CARL Bolton watched in horror as hospital staff dashed around in the “chaotic” neonatal unit, and water dripped from the ceiling of the since demolished building.
His new born baby Jessica spent a week on the ward due to birthing complications, and said not once did a doctor speak to him or wife Clare and frantic nurses struggled to deal with emergencies – but there was one shining light: “brilliant” Lucy Letby who he says saved the vulnerable tot’s life twice.
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Carl told The Sun the nurse – later jailed for the murders of seven babies and the attempted murders of seven more at Countess of Chester Hospital between June 2015 and June 2016 – was the “only one who seemed to know what she was doing”.
It comes as the dad prepares to head to Parliament today with MP Sir David Davis and other families whose children suffered “poor” treatment at COCH outside of Letby’s indictment, to urge a full inquiry be opened into wider failings at the hospital – amid a raft of key unanswered questions.
Next Tuesday (September 15), the conclusions of the long-awaited Thirlwall Inquiry, assessing the circumstances and wider implications of the crimes Letby was convicted of, will be published – but Carl, of Little Sutton, Cheshire, says it’s “far too narrow”.
“Anyone else who’s had problems in that unit over a number of years is not going to get the answers they deserve,” he said this week.
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Since Letby’s convictions in 2023 and 2024, there has been a growing suspicion among many experts that she was a scapegoat amid a spike in baby deaths caused by an ill-equipped and understaffed hospital ward.
Despite her supposed heroics with his own daughter, including twice apparently going “above and beyond” during emergencies, Carl accepts that does not mean she is innocent of her convictions, which has seen her sentenced to 14 whole life orders – but he suspects her trial wasn’t fair and she was a “scapegoat”.
He said, unknown to him and Clare at the time, on two separate occasions Jessica needed to be intubated and was given surfactant into her lungs, a medical procedure normally only for premature babies.
They were later told in a meeting with the hospital trust, Letby “escalated her care and on the second occasion she went above and beyond her call of duty“.
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Wife Clare was admitted to Chester for observation at 35 weeks pregnant as baby Jessica was positioned sideways in the womb.
She was then born via an emergency caesarean a week later on May 7, 2016 and moved to the neonatal unit for five days – weeks before the end of the murder spree Letby was convicted of.
Carl told The Sun the “tense and chaotic” state of the department may have been to blame for the collapses and deaths pinned on neonatal nurse Letby.
He described how he and wife Clare weren’t seen by a doctor once during their time on the unit – which he said was “like a bottle of pop waiting to blow”.
And Carl told how the couple felt like they had “won the lottery” by leaving the “failing” hospital with their baby, Jessica, “in one piece”.
The 49-year-old said he now has “huge” doubts over the fairness of Letby’s trial, based on his and Clare’s experience on a ward “where it wouldn’t have taken much for something to go wrong”.
He added: “We feel that the process wasn’t fair. We feel like the jury wasn’t given the full information about that unit.
“It’s obvious that the condition and the state of that unit wasn’t really a factor in the convictions. And for me and Clare, that didn’t make sense.”
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He went on to say “we very much believe in fairness”, adding: “I’m sure you can imagine, if someone had saved your child, and then a number of years later they were accused of something heinous, you’d want to know that they got a fair trial, at least.
“And we don’t feel that she did. So I feel like I have a duty to that woman to stand up and say what she did for us, because nobody else is.
“Because at the end of the day, I wouldn’t have my daughter if it wasn’t for her.”
He added: “For us, she was brilliant. She saved Jessica’s life. From our perspective, she’s one of the best nurses we’ve ever come across.”
Carl said he and Clare feels like police and prosecutors “reached for an extraordinary explanation for something that could be quite easily explained ordinarily by the failure of that unit”.
He added: “It feels like she is a scapegoat.”
Carl told how they then had a “lot of problems” with Jessica after she was born, with the tot, now aged 10, struggling to breathe and as a result was introduced to lead nurse Letby.
The dad said the jailed nurse was the “only one that really explained anything to us and really gave us the time to tell us what had happened to Jessica”.
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He described Letby as “very humane”, and despite “everybody rushing around”, took the time to talk them through all the procedures Jessica was going through.
Carl described how, despite being on the unit for five days, they didn’t have a single conversation with a doctor about baby, adding how they “naively at the time” assumed that if there was a problem, a medic would come and see them.
At one stage, he recalled how alarms kept going off in the bed next to them, and they overheard nurses saying “we don’t understand why this baby keeps stopping breathing”, which he said was “terrifying”.
After hearing of Letby’s arrest in July 2018, the couple approached Cheshire Police for reassurance their daughter had not been harmed and whether she would form part of the criminal investigation.
