Even as a doctor who has appeared regularly on television, Dr Ravi Jayaram may have felt some trepidation about his latest lead role. The consultant paediatrician, 56, who has appeared on the BBC’s The One Show and ITV’s Good Morning Britain, was the key prosecution witness in the trial of Lucy Letby over the attempted murder of a newborn baby girl.
Letby, 34, was found guilty on Tuesday of trying to kill the two-hour-old infant by tampering with her breathing tube on the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester hospital. She will be sentenced on Friday.
The nurse was caught “virtually red-handed” by Jayaram, who walked in on her seconds after the murder attempt in the early hours of 17 February 2016, the prosecution said.
Letby, who was convicted last year of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill another six, denied harming any babies in her care and said she had no memory of the night in question.
The prosecution case rested largely on Jayaram’s testimony. “If his account is not truthful or accurate then there is no safe basis for convicting Lucy Letby on this charge – on that point the defence and the prosecution are in agreement,” the defence barrister, Benjamin Myers KC, told the jury. “Ultimately this comes down to the evidence of Dr Jayaram.”
The paediatrician has worked at the Chester hospital for almost 20 years, since December 2004. He was the lead clinician on the neonatal unit where Letby worked from 2009 until December 2018.
He has fronted a Channel 4 series about children with behavioural issues called Born Naughty? and appeared on various daytime television shows to discuss child health.
Jayaram was one of the senior doctors who linked Letby to a series of unexplained deaths and life-threatening collapses on the neonatal unit in the months after June 2015.
He has shied away from praise for blowing the whistle on Letby, tearfully telling ITV News last year: “I’m not a hero. I was just doing my job.”
His television work at one point risked derailing his evidence in court after it was reported on the eve of the trial that he was working on a TV drama about Letby with the Line of Duty creator Jed Mercurio.
On the first day of the trial, Myers, for Letby, urged the judge to order that a statement be taken from Jayaram to ascertain whether he had any “commercial involvement” with the TV production.
It was an “obvious inquiry” to make, Myers said, because the TV drama might suggest Jayaram had an incentive to “portray himself in a particular way in a story that is being developed”.
The judge declined to make the order, suggesting instead that Letby’s legal team could make those inquiries.
It helped make Jayaram the focus of the trial. From the witness box of Manchester crown court’s courtroom seven, the doctor described how he had seen Letby doing nothing as Baby K’s condition deteriorated.
In occasionally testy exchanges with Letby’s barrister, Jayaram was peppered with questions about why he had not phoned the police immediately if that night would end up being “etched in [his] nightmares for ever”, as he had said in an ITV News interview played to the jury.
Jayaram said it was a matter of “infinite regret” that he had not called 999, adding that he and his consultant colleagues had been in “uncharted territory” feeling an “element of denial” about working alongside a serial killer.
“I only wish I had the courage to escalate [the concerns] in a different way,” he told the jury. “I only wish I had the courage to do that. That’s why it’s going to be in my nightmares for ever.”
