In 1985, the violent murder of a whole family in a sleepy village in Essex stunned the nation. It was a shocking crime in an area where there was very little or no crime. Two six-year-old boys and three adults were shot dead in a seemingly unprovoked attack. It was just ridiculously big, the story. It was just almost crazy.
Police believed the daughter had murdered her family then turned the gun on herself. But in a sensational twist, the surviving relative, Jeremy Bamber, was convicted of the multiple murders. “I don’t think Britain had heard of a twist like it.”
But did Jeremy Bamber kill his family? “It’s beginning to look as though the original prosecution case is wrong. There’s actually no forensic evidence, compelling evidence a silencer was used at all.”
Bamber, along with others, claim that there is strong evidence to prove he is not a murderer. “The police photographer had not actually picked up that there was a scratch on the mantlepiece at all.”
In this program, we hear from Bamber himself. “I recognized dad’s voice and he said, ‘Please come over. Your sister has gone crazy and has the gun.'” He reveals shocking evidence that wasn’t disclosed at his trial, which brings into question whether he committed the murders. “The scratch had been put there after the original scene of crime photograph had been taken. The sound moderator wasn’t on the rifle that night, and the sound moderator has become a crucial part of this case. Something very strange had gone on. Dead bodies don’t move.”
Tolleshunt D’Arcy, Essex, a quiet village in the south of England. The Bamber family were well-known residents in the area and lived in a sprawling farmhouse sat on a 300-acre estate. “Tolleshunt D’Arcy is a very pleasant rural area, there won’t be an awful lot going on. Probably quite dull, but if you visited it, I’m sure you’d like the look of it.”
The family appeared to be very well respected. They were just, they appear to be pillars of society, people who lived life nicely and honorably, and there’s never any trouble, and Neville was, you know, a magistrate. His wife was involved in the community and religious. So it seemed like the perfect family. Their son, Jeremy, lived close by in Goldhanger and still worked on the farm with his father. Their daughter, Sheila, often visited with her two sons.
“As for the reason Sheila went to White House Farm, yes, I think we do know she was finding life just too much for her and there she was staying with her adopted parents, two children with her. And we have many witness statements about how she behaved, what she did during the days leading up to the tragedy.” Sheila Caffell had arrived from London three days earlier and had been receiving support from her parents.
At 3:15 a.m. on the 7th of August, Jeremy Bamber received a phone call from White House Farm. Jeremy Bamber had apparently received a phone call from his adoptive father to say that his sister, Sheila, had gone berserk in the house and had a gun. Jeremy Bamber tried to call back and he could not get through. In his state of anxiety, he wasn’t sure, and who would be sure whether it was engaged or off the hook, whatever, but he couldn’t get through. Jeremy phoned the local police station and was advised to go to White House Farm, where he would find police officers waiting for him.
A conversation started. The police officers wanted to know about the house, who was in it, and what might be behind the phone call. Bamber explained he had left the farm after work the previous evening. Officers made the decision not to enter the house until armed police arrived. That backup did not arrive until nearly four hours later.
Police reinforcements were called and they were briefed. They were told there was a siege situation. Jeremy was asked to sketch a plan of the house for the firearms team.
At 7:35 a.m., armed officers entered the sprawling 18th-century farmhouse to be faced with a devastating scene. The father, Neville Bamber, was in the kitchen. He’d been shot there. The twins were in their beds. One certainly had been shot through the head and was still sucking his thumb. We had June out of her bed in the bedroom, and Sheila, the adopted daughter, laying there with a rifle laying across her body with an open Bible alongside her.
The only immediate surviving relative remained outside, Jeremy Bamber. Jeremy had been warned to expect the worst. He had been driven back from like the front line of operations and was some hundreds of yards back. As 24-year-old Jeremy reeled from the devastation of losing his entire family, the crime scene suggested there was no one else involved. Police elicited that Sheila, suffering a mental illness, few days before, had come out of a hospital.
