Jeremy Bamber's murder convictions are again undergoing critical examination: Scott Jones and Glen Owen recount in a Mail article of 29 03 25 referencing another more detailed article by the journalist Heidi Blake on July 29th last year in the eminently respected New Yorker a nicely read transcript of which can be found linked here, that a retired CID Officer erstwhile of the Essex Constabulary corroborates that a significant amount of evidence was withheld or tampered with, which I always thought was fairly obvious from the amount of conflicting claims the case generated. It is quite difficult to grasp the extent to which it is unquestionably the case that what he was convicted on has been categorically discredited and there will be absolute hell to pay if he ever gets the matter back into Court. I have always been fascinated by the case as I suppose have many since it has all the ingredients of an intriguing whodunnit concerning the gruesome gunshot slaughter of five members of three generations of a farming family in an isolated rural farmhouse with huge inheritances at stake where only one of two incredibly unlikely stories has to be correct in precise detail: according to Heidi Blake's article the house has a spooky history with not just one but two previous owners having committed suicide.

My own interest is somewhat more than generally incidental, in that I tend to believe that June Bamber in particular was far from unlikely to have been acquainted with perhaps several of my father's aunts and uncles as he had at least about half a dozen in Colchester in the later seventies, particularly his paternal aunt Queenie who was nearest in age to his father who was also himself a firstborn child. Since she, was like June Bamber a lifelong committed Anglican it is rather unlikely that they were not to some extent acquainted within the same diocese. It is far from unlikely that she had known June Bamber since she was a small child and I believe it not entirely unlikely she might have mentioned the Bamber case the last time she spoke to me which was as I recall it a few years prior to her decease in the later nineties. It is furthermore the case that my own severe problems with the legal establishment had blown up some six months or so before the unfortunate deaths at Whitehouse Farm and I would end up nearly stabbed to death in downtown Ipswich some 15 months later. They were very harsh times for me, by 1983 I had been abandoned by all my father's relatives as far as any helpful concern for a fairly dystopian personal situation might have existed and the pictures of Sheila Caffel seem like some taunting reminder of a caring world that had been snatched away.

There is not much question that whatever else might be true it does seem a fact that Jeremy was in 1985 all too arguably a rather spoiled and unappealing character who had among other things, according to the recent BBC drama wherein he was played by Freddie Fox, had the family dog put down because it was annoying him which would intensely annoy many including myself. He was certainly significantly successfully portrayed as a worthless sort of wannabee inheritor which is actually not specifically a crime; if it was huge numbers of public figures including at least half the House of Lords would be in gaol with him. Like many with family connections to money he had to some extent sensed that the Thatcher regime was abandoning attempts to legislate for economic inequality and morality and had significantly resigned itself to the fact of greed being an uncontrollable fact of life.

There may in the first instance be some relatively innocent explanation for this tampering referenced by the whistleblower, since it had first appeared an open and shut case that would not require meticulous analysis and record keeping as it appeared unquestionable that Sheila, Jeremy's adoptive sister, had killed the family and then herself during some kind of protracted and violent altercation. There were supposedly various fairly damning circumstantial facts that subsequently pointed at Jeremy such as the conveniently broken window lock he supposedly used to make the farmhouse appear sealed from within as shown by the BBC drama, which is said to have been actually false according to what was published in the New Yorker, perhaps foremostly that Sheila was too small to have killed herself with an attached silencer, but I suppose it seems fair to assume the silencer evidence is surely now by any reckoning in at least some very serious question, and the fact remains that being a spoiled and unappealing reptile is not in itself a crime: if it was huge number of public figures including about half the House of Lords would be in gaol. One would have to have a spare decade to go over all the material the case has generated but one tends to imagine that the whistleblower must have some concern that Jeremy might be innocent for him or her to have spoken out in such terms. He or she whilst stopping short of an explicit statement about anyone's guilt, does say that the crime scene has no integrity, so neither does the investigation, nor the case against him. Whilst the remark is not about guilt or innocence but rather the proper procedure for determining it, one tends to imagine that an experienced cop would not make such a remark without meaning to raise the question: information as to how much he or she might or might not have been paid for a simply saleable feature remains unknown.

It is extremely troubling that the New Yorker should contradict the facts given by the BBC drama and I honestly never thought I would hear of such an allegation about what it seemed to purport as fact and One inevitably tends to imagine that some sort of qualifying statement about its sources ought to have been made.

