The Family Massacre That England Got Wrong

In the early hours of the 7th of August 1985, 24-year-old Jeremy Bamber was woken by the telephone. It was his father, Nevill, who lived about three and a half miles or 5.6 km away at White House Farm in Essex, England. Jeremy heard him saying that Sheila, Jeremy’s sister, had gone berserk, had a gun and that her young twin boys were sleeping upstairs.

Then the phone went dead. Jeremy called the local police station, then drove to meet them outside the farmhouse. Eventually, the police entered the home to discover the bodies of 61-year-old Nevill Bamber, his wife, 61-year-old June Bamber, their daughter, Sheila Caffell, 28, and, heartbreakingly, Sheila’s twin boys, Daniel and Nicholas who were just six years old.

Everyone had received multiple gunshots at close range, apart from Sheila who only had two gunshot wounds, one to the neck and the other beneath her chin. She was found with a rifle and a Bible next to her, open to the book of Psalms. The line “Save me from blood guiltiness” was underlined in a red smear.

With a well-documented history of schizophrenia and previous violent episodes, it was determined that Sheila had murdered her family before turning the gun on herself. Sheila was vilified in the media as a “deranged divorcee,” and “model gone berserk” after having committed one of the UK’s most notorious family massacres, an image confirmed by Jeremy who had told police that the siblings didn’t get along.

A month later at the funerals, however, opinions started to change. Jeremy Bamber, the new heir to the White House Farm and its sizable assets, was behaving in a way contrary to how a bereaved person should behave. He was booking holidays, partying with friends, selling his parents’ possessions, putting the family dog down, offering nude photos of Sheila to the papers and all in all, acting really shady.

Photos and videos taken of him at his family funeral showed a man who seemed to be putting on a show of fake grief, and the police were getting more and more suspicious. Then, after a tip-off from an ex-girlfriend that Jeremy had told her he had been planning to kill his family and get away with it, he was arrested on the 29th of September 1985 and charged with murder.

The trial began the following October and Jeremy was found guilty of the murders of his parents, sister and two nephews at White House Farm. The judge said: “Your conduct in planning and carrying out the killing of five members of your family was evil, almost beyond belief.” As a result, Jeremy Bamber was sentenced to a whole life order, meaning he had no chance of parole and will stay in prison until he dies.

The public were happy to see the spoiled, cruel and manipulative Bamber behind bars where he belonged. It seemed that, having framed his mentally ill sister as the killer, he had nearly got away with the perfect crime. At the time of writing, Bamber will be in his 40th year of incarceration, making him one of the UK’s longest serving prisoners.

But as this sad anniversary comes around, more and more people are beginning to believe that Jeremy Bamber is himself the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice.

The Bambers

Ralph Nevill Bamber, who went by his middle name, and June Speakman got married when they were both 25. Nevill was a fighter pilot who later became a magistrate. At 6 feet 4 inches tall, or 193 cm and still in good nick at the age of 61, he lived up to the image of a country gent, residing in a Georgian manor on acres of farmland in the small village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy in Essex. His wife June seemed to play the role of a trad wife, volunteering to help with various things at the local church and otherwise keeping to herself.

The Bambers were wealthy, owning several properties and several hundred acres of land.

They weren’t able to conceive children, however, which allegedly was a crushing blow to June’s already fragile mental health. In an article for the New Yorker by Heidi Blake, she writes: “June had been racked by mental illness since soon after their wedding, apparently brought on by grief at their inability to conceive. She had been hospitalized with depression, psychosis, and paranoia, undergoing multiple courses of electroshock therapy. Her psychiatrist told police that her illness had caused a ‘distortion of her already strong religious beliefs,’ so that she saw ‘everything in terms of good and evil’—a pathology that, he said, had done terrible harm to her daughter.”

Speaking of her daughter, the Bambers adopted two children, a girl called Sheila, and a boy called Jeremy. The two were not biologically related. Sheila was adopted as an infant in 1957 but had a turbulent relationship with June which really kicked off in her teenage years. When caught flirting with boys as any teen would, June would tell her she was under Satanic impulses.

When caught sunbathing naked once, Sheila was told she was “the Devil’s child.” Understandably not wanting to hang around with her mother for any longer than necessary, Sheila hotfooted it to London where she picked up a variety of jobs and did a short stint as a model. As a play on her surname along with her slim frame and large eyes, friends used to call her “Bambi.”

At 17, Sheila fell in love with art student Colin Caffell, however, this was yet another turbulent relationship in her life. After having an abortion, her parents insisted the two get married after Sheila became pregnant again, but she then suffered a miscarriage shortly after the wedding. She had another miscarriage soon afterwards, and then just months later became pregnant again.

