PASSAGE ONE OF THE DAY: "The 36-year-old’s 10-month trial was one of the longest murder trials in UK history. Two applications for permission to appeal have been refused, and the case is now with the Criminal Cases Review Commission. But last year, an international panel of 14 medical experts who had examined medical records and witness testimony on a pro bono basis found no evidence of deliberate harm. They concluded that all of the incidents could be explained by natural causes. This is despite those who have heard the full evidence over a number of months – jurors, judges and families – consistently maintaining that Letby is guilty, and describing outside claims as “purely speculation”.
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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "cross 10 episodes, Knox takes listeners through the deeply complex Letby case, but she admits there are aspects that resonated particularly with her. She highlights the diary entries that were key to the prosecution’s argument and became one of the most contested aspects of the trial. Letby’s entry “I AM EVIL I DID THIS” made international headlines. But it was subsequently revealed by The Guardian that the nurse had also written “Why me?” and “I haven't done anything wrong” after being encouraged to write her thoughts by a therapist as a way of coping with extreme stress after discovering that some of her colleagues suspected her."
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PASSAGE TREE OF THE DAY: "“Something that I found personally troubling was just how Lucy Letby’s personality was dissected through these personal, ambiguous diary writings,” says Knox. “You are going through an incredibly surreal, overwhelming experience, accused of a crime that you did not commit, and you are trying to make sense of. “When I was in prison, I was trying to think, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ And I was coming to crazy conclusions. Maybe we’re all supposed to suffer a certain amount in our life, and mine is all just happening all at once. Or maybe fate forgot about me, and I was supposed to have a terrible childhood, but I had a great childhood, so now I‘m having a horrible adulthood. “The accusation and situation are so overwhelming that you find yourself trying to make sense of it. And I think it’s also a stereotypically woman thing to find fault in oneself to try to take the blame because we are socially sort of encouraged to do that.”
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STORY: Amanda Knox: 'I was not looking for Lucy Letby; Lucy Letby found me’ by Megan Lloyd Davies, published by The Independent, on March 14, 2026.
SUB-HEADING: One is a high-profile woman definitively acquitted of a murder conviction; the other is serving a life sentence as Britain’s ‘worst child serial killer’ and fighting to have her appeal heard from behind bars. Here, after examining the details of her case, Amanda Knox tells Megan Lloyd Davies what she really thinks of Letby’s claims
GIST: "Amanda Knox smiles as she greets me. Dressed in a multi-coloured cardigan, face bare of make-up, she seems relaxed and at ease as we speak.
Knox has agreed to talk to me on a Zoom call ahead of the release of her new podcast, which examines Lucy Letby’s conviction in August 2023 for the murder of seven babies and attempted murder of six others when working as a neonatal nurse at the Countess of Chester Hospital. She was subsequently convicted of another attempted murder and sentenced to 15 whole-life terms.
The case has dominated headlines ever since, the subject of heated debate between those who are convinced of Letby’s guilt and those who question it.
The 36-year-old’s 10-month trial was one of the longest murder trials in UK history. Two applications for permission to appeal have been refused, and the case is now with the Criminal Cases Review Commission. But last year, an international panel of 14 medical experts who had examined medical records and witness testimony on a pro bono basis found no evidence of deliberate harm. They concluded that all of the incidents could be explained by natural causes. This is despite those who have heard the full evidence over a number of months – jurors, judges and families – consistently maintaining that Letby is guilty, and describing outside claims as “purely speculation”.
Knox, who was infamously convicted of the murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia before Italy’s highest court threw out the verdict, is now adding her own thoughts to the debate, in her new podcast investigating the nurse, Doubt: The Case of
“I was not looking for Lucy Letby,” Amanda Knox tells me. “Lucy Letby found me.”
Knox has a uniquely painful experience of how narrative can shape everything from how police investigate to public perception, and says that today she does a lot of work in the criminal justice space. “But I’m more interested typically in the institutional and legal aspects,” she says. “I’m not just consuming true crime news.”
Soon after Letby’s conviction, people began to reach out. Initially, Knox says statisticians contacted her with concerns about how evidence presented at trial was, they claimed, “flagrantly misused”. But others claimed they had also noticed patterns and similarities to Knox’s experience.
