Former head of nursing at Countess of Chester says Letby ‘cried in her arms’ after being removed from the ward. Lucy Letby’s former boss has said “if she was acting she deserves an Oscar” as she described tearful meetings with the neonatal nurse after accusations against her first emerged. Karen Rees, the head of nursing at the Countess of Chester hospital before her retirement in March 2018, revealed to the Sunday Times that she had always believed in Letby’s innocence. The pair developed a close relationship in the months after Letby was removed from the ward over concerns she was connected to a sharp rise in infant deaths.
Letby is serving 15 whole-life prison terms after being convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill another seven in 2015 and 2016, making her Britain’s worst child serial killer of modern times. She was found to have poisoned babies with insulin and injected air into them to cause a fatal air embolism. The court of appeal has twice refused her permission to appeal against her convictions. Letby has always maintained her innocence.
In weekly meetings to check on Letby’s wellbeing after she was removed from the ward, Rees described how she “cried in her arms”. “She was crying … very distressed every time we met her, saying, ‘Why is this happening to me?’,” she said. “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. It was harrowing.”.
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.”. This month, an international panel of experts said they had found no evidence Letby murdered or harmed any of the babies she was accused of attacking, and that they had suffered a catalogue of “bad medical care” or deteriorated as a result of natural causes.
In 2023, shortly after Letby’s conviction, Rees issued a statement saying she had “no doubt at all that she was guilty of these despicable crimes, having seen the reports of the evidence” and that she “was deceived, as were so many others”. She now claims to regret these words, and said her lawyers advised her to publicly denounce the nurse. “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,” she said. “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.”.
At the Thirlwall inquiry into the events surrounding the murders and attempted murders, Rees admitted she became too close to Letby after she was removed from her post. She was shown to have texted Letby saying: “Hang on in there girl … your nursing team are fully behind you. We will get through this.”. In December 2017, seven months after the police had been contacted, Rees texted Letby to say: “We’ll continue to fight for you,” the inquiry heard.
