has some doubts! (It is worth mentioning that the only people in the film who attended most of the trial, as far as I know, are the two people who are most convinced of Letby’s guilt: Evans and Hull.)

Conviction is not a film about the medical evidence. As Bogada said, you can read an article about that if you’re interested. Nevertheless, the medical evidence comes up a great deal, largely because of the two press conferences that took place while the film was being made. Hull and Evans sometimes get the chance to respond, but not always. Some contestable claims and outright disinformation go unchallenged.

For example, an investment fund manager who portrays himself as a statistics expert claims that there were 17 deaths in the hospital in 2015-16 and yet Letby was “only” charged with 7 murders. Evans explains the obvious point that some of the deaths were natural, expected and not suspicious, but no one explains that there were actually 13 deaths and that Letby was on duty for 12 of them.

A lot of airtime is given to the December 2024 press conference at which Richard Taylor, summarising a report written by the neonatologists Svilena Dimitrova and Neil Aiton (both of whom appear in the film), claimed that Baby O died from shock due to a botched medical procedure and claimed that the “ridiculously high” level of glucose recorded in Baby F’s blood – 999 millimoles per litre - proved that his blood tests were “unreliable”.

Liz Hull rightly pushes back on the theory about Baby O, pointing out that it was discussed at length in court and rejected because it did not stand up against the facts, but it is not made clear quite what a clown show that press conference was. It seems that Baby F wasn’t tested for glucose (the 999 reading was a placeholder) and Shoo Lee’s panel came up with a totally different explanation for Baby O’s liver injury at another press conference two months later (which also had no evidence to support it).

The film doesn’t mention Richard Taylor’s glucose error, but it does discuss the insulin poisonings in the context of a different test from the same lab which Letbyists claim is proof that the tests can’t be relied on. This was reported by Unherd while the film was being made. In short, some test results conducted in the lab in 2016 came to light. They came from an external quality assessment and appeared to show implausibly high insulin levels and implausibly low C-peptide levels. Viewers of Conviction will get no counter-argument to this, but an expert interviewed by Judith Moritz and Jonathan Coffey gave a simple explanation: someone had written in the two values the wrong way round during the quality assessment (and, no, this wouldn’t happen when results were transmitted from the lab to a hospital under normal conditions because that uses “electronic end-to-end result transmission”).¹

I can understand why the makers of Conviction don’t want to get bogged down in details like this, but it would be better not to mention the science at all than to only give us half the picture. Dewi Evans says (in the film) that he has written reports responding to all the claims made by the Shoo Lee panel, but we don’t hear him talking about any of them (the producers visited his home three times so Evans must have discussed the medical claims of the Lee panel in more detail than we see in the film). Instead, we get footage of him basically just saying that Lee’s experts are wrong.

Speaking of Lee, the film does contain one new nugget of information. A journalist whose name I’m afraid I have forgotten found one of the e-mails Lee sent to a fellow medic when he was trying to assemble the panel. You may recall that the idea was to get an impartial fresh pair of eyes on the case and that Lee would publish their reports even if they incriminated Letby. And yet Lee signed off his e-mail by saying:

“We might be her last hope”

This suggests that Lee was biased in Letby’s favour when he started the process. Moreover, the e-mail itself was likely to have weeded out non-believers and helped create a panel that was also biased in her favour.

Lee has a habit of saying the quiet part out loud. What he says in that e-mail should be read alongside what he said to the Sunday Times in February:

After Letby’s appeal was rejected, Lee spoke to her legal team and asked: “What happens now?” He was told the case had run out of road and the only option was to apply to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which investigates potential miscarriages of justice. The bar would be “very high”, the lawyers said.

“What they said to me was that you have literally got to find a different person or thing that caused the death,” said Lee. “And I asked ‘So what’s the chances?’ They said ‘none’, because it’s going to be very hard to prove anything now. ‘We’ve had our chance, and unless you can come up with something that is totally different, she’ll be in jail for the rest of her life’.

The other genuinely new piece of information in the film is an interview with the parents of a child whom Letby was suspected of harming but did not feature in the trial. The baby was born full-term and collapsed several times unexpectedly. The nurses remember Letby’s strange and inappropriate behaviour. This certainly fits a pattern that the jury would have been familiar with, but the police decided that there was not enough evidence to prosecute and it is impossible to draw any conclusions from what little we are told in Conviction.

Overall, this is a fine film and well worth watching. But it is probably best enjoyed in the privacy of your own home rather than in a cinema surrounded by cackling victims of Dunning-Kruger syndrome.

1. Unmasking Lucy Letby (paperback edition), pp. 495-7.