Lucy Letby's Notes and Digital Trail Explained

Alongside the medical evidence at the centre of Lucy Letby's trial sat a very different body of material: handwritten notes recovered from her bedroom, a personal diary, hundreds of nursing documents she had no authority to keep, and a detailed digital record of who she had searched for on Facebook, and when. None of this material could, on its own, prove how a specific baby died. What prosecutors argued it could show was intent, preoccupation and concealment — while Letby's defence argued much of it reflected ordinary, if unusual, personal coping behaviour, taken out of context.

This category of evidence carries none of the technical complexity of the air embolism or insulin evidence, and requires no expert medical interpretation to understand — which is precisely why it featured so heavily in press coverage of the trial, and why it has remained so vivid in public memory of the case, even as the more clinically complex evidence has come under sustained expert challenge since 2025.

The Green Post-it and the "Confession" Notes

When police searched Letby's home following her first arrest on 3 July 2018, they recovered a collection of handwritten notes, including one on a green Post-it found inside a diary, on which she had written that she did not deserve to live. Other notes, found alongside it, included the phrases "I am evil I did this" and a line stating she had killed babies because she was not good enough to care for them. Prosecutor Nick Johnson KC urged the jury to read these lines "literally."

The same collection also contained material that ran in a different direction: expressions of loneliness, declarations of affection for a colleague doctor, and lines like "help me," "I can't do this any more" and "how can life be this way?" Defence barrister Ben Myers KC argued the notes read, taken as a whole, more like the private writing of someone under acute psychological strain than a deliberate confession — pointing out that several lines were self-evidently exculpatory or simply confused, sitting awkwardly alongside the phrases the prosecution highlighted.

The 2016 Diary and the Handover Sheets

Officers also recovered a 2016 diary from a chest of drawers in Letby's bedroom. Prosecutors pointed to an entry referencing "twins" on the date twin boys, later referred to in court as Child E and Child F, were born — babies she was convicted of murdering and attempting to murder respectively.

Separately, and in a category of its own, police found 257 nursing handover sheets in Letby's home — documents that should have remained on the ward, of which 21 contained the names of babies who would later feature in the indictment. Handover sheets are routine clinical paperwork, used to brief an incoming shift on each baby's condition, and nurses have no authorisation to remove them from hospital premises. Letby's defence argued these had simply accumulated through ordinary, if untidy, habits of taking paperwork home to process difficult shifts, and pointed out that the majority of the 257 sheets recovered had nothing to do with any of the babies on the indictment at all.

288 Facebook Searches: What the Data Actually Showed

Digital forensic analysis of Letby's phone and computer produced a detailed log of her Facebook search activity between June 2015 and June 2016. In June 2015 alone — the month the first babies she was convicted of murdering died — she carried out 113 Facebook searches; by August that year, the figure had risen to 175. Many of these searches were for colleagues, friends and acquaintances entirely unconnected to the case, a point Letby's defence drew out through cross-examination of a Cheshire Police intelligence analyst, who confirmed there were "a lot of searches for other people in the data." The prosecution didn't dispute this, but argued a subset of the searches, examined individually, showed a pattern too specific and persistent to be explained by general browsing habits alone.

Letby herself told the jury she was "always on my phone," and that her searches reflected "general curiosity" rather than anything more sinister. This is one of the clearer examples in the case of evidence that is genuinely ambiguous on its own terms: a high overall volume of social media searching is unremarkable behaviour for a smartphone user in the mid-2010s, and only becomes potentially significant when narrowed to a specific pattern involving specific individuals at specific times.

That narrower pattern is where the prosecution's argument carried more weight. The jury was shown evidence that Letby had repeatedly searched for the mother of Child E, the baby she was convicted of murdering by air embolism, in the weeks and months following his death — including one search logged at 11:26pm on Christmas Day 2015. Letby's defence didn't dispute these searches had taken place, but maintained they should be read in the context of her broader, high-volume social media habits rather than treated as evidence of guilt in isolation.

Text Messages: A More Complicated Emotional Picture

The messages recovered from Letby's phone complicate any simple narrative in either direction. In exchanges with colleagues shortly after Child E's death, she described feeling "numb," and in a separate exchange called the death "heartbreaking," saying she felt sad for his parents. Whether these messages reflect ordinary grief and professional coping, or a calculated performance of normal emotional responses, was contested at trial and remains contested now — this category of evidence is inherently open to more than one reading, which is precisely why it was presented to the jury as context rather than standalone proof.

How This Evidence Is Being Revisited Now

Unlike the medical evidence, the documentary and digital evidence has not been the primary focus of the post-conviction challenge to Letby's convictions — the Shoo Lee panel and the statistical critiques centre on the clinical and forensic evidence rather than the notes, diary or search history. That said, Letby's legal team has argued more broadly that the cumulative emotional impression created by presenting all of this material together, alongside contested medical evidence, made it harder for the original jury to weigh each individual charge on its specific merits — an argument about trial fairness as much as about any single piece of documentary evidence.

It's worth noting this category of evidence is, by its nature, resistant to the kind of expert re-examination that has reshaped debate around the medical evidence. A statistician can recalculate a probability, and a neonatologist can offer a competing clinical opinion, but a handwritten note or a search-history log is simply what it is: the interpretive question of what it means was always going to remain with the jury, and later, if the case is referred back, with the Court of Appeal, rather than with any panel of outside specialists.

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