The last remark I left online about the Bamber case myself was to the effect that such police tactics tend to weaken public faith in the integrity of policepersons and that even if Jeremy is guilty they should not have tampered with the evidence to make it seem so, since among other things this might be likely to have had a disastrous impact on other investigations where public confidence is very key to their progression. According to my appreciation of such matters if police taint a crime scene it is not supposed to be anyone else's problem if they end up with no real or legitimate evidence for a case; it obviously seems a relevant sort of question as to which person or persons it was who suggested the evidence at the scene should be so quickly disposed of. If it was a crime scene Jeremy had himself prepared One tends to imagine that he would have wanted it examined in detail so this question seems very key to an understanding of what took place: a lot of simple tests such as for gunshot residue that One also tends to consider could have ruled out any significant misinterpretation do not seem to have been undertaken.

It is interestingly and perhaps relevantly the case that despite an arguably quite hostile judge and an elaborate character assassination headed by the jilted girlfriend Julie Mugford of whom I seem to recall it has been said she was excused a smuggling rap for testifying, that two jurors were unconvinced, making the narrowest possible legal margin for conviction, and must among other things have believed that she was significantly untruthful. It seems reasonable to add that in such an extraordinary case if the official verdict is correct that there really should have been little or no demur once it and the accused had been exposed to the public, the media, and twelve jurors at quite some length. It seems logical to suggest that the whole thing should have been seen to have been exposed in terms of a psychological appraisal as it were, and that no real doubt should have existed at all if the guilty Jeremy theory had really been exposed as a blatant and unquestionable horror. The fact that two jurors refused to concur with the prosecution's story despite everything that was quoted as fact at the time does tend to suggest that the jury did not quite see this as such a case of unquestionable culpability which some clearly want the public to believe. The recent quashing of the conviction of Andrew Malkinson for a very violent rape after 17 years in jail despite it being known for most of that time new evidence would have acquitted him, unfortunately tends to suggest that police can be simply uncaring about guilt or innocence and are often more interested in their pretensions, predilections, prejudices, pensions and public standing than the quality of justice.

In looking at the context of the quashing of all the guilty verdicts of supposed perpetrators of Republican bombing outrages throughout the years of the Irish Troubles having led to the establishment of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, necessarily signifying an unfortunate fallibility on the part of the judicial system, it has to be admitted it is clearly capable of committing enormities, that it is not good enough at confessing its mistakes, and that the judge was really unquestionably very favourable to the prosecution in his summing up at the Bamber trial: what is of accepting that much of the key information he directed the jury to believe seems to have been proven erroneous or unreliable at best.

If he is innocent, besides the fact that Mugford must have lied which does seem perhaps improbable under the particular circumstance of the case having attracted so much detailed investigation, there must also be some very strange input floating around between the members of the near family who had a clear inheritance motive for their insistence the real story was that Jeremy had killed the family and then staged the scene to make it appear his sister Sheila had done it prior to her own suicide: to which proposition one detective had swiftly concurred. Either story is as I say incomprehensibly unlikely but one of them must be the precise truth, and that is surely not remarkably unlikely to be clearly visible from some angle or other even now after forty years. Police were under an enormous amount of pressure to resolve this case as the victims were a WW2 RAF pilot veteran and local magistrate, his popular respected churchgoing wife, a troubled young woman their adopted daughter, and her two children, in a gruesome scene involving repeated execution style head shots during the discharge of more than twenty rifle rounds: many of those involved at the scene had apparently some trouble coping with this.

Jeremy as the only member of the immediate family left alive had attracted immediate opprobrium for an unlikeable manner and wanton lifestyle in his assumption of its very significant estate and a contrary story was brewed up at the significant instigation of hard up members of the wider family whom as far as I know do remain unanimous in their acclamation of his culpability. I acquired the impression that they had rather sought to obfuscate that Sheila's history was really quite troubled, and that it was in fact a reasonable statement that she had learned to use firearms such as the 22 rifle used for rabbiting that Jeremy claims to have left unsecured in the farmhouse: she would surely have been familiar with it. The mother June Bamber had also had mental health issues but Sheila's was really quite serious in that it did among other things, include religious delusions to the extent of imagining her children evil: these do appear to have been reliably documented as quite serious. Among the things which do tend to point at Sheila rather than otherwise, are the facts that it seems Neville Bamber had been seriously thinking of having the children removed from her care. The scene first encountered when the farmhouse was entered seems to have included Neville Bamber being slumped over a chair with his trousers down with certain of Sheila's bloody period stained underwear soaking in a bucket nearby. These details tend to paint a more generally conclusive sort of picture and the fact that June Bamber's mental health problems seem to have initially stemmed from an inability to conceive, hence the two adopted children, arguably seems to suggest rather than otherwise, that something went wrong between Neville and Sheila within the context of a long term conversation dialogue about motherhood and responsibility and suchlike: there could perhaps plausibly be some kind of undeclared subplot about the respectable magistrate having some trouble overlooking the charms of a youthful, sexy and stoned model in the family home.

