Charlotte Purdy Photo: supplied
Something didn't feel right to Charlotte Purdy about the UK's killer nurse case - so she used her investigative tools from a world away to go to bat for a jailed nurse.
Defying a nation's opinion and a court's unanimous guilty verdicts, a New Zealand documentary maker has worked diligently to prove the innocence of a notorious British baby killer, in the belief she could be the victim of a miscarriage of justice.
And this month an international panel of medical experts held a press conference to say what Charlotte Purdy has long suspected - the seven babies that Lucy Letby was found guilty of killing died of natural causes and not murder.
"I am just hugely relieved for Lucy Letby... I think there is a really high chance she could now be exonerated," Purdy tells The Detail.
A former 60 Minutes, Sunday and 20/20 producer, Purdy told The Detail she did not know Lucy Letby or attend her highly publicised, high-profile murder trial but followed it from New Zealand and felt something was not right.
"I just started researching it because there were aspects that simply didn't fit," said Purdy.
"She was a diligent nurse with friends and family, passionately claiming that she could never do this.
"When cases have an element of being hysterical or too strange to be true, such as satanic cults or pumping babies with air, and all the other things that it's claimed she has done... as we have learned in New Zealand, sometimes it's not actually true.
"We know juries get it wrong and I wondered if they did.
"And from there I started researching, waiting for the obstacle to come, when I'd go 'right, now I will down tools', but no obstacle came that could not defend elements of her evidence.
"For me, it became clearer and clearer that it was an unsafe conviction."
The prosecution alleged that Letby, a neonatal nurse, deliberately harmed infants in her care between 2015 and 2016 by injecting them with air, overfeeding them with milk, or poisoning them with insulin at the Countess of Chester Hospital in England.
Police bodycam footage shows Lucy Letby arrested at home on 3 July 2018. Photo: AFP / Cheshire Constabulary / Handout
The case relied largely on statistical patterns, noting that the increase in unexplained baby deaths coincided with Letby's shifts.
In 2023, after a 10-month trial at the Manchester Crown Court, Letby was found guilty of the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of six others.
The case, one of the most shocking in British criminal history, resulted in a life sentence for Letby with no possibility of parole. And left her with the title of being the most vilified woman in the UK.
But, since that verdict, Purdy and a small group of Letby supporters and medical staff have questioned whether she was wrongfully convicted, arguing that the prosecution case relied heavily on circumstantial evidence rather than definitive proof.
"The moment for me when I thought 'she didn't do it' was when I talked to the neonatologist, who had read the babies' case notes and he said to me 'there are different ways that these babies could have died that are not murder but natural causes'... and that point, I knew that a neonatologist who had read the case notes and who could say that this... well, it was massively problematic."
Then this month, a panel of 14 international medical experts, led by retired Canadian neonatologist Dr Shoo Lee, released a report, and held a press conference, challenging the convictions of Letby, suggesting that the infants' deaths and medical complications were due to natural causes or substandard medical care, rather than murder.
The panel said there was no medical basis for the allegations of intentional harm. Instead, they identified issues such as inadequate staffing, misdiagnoses, and delays in treatment as contributing factors to the babies' deaths.
"Most people don't have an expert panel like this coming to their rescue, but these people are really high calibre," Purdy said.
"I am thrilled for Lucy because I don't think they can be dismissed as other experts have been in the UK, who were trying to raise the alarm [for Letby]. I think there is a really great chance she will be exonerated."
A spokesperson for the Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust told UK reporters: "Due to the Thirlwall inquiry (a statutory public inquiry) and the ongoing police investigations, it would not be appropriate to comment further at this time."
Letby's new barrister, Mark McDonald, has now referred her case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission to have it reopened.
When asked whether he believes that the CCRC will send the case back to the courts, McDonald told a UK radio show: "I think they're going to have no choice. The evidence that was presented [at the press conference] completely demolishes what was said before the jury."
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