Serial killers - where are they now?

[gosling]

Thanks for the extra links.

I did wonder if there was some cherry picking of data in my links. Also hadn't spotted that the death rates were for the trust not the specific hospital. Serves me right for skim reading. It's all very sad and horrific.

[El Pollo Diablo]

There appear to be a few people online who claim the evidence is flawed statistically:
https://www.chimpinvestor.com/post/the- ... y-verdicts
and scientifically:
https://rexvlucyletby2023.com/
https://gill1109.com/2023/05/24/the-lucy-letby-case/

I can't comment on the science but the stats shown in that first blog don't seem to support the idea of a serial killer at work, i.e. higher than expected deaths also occurred when Lucy Letby was not on duty.

People do go crazy when children are dying, so I am open to there being a miscarriage of justice. But i think you’d have to look into the source of those stats and if they really addressed the case. They seem to be data for two hospitals not just the one in question as addressed on your link (it says the one in question accounts for 80% of the deaths) and I am not sure but I can imagine there are many neonatal wards in the hospital or there is some other aggregation of the data such that this is just going to wash out the small number of cases they are looking at here. Or do you know otherwise? What is written is there seem in total conflict with what I have seen reported e.g. here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66120934 where they say there was only 1 death in seven years after she left the ward.

Not sure of the timing, but worth bearing in mind the statement a few sentences earlier that the neonatal unit no longer cares for infants in as poor a condition as they did when Letby worked on the ward. Presumably that would affect the death rate in the time after.

[Bewildered]

There appear to be a few people online who claim the evidence is flawed statistically:
https://www.chimpinvestor.com/post/the- ... y-verdicts
and scientifically:
https://rexvlucyletby2023.com/
https://gill1109.com/2023/05/24/the-lucy-letby-case/

I can't comment on the science but the stats shown in that first blog don't seem to support the idea of a serial killer at work, i.e. higher than expected deaths also occurred when Lucy Letby was not on duty.

People do go crazy when children are dying, so I am open to there being a miscarriage of justice. But i think you’d have to look into the source of those stats and if they really addressed the case. They seem to be data for two hospitals not just the one in question as addressed on your link (it says the one in question accounts for 80% of the deaths) and I am not sure but I can imagine there are many neonatal wards in the hospital or there is some other aggregation of the data such that this is just going to wash out the small number of cases they are looking at here. Or do you know otherwise? What is written is there seem in total conflict with what I have seen reported e.g. here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66120934 where they say there was only 1 death in seven years after she left the ward.

Not sure of the timing, but worth bearing in mind the statement a few sentences earlier that the neonatal unit no longer cares for infants in as poor a condition as they did when Letby worked on the ward. Presumably that would affect the death rate in the time after.

Yes it’s also not useful as statical evidence of guilt or innocence, was just using that as an example of how the plot shown in the chimp investor blog doesn’t fit what I’ve read.

[jimbob]

The deaths data.

Document 5: Number of deaths (monthly) by type (late fetal loss, stillbirth, early neonatal, late neonatal, post neonatal) at the Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, January 2013 to October 2018 - Freedom of Information Request Link: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/ ... sthrough=1

Via Darat on ISF

[jimbob]

It wasn't just statistical analysis but the note in her diary saying.


'I don't deserve to live. I killed them on purpose because I'm not good enough'. 'I am a horrible evil person' and in capital letters, 'I AM EVIL I DID THIS'."

[snoozeofreason]

It wasn't just statistical analysis but the note in her diary saying.


'I don't deserve to live. I killed them on purpose because I'm not good enough'. 'I am a horrible evil person' and in capital letters, 'I AM EVIL I DID THIS'."

It was a post-it note, rather than a diary entry. The complete post-it note is reproduced here. I think it would be a bit of a stretch to interpret it as a confession of guilt - partly because the rambling, stream of consciousness, nature of this note and others found by police makes it difficult to tell whether she is writing about things that she has done, or things that have been said about her, or a mixture of the two (the note also includes the sentence "I haven't done anything wrong"); and partly because it would be a bit odd if someone who had been calculating enough to commit seven murders in a busy hospital without being caught in the act had also been careless enough to leave a confession on a post-it note.