One cannot help but feel that just for the sake of argument in putting the hypothesis of Jeremy's innocence under examination, that should it be the correct explanation for the tragic events of that August evening the wider family must be likely to know so in some instinctive sense. That is to say if he is innocent, among other things it might be easier to appraise by an examination of their conversation than from other perspectives. They would have to be making several certain fairly unmistakeable comments adding up to something like it being his fault anyway because he did not secure the rifle, perhaps likely knew what Sheila might be capable of, might even have left the rifle conveniently to hand with some deliberateness, and why should anyone care about someone so spoiled and worthless being permanently locked up? It is after all a simple sort of objective philosophical proposition that if he had euthanised the family dog because it was an unwanted nuisance he should imagine himself lucky to be alive at all. I suppose that does depend on the individual's view of a meaningless and deterministic universe but there you are and of course One has to ask how accurate is this particular detail since the New Yorker does claim the window latch story to have been fabricated by some agency: it would be impossibly difficult to view an individual sympathetically if they really have honoured the memory of such a distinguised and unfortunately deceased veteran's memory by killing his dog!

Notwithstanding that I do not really know an immense amount about psychology or psychiatry I am perhaps the very last person who would treat these as other than theorising and self justifying sensationalism but I do consider there was much in the way of an attempt to belittle the serious nature of Sheila's mental health issues undertaken, and that on the balance of known possibilities and probabilities, the story that Sheila went mad with the rifle seems rather less unlikely than that Jeremy plotted an appalling murder spree on the family as for example he made no attempt to pacify or conciliate the wider family as many might consider a culpable person would, they were immediately in conflict with him over the estate and household goods and he, seems to have made no obvious attempt to evade or deflect their supposedly reasonable suspicions. The theory that he planned and executed these horrific killings in an almost entirely unheard of sort of cold calculating scheme involving the murder of the couple who had rescued him from being an unwanted baby surely in general seems the more unlikely story.

Notwithstanding that forensic science was a much more rudimentary matter in the eighties than it is now, such a person would surely have also known that there must be the most enormous risk of leaving incriminating evidence behind in the fabrication of a fictional interpretation of the scene of a mass murder in which he would be the only alternative suspect. Any competent calculating mind would surely have reasoned that a single misplaced detail could have been utterly disastrous. It also seems reasonably commonsensical that any person capable of or inclined toward such a unspeakable calculated act, would surely have betrayed some tendency toward aberrant behaviour whilst being expensively educated and socialised but Jeremy's history very arguably does not really mark him out as anything much more than a fairly typical example of young sociable bourgeoisie recently liberated from much informal constraint by the Thatcher government with a misdemeanour or two against his name. I really do think it reasonably commonsensical that anyone capable of calmly discharging nine rounds into the face and head of two six year old children, his parents and sister, has to be either quite obviously genuinely unhinged and deranged or such a cold fish as for it to have been previously observed as a character trait in some respect or other.

The scene which first presented itself to police officers seem to have been chaotic and inevitably suggestive of some sort of protracted struggle having gone on throughout several rooms in the house perhaps starting with the summary execution style killing of the six year old twins who seem to have been taken relatively unawares. This generally tends to argue against the murders being planned in that if you are going to shoot people and stage a fake interpretation of the scene you would surely do just that, you would work out how to take them down without also getting involved in some kind of a wrestling match as arguably seems to have taken place, you would certainly do that by shooting the six ft four ex military man first and from a safe distance, you would arrange your planned fake evidence, you would get out, get home, tidy up your appearance, mentally check over your alibi facts and start making calls to establish your faked narrative directing police toward prepared evidential corroborations of apparent facts. Whilst on the one hand it seems not unreasonable to suggest such a person would be unlikely to faff around pointlessly pulling a dead victim's pants down for no obvious reason, it might for instance be surmised by proponents of the Jeremy guilty theory as a comment on the fact he was it seems, rightly suspected of having recently stolen the cash float from the campsite owned by the family and had been caught sneaking into the house. I seem to recall having read in other sources that the incident involved Mugford and that Neville Bamber had tidied the thing over discreetly so it might be viewed as a case of something more like him getting a bit too entitled than of him evidencing a genuinely malevolent disposition: Wikipedia quotes him as having explained the matter as wanting to prove that site security needed improvement.