Lucy Letby: how the charges were selected

Prelude: A daycare centre in New Zealand

Peter Ellis was a childcare worker in Christchurch, New Zealand. A creative, flamboyant and somewhat uninhibited character, Ellis loved his job, put a lot of energy into programme planning, and would entertain children with elaborate puppet shows and somewhat provocative productions, sometimes to the point of being “risqué and outrageous”. Ellis had worked at the daycare centre for several years and was popular with children and parents alike.

In 1991 a parent made a complaint. Her child had remarked that he did not like “Peter’s black penis”. An investigation ensued. Parents talked. Things escalated. The police were involved. They interviewed hundreds of children. The stories were horrific. Christchurch police eventually charged Peter Ellis with the systematic and horrendous abuse of twenty preschool children in his care.

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Before his trial, the police had disclosed to his legal team the statements of the 20 child complainants, as they were obliged to do. The children were all under 5. Their statements were broadly consistent. They told an appalling story.

The police did not disclose the statements from nearly 100 other children — on the pretext that, since no charges were laid regarding these children, their interviews were not relevant to the criminal proceedings against Ellis.

The nature of the allegations — that Ellis had abducted the children, removed them to a different location across town, ritually abused them and then returned to the daycare centre in time for pickup — made it very difficult for Ellis rebut the children’s evidence. There were no independent witnesses. He had no alibi. The consistency of the twenty complainants’ stories was striking. It was enough to convince the jury. Ellis was convicted and imprisoned.

It later turned out that while the witness statements the defence did see were consistent and theoretically plausible, many of the other children’s stories were not. Some were physically impossible. Some claimed Ellis had amputated limbs the children still possessed, or inflicted horrific injuries of which there was no trace. This is presumably why police did not press charges charges in these cases.

Furthermore, a significant number of children had flatly denied any abuse had happened. The defence were not told of these children either.

Plainly, these statements would have enormously helped Ellis’s defence: they would have provided context in which the “credible” accounts ought to have been set. They opened the argument that the police had cherry-picked accounts from interviews with six times that many children, thereby generating a wholly misleading impression of consistency and reliability.

This was a classic Texas sharpshooter: the police had ignored a greater volume of obviously made up stories, had shelved insistent denials and painted a target around the small number of outwardly plausible statements, and presented that to the defence and the jury as the whole story.

All the allegations against Peter Ellis were false. Ellis did not abuse anyone.

Even the “black penis” remark was explained: it arose when Ellis was showing the children how to identify the sex of a labrador puppy.

That this was a catastrophic miscarriage of justice was not finally acknowledged until Ellis had completed his sentence. Though he died of cancer in 2019, the New Zealand Supreme Court took the unusual step of posthumously exonerating Peter Ellis in 2022. The case was and is a cause célèbre in New Zealand. It led to significant changes in evidence disclosure rules and a thorough revision of the interview techniques used by police and social workers.

Relevance for Ms. Letby

Peter Ellis’ case shares two features with Ms. Letby’s: firstly, the danger of selective disclosure. By presenting only the collapses during Ms. Letby’s shifts and excluding the context of similar collapses when Ms. Letby was not present, the charge sheet, and particularly the staff attendance chart, creates an “artificial coherence” to one unlikely narrative — a healthcare serial murderer — whilst suppressing evidence suggesting a much more likely one — a poorly managed and under-resourced hospital suffering a cluster of collapses in desperately ill children it was not properly equipped to treat.

Just as Peter Ellis could not properly contextualise the credible complaints against him with evidence of a great