Farmer’s daughter could handle a firearm. Jeremy Bamber, he’d been shooting rabbits and had left the gun with ammunition and a fully loaded magazine on the kitchen table. So everything was slotting into place to set the scene of her going berserk, having access to a gun, picking it up and then shooting everybody and then shooting herself. There was no doubt in the minds of the majority of the senior police officers that they were dealing with a case of one suicide and four murders.
Sheila was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. She had a history of mental illness. The massacre at White House Farm. It was stated that Sheila Caffell’s injuries appeared to be self-inflicted. “I was chief reporter on the Evening Gazette at the time of the killings. The policeman said, ‘Well yeah, what’s happened is you know five people have been found murdered in a farmhouse. You might get one murderer in a year in the Colchester area and that would be a big deal. But to have so many deaths reported like that, he just couldn’t quite take it in, I don’t think.'”
Police needed to interview Bamber to try and piece together the events that led to the tragedy. The previous day, Jeremy and his father had worked on the farm, whilst June took Sheila and the boys into the local village. Jeremy and Neville came back from harvesting. There was some sort of family supper and they all sat around the kitchen table. And it was that point, according to Jeremy, that the conversation happened. And one element of that was suggesting that Sheila could not quite cope with her children. Sheila Caffell was taking prescribed medication for her mental illness. She had separated from her husband. Her state of mind at the time had given her parents cause for concern.
“Jeremy says that there was tension, quite considerable tension, when he wept. The last communication from June Bamber before the killings was a telephone call to her sister in which she said that Sheila really was causing problems.”
The sleepy village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy in Essex had been rocked by the news of five horrific murders at a farmhouse. Three generations of a family had been shot and killed, including two six-year-old boys. Only one close family member remained alive, the son, Jeremy Bamber. The police believed there was a siege situation at White House Farm and that was why the reinforcements were called. It is also why two ambulances were called.
Armed response officers entered the house hours after the initial call. From the scene that confronted them, they quickly concluded that Sheila Caffell had murdered her family before killing herself. Detective Inspector Miller arrived after the bodies had been discovered. “When I got there, I was quite amazed to find a lot of press people there and that a press announcement had already been made saying that this woman had killed all of her family. That’s as much as I knew. And I was told, instructed to clear things up at the house and prepare a file for the coroner.”
Just hours after finding the bodies, police took the decision to remove certain items from the house. Crucial evidence was taken and destroyed as officers believed they were dealing with a case of murder-suicide and there were no other suspects. “Within 12, 24 hours, there was a general cleanout of White House Farm and a fair amount was removed, in particular carpets, and one does wonder why but they were taken out and they were destroyed before any real forensic evidence could be taken from them. The carpets, which would be heavily bloodstained, were burned in the grounds of the farm.”
In the immediate aftermath, Jeremy Bamber agreed to officers destroying some items from the farm. “It was nothing like as secure as we would have been nowadays for what was a murder scene where we were still looking for somebody else. That would have been contained obviously a lot better but the instruction had gone out that it wasn’t such a scene and it got not such an in-depth forensic examination.”
Within just three days of the multiple murders, police gave the keys to White House Farm to Jeremy and his extended family as forensic evidence was not a priority. “The relations of the Bambers, one particular woman, Ann Eaton, I think was a cousin. She had come to the farm to do an inventory with the family solicitors.”
Jeremy Bamber’s cousins, Ann Eaton and David Boutflower, and Uncle Robert Boutflower were also farmers who lived nearby. They were keen to safeguard the property in the aftermath of the tragedy. “There bit of a Miss Marple thing going on there and they obviously went into the house and had their suspicions.” The Eatons and the Boutflowers decided to search the farmhouse. What happened next turned the case upside down.
“It was shortly prior to the coroner’s hearing that a surprising development happened. And they say in the gun cupboard in that downstairs office, they found the silencer and other materials. This silencer would fit and would be used with the rifle that we found on the body of Sheila Caffell. And Ann Eaton found it strange that the silencer was not on the gun when we found it, cuz there was no silencer on the gun when we found it.”