By this point, Colin was seeing other women and when the twins, Daniel and Nicholas were born in June 1979, the couple were not together and ended up divorcing in 1982. Colin himself acknowledged their relationship was troubled, writing: “Violence was just below the surface (…) There were even times we could have killed each other.”

Sheila was only 22 when the twins were born, and 25 when she got divorced. Colin remained in the boys’ lives and actually dropped Sheila and the twins off at White House farm the fateful week of the murders. The visit had been arranged at Nevill and June’s suggestion so they could spend some time with their grandsons before Colin took them on a trip abroad.

Although it might have been due to hindsight following what happened, Colin describes the boys as being fearful when he said goodbye and that he had a “nagging doubt” about the situation. There was another reason for the boys’ reaction, however. Their grandmother, June Bamber, had become extremely religious and they reported she would force them to kneel down and pray and had flown into religious fervours.

Daniel had reportedly drawn violent and disturbing images of June looking demonic a few weeks before the murders, and one picture featured guns and a decapitated head.

On the drive to the farm, Sheila had been mentally checked out, potentially a sign that she wasn’t very well. Like her mother, Sheila suffered from pretty severe mental illness. After the twins were born, she became extremely fearful that she would hurt them and ended up in St. Andrew’s Hospital when the boys were four.

She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and given anti-psychotic medication which she did not take with any frequency, and friends witnessed paranoid outbreaks where she would pitch violent fits and accuse people of trying to kill her. Like June, Sheila’s delusions veered into the religious and she thought she could hear the voice of God and that she was being chased by the devil. As well as skipping meds, she also took cocaine and smoked marijuana and would call her parents, telling them she was the Virgin Mary or Joan of Arc.

Sheila was eventually readmitted to the hospital where her treatment was changed so she would receive an intravenous dose every month, meaning she didn’t need to worry about taking pills regularly. Whether the drugs were effective enough is still open to debate, but the effect of returning to her childhood home always seemed to bring up bad memories for Sheila. According to Heidi Blake’s piece in the New Yorker: “Her condition seemed to worsen during visits to the Whitehouse.

On one occasion, left alone with her thirteen-year-old cousin, Sheila offered the girl drugs, talked about suicide, and described herself as a ‘white witch.’ She told her father’s secretary that ‘all people are bad’ and that some ‘deserve to be killed.’”

Barbara Wilson, who was the secretary in question and had worked for the Bambers for years, remembered that when Sheila arrived for that last visit, she “didn’t look well” and “just looked vacant.” During a chat between Barbara, June and Sheila, Sheila suddenly announced: “Everything is black. All men are evil.” Barbara said it was glossed over because she “knew that (Sheila) wasn’t herself.

She was a poor thing, really, towards the end.” Heidi Blake goes on to note that despite her troubled history, Sheila convinced her doctor to only give her half the usual anti-psychotic medication dosage the month before the murders.

So that leaves Jeremy Bamber. Jeremy was adopted by Nevill and June in 1961 when he was 6 months old. Afforded a life of privilege, Jeremy was pretty rebellious and his parents sent him to Gresham’s, a boarding school, when he was 9. Jeremy did not take advantage of all that academia had to offer, and spent most of his time sneaking out and brewing beer.

He was bullied by other boys when they found out he was adopted and had trouble making friends. He went to sixth-form college, travelled around Australia and New Zealand on his father’s dime and eventually went back to live on the farm.

Nevill had intended to pass it on to Jeremy, but he seemed more interested in growing cannabis, learning to scuba dive and having an affair with a local married mother. Considered to be arrogant, lazy and cruel, Jeremy didn’t fit in with the other young men in the area, and would deliberately provoke his parents and the residents of his small countryside community by wearing make up and behaving in what they deemed to be an outrageous manner. This was in the early 80s, a time of homophobia, and later in the case, Detective Superintendent Mike Ainsley wrote of Jeremy: “he is considered by some who know him to be bisexual” which was meant as a negative thing, by the way.

Barbara Wilson recalled that Jeremy would play nasty tricks on people and had once hidden a bag of rats inside a sack of potatoes that was in her car. By all accounts, while Nevill and Jeremy seemed to tolerate each other, Jeremy had had a much more turbulent relationship with June and also didn’t get on with his sister. At the time of the murders, Jeremy was 24 years old and ostensibly working on the family farm. He also had a small share in the family company and lived a couple of miles away in the village of Goldhanger, in a cottage owned by his parents.

The Crime Scene

On the 7th of