The three phrases
At the original trial, the prosecution invited the jury to focus on three phrases drawn from a larger collection of notes and scraps of paper recovered from Letby’s home in the 2018 police search:
- “I am evil I did this”
- “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them”
- “I don’t deserve to live”
The prosecution’s closing speech described the notes as a confession. Members of the public repeating “but she confessed” online are, almost always, referring to these three phrases.
What else was on the same pages
The same pieces of paper contain, alongside those three phrases, other writing by the same hand. The most frequently-cited lines are:
- “I haven’t done anything wrong”
- “WHY ME?” (in capital letters, multiple times on different pages)
- “I know I did nothing wrong, but they are blaming me”
- “How can they think I would do this?”
A reader encountering the notes as a whole document — rather than the three phrases only — sees something that reads very differently: a person oscillating between intrusive self-blame and protest of innocence, under acute professional stress, in the aftermath of being told by senior colleagues that she is the suspect in every unexplained death on her unit.
What clinical psychology says about writing of this kind
Self-blame writing in response to accusation is a recognised psychological phenomenon. Clinicians working with false-accusation cases have documented it across multiple professional contexts. The specific features typical of stress-diary writing — which these notes carry — are:
- Oscillation between self-blame and protest of innocence on the same page or adjacent pages.
- Absence of any specific method, victim or motive. A forensic confession, by contrast, names what was done, to whom, and why.
- Use of globally-exaggerated language (“I am evil”, “I don’t deserve to live”) rather than clinically-specific description.
- Repetition of the same intrusive thought in different forms across pages and dates — consistent with rumination rather than intentional account.
None of this means the notes prove Letby’s innocence. It does mean that, read as a whole document, they do not straightforwardly prove her guilt either.
The context in which the notes were written
The notes were written during a period in which Letby had been removed from the neonatal unit, directed into a non-clinical role in the risk-and-patient-safety office, and told by her management that consultants were raising concerns about her. She had been excluded from a role she had trained for without explanation. The consultants’ September 2016 letter explicitly named her as the common factor. She was, on any view, a young person under acute professional siege when she wrote the notes.
Ms Letby addressed the notes directly in her own police-interview and trial evidence, saying that the phrases were written as a way of processing what was happening to her at the time and were not a confession in any meaningful sense. See our summary of her police interviews and her trial testimony.
What the prosecution’s own expert conceded
At trial the prosecution did not call a forensic psychologist to characterise the notes as a confession in the technical sense. The framing “confession” is a lay-language framing used in the prosecution’s closing speech, not an expert opinion on the record.
Why this matters for the CCRC
If the notes are stress-diary material rather than a forensic confession, they do not corroborate the medical evidence in the way the Crown invited the jury to treat them. And if the medical evidence fails on its own terms — as the Shoo Lee Panel concludes it does — then the notes are the only remaining piece of “direct” evidence, and they stop being “direct” once read in full. See our full evidence page on the notes.