DAN HODGES: Lucy Letby killed babies. Those who think she’s innocent have fallen for a conspiracy theory: Here’s the evidence that’s convinced me

You’ve probably never heard of Buell Frazier. Or Ruth Paine. Or Roy Truly.

But you really should have done. Because they’re purportedly the masterminds of the greatest criminal conspiracy in history.

Paine was the neighbour of Lee Harvey Oswald, who informed her in that fateful autumn of 1963 that he was looking for work. Frazier, her friend, said he’d recently taken a job at the Texas Book Depository, and some other positions were going. Roy Truly, the Depository’s manager, agreed to interview Oswald, and hired him.

Or that’s what the trio claimed to investigators. But if you’re a Kennedy Assassination conspiracy theorist, you know that’s all a lie. Or rather, you have to convince yourself it’s a lie. Because if you don’t, then your beloved theory that Oswald was actually placed there by his CIA/Cuban/Mob handlers – with a couple of pals lurking behind the Grassy Knoll up the road – completely falls apart.

So it is with the small, but increasingly fanatical, army of Lucy Letby ‘truthers’. Yesterday, the Public Inquiry into how Britain’s worst child murderer was able to commit her crimes got under way.

But in the background the clamour to prove her innocence had grown so loud the inquiry chairman Lady Justice Thirwall was forced to assert: ‘I make it absolutely clear, it is not for me as chair of this inquiry to set about reviewing the convictions. The Court of Appeal has done that with a very clear result. The convictions stand.’

Yet the online sleuthers and self-appointed criminologists are having none of it. They claim their heroine has been wrongly convicted. And demand a halting of the inquiry pending a re-examination of her case.

Fine. Let’s re-examine it.

And let’s start by understanding this simple fact. Which is that to believe Letby is indeed innocent of the heinous murder of seven babies, and attempted murder of seven more, you have to embrace your own grand conspiracy theory.

The first part of which is the conspiracy Letby herself placed at the very heart of her defence. On the witness stand she claimed four senior consultants at the Countess of Chester hospital had conspired to ‘get her’.

According to her testimony, they had collectively ‘been making comments that I was responsible for the deaths of babies, and they were very insistent that I was removed from the unit’. When asked by the Prosecution barrister why she had fallen victim to the malign machinations of this ‘Gang of Four’ she replied: ‘They apportion blame on to me… I believe to cover up failings at the hospital.’

Which leads directly to the second main plank of the conspiracy. That suggests almost the entire senior management team at the Countess of Chester coldly and callously agreed to join this sinister cabal, and opted to frame a dedicated nurse and colleague in a desperate attempt to cover up their own clinical and institutional failings.

In reality, as doubts began to surface about the unprecedented spike in neonatal mortality within the trust, managers actually tried to suppress discussion about deliberate criminal intervention. But to sustain the idea of a conspiracy against Letby it’s necessary to shunt minor facts likes this aside.

So instead, let’s believe what her defenders need us to believe. Which is that senior management suspected some mysterious infection, created by their own negligence, was killing their young patients. And collectively decided to salvage their reputations, and that of their failing hospital, by falsely pretending they’d left a crazed serial killer to run amok through their wards.

Then let us take a further leap. Which is that having thrown their lot in with ‘The Gang of Four’, these same managers succeeded in co-opting the entire British medical, criminal and judicial establishment to their perfidy. The police and independent medical professionals who painstakingly compiled, analysed and peer reviewed the overwhelming evidence the children’s deaths could not be attributed to natural causes.

The officials at the Crown Prosecution Service who conducted their own detailed evidential assessment, and sent it to trial. The multiple independent expert witnesses who gave evidence at two trials. Two separate juries. Two judges. Three appellate judges. And now, apparently, Justice Thirwall. Every one of them is either complicit in, or has been duped by, this sulphurous scheme.

And then we must reach the final – perhaps most significant – suspension of disbelief. Which is this. To believe Lucy Letby, you cannot just believe her persecutors were exceptionally malicious. You also have to believe they were staggeringly lucky.

Because when the Gang of Four and their allies selected Letby as their patsy, there were so many things they could not have known. That it would turn out she had taken an unusual and morbid interest in the victims and their families. That she had improperly taken home case notes relating to the dead children.

Letby’s supporters, who believe she is innocent of the murder of seven babies and attempted murder of seven more, outside the Court of Appeal

That it was Letby who had made an unsigned manuscript entry on Baby D’s blood chart just before the child collapsed, even though she was not the designated shift nurse. And never in their wildest dreams could they have imagined once she came under investigation, and was advised to write down her thoughts to relieve her ‘stress’, she would pen the words ‘I did this…I killed them on purpose because I am not good enough to care for them. I am a horrible and evil person’.

Yes, there have been rare instances where incredible murder conspiracy theories have proven correct. The most famous probably being the Dingo Baby case, where Australian mother Lindy Chamberlain claimed a wild dog had run off with her child, and insisted she had been wrongly blamed by the authorities. Chamberlain was eventually vindicated.

Indeed, Lucy Letby and her defenders have their own ‘Dingo Baby’ – the plumbing at the Countess of Chester hospital. At trial Letby made great play of the fact that ‘we used to have raw sewage coming out of the sinks [and] coming out on the floor in Nursery One’. Though she conspicuously failed to explain how faulty plumbing could account for over a dozen documented cases of murder and attempted murder by air embolus, air via nasogastric tube, insulin poisoning, overfeeding with milk or throat trauma.

Some conspiracy theories, like the Kennedy assassination, hold a historic fascination. Others, such as the fake moon landings, are relatively harmless fun.

But this is not an Oliver Stone movie. Replace the names Buell Frazier, Ruth Paine and Roy Truly with Dr Ravi Jayaram, Dr Stephen Brearey and Dr John Gibbs. 

Three of the four consultants who finally convinced their managers Letby was behind the unexplained deaths, saving countless other children’s lives. And whose reputations Letby’s allies are now dragging through the mud.

Think as well of those whose names we don’t know. Letby’s victims. Baby A. Baby C. Baby D. Baby E. Baby I. Baby O. Baby P. And their parents and other loved ones, who are being forced to relive their nightmare to satiate the cravings of the internet inquisitors.

Lucy Letby killed those children. And she did it alone. The campaign to free her is a crazy conspiracy theory too far.