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March 30, 2026

March 2026 Bonus: The Investigation Of Lucy Letby

the true crime that's worth your time

The recent Netflix doc on a notorious UK "angel of death" case misses most of its opportunities.

(Netflix)

The crime
From
Rachel Aviv's account of the case for The New Yorker in May of 2024:

Lucy Letby, a thirty-three-year-old British nurse, was convicted [in August 2023] of killing seven newborn babies and attempting to kill six others. Her murder trial, one of the longest in English history, lasted more than ten months and captivated the United Kingdom. 

… Letby had worked on a struggling neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital, run by the National Health Service, in the West of England, near Wales. The case centered on a cluster of seven deaths, between June, 2015, and June, 2016. All but one of the babies were premature; three of them weighed less than three pounds. No one ever saw Letby harming a child, and the coroner did not find foul play in any of the deaths.

Subsequent re-examinations of the case file have suggested to journalists and medical experts that the case against Letby is more "circumstantial" than "evidence," but Letby remains incarcerated as of this writing.

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