In 2007, Knox was a 20-year-old American studying in Italy when her flatmate, Meredith Kercher, a British exchange student, was sexually assaulted and murdered. When Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, the 23-year-old man she had been seeing for just six days, found Kercher’s body, it was the start of an eight-year ordeal.
The pair were convicted of murder in 2009, released on appeal, then convicted again before a final appeal. A third defendant, Rudy Guede, whose DNA was found at the scene, opted for a fast-track trial and was found guilty in 2008 of sexually assaulting and murdering Kercher.
Knox and Sollecito, however, had been identified as suspects by police and prosecutors intent on proving they were complicit. Finally, in 2015, Italy’s highest court definitively quashed their convictions. Judges said no “biological traces” had been found of either individual at the murder scene, key forensic evidence presented by the prosecution had been potentially contaminated, while police and prosecutors were accused of displaying “stunning weakness” and “investigative bouts of amnesia”.
And yet the story around Knox lingered, a highly charged media and public fascination sparked into life in the days after Kercher’s murder when headlines painted “Foxy Knoxy” as a sexually deviant killer.
The narrative around criminal cases involving women is Knox’s entry point into Letby’s story.
“There was little to nothing the public knew up until (Letby’s) conviction,” says Knox. “But as soon as that conviction took place, it was like the dam broke and this tidal wave of a fully formed narrative about her took hold.”
Knox then claimed that for some, “she’s a psychopathic serial killer who somehow perfectly represents this archetype of the hidden female psychopath who has no history of violence, no history of any mental illness, no motive whatsoever, and no one saw her do anything. And yet one day she just snaps or decides to put this calculated plan into play.”
Knox, 38, has lived with the consequences of this type of speculative narrative for years, and continues to do so. After returning to the US in 2011 after her first successful appeal, she was at the centre of intense press interest. Despite trying to keep her 2020 wedding to author and filmmaker Christopher Robinson “utterly locked down and secret”, for instance, paparazzi turned up.
Knox is articulate about the impact of wrongful conviction and the ongoing effects that do not end when the legal process does. She has spoken in the past about feeling “completely ostracised” on her return home to Seattle after her first acquittal in 2011. She was convicted for a second time in absentia in January 2014 and her life continued to be subsumed by the legal process from afar.
“Prison was almost easier,” she says. “It was obvious why I was sad and frustrated. I’m in prison for a crime I didn’t commit. My fantasies always involved getting the life back that had been stolen from me.
“And the cruel reality that I faced upon coming home was that it didn’t exist for me any more. I did not get to go back to being that anonymous college student. I am a public figure. I am branded with the crimes of someone else. It was incredibly debilitating, and I entered into a state of deep existential crisis trying to
Slowly, however, Knox carved a path through the wreckage and in the years since has built a career as a journalist, author, podcaster, campaigner and executive producer working to highlight the issues raised not just by her own story but those of other victims of miscarriages of justice.
“It’s not lost on me that of the two of us, me and Meredith, I am the lucky one because I am alive,” she says. “I’m trying to take a very, very bad experience that I had and make some good out of it.
“I’ve learned a lot about how justice systems work, how media systems work, how human minds work, especially around emotionally and morally charged stories. Instead of just keeping that knowledge to myself, I’m applying it and sharing it where I can.”
Across 10 episodes, Knox takes listeners through the deeply complex Letby case, but she admits there are aspects that resonated particularly with her.
She highlights the diary entries that were key to the prosecution’s argument and became one of the most contested aspects of the trial. Letby’s entry “I AM EVIL I DID THIS” made international headlines. But it was subsequently revealed by The Guardian that the nurse had also written “Why me?” and “I haven't done anything wrong” after being encouraged to write her thoughts by a therapist as a way of coping with extreme stress after discovering that some of her colleagues suspected her.
“Something that I found personally troubling was just how Lucy Letby’s personality was dissected through these personal, ambiguous diary writings,” says Knox.
“You are going through an incredibly surreal, overwhelming experience, accused of a crime that you did not commit, and you are trying to make sense of.
“When I was in prison, I was trying to think, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ And I was coming to crazy conclusions. Maybe we’re all supposed to suffer a certain amount in our life, and mine is all just happening all at once. Or maybe fate forgot about me, and I was supposed to have a terrible childhood, but I had a great childhood, so now I‘m having a horrible adulthood.
