Context
Lucy Letby was interviewed under caution by Cheshire Police on three occasions between July 2018 and November 2020. Each interview was conducted under standard PACE protocols — legal representation, tape-recorded, cautioned. This page extends the earlier police-interviews transcript summary with the analytical framework the CCRC application materials apply to the interview record.
The three interview dates
- 3 July 2018. First arrest at her home in Chester. Interviewed under caution.
- June 2019. Second arrest. Expanded allegations. Interviewed under caution.
- November 2020. Third arrest and charge. Interviewed under caution before charge.
The consistency across interviews
The four specific findings the CCRC submission draws from the three interviews:
- Consistent denial. Across all three interviews, over two and a half years, Letby denied the allegations. She did not admit any deliberate act. She did not confess at any point.
- Clinical-context accounts. She offered clinical explanations for each event put to her, consistent with her subsequent trial testimony.
- No use of right to silence. She engaged with the questions put, rather than exercising the right to silence available under PACE. A defendant with something to hide typically uses the right to silence.
- Lock-in effect. Her accounts were locked in, in detail, from the first interview. The Crown’s trial cross-examination did not adduce any material inconsistency.
What this does for the “confession” reading of the notes
The Crown’s case on the Post-it notes asked the jury to read them as confessional text. If that reading were correct, one would expect some echo of the admission in the police interviews conducted after the notes had been found. There is none. The interviews are consistent denials. This is inconsistent with a confessional reading of the notes and consistent with the private-self-blame-under-sustained-accusation reading the clinical-psychology reports develop.
The Allitt comparison
In the Allitt case, the strongest evidence at trial included direct observational evidence from colleagues, recovered physical exhibits, and forensic-standard toxicology. The Crown also had contemporaneous written admissions by Allitt in her nursing Kardex in two cases. The Letby case does not contain any of these evidential classes. The absence of an interview admission is evidentially material: across three separate arrests and two and a half years, the Crown never had the defendant’s own words as an admission.
Read alongside
Police interviews — short summary, Our police-interviews critique, Evidence: police-interview consistency, The Allitt framing effect.