The weapon that lay with Sheila Caffell was a .222 caliber rifle, a gun used by the family for shooting rabbits. It was able to accommodate a silencer or sound moderator like the one discovered in the gun cupboard. “Once you got it out the box, on it seemed like some red paint or blood or both and a gray hair coming out of that sort of attached itself to it.”
The family was convinced these items were connected to the murders. So they made the decision to remove them from White House Farm and gave them to police two days later. “We were fortunate as an investigating team that Ann Eaton, who was familiar with the house, was able to find that silencer and deliver it to us. Because had we not got that, I’m not so sure that we would have ever had the conversation with Ann Eaton about the rifle that we found not having a silencer on it.”
The discovery of this silencer by Ann Eaton and her family and the suggestion that it had to have been on the gun during the murders changed the whole investigation. Officers said the gun found on Sheila Caffell did not have a silencer on it. If they proved ultimately that it did, she could not have committed the crime.
“She rang Stan Jones and he went over and collected it and brought it straight over to me. Rang me and said, ‘Can I come and see you? I got this silencer.'” Detective Inspector Bob Miller took possession of the device and sent it for forensic examination. “Mildly excited, I have to say, when I saw it but keeping an open mind and always looking at the negative side of things said, ‘Well, it could be blood from a rabbit. The hair could be from a rabbit. It could be where the rabbit’s only injured and they’ve actually gone up close to it to put it out of its misery, but we will send it to the forensic laboratory at Huntingdon for them to carry out a proper examination of it.'”
Just a day later, police were called to the farm once more. This time, the cousins said they had found a scratch on the mantlepiece in the kitchen. The relatives of Jeremy Bamber had told the police that they discovered this mark and that it was related to a silencer that they’d also found in the farmhouse. Jeremy’s cousin believed red flecks on the silencer could have been the result of a violent struggle in the kitchen where the gun came into contact with paint on the mantle. Whilst this was examined, results on tests carried out on red particles in the silencer were reported back.
“The result came back with the fact that it was human blood on the silencer, inside the silencer, but not inside the rifle.” This was a major turning point in the case. If traces of human blood were found, it suggested the device had to have been used for something other than killing animals. And the lab reports went even further. “The blood inside the silencer was Sheila Caffell. I’m not too sure if they, if the laboratory were 100% that it wasn’t also a mixture of June and Neville’s blood. But either way, it was certainly Sheila Caffell’s.”
Forensics found the enzyme AK1 in the particles of blood and attributed it to Sheila Caffell. If her blood was on the silencer, police believed the whole case was different to the one they originally thought. “The silencer had to be on the rifle at the time when the shootings took place. Whoever did it must have removed the silencer, put it back in the box, put it back in the cupboard. Now this, of course, put a whole different complexion on the inquiry because with the silencer fixed onto the rifle laying across her body, had she shot herself, the gun now was too long for her to get a hand down to pull the trigger to be resting under her chin. Couldn’t be done. Impossible.”
Police were originally convinced they were dealing with a murder-suicide. Now a very different picture was being painted. As some officers investigated this new line of inquiry, the official verdict remained. Just nine days later, the bodies of the family were released and Jeremy Bamber laid them to rest.
“He was inconsolable. He had his girlfriend, Julie Mugford, by his side and Colin Caffell, Sheila’s estranged husband, by his other side, and it was like something out of a movie. I remember looking at the photographs, thinking there was a real power about pictures. He did appear to be genuinely devastated.”
Yet behind the images of a broken man in mourning, Essex police were building a different picture of Jeremy Bamber. And shortly after the funerals came another revelation. Jeremy Bamber’s girlfriend at the time was a school teacher, Julie Mugford. She lived in Goldhanger or stayed in Goldhanger with him. “There were other girls around and Jeremy enjoyed life, as he would say, perhaps at the time. It appears that early discussions with her, Jeremy suggested he was going to carry out the murders himself.”
“Police in Essex have reopened their investigation into the deaths of a family of five last month. Jeremy Bamber’s girlfriend at the time of the tragedies said he discussed ways of getting rid of the family.”