“The accusation and situation are so overwhelming that you find yourself trying to make sense of it. And I think it’s also a stereotypically woman thing to find fault in oneself to try to take the blame because we are socially sort of encouraged to do that.”
So, having examined Letby’s case and spoken to so many people who are questioning the evidence, does Knox believe she is innocent?
“I cannot personally say anything definitive about this case the way that I can definitively say things about my own case,” she says. “I think there is a lot of ambiguity here. There are reasonable alternative explanations for what took place. I absolutely believe the conviction is unsafe.
“My concern here is the insistence that the only respectful way of approaching this story is through silence at the expense of truth and justice.”
This is a particularly potent aspect of both Knox and Letby’s stories because human tragedy lies at the heart of both cases – the deaths of children whose parents’ grief has been made unimaginably more complex by combative legal processes. A solicitor for six of the victims’ families said speculation about Letby’s innocence has been “upsetting” and harmful for relatives still grieving.
Knox is keenly aware of the need to “respect and value victims”. But she also questions our collective tendency to see things in black and white, good and evil, and highlights the need to balance the emotional stakes these cases raise with a dispassionate appraisal of the evidence, police investigation and legal process.
“One of the biggest criticisms that I get to this day is basically ‘How dare you talk about your own case when there’s a grieving family?’” says Knox. “You are a secondary victim at best. You’re probably guilty anyway, so just shut up and disappear.
“And I believe that is completely unfair and unjust. I think you can have compassion for the victims of the original crime and you can scrutinise the way that crime was talked about in the media and the way it was presented at trial.”
Knox references the “institutional issues” that her case – and possibly Letby’s – raise. In her case, police procedures, incompetence, and bias, in Letby’s possible NHS pressures, staffing shortages and infrastructure challenges.
“That’s a way more difficult problem to address than just ‘we have a bad apple’,” she says. “There’s this push to find fault in individuals because that also leads to easy solutions.”
What’s clear is that even if an individual is exonerated, the echoes of their experience are ever-present. There is no neat ending.
“A bomb went off in my life,” says Knox. “I’ve just been picking up all the pieces and trying to build a monument to that tragedy that does it justice from all those pieces.”
She has clearly found purpose in her professional life and meticulously worked through many phases of her personal recovery. But Knox meets many fellow exonerees and says they share the sense that they will “have to spend the rest of our lives proving our innocence”. She says she has learned to live with the suspicion that persists.
“I have a lot of compassion for people who to this day still believe wrong things about me, because they were lied to,” she said. “People just refuse to look at it because it’s too painful, the idea of having your entire belief system rewritten.”
Knox’s world today remains inextricably bound up with her past and the retelling of her story, and she says her husband has been trying to encourage her to work on something “just for joy”.
“It’s hard,” says Knox. “When you’ve lived through a catastrophe, it almost feels like unless you’re picking up a piece of that catastrophe, you’re being frivolous.”
To give herself permission to feel joy, she has started doing stand-up comedy in a bid to push herself into more playful territory. Knox’s face also illuminates as she speaks about becoming a mother to daughter Eureka, four, and son Echo, who was born in 2023.
“I’m very much like all mums. But at the same time, I’m aware that the only thing that really exists is what’s happening right now,” she says. “So if imagining worst-case scenarios is going to take me away from just being with them right now, I’m not going to.”
She does, however, admit that it will probably get harder as her children get older and closer to the age
Knox’s story – or at least the one confected around her – was known worldwide, but she says she had little sense of its massive impact until she got home to the US. But she smiles as she remembers going to the local record store she used to visit as a teenager, soon after getting home, and seeing “Welcome home, Amanda” written on the notice board outside.
“That was really big,” she says. “And it was really comforting in a way. It gave me hope. People are concerned about the truth and getting it right, and doing the right thing. That has always been a comfort to me, and I hope that’s a comfort to Lucy.”
Doubt: The Case of Lucy Letby’, hosted by Amanda Knox, is a production of iHeartPodcasts, Knox Robinson Productions and Vespucci. It is available now on streaming platforms
https://www.the-independent.com/news/people/news/amanda-knox-lucy-letby-innocence-b2938160.html
Lucy LetbyAmanda KnoxpodcastConvictionPodcasts
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
