TV pediatrician played central role in Lucy Letby’s retrial

IEven as a doctor who has appeared regularly on television, Dr. Ravi Jayaram may have felt some trepidation about his latest starring role. The 56-year-old pediatrician, who has appeared on the BBC’s The One Show and ITV’s Good Morning Britain, was the prosecution’s key witness in the trial of Lucy Letby over the attempted murder of a newborn girl.

Letby, 34, was found guilty on Tuesday of attempting to murder the two-hour-old baby by tampering with her breathing tube in the neonatal unit of the Countess of Chester Hospital. She will be sentenced on Friday.

The nurse was caught ‘almost red-handed’ by Jayaram, who caught her seconds after the attempted murder in the early morning of February 17, 2016, the Public Prosecution Service said.

Letby, who was convicted last year of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder six more, denied harming the babies in her care and said she could not remember the night in question.

The prosecution based its case largely on Jayaram’s testimony. “If his story is not truthful or accurate, then there is no safe basis to convict Lucy Letby on this charge – on that point the defence and prosecution are in agreement,” defence barrister Benjamin Myers KC told the jury. “Ultimately it comes down to the evidence of Dr Jayaram.”

The paediatrician has worked at Chester Hospital for almost 20 years, since December 2004. He was senior physician on the neonatal unit, where Letby worked from 2009 to December 2018.

He presented a Channel 4 series about children with behavioural problems, called Born Naughty?, and appeared on various daytime television programmes to discuss children’s health.

Jayaram was one of the senior doctors who linked Letby to a series of unexplained deaths and life-threatening collapses in the neonatal unit in the months following June 2015.

He has tearfully avoided praise for blowing the whistle on Letby. tell ITV News last year: “I’m not a hero. I was just doing my job.”

His television work at one point threatened to disrupt his testimony in court, after it was reported on the eve of the trial that he was working on a TV drama about Letby with Jed Mercurio, the creator of Line of Duty.

On the first day of the trial, Myers, representing Letby, urged the judge to order that a statement be taken from Jayaram to determine whether he had any “commercial involvement” in the TV production.

It was an “obvious question,” Myers said, because the TV drama could suggest that Jayaram had a motive to “portray himself a certain way in a developing story.”

The judge refused to issue the order and suggested that Letby’s legal team conduct the investigation themselves.

It helped Jayaram become the centrepiece of the trial. From the witness box in courtroom seven at Manchester Crown Court, the doctor described how he had watched Letby do nothing as Baby K’s condition deteriorated.

During sometimes testy conversations with Letby’s lawyer, Jayaram was peppered with questions about why he had not immediately called police and whether that night would be “forever etched in (his) nightmares”, as he had said in an interview with ITV News played to the jury.

Jayaram said he “infinitely regretted” not calling 999. He and his fellow advisers were in “uncharted territory” and felt an “element of denial” about working with a serial killer.

“I wish I had the courage to escalate (the concerns) in a different way,” he told the jury. “I wish I had the courage to do that. That’s why it will forever be in my nightmares.”