“But I think the turning point for her, not only was her conscience getting the better of her and she felt she had to come and unburden it to us, but I think she’d overheard him talking to an old flame on the phone at the time that they were going out together and felt a bit as though she was a jilted lover as it were. And I think that certainly helped to be the turning point, which at the end of the day was in the favor of the investigation.”
Their relationship had changed and perhaps it wasn’t quite what she hoped it was. So it appears that was the catalyst for her going to the police to make a sensational allegation about him being behind the murders. Initially, I believe she said that he told her, “Tonight’s the night.”
This startling disclosure, along with the blood results from the silencer, gave the police two strong indications that Sheila Caffell may not have killed her family. Their attention quickly turned to Jeremy Bamber. The only person with any motive to kill all of that family, not rob the house, not burglarize the house, just to go in and kill a complete family. The only motive could have been the inheritance. And the only people that stood to inherit was Sheila Caffell and Jeremy Bamber. With Sheila Caffell out of the way, the only inheritor would be Jeremy Bamber.
Bamber was privately educated and well known in the area for his adventurous lifestyle. Having traveled the world after leaving college, he eventually settled down to work full-time in the family businesses, White House Farm and a nearby caravan park. Now police had Julie Mugford’s allegations and the evidence found by the family. Detective Inspector Miller and his team were keen to turn the investigation around.
“Mick Hinsley, Sergeant Jones, myself, Taff Jones were in an office at Witham Police Station. We related what we’d got from Julie Mugford and Mike Hinsley went round the circle of us. So, ‘Right, what do you think?’ Taff said, ‘I’m sticking with what I’ve always said, that she’s committed the murders and shot herself.’ He said to Stan Jones, ‘What do you think?’ He said, ‘Well, I think Jeremy’s done it.’ And he said to me, ‘What do you think?’ And I said, ‘Well, this witness seems very plausible.’ As far as I was concerned, there was enough evidence to bring in and charge with the murders Jeremy Bamber.”
At that point, Essex police destroyed evidence from the scene of multiple murders in Tolleshunt D’Arcy after believing that Sheila Caffell had shot her parents and twin boys and then herself. But after being given potential evidence contradicting that theory, they started to investigate Jeremy Bamber and looked into how he could have committed the murders instead.
“There’s a sea wall from Goldhanger around to the farm. I think a bicycle ride to and from the scene would never have been seen in a million years. Certainly wouldn’t take a car. Car headlights could have been seen coming around the village. Traveling over land to go from my house to White House Farm in the middle of the night on my mom’s old bicycle, with no lights, across fields that I had no idea of the route in the middle of the night, it’s impossible. It’s laughable.”
Investigators believed Bamber entered the farmhouse through a small downstairs window, shot his family, then cycled back to his house in Goldhanger before calling the police. “The police knew that when they examined the downstairs toilet window on the 10th of September, there were no scratch marks between the two sash windows that had been made by a hacksaw blade. But then about a month later or three weeks later, when they go to examine it a second time, they discover a hacksaw blade laying on the windowsill and they discover scratch marks between the two sash windows indicating that it had been open with it. But of course they just kept quiet about the early examination at my trial.”
After the funerals, Jeremy Bamber left the country, but on his return, officers arrested him. “I’ve talked to Jeremy about his reaction to being arrested and corresponded about it. He had two feelings. One, he felt it was coming. Second, he couldn’t believe it was coming. Contradictory, and he was in a state of bewilderment.”
If you look back over August 1985, you have first of all, family members determined to demonstrate to the police that Jeremy was a murderer. The two key elements throughout were one, the silencer, two, Julie Mugford.
Jeremy Bamber was interviewed and charged with five counts of murder on the 29th of September 1985. He strongly denied any involvement in his family’s tragic deaths, stating he was at home when his father called and that Julie Mugford had been lying in a statement to police. But Essex police believed they had their evidence. Just over a year later, Bamber’s high-profile court case began.
