From 2023- Lucy Letby nursing boss: Calculating killer duped me like so many others

 

Lucy Letby nursing boss: Calculating killer duped me like so many others

Karen Rees, the former deputy nursing director of the Countess of Chester Hospital, refused to believe she was guilty until end of trial
Tom Ball
, Northern Correspondent |
Tom Witherow
The Times
Karen Rees said Lucy Letby was “very convincing”
Karen Rees said Lucy Letby was “very convincing”
A hospital manager accused of failing to act on doctors’ warnings about Lucy Letby has said that she was duped by the “calculating” child killer for years.
Speaking about her relationship with Letby for the first time Karen Rees, the former deputy nursing director of the Countess of Chester Hospital, said that she had believed until the conclusion of the trial that the nurse was innocent.
“I have no doubt at all that she was guilty of these despicable crimes, having seen the reports of the evidence,” she said. “I did not attend the trial so I had an incomplete picture until the verdicts were announced, and more detail provided.” Rees said she had refused to believe in Letby’s guilt because she had had regular meetings with her after her suspension from the neonatal unit in June 2016, and had “witnessed her in complete distress, crying and swearing her innocence”.
Rees said: “She was very convincing. I now know that this was a calculated and successful attempt to make me believe her story, and I was deceived, as were so many others.”
Letby’s ten-month trial was told that doctors raised concerns about the nurse’s connection to a series of unexplained collapses of babies on at least five occasions before she was removed from the ward more than a year after she began killing. Rees was said in court to have declined a request from Dr Stephen Brearey, a consultant paediatrician, to have Letby taken off the ward in June 2016, only for a baby to collapse the following day.
Rees has said that she disputes Brearey’s account.
It is understood that Rees regularly met Letby for coffee in the two years after her suspension, which she said was part of her job, and that the pair met socially outside work. She had told Letby “the intention was to get her back on to the neonatal unit”, according to The Sunday Times.
When Rees retired in March 2018, four months before Letby’s arrest, the killer bought her a leaving present and attended a small farewell party.
Rees, who lives in north Wales, said she had understood that the most life-threatened babies had been placed in Letby’s care and that no performance problems had been raised until Brearey contacted her on June 24, 2016, demanding her removal. She said that the neonatal unit’s manager, Eirian Powell, had assured her that there were no concerns about Letby. Powell has not responded to requests for comment.
When approached before the verdict was delivered but after all the evidence in the trial had been heard, Rees’s sister-in-law, who lives next door to her, said that the former nursing director believed that Letby was innocent.
A source at the Countess of Chester said: “There are still a small number of people on the neonatal unit who think she is innocent. They are finding it difficult to believe she could have done it, because for so long they were fed the narrative that Letby was being blamed by consultants who were making excuses for their own mistakes.”

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