Lucy Letby ‘innocent’ and regularly ‘cried in my arms’, says ex-head of nursing

A retired head of nursing at Lucy Letby’s hospital has claimed the convicted killer is innocent, describing “shocking” meetings with the nurse who “cried in my arms”.

Letby, 35, from Hereford, is serving 15 whole-life orders after she was convicted across two trials at Manchester Crown Court of murdering seven infants and attempting to murder seven others, with two attempts on one of her victims, between June 2015 and June 2016.

She lost two bids last year to challenge her convictions at the Court of Appeal – in May for seven murders and seven attempted murders, and in October for the attempted murder of a baby girl which she was convicted of by a different jury at a retrial.

Karen Rees, 62, a now-retired head of nursing at Countess of Chester Hospital, met Letby for the first time in the summer of 2016 when she had to tell the nurse she was being removed from the neonatal ward after concerns about her “clinical practice”, according to The Sunday Times.

She said: “What I saw was a very frightened young woman who was shocked and bewildered.”

Over the next two years, Ms Rees met with Letby regularly and developed a close relationship with the nurse.

At her first meeting with her, the retired head of nursing claimed she was shocked and sympathetic to see the broken woman before her, but that she had a job to do.

She reportedly told Letby: “I’ve been given a management instruction that I have to remove you from your clinical practice. This is a neutral act. It’s to protect you as well as the babies. But until this is investigated, you’re going to do a non-clinical role.”

As the investigation continued, Ms Rees was given a “management instruction” to meet with the nurse weekly to check on her wellbeing.

She described the meetings as “shocking”, adding: “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.”

Ms Rees said she was worried Letby was suicidal and that she and others set up a WhatsApp group in support.

Text messages included Ms Rees telling Letby to “hang in there girl… your nursing team are fully behind you. We will get through this”.

The babies were attacked by various means while Letby worked as a nurse on the neonatal unit at the hospital.

One such method was injecting air into the bloodstream which caused an air embolism that blocked the blood supply and led to sudden and unexpected collapses.

Ms Rees, who lives with her husband on a farm in Flintshire, retired in March 2018 – four months before police first arrested Letby.

She told The Sunday Times she wanted to attend Letby’s trial at Manchester Crown Court but was prevented from doing so because she was a potential witness.

She also offered to give evidence for Letby’s defence but was never called, saying she always believed her to be innocent.

Following Letby’s conviction in 2023, Ms Rees was advised to publicly denounce the nurse, and she said at the time: “(Letby) was very convincing. I now know that this was a calculated and successful attempt to make me believe her story, and I was deceived.”

But asked by The Sunday Times why she believes Letby is innocent, she said: “The one person that knows her nursing team is the manager or the unit manager – not a consultant that visits a couple of times a week.

“They know the strengths and weaknesses. I trusted Lucy’s ward manager when she looked me in the eye and said, ‘she’s (Letby) fantastic and she’s right by the book, she does everything right’.

“I believed Lucy when she told me she had done nothing wrong. I will always recall her saying to me, ‘you’re the only person, Karen, that hasn’t asked me if I did it?’ Because I didn’t think she had.”