Despite reassurances by the force Jessica was not involved, Carl and Clare requested a meeting with the senior medical team at the hospital trust, which was granted in 2019.
It was then they realised their baby had been “very, very poorly”, and at one point was the sickest baby on the unit for over 24 hours – with Letby critical in helping her to survive, Carl says.
Although, he admits, he doesn’t understand exactly what the nurse did to save Jessica but was told she had “escalated her care, and on the second occasion she went above and beyond her call of duty”.
Carl, a self-employed artist, said, as well as the chaotic nature of the ward, he also had concerns about security as “anybody could walk in and out” – and he noticed leaks from the roof.
The charges Letby has been convicted of in full
Child A, allegation of murder. The Crown said Letby injected air intravenously into the bloodstream of the baby boy. COUNT 1 GUILTY.
Child B, allegation of attempted murder. The Crown said Letby attempted to murder the baby girl, the twin sister of Child A, by injecting air into her bloodstream. COUNT 2 GUILTY.
Child C, allegation of murder. Prosecutors said Letby forced air down a feeding tube and into the stomach of the baby boy. COUNT 3 GUILTY.
Child D, allegation of murder. The Crown said air was injected intravenously into the baby girl. COUNT 4 GUILTY.
Child E, allegation of murder. The Crown said Letby murdered the twin baby boy with an injection of air into the bloodstream and also deliberately caused bleeding to the infant. COUNT 5 GUILTY.
Child F, allegation of attempted murder. Letby was said by prosecutors to have poisoned the twin brother of Child E with insulin. COUNT 6 GUILTY.
Child I, allegation of murder. The prosecution said Letby killed the baby girl at the fourth attempt and had given her air and overfed her with milk. COUNT 12 GUILTY.
Child K, allegation of attempted murder. The prosecution said Letby compromised the baby girl as she deliberately dislodged a breathing tube. COUNT 14 JURY COULD NOT REACH VERDICT AT ORIGINAL TRIAL, NOW GUILTY AFTER RETRIAL
Child L, allegation of attempted murder. The Crown said the nurse poisoned the twin baby boy with insulin. COUNT 15 GUILTY.
Child M, allegation of attempted murder. Prosecutors said Letby injected air into the bloodstream of Child L’s twin brother. COUNT 16 GUILTY.
Child N, three allegations of attempted murder. The Crown said Letby inflicted trauma in the baby boy’s throat and also injected him with air in the bloodstream. COUNT 17 GUILTY, COUNT 18 JURY COULD NOT REACH VERDICT, COUNT 19 JURY COULD NOT REACH VERDICT.
Child O, allegation of murder. Prosecutors say Letby attacked the triplet boy by injecting him with air, overfeeding him with milk and inflicting trauma to his liver with “severe force”. COUNT 20 GUILTY.
Child P, allegation of murder. Prosecutors said the nurse targeted the triplet brother of Child O by overfeeding him with milk, injecting air and dislodging his breathing tube. COUNT 21 GUILTY.
Child Q, allegation of attempted murder. The Crown said Letby injected the baby boy with liquid, and possibly air, down his feeding tube. COUNT 22 JURY COULD NOT REACH VERDICT
He said: “Living up here in the area, there has always been a common theme.
“It’s, ‘Don’t have your baby at the Countess of Chester if you can go to another one’.”
The hospital’s original women and children’s building, built in the 1970s, was ultimately knocked down after a new facility was constructed next door, opening in September 2025, with the original building deemed unsafe due to deteriorating RAAC (Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete).
Describing his memories of the unit, Carl said: “Every ceiling tile had a stain on it of some kind.
“It was a very, very old building. Imagine a really old office building – that was what it was like.
“It was really run down, in need of some serious care, which it obviously never got.”
After their meeting with the trust, Carl and Clare urged the police to take the issues on the unit into consideration – as well as Letby’s actions in saving their baby.
“We didn’t get an answer to that,” he said.
“Every time we tried to, in effect, raise the alarm, that there was more to this story than they were taking into consideration, they really didn’t want to know,” he continued.
“We felt completely ignored.”
He added: “But that was one of the things that prompted us to really push this as hard as we could, because we feel like the whole story had been given to the public, or the jury.”
Carl said, ultimately, the family are still awaiting the “full answers” about Jessica’s care.
“We still haven’t had our medical records. We’re still chasing all that,” he said.
Carl told how he would “never wish to speak over the families of those who lost children in any way”, but added: “That said, if we hadn’t brought Jessica home from that unit, and we had been one of those poor families, I’d want to know every single lick of the truth, right down to the tiniest detail of it, so that I knew exactly who was responsible.
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“If there was any question mark over her conviction, I would want to know the truth.”
The Sun has approached Countess of Chester Hospital Trust and Cheshire Police for comment.