Footage of the arrest of Lucy Letby, the convicted child serial killer, that will feature in a Netflix documentary released this week has never been shared with Letby or her current legal team, The Observer understands.
It was filmed on police body-worn cameras in November 2020, but never shown as evidence during her trial. Cheshire Police subsequently shared the footage exclusively with ITN, the makers of the feature-length documentary.
It was after this arrest that Letby was formally charged with eight counts of murder and 15 counts of attempted murder for deaths at the Countess of Chester Hospital in 2015 and 2016.
Lawyers acting on behalf of Letby questioned whether it was “necessary” to publish the footage, which shows her being taken from her bed at her parents’ home in Hereford and tearfully telling her family “don't look”, as she is led to a police car.
Letby’s barrister, Mark McDonald, who took part in the documentary, said the sharing of the footage with the public was “an invasion of the family and her [Letby’s] privacy”.
In their first public statement on the case, Letby’s parents, Susan and John Letby, told the Sunday Times the release of the recording was a “complete invasion of privacy” and claimed the lead investigator, Det Supt Paul Hughes, “seemed to have a deep hatred” of them.
Letby is currently serving 15 whole-life terms for the murders of seven babies and the attempted murders of seven others. The documentary will stream on Netflix from 4 February and will feature “new materials and testimony” discovered as part of Operation Hummingbird, Cheshire Police’s ongoing investigation into Letby and a suspicious rise in baby deaths on the hospital's neonatal ward.
In 2023 ITN beat more than six other production companies in bidding for exclusive access to the Cheshire police and Crown Prosecution Service investigations into Letby.
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A spokesperson for Cheshire police said the force had “provided interviews with key members of the investigation team as part of the documentary along with limited investigative material to visually explain the case on an exclusive basis”. They confirmed that neither the officers who were involved in the documentary, nor the force as a whole, received any payment.
“This was an incredibly challenging story to tell,” said Ian Rumsey, managing director of content at ITN. “We have presented perspectives from all sides to let viewers draw their own conclusions”.
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The film includes an anonymous interview with the mother of one of Letby’s victims. It also features an interview with Dr Shoo Lee, the Canadian neonatologist who chaired a panel of international experts formed to independently review the medical evidence used to convict Letby. The panel concluded that the evidence did not point to Letby murdering the babies on the ward.
A report produced by the panel is among evidence being reviewed by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which has the power to decide whether Letby’s case should be sent back to the court of appeal. A growing number of medical and legal experts have claimed that Letby’s conviction is “unsafe” and argued that her case may be one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British history.
On Wednesday, the day the documentary is released, a hearing at Cheshire coroner’s court will open inquests into the deaths of six of the babies Letby was convicted of murdering. Last week, the coroner agreed to allow Letby to be formally represented at the hearings as an interested party, after her lawyers made representations to the court.
Last month the CPS said it had reviewed evidence from Cheshire Police of further allegations of murder and attempted murder of nine children at the Countess of Chester Hospital and Liverpool Women’s Hospital, but concluded that “the evidential test was not met in any of those cases”.
Photograph by Metropolitan Police