Reading an article in the Guardian just now and this excerpt shocked me:
“DS Paul Hughes, who led the investigation, told the Observer the information provided by Brearey and his colleagues had been “the golden thread” for their inquiry. “They have been very brave in coming forward and they’ve put this ahead of their careers, in my view,” he said. “If it wasn’t for their ongoing determination, would there have been more [murders]? I don’t know. It’s difficult to answer or speculate on the future. But they’ve done well.”
If there was a smoking gun in this medically complex case, it was uncovered by one of Letby’s colleagues. On the night before Valentine’s Day in February 2018, nearly a year after police launched their investigation, Brearey was hunched over his computer screen when he spotted something unusual.
He had been asked by detectives to review the care of siblings and twins on the unit and was looking at the records of a seven-day-old boy. The infant, known as Child F, had suffered a serious collapse on the unit in August 2015, a day after his twin brother had died unexpectedly.
In the very last paragraph of Child F’s discharge letter was a line about his insulin level and the level of another hormone called C-peptide. In normal readings, the insulin level would be between 200 and 300. For Child F it was 4,657. The results also showed a very low C-peptide level. It was conclusive proof that he had been poisoned. Letby had laced his feeding bag with insulin a day after fatally injecting air into the bloodstream of his six-day-old twin brother. It was a miracle that Child F had survived.
“I just had this gut-wrenching moment: ‘What the fuck is this?!,’” said Brearey. “It was a smoking gun. You saw it there, in plain sight. If there was any iota of doubt [about her guilt], it was removed then.”
It was, said DCI Nicola Evans, a “real milestone” in the investigation. “We were shocked to the core,” she said.”
