You’ve probably never heard of Buell Frazier. Or Ruth Paine. Or Roy Truly.
But you really should have. Because they are reportedly the masterminds of the largest criminal conspiracy in history.
Paine was a neighbor of Lee Harvey Oswald, who told her in that fateful fall of 1963 that he was looking for work. Frazier, her boyfriend, said he had recently accepted a job at the Texas Book Depository and that a few other positions were available. Roy Truly, the manager of the Depository, agreed to interview Oswald and hired him.
Or so the trio claimed to investigators. But if you’re a conspiracy theorist who believes in the Kennedy assassination, you know that’s all a lie. Or rather, you need to convince yourself that it’s a lie. Because if you don’t, your cherished theory that Oswald was actually put there by his CIA/Cuban/Mafia handlers—with a few friends lurking behind the Grassy Knoll down the road—falls completely flat.
The campaign to free Lucy Letby is one insane conspiracy theory too far, writes Dan Hodges
So it is with the small but increasingly fanatical army of Lucy Letby ‘truthers’. Yesterday, the Public Inquiry into how Britain’s worst child murderer was able to commit her crimes began.
But in the background the clamour for her innocence had become so loud that the chair of the inquiry, Lady Justice Thirwall, felt compelled to say: ‘I make it absolutely clear, it is not for me as chair of this inquiry to review the convictions. The Court of Appeal has done so with a very clear result. The convictions stand.’
But the online sleuths and self-proclaimed criminologists are having none of it. They claim that their heroine has been wrongly convicted. And demand that the investigation be stopped pending a re-examination of her case.
Okay. Let’s take another look at it.
And let’s start by understanding this simple fact. Namely, that to believe that Letby is indeed innocent of the horrific murder of seven babies, and the attempted murder of seven more, you have to embrace your own grand conspiracy theory.
The first part is the conspiracy that Letby herself placed at the heart of her defence. On the witness stand she claimed that four senior consultants at the Countess of Chester Hospital had conspired to ‘get her’.
According to her testimony, they had collectively “made comments that I was responsible for the deaths of babies, and they were very insistent that I be removed from the unit.” When the prosecution lawyer asked her why she had fallen victim to the evil machinations of this “Gang of Four,” she replied, “They blame me… I believe to cover up shortcomings in the hospital.”
Which leads directly into the second major strand of the conspiracy. It suggests that almost the entire senior management team of the Countess of Chester coldly and callously agreed to join this sinister cabal, choosing instead to frame a dedicated nurse and colleague in a desperate attempt to cover up their own clinical and institutional failings.
In reality, when doubts were raised about the unprecedented spike in neonatal deaths within the trust, managers tried to suppress discussions of deliberate criminal intervention. But to maintain the idea of a conspiracy against Letby, it is necessary to brush aside minor facts such as these.
So let’s believe what her defenders would have us believe. Namely, that senior management suspected that a mysterious infection, caused by their own negligence, was killing their young patients. And collectively decided to save their reputation and that of their failing hospital by falsely pretending that they had left a deranged serial killer to run amok in their wards.
Let us then take a leap further. Namely that these managers, having cast their lot with ‘The Gang of Four’, succeeded in co-opting the entire British medical, criminal and legal establishment into their treason. The police and independent medical professionals who painstakingly collected, analysed and peer-reviewed the overwhelming evidence that the children’s deaths could not be attributed to natural causes.
The Crown Prosecution Service officers who conducted their own detailed assessment of the evidence and sent it to the court. The multiple independent expert witnesses who gave evidence at two trials. Two separate juries. Two judges. Three professional judges. And now, apparently, Judge Thirwall. Every one of them is complicit in, or has been duped by, this sulphurous scheme.
And then we must reach the final—perhaps most significant—suspension of disbelief. And that is this. To believe Lucy Letby, you must not only believe that her persecutors were exceptionally evil. You must also believe that they were astonishingly lucky.
Because when the Gang of Four and their allies chose Letby as their scapegoat, there were so many things they couldn’t have known. That it would turn out that she had an unusual and morbid interest in the victims and their families. That she had mistakenly taken notes about the dead children home.
Supporters of Letby, who believe she is innocent of the murder of seven babies and attempted murder of seven others, outside the Court of Appeal
That it was Letby who had made an unsigned manuscript note on Baby D’s blood chart just before the infant collapsed, even though she was not the designated nurse on duty. And never could they have imagined that when she was examined and advised to write down her thoughts to relieve her ‘stress’, she would write the words: ‘I did this… I killed them on purpose because I am not good enough to take care of them. I am a horrible and evil person’.
Yes, there have been rare cases where unbelievable murder conspiracy theories have been proven correct. The most famous is probably the Dingo Baby case, in which Australian mother Lindy Chamberlain claimed that a feral dog had run away with her child and maintained that she had been wrongly accused by authorities. Chamberlain was eventually acquitted.
Lucy Letby and her defenders do indeed have their own ‘Dingo Baby’ – the plumbing at the Countess of Chester Hospital. During the trial Letby made much of the fact that ‘we used to have raw sewage coming out of the sinks [and] on the floor of Nursery One’. Although she conspicuously failed to explain how faulty plumbing could be responsible for more than a dozen documented cases of murder and attempted murder by air embolism, nasogastric tube feeding, insulin poisoning, overfeeding with milk, or throat trauma.
Some conspiracy theories, such as the Kennedy assassination, have a historical fascination. Others, such as the fake moon landings, are relatively harmless entertainment.
But this is no Oliver Stone movie. Replace the names Buell Frazier, Ruth Paine and Roy Truly with Dr. Ravi Jayaram, Dr. Stephen Brearey and Dr. John Gibbs.
Three of the four consultants who eventually convinced their managers that Letby was behind the unexplained deaths, thereby saving the lives of countless other children. And whose reputations are now being dragged through the mud by Letby’s allies.
Spare a thought for those whose names we do not know. Letby’s victims. Baby A. Baby C. Baby D. Baby E. Baby I. Baby O. Baby P. And their parents and other loved ones, forced to relive their nightmares to satisfy the Internet inquisitors’ cravings.
Lucy Letby killed those children. And she did it alone. The campaign to free her is an insane conspiracy theory too far.