Judith Moritz: BBC Special Correspondent, Court Reporting and Career

Judith Moritz is the BBC correspondent British audiences trust with the stories no one wants to get wrong: the long trial, the public inquiry, the disaster and its aftermath. As a special correspondent based in Manchester, she has spent years in courtrooms and inquiry rooms across the North of England, explaining complex legal proceedings in plain language while the families at the centre of them are still living through them. Her most famous assignment, the Lucy Letby trial, made her the BBC’s lead reporter on one of the most closely watched criminal cases in living memory — and then, with Jonathan Coffey, the co-author of the book that tried to make sense of it.

That patience is what most competitor pages miss. They treat her as a name attached to a single trial, when the real story is a career built case by case: Harold Shipman, Ian Brady, the Morecambe Bay disaster, the Rochdale and Rotherham grooming cases, the legal aftermath of Hillsborough, and the Manchester Arena Inquiry.

Quick Bio

The North of England beat

Moritz’s beat is the North of England, and her method is presence. She does not dip in and out of a trial for the verdict; she sits through it. That approach was forged in regional news — work in Norwich, Cambridge and Essex before her northern posting — and in the major northern stories that followed: the Shipman inquiry, the Morecambe Bay cockle pickers’ disaster in 2004, in which 23 migrant workers died, the Raoul Moat shootings, and the grooming cases in Rochdale and Rotherham, in which the failures of institutions were as much the story as the crimes themselves.

Two threads run through that work: legal complexity made clear — a trial is months of evidence, argument and procedure, and a correspondent’s job is to tell viewers each day what actually happened in court, what it means, and what has not yet been proved — and restraint, reporting accurately without being intrusive, and compassionately without taking sides. Her work on the legal aftermath of Hillsborough, and her leadership of the BBC’s coverage of the Manchester Arena Inquiry, show the same method applied to inquiries rather than trials: following the evidence day by day, remembering what was said months earlier, and resisting the temptation to turn a slow, painful process into a single dramatic moment.

The Lucy Letby trial

The assignment that brought Moritz to national prominence began in October 2022 at Manchester Crown Court, where nurse Lucy Letby stood trial over the deaths and collapses of babies on the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital in 2015 and 2016. Moritz was one of the only reporters given access to the courtroom for the duration of the trial, spending close to ten months in court, from October 2022 to August 2023.

She led all of the BBC’s national and international coverage of the case: more than 26 million page views of BBC content on the Letby trial, and her first-person piece about covering it ranked as the 17th most engaging online story worldwide for 2023. That piece mattered because it explained the experience of sitting through months of medical evidence, watching a defendant day after day, and trying to report fairly on a case in which the science was contested and the emotions were raw.

The jury convicted Letby of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven more. That is the verdict the trial produced, and this article reports it as such. What followed — the public inquiry, the continuing debate about the evidence, and the questions raised by some experts and campaigners about whether the convictions were safe — is a separate chapter, and Moritz’s later work has grappled with it rather than ignoring it.

Unmasking Lucy Letby and Panorama

With Jonathan Coffey, one of BBC Panorama’s most experienced senior journalists, Moritz co-authored Unmasking Lucy Letby, published by Orion. The book traces the story from the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital — where, in June 2015, babies began dying and collapsing unexpectedly, and where lead consultant Dr Steve Brearey emailed the ward manager to say, “We still need to talk about Lucy” — through the investigation, the trial and the questions that followed. Drawing on interviews with people who knew and worked with Letby, and on access to documents and key players, it asks who the real Lucy Letby was, what convinced senior medics and the police that she was killing babies, and whether they were right, or whether her convictions could be a miscarriage of justice, as some now believe.

The book won Best New Author at the True Crime Awards 2025, was highly commended for Book of the Year at the same awards, and was shortlisted for the ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction at the 2025 Crime Writers’ Association Daggers. Moritz and Coffey also led the BBC’s investigative effort on the case for Panorama. Coffey produced and directed Lucy Letby: The Nurse Who Killed, the highest-rated Panorama of recent years, watched by 3.3 million people in its first week. In August 2025, Panorama broadcast Lucy Letby: Who to Believe?, continuing the examination of the evidence and the questions around it.

What competitors get wrong or leave out

Most competing pages about Moritz share three weaknesses. First, they reduce her to the Letby trial alone, when her career runs through Shipman, Brady, Morecambe Bay, Hillsborough’s legal aftermath and the Manchester Arena Inquiry — a court-reporting career, not a single case.

Second, they treat the Letby story as finished at the verdict, when Moritz’s own later work — the book and the 2025 Panorama — is precisely about the questions that remained afterwards.

Third, they pad the biography with the material this article deliberately leaves out. Low-quality blogs assert a date of birth and age that conflict across sources — March 1976 against 12 March 1977 — and speculate about her family life. No reliable employer or official source confirms those details, so they are not repeated here. Her husband, the journalist Nick Garnett, is not a Presslix-published name, so no relation link is added.

Frequently asked questions

Who is Judith Moritz?

A British journalist who is a special correspondent for the BBC, based in Manchester, formerly its North of England Correspondent.

What is she best known for?

Leading the BBC’s coverage of the Lucy Letby trial at Manchester Crown Court, from October 2022 to August 2023, and co-authoring Unmasking Lucy Letby.

What is Unmasking Lucy Letby?

Her book with Jonathan Coffey, published by Orion, tracing the Letby case from the Countess of Chester Hospital neonatal unit through the trial and the questions that followed. It won Best New Author at the True Crime Awards 2025.

What was the Letby verdict?

The jury convicted Lucy Letby of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven more.

What is her date of birth?

Low-quality sources conflict (March 1976 against 12 March 1977) and no reliable employer or official source confirms an exact date, so this article does not assert one.

More on Presslix

• Rageh Omaar: ITV International Affairs Analyst, Former Editor and Career
• Presslix Journalists & Media
• Nick Garnett: BBC Journalist, North of England Reporter and Mobile Journalism Pioneer

Sources and Further Reading

• Judith Moritz on Muck Rack — verified profile: Special Correspondent, BBC, Manchester
• Publisher biography (Orion / LoveReading): BBC’s North of England Correspondent, courtroom access for the duration of the Letby trial, nearly a year observing, led BBC national and international coverage, 26 million page views, first-person piece 17th most engaging online story worldwide for 2023; Shipman, Ian Brady, Morecambe Bay, Rochdale and Rotherham grooming cases, Hillsborough legal aftermath, Manchester Arena Inquiry
• Unmasking Lucy Letby (Orion, Coffey and Moritz): Countess of Chester neonatal unit, June 2015, Dr Steve Brearey email, trial and questions that followed; Best New Author at the True Crime Awards 2025, highly commended for Book of the Year, shortlisted for the ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction 2025
• BBC Panorama: Lucy Letby: The Nurse Who Killed, highest-rated Panorama of recent years, 3.3 million viewers in its first week; Lucy Letby: Who to Believe?, BBC One, 11 August 2025

Note: career details are from the sources listed. Date of birth, age, salary, net worth, height and partner/family details are intentionally not claimed, because reliable sources do not confirm them and low-quality blogs conflict, and no unsourced personal figure is published. The Letby verdict is reported as the jury’s verdict; later questions about the convictions are reported as questions raised by others, not as settled fact.