[Bewildered]

It wasn't just statistical analysis but the note in her diary saying.


'I don't deserve to live. I killed them on purpose because I'm not good enough'. 'I am a horrible evil person' and in capital letters, 'I AM EVIL I DID THIS'."

It was a post-it note, rather than a diary entry. The complete post-it note is reproduced here. I think it would be a bit of a stretch to interpret it as a confession of guilt - partly because the rambling, stream of consciousness, nature of this note and others found by police makes it difficult to tell whether she is writing about things that she has done, or things that have been said about her, or a mixture of the two (the note also includes the sentence "I haven't done anything wrong"); and partly because it would be a bit odd if someone who had been calculating enough to commit seven murders in a busy hospital without being caught in the act had also been careless enough to leave a confession on a post-it note.

I didn’t want to get into playing amateur sleuth because I have no time to go over all the evidence, which the judy did. However I also found it weird how much this was mentioned and I found it very flimsy as evidence. Firstly because her note looks like crap I write where I am just spewing out random thoughts and associations (some of which would look like confessions or accusations of hideous crimes that have never happened) and secondly because writing something like that makes complete sense if babies you are looking after have died and even more sense if people are already pointing the finger at you. So I hope the verdict was based more on other things and this was not an important factor.

[Bewildered]

This isn’t falling further into the stupid amateur sleuth hole at least, but something else that I find strange in general about judges statements is they very often say things that they are not capable of knowing like in this case the judge said she had no remorse. Not she showed no remorse, or came across this way in court, but that she had none. I really don’t understand why they don’t add appropriate caveats. Somehow in this case people thought hearing the judges statement was an important part of the punishment and she ‘escaped’ it (she wasn’t present in court for it for some reason), so maybe that’s partly why - the aim is to make the hear themselves condemned ? But I don’t get that either.

Edit, Or maybe the idea is that this is their verdict so it’s not supposed to have doubt, whereas all I want to hear is their reasoning for the sentence and if that contains statements I know they can’t know it just makes me less confident in them…

[Bewildered]

Ignore

[El Pollo Diablo]

It wasn't just statistical analysis but the note in her diary saying.


'I don't deserve to live. I killed them on purpose because I'm not good enough'. 'I am a horrible evil person' and in capital letters, 'I AM EVIL I DID THIS'."

It seems possible to poke holes in many aspects of the charges against Letby, such as whether there is sufficient medical evidence to link murderer with crime in each of the deaths. However, what seems very hard to argue with is that several babies died or suffered life-changing injuries whilst on the ward, that Letby was the only nurse on shift for every one of them, that the incident rate was a spike that occurred only during the phase when she was there, and that after her removal from the ward, the spike died down again.

Now, we all know that exceptional coincidences can happen, and can serve to incriminate someone who is innocent (e.g. Sally Clark), but for the life of me I cannot think of any explanation for the previous paragraph, other than to say Letby was the cause of those deaths. Incompetence seems improbable given her training, so malice seems the only remaining option. I was not in court or on the jury, and I did not see all the evidence, but from what I know I would struggle to come down on the side of not guilty.

[Woodchopper]

This isn’t falling further into the stupid amateur sleuth hole at least, but something else that I find strange in general about judges statements is they very often say things that they are not capable of knowing like in this case the judge said she had no remorse. Not she showed no remorse, or came across this way in court, but that she had none. I really don’t understand why they don’t add appropriate caveats. Somehow in this case people thought hearing the judges statement was an important part of the punishment and she ‘escaped’ it (she wasn’t present in court for it for some reason), so maybe that’s partly why - the aim is to make the hear themselves condemned ? But I don’t get that either.

