Lucy Letby was 'innocent', distressed and ‘deserves an Oscar if she was acting’ says former boss

16 February 2025, 10:56 | Updated: 16 February 2025, 11:13

Lucy Letby was ‘shocked and distressed’ during the investigation into the deaths of babies that she was later found guilty of murdering, and ‘deserves an Oscar’ if she was lying, her former boss said.

Karen Rees was the former head of nursing at the Countess of Chester hospital, and was Lucy Letby’s boss when seven babies died in her care.

Letby, 35, from Hereford, was convicted of murdering seven babies and the attempted murders of seven others when she worked on the neonatal unit under Rees between June 2015 and June 2016.

After two trials, she was given 15 whole-life orders, making her only the fourth woman in UK history to be told she will never be released from prison. She lost two attempts to challenge her convictions at the Court of Appeal.

But her former boss has always believed Letby was innocent. She told the Times: “What I saw was a very frightened young woman who was shocked and bewildered.”

Rees, 62, first met Letby in the summer of 2016, when she had to tell the nurse she was being removed from the neonatal ward over concerns about her ‘clinical practice’.

She was then given a ‘management instruction’ to meet with Letby every week to check in on her wellbeing as she seemed constantly distressed. Rees says the meetings were ‘shocking’.

Rees said: “She was crying … very distressed every time we met her, saying, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ She kept saying to me, ‘I am not going to let them drive me out of the job that I love. I worked hard. I’ve done nothing wrong.’ That’s what she kept repeating to me. She cried in my arms on a weekly basis. It was harrowing.”

Over the next two years, the pair met regularly and developed a close relationship as the investigation was ongoing, until Letby was convicted and became the UK’s most prolific child serial killer.

Rees added: “People say she’s not emotional. Trust me, she is emotional. I know that they say psychopaths are clever. But if she was acting she deserves an Oscar because she was so convincing.

“She was really hurt when she was told about the consultants’ allegations because she thought they were friends, not just colleagues, and she could not understand why they were doing this to her.”

The consultants in question, Dr Stephen Brearey and Dr Ravi Jayaram, had raised concerns about a spike in infant deaths at the hospital, even before Rees took the job there.

Three babies, who would later be known as babies A, C and D died in the neonatal unit in June of 2015. Baby A’s twin sister, baby B, had collapsed, but survived after being resuscitated.

But Rees said she wasn’t aware of what was happening in the unit. “Certainly from October until the following year, there were no concerns raised with me,” Rees said.

After the mortality rate on the neonatal unit kept increasing, Brearey carried out a review into the deaths of the infants. When Rees was sent this report, which showed that Letby was on shift for each of the deaths, she was told that nothing “directly pointed the finger at Lucy”.

Caller Najma gives Tom Swarbrick her unfiltered opinion on the Lucy Letby retrial

But after baby P died, Brearey called Rees at home to inform her. Baby P’s brother, baby O, had died the day before.

This is when Letby was finally removed from clinical duties, and Rees began to spend time with her on a weekly basis.

She was worried Letby might be suicidal after being taken off her clinical duties, and set up a support group on WhatsApp so she could “have somebody to talk to if she wanted to.”

The texts in that group show Rees telling Letby to “hang on in there girl … your nursing team are fully behind you. We will get through this.” Another said: “Let’s hope we get closure this year,” according to the Times.

“We were all worried about her and just wanted her to have an outlet,” said Rees, who admits she got too close to the killer nurse.

The group set up by Rees would also take Letby ‘out for tea’ every few months to ‘keep her tyres pumped up’.

Letby was also having counselling, and was encouraged to write down her thoughts.

Some of these notes were later used as evidence against Letby, as the prosecution believed them to be a confession.

Scribbled on Post-it notes and a torn bit of paper, the notes said: “I am evil I did this”, “I killed them on purpose because I am not good enough to care for them and I am a horrible evil person”, and “hate”.

Timeline - The investigation into nurse Lucy Letby

Rees said Letby hadn’t shared anything like that in their many conversations.

She told the Times: “She was quiet, a normal 28-year-old. But when under stress I can see she goes catatonic almost.”

Letby tried to return to work multiple times, but the two consultants who complained about her refused to work with her again.

In 2017, she asked Rees to read out a statement at a meeting with senior hospital staff, including the consultant team.

Rees believes the statement was meant to ‘draw a line’ under what had happened so that Letby could ‘move forward’.

The four-page document was “giving her side of the story,” Rees said.

“She said ‘I haven’t done anything wrong, I want to come back to work with you’. And at the end of it I clearly remember — because during this meeting you could hear a pin drop — it said something like, ‘I am not the cold calculating murderer that some of you in this room believe me to be.’

“She was trying to touch the hearts of people, I think, to say, ‘Please let me just come back to my job’.”

Letby was found guilty of attacking the babies in her care often just moments after their parents or other nurses left her alone with them.She was found guilty of fatally injecting seven babies with air, trying to kill two others by lacing their feed bags with insulin, and the attempted murder of another by thrusting a tube down the baby's throat.

Rees also publicly denounced Letby in 2023 on the advice of her lawyers, which she says she regrets.

She has tried to call into HMP Bronzefield in Surrey, where Letby is serving her sentence, for a visiting order, which Letby has not accepted.