You’ve probably never heard of Buell Frazier, or Ruth Paine, or Roy Truly.
But you really should have, because they are supposedly the masterminds behind the largest criminal conspiracy in history.
Paine was a neighbor of Lee Harvey Oswald, who told her that fateful fall of 1963 that he was looking for work. Frazier, his friend, told her that he had recently accepted a job at the Texas Book Depository and that there were other openings. Roy Truly, the Depository’s director, agreed to interview Oswald and hired him.
Or so the trio claimed to investigators. But if you’re a Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist, you know that’s all bullshit. Or rather, you have to convince yourself that it’s bullshit. Because if you don’t, then your cherished theory that Oswald was placed there by his CIA, Cuban, and Mafia handlers, with a couple of friends lurking behind Grassy Knoll down the street, completely falls apart.
The campaign to free Lucy Letby is a conspiracy theory too crazy, writes Dan Hodges
The same goes for the small but increasingly fanatical army of Lucy Letby “conspirators”. A public inquiry into how Britain’s worst child killer was able to commit her crimes was launched yesterday.
But the clamour to prove his innocence had grown so loud that the chair of the inquiry, Lady Justice Thirwall, was forced to say: “I want to make it absolutely clear that 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.”
However, online detectives and self-proclaimed criminologists want none of this. They claim that their heroine has been wrongly convicted and demand that the investigation be halted pending a re-examination of her case.
Okay, let’s take another look at it.
And let’s start by understanding this simple fact: to believe that Letby is truly innocent of the heinous murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of seven more, you have to accept a huge conspiracy theory.
The first part is the conspiracy that Letby herself placed at the centre of her defence. In the witness box, she claimed that four senior doctors at the Countess of Chester hospital had conspired to “get her”.
According to her testimony, all of them had “made comments that I was responsible for the deaths of babies, and 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 think to cover up the hospital’s failings.”
This brings us directly to the second main point of the conspiracy, which suggests that almost the entire senior team at the Countess of Chester coldly and ruthlessly agreed to join this sinister cabal, choosing to frame a dedicated nurse and colleague in a desperate attempt to cover up their own clinical and institutional failings.
Indeed, when questions began to emerge about the unprecedented rise in neonatal mortality within the trust, the trustees tried to suppress debate about deliberate criminal intervention. But to sustain the idea of a conspiracy against Letby it is necessary to set aside minor facts such as this one.
Instead, we believe what its defenders want us to believe: that senior management suspected that a mysterious infection, created by its own negligence, was killing its young patients, and collectively decided to save its reputation and that of its ailing hospital by falsely pretending that they had let a crazed serial killer wreak havoc on its wards.
Now, let’s take it a step further. After collaborating with the Gang of Four, these same executives managed to co-opt the entire British medical, penal and judicial establishment for their perfidy. The police and independent medical professionals who carefully collected, analysed and 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 submitted it to trial; the many independent expert witnesses who gave evidence at two trials; two separate juries; two judges; three appeal judges; and now, apparently, Mr Justice Thirwall. They are all either complicit in this sulphurous scheme or have been misled by it.
And then we must come to the final, perhaps most important, suspension of disbelief. Which is this: to believe Lucy Letby, it is not enough to believe that her pursuers were exceptionally malicious. You also have to believe that they were amazingly lucky.
Because when the Gang of Four and their allies chose Letby as their scapegoat, there was a lot they couldn’t have known. That it would turn out that she had taken an unusual and morbid interest in the victims and their families. That she had inappropriately brought home case notes relating to the dead children.
Letby’s supporters, who believe he is innocent of murdering seven babies and the attempted murder of seven more, outside the Court of Appeal.
That it was Letby who made an unsigned handwritten notation on Baby D’s blood chart just before the child fainted, even though she was not the designated nurse for the shift. And never in their wildest dreams could they have imagined that once she was investigated 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’m not good enough to take care of them. I’m a horrible, evil person.”
Yes, there have been rare cases where incredible conspiracy theories about murder have turned out to be true. The most famous is probably the Dingo Baby case, in which Australian mother Lindy Chamberlain claimed that a wild dog had run off with her child and insisted that authorities had wrongly blamed her. Chamberlain was eventually vindicated.
In fact, Lucy Letby and her defenders have their own “baby dingo”: the pipes at the Countess of Chester hospital. At trial, Letby made much of the fact that “we used to have raw sewage coming out of the sinks (and) onto the floor in Nursery One,” though she conspicuously failed to explain how faulty pipes could explain more than a dozen documented cases of murder and attempted murder by air embolism, air through a nasogastric tube, insulin poisoning, milk overfeeding or throat trauma.
Some conspiracy theories, such as the Kennedy assassination, have great historical appeal. Others, such as the fake moon landings, are relatively harmless fun.
But this is not an Oliver Stone movie. Let’s replace the names of Buell Frazier, Ruth Paine and Roy Truly with those of 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, saving the lives of countless more children. And whose reputations are now being dragged down by Letby’s allies.
Let us also think of 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, who are forced to relive their nightmare to satisfy the whims of the Internet inquisitors.
Lucy Letby killed those children. And she did it alone. The campaign to free her is a wild conspiracy theory.