Edit, Or maybe the idea is that this is their verdict so it’s not supposed to have doubt, whereas all I want to hear is their reasoning for the sentence and if that contains statements I know they can’t know it just makes me less confident in them…

I agree (with your edit), its the role of the judge to make that decision. They need to decide whether the accused feels remorse as that will affect sentencing.

[Woodchopper]

Trials are rarely decided by one piece of evidence. The jury has to carefully weigh up all the evidence and make a decision.

As I understand it the key issues in this case are:

a) An increase in deaths
b) Pathologists concluding that some were not from natural causes
c) Among the hundreds of hours spent by staff around the infants that died in suspicious circumstances, Letby was always present and often the only one present
d) Letby had kept hundreds of confidential documents at home, many of which related to the infants that had died in suspicious circumstances.
e) Letby frequently viewed the social media profiles of the parents of the infants that had died in suspicious circumstances.
f) Writing by Letby which appears to admit guilt.

Certainly we can be skeptical about on any one of those. Coincidences happen. But all together they look like a reasonable guilty verdict.

In addition, Letby was acquitted on some charges. So the jury clearly did its job and assessed whether there was reasonable doubt in some cases.

[snoozeofreason]

It seems possible to poke holes in many aspects of the charges against Letby, such as whether there is sufficient medical evidence to link murderer with crime in each of the deaths. However, what seems very hard to argue with is that several babies died or suffered life-changing injuries whilst on the ward, that Letby was the only nurse on shift for every one of them, that the incident rate was a spike that occurred only during the phase when she was there, and that after her removal from the ward, the spike died down again.

Now, we all know that exceptional coincidences can happen, and can serve to incriminate someone who is innocent (e.g. Sally Clark), but for the life of me I cannot think of any explanation for the previous paragraph, other than to say Letby was the cause of those deaths. Incompetence seems improbable given her training, so malice seems the only remaining option. I was not in court or on the jury, and I did not see all the evidence, but from what I know I would struggle to come down on the side of not guilty.

This is close to the line of reasoning that the Royal Statistical Society cautioned against in a report produced around the time the trial started. The problem with presenting it without sufficient caveats is that it ignores base rates. There are thousands of hospital departments in the UK, in which hundreds of thousands of nurses work millions of shifts. Of course most of these departments aren't neonatal wards, and most of the nurses aren't Lucy Letby, but that is beside the point. We don't hear about those other wards and nurses because no "unusual" patterns of deaths occur, and we do hear about Letby and Chester because they did - in much the same way that it is not news when someone fails to win the lottery but it is news if someone wins two lotteries in a single day.

The RSS also point out that when you weigh up such evidence you are comparing one potentially unlikely explanation (that the pattern happened by chance) with another unlikely explanation (that the suspect is one of those very rare individuals who commit serial murders), and the trick is to work out which is more unlikely, and by what margin

The Bayesian thought experiment suggested by the RSS report when deciding how much weight to put on an unusual pattern of events is to ask how likely we would be to decide a suspect was guilty if we were unaware of that pattern, but were aware of any other evidence that might be available. For example in the case of Harold Shipman there are the wills he forged for his patients. This would be pretty strong evidence even in the absence of an unusual pattern of events, and it greatly increases the weight that can be put on that pattern because we are now asking how likely it is that such a pattern would be found in the hopefully small set of doctors who go around forging wills. In the absence of such prior evidence, much less weight can be attached to any unusual pattern of events because the pool of people to whom it could potentially have happened is much larger.

In the Letby case the prior evidence doesn't seem to convincing in the same way as the Shipman evidence is. I am not a doctor, but it sounds as if people who are doctors have considered the reasoning in the Letby case to be medically questionable, and most of it involves cases that were originally thought to have innocent explanations being retrospectively examined by people who were aware of the unusual pattern of occurences, which is also something that the RSS warned against (their suggestion was that such evidence be considered in a study where an expert is given a set of cases in which the suspect could have committed a murder, and a set of controls where they couldn't and is blinded as to which are the cases and which are the controls).