“Jeremy Bamber, the brother of model Sheila Caffell, has appeared in court charged with the murder of his parents, his sister and her twin sons. Mr. Bamber denied all the charges.”
“The big moment was when he came into court. My recollection of him standing there being very polite, very attentive, not humble, but trying to portray this image of someone who was quite nice, charming, decent fellow.”
The key moment in the trial was Julie Mugford’s testimony because the jury had to decide who was telling the truth, Julie or Jeremy. “Didn’t show much emotion at times. He seemed still a little bit amused by the proceedings. I suspect he really thought he was going to get off.”
“The silencer evidence, yes, there it was. But that didn’t have quite the emotional pull, emotional influence that seeing this young girl in the dock and having to adjudicate on her truth.”
“It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced. It was a buzz. You could feel it in your stomach. You know, the court was packed, packed with journalists, packed with spectators. It was probably the most memorable day of my journalistic career.”
Jeremy Bamber’s trial lasted 19 days. In summing up, the judge outlined key points for the jury to consider. “As part of his defense, he called or had read to you evidence to show that Sheila was mentally ill and argues that in her conduct in killing her family, it is entirely consistent with that illness.” “The red paint on the knurled end and the mark on the knurled end of the mantlepiece show that on that fact alone, that the silencer was on the gun during the fight in the kitchen.”
The jury, by 10 to 2 majority, decided that he’d committed all the murders and he was sentenced to five life sentences.
“Jeremy Bamber, the man who killed his family in order to inherit a fortune, has been sent to jail for at least 25 years.” Justice Drake was the presiding judge and said, “You will serve a minimum of 25 years. You’re a warped individual.”
Bamber has now been in prison for over 30 years for the multiple murders. All appeals declined despite the passing of time. This extraordinary crime rarely leaves the headlines for long. Since his conviction, new documentation has come to light that was not presented at Bamber’s trial. Does this evidence tell a different story?
“Here, for the first time, we reveal the contents. Firstly, the night of the murders. Police records from the time suggest they were talking to someone in the house. Police telephone logs from the evening state officers were in conversation with somebody inside the farm at 5:25 a.m. Jeremy Bamber had arrived at the house just before 4:00 a.m. If police were speaking to somebody in the farmhouse, how could Bamber have murdered them beforehand?”
Armed response waited to enter the house until 7:37 a.m., over four hours after police initially arrived at the scene and more than two hours after an alleged conversation with somebody inside. “7:37, they reported that in the kitchen were two dead bodies, one male, one female. That same message was picked up and recorded by two other sources.”
After discovering two bodies in the kitchen, all but one of the armed officers searched the rest of the house. At 10 minutes to 8:00, they radioed three more bodies found upstairs. So initial inspection of the property reported two bodies downstairs and three upstairs. Yet by the time of Jeremy Bamber’s trial, that had changed.
“The entire scene of crime presentation at Jeremy’s trial and in his statements should be there were four bodies upstairs. That’s what they said. Something very strange had gone on. Dead bodies don’t move.”
The question arises as to where those bodies were, because we have all this evidence that two bodies were downstairs and three upstairs. Whereas the scene of crime evidence support in Jeremy’s trial and many other times was that four were found upstairs.
Why these initial crime scene accounts were not presented at the trial is unknown. “There was a commotion and one of the police officers in his witness statement refers to that and his interpretation or his explanation is there was movement upstairs.”
What were the noises mentioned in the statement? The document goes on to suggest that it could have been movement from another officer. But by the time other police attended the scene, one more body was recorded upstairs than originally stated. The prosecution in the trial was resolute, Neville Bamber was discovered in the kitchen, the twins in their beds, and June and Sheila in the main bedroom upstairs.
So what could have happened? Some theories suggest Sheila moved from the kitchen up to the bedroom via one of the farm’s three staircases whilst the police were searching other areas of the house, having only injured herself with the first gunshot wound. Also, forensic photographs taken around 10:00 a.m. on the day show Sheila’s blood was still running from her wounds. Two official statements also support this. Added to that, her body did not have liver mortis suggesting she had not been dead for a long period of time. The prosecution claimed she died by 3:30 a.m., six and a half hours earlier. Jeremy Bamber had been outside with police since 3:45 that morning.