I wouldn't want to stick my neck out and suggest that verdict is right or wrong, but I would have been much happier with this, and other such verdicts if jurors were given explicit warnings about our human tendency to exaggerate the unlikeness of "unlikely" occurrences, and reminded forcefully that their job is to distinguish one unlikely explanation of events (the one in which the suspect is innocent) from another (the one in which they are guilty).

[Rich Scopie]

… and that "crossbow cannibal" guy (forgot his real name).

Stephen Griffiths. He was in the year below me at school.

We also had John George Haigh, the Acid Bath Murderer. Mind you, he was well before my time.

R.

[Woodchopper]

In the Letby case the prior evidence doesn't seem to convincing in the same way as the Shipman evidence is. I am not a doctor, but it sounds as if people who are doctors have considered the reasoning in the Letby case to be medically questionable, and most of it involves cases that were originally thought to have innocent explanations being retrospectively examined by people who were aware of the unusual pattern of occurences, which is also something that the RSS warned against (their suggestion was that such evidence be considered in a study where an expert is given a set of cases in which the suspect could have committed a murder, and a set of controls where they couldn't and is blinded as to which are the cases and which are the controls).

Do you know whether the cases which were examined retrospectively were also those cases for which Letby was not found guilty?

If so it would seem that the jury may have taken that into account.

[snoozeofreason]

In the Letby case the prior evidence doesn't seem to convincing in the same way as the Shipman evidence is. I am not a doctor, but it sounds as if people who are doctors have considered the reasoning in the Letby case to be medically questionable, and most of it involves cases that were originally thought to have innocent explanations being retrospectively examined by people who were aware of the unusual pattern of occurences, which is also something that the RSS warned against (their suggestion was that such evidence be considered in a study where an expert is given a set of cases in which the suspect could have committed a murder, and a set of controls where they couldn't and is blinded as to which are the cases and which are the controls).

Do you know whether the cases which were examined retrospectively were also those cases for which Letby was not found guilty?

If so it would seem that the jury may have taken that into account.

I am not entirely sure I have understood the reasoning behind the question. I think there was retrospective evidence offered in all the counts. But if you are considering whether the jury, when deciding what weight to give to the unlikely pattern of deaths, might have taken into account weaknesses in the "prior" evidence related to those deaths, then I can't see any reason to think they did, because in all the cases where a baby died, and which would have formed part of that pattern, Letby was found guilty.

The only counts on which not guilty verdicts were returned, or the jury failed to return a verdict, were counts involving cases where the baby didn't die (in other words they were alleged attempted murders). FWIW in several of those cases the jury returned a verdict of guilty on another attempted murder count involving the same baby.

[Woodchopper]

In the Letby case the prior evidence doesn't seem to convincing in the same way as the Shipman evidence is. I am not a doctor, but it sounds as if people who are doctors have considered the reasoning in the Letby case to be medically questionable, and most of it involves cases that were originally thought to have innocent explanations being retrospectively examined by people who were aware of the unusual pattern of occurences, which is also something that the RSS warned against (their suggestion was that such evidence be considered in a study where an expert is given a set of cases in which the suspect could have committed a murder, and a set of controls where they couldn't and is blinded as to which are the cases and which are the controls).

Do you know whether the cases which were examined retrospectively were also those cases for which Letby was not found guilty?

If so it would seem that the jury may have taken that into account.

I am not entirely sure I have understood the reasoning behind the question. I think there was retrospective evidence offered in all the counts. But if you are considering whether the jury, when deciding what weight to give to the unlikely pattern of deaths, might have taken into account weaknesses in the "prior" evidence related to those deaths, then I can't see any reason to think they did, because in all the cases where a baby died, and which would have formed part of that pattern, Letby was found guilty.

The only counts on which not guilty verdicts were returned, or the jury failed to return a verdict, were counts involving cases where the baby didn't die (in other words they were alleged attempted murders). FWIW in several of those cases the jury returned a verdict of guilty on another attempted murder count involving the same baby.

Ok thanks for that.

[Sciolus]

In general, confessions (even considerably more explicit ones than we have here) are poor evidence of guilt. They are often associated with mental disorders and/or brutal or coercive interrogation. In the Letby case, the latter may or may not be the case, but you aren't telling me that that post-it is the product of a calm and rational mind.

[Al Capone Junior]

I think all the serial killers remaining at large in the United States are running for office now.

But I'm sure the repugnicans will feel a real sense of loss given Ted bundy and John Wayne Gacy are already dead and thus unable to run for office.

I think it likely there are always a few serial killers on the loose at any given moment, tho I'm not sure about statistics.

But I'm quite sure that the US leads in those stats. And with how many deranged psychos with the "dark triad" (or whatever it is these days) of psychological qualities are currently holding public office

[JQH]

It reminds me more than a little of the Lucia de Berk case

[Bewildered]

This isn’t falling further into the stupid amateur sleuth hole at least, but something else that I find strange in general about judges statements is they very often say things that they are not capable of knowing like in this case the judge said she had no remorse. Not she showed no remorse, or came across this way in court, but that she had none. I really don’t understand why they don’t add appropriate caveats. Somehow in this case people thought hearing the judges statement was an important part of the punishment and she ‘escaped’ it (she wasn’t present in court for it for some reason), so maybe that’s partly why - the aim is to make the hear themselves condemned ? But I don’t get that either.

Edit, Or maybe the idea is that this is their verdict so it’s not supposed to have doubt, whereas all I want to hear is their reasoning for the sentence and if that contains statements I know they can’t know it just makes me less confident in them…

I agree (with your edit), its the role of the judge to make that decision. They need to decide whether the accused feels remorse as that will affect sentencing.

Thanks, so yes it makes sense that they need to determine this for sentencing (of course!) and saying this is part of the reasoning for the sentence. However stating it as a blunt fact here rather than saying it’s their conclusion based on x,y,z makes it sound like poor reasoning to me. I don’t trust people if they claim to know things they cannot possibly know. While I can think about it like I am here and reading that there is probably more behind, my initial impression is not to trust it so it doesn’t (I’m my case at least) build faith in the judgement. And beyond that wouldn’t it be better for transparent justice if the judge does explain themselves more fully, ie rather than just stating which of the (likely legislated) factors the person does / does not satisfy actually explained why they have concluded this?

Sorry I am really thinking out loud before as I just thought about my reaction here and recall reacting similarly in the past. I haven’t really considered it much in the past. Surely this has been thought about and there are guidelines for judges as how much they should explain the sentence and it’s been the subject of debate before?

[Tessa K]

Interesting piece about female serial killers in general and this one in particular

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... um=twitter

[bob sterman]

It reminds me more than a little of the Lucia de Berk case

Except in that case there wasn't really any direct evidence - whereas in the Letby case there are 2 babies with extremely high insulin and low C-peptide. Strong evidence of exogenous insulin administration.

[jimbob]

It reminds me more than a little of the Lucia de Berk case

Except in that case there wasn't really any direct evidence - whereas in the Letby case there are 2 babies with extremely high insulin and low C-peptide. Strong evidence of exogenous insulin administration.

And the evidence of her having tampered with the medical records to change the times

[snoozeofreason]

It reminds me more than a little of the Lucia de Berk case

Except in that case there wasn't really any direct evidence - whereas in the Letby case there are 2 babies with extremely high insulin and low C-peptide. Strong evidence of exogenous insulin administration.

There was direct evidence in the De Berk case. It was claimed that digoxin had been found in the body of one alleged victim and an overdose of chloral hydrate in another. This evidence was overturned on further examination. Richard Gill, who was one of the key figures in the campaign to exonerate De Berk, has pointed to similar problems with the evidence in the Letby insulin cases, as have other scientists (see the links that gosling posted earlier).