Something had gone wrong. Why were the accounts so different? An extract from a police interview that has come to light since the murders also suggests that an officer found a suicide note from Sheila Caffell at the time. If a suicide note did exist, it has not been released publicly.
Official records regarding the silencer also tell a different story. Documents reveal that officers had searched the gun cupboard shortly after the murders. “The police had looked. They had carried out very thorough investigations and they had not found these items.”
The initial discovery of a silencer by the family was what turned the whole case towards Bamber, and a main element of the prosecution was that a silencer must have been on the gun on the night of the killings. Otherwise, the shootings would have been heard. But Jeremy Bamber has always stated that this could not have been the case. From letters he has written during his appeal campaign, he believes there was never such a device on the gun. A .22 rifle is a low caliber gun. Bamber also explains that even without a silencer, these make less noise when fired than other higher caliber weapons.
“Well, I think the noise is one thing, but the blood in the silencer and not in the gun tells you the silencer must have been fitted when the people were murdered. And if that’s the case, which it is, someone’s had to remove the silencer. Otherwise, the blood would have been in the barrel of this rifle.”
As for the issue of the silencer, Jeremy’s defense team have conducted experiments. “Prosecution alleged that Sheila’s arms were too short and the gun plus silencer too long for her to have committed suicide. We now know that is not the case. We have the evidence and you can show it.”
So was a silencer ever on the gun? The debate on that continues. Its existence did form a large part of the trial and allegedly created the scratch found on the mantle by the extended family. “The prosecution made a great play on the evidence of the scratch mark and how it implicated Jeremy Bamber in the murders that took place in the farmhouse.”
Now, Peter Surs, a photographic expert with decades of experience in crime scene photo analysis, has been given access to the official images. “On the original scene of crime pictures taken on the day of the incident, the police photographer had not actually picked up that there was a scratch on the mantlepiece at all. The relatives of Jeremy Bamber had told the police that they discovered this mark.”
“The scratch mark itself was quite deep and would have produced a fair quantity of wooden paint which would have dropped onto the carpet if it had been there. There was no sign of any debris at all in an area which I’d expect to see debris.”
The conviction and sentencing of Jeremy Bamber has courted controversy for decades. He has always protested his innocence. Now, evidence from police files at the time does cast doubt on whether he did in fact murder all his immediate family. Crime scene photographic expert Peter Surs studied original police photographs taken at the time and made an alarming discovery.
“I was able to demonstrate using life-size pictures that the marks underneath the mantlepiece that I would have expected to see were not there and therefore the scratch had been put there after the original scene of crime photograph had been taken. If we say that the scratch marks didn’t appear on the original scene of crime and therefore the silencer was not implicated in that, we can take the silencer out of the case altogether and that alters the entire complexion of it.”
If the scratch was not on the mantle at the time of the murders, a large part of Jeremy Bamber’s trial is fundamentally flawed. The theory was that a violent struggle had taken place in the kitchen between Jeremy and his father, the silencer scratching the mantle in the process. Also, the prosecution stated Sheila could not have fought with Neville Bamber. He would have simply overpowered her. Yet Neville was in a defenseless position when he died. “Poor Neville eventually died sitting on a chair, leaning forward. There’s nothing in that tragic, ghostly picture that demands or refutes Sheila who did the deed.”
The jury at Bamber’s trial was told that the blood examined in the silencer was a mixture of human and animal. The human being Sheila’s with the presence of the enzyme AK1, supporting the argument she could not have killed herself, then placed the device back in the gun cupboard. “The blood that was found in the silencer, which allegedly was found in the gun cupboard two or three days after, had some blood deposit in it. They are totally inconclusive. There is no absolute forensic evidence a silencer was used at all.”
The forensic expert actually reported that the blood examined in the silencer could have come from Sheila Caffell or Robert Boutflower. The latter name was not given at the trial.
Prior to the tragedy, Jeremy Bamber said his parents were trying to reason with his sister, suggesting she received extra help with her twin boys. “Sheila wasn’t really interested in any of the options. She didn’t say a lot and I didn’t add a lot to the conversation while I was stood there, but we just didn’t know how to reach out. With schizophrenia, it’s really difficult and our understanding of mental illness was very limited.”
“Much more should have been made. The fact that Sheila, the day before the killings, was showing every sign of heading for an episode of paranoid schizophrenia and that her psychiatrist said, given any hint that she was an inadequate mother, she could flip it. And the defense didn’t pursue that enough.”
Statements from Sheila’s psychiatrist show how he believed her fragile mental state could have driven her to snap if faced with losing her boys. When questioned, Dr. Ferguson also revealed an occasion a couple of years before the murders in 1983, where Sheila had admitted to having thoughts about murdering her children.
Another crucial element of Jeremy Bamber’s conviction was Julie Mugford’s statement, his girlfriend at the time. She claimed Bamber had hired a hitman to carry out the attacks, but the man, when questioned by police, had a cast-iron alibi and was disregarded. “She had mentioned about he’d given 2,000 pound to a hitman, who was a man that we did arrest, bring him in. And what was interesting there was that we actually uncovered a sort of an illicit relationship. He was a married man but carrying out an illicit affair. We were able through that and talking to the other woman on the night in question to completely eliminate him from the inquiry.”
Shortly after the murders and before her statement to police, Bamber had ended his relationship with Julie Mugford. They had this enormous fallout. “We’re talking about the last week in August if I recall correctly.” Mugford also admitted to officers that she tried to smother Jeremy with a pillow. It took one month after the murders for her to go to police with her story. She said that she was in anguish and turmoil and distressed, but she appears to have acted a very ordinary life during August.
Whatever the reality, Jeremy Bamber’s account of that fateful evening in 1985 has never changed. He has always claimed that his father called him asking for help in the early hours of the morning. Bamber has also maintained that Neville would also have called the police, but only Jeremy’s call was discussed at his trial. Now we can reveal this.
A crucial document that shows a phone call from Neville Bamber to police at 3:26 from White House Farm that states, “Daughter gone berserk and has got hold of one of my guns.” This other phone log, 10 minutes later, is from Jeremy Bamber from his home in Goldhanger. Two calls from different phone numbers, two different police phone logs. Thousands of documents relating to the case have been placed under public interest immunity, never to be released to the public by the police. Many articles have also been destroyed.
“There have presented to us a scenario wholly incompatible with the scene of crime evidence presented at Durham’s trial. And what we are now absolutely certain of is that Jeremy’s conviction is not only unsustainable but it is wrong. That Jeremy Bamber is an innocent man.”
So can the conviction be questioned? The documents now available to interrogate are the official police log that shows Neville Bamber called police about his daughter on the night. Different reports suggesting a body moved while police were there. A police log showing they did not find a silencer in the gun cupboard before the extended family found one. Forensic evidence on a silencer that is inconclusive and could have come from a number of people or animals. A scratch mark that formed part of the trial which wasn’t on police photographs taken after the tragedy and a police account suggesting they were talking to someone inside the farmhouse when Bamber was stood outside with officers. Whatever the exact events were on the 7th of August 1985, a whole family was brutally murdered and their remaining family has the grief to bear.
“I’m absolutely convinced, unequivocally, right man behind bars.”
“The thought of those two little six-year-olds, you know, their lives just starting, being shot in such a calculating and terrible way. Still upsetting now.”
Shortly after the massacre, Neville and June’s extended family inherited the Bamber estate and the Eatons moved into White House Farm. The family stand by the original conviction and continue to make their voices heard in the media. “And a lot of sisters, why sisters, if no one wins, we all lose. Can’t bring them back.”
Jeremy Bamber has appealed his conviction since 1986. So far, every appeal has been turned down. He is one of around 70 prisoners in the UK to be given a whole life tariff. At present, he will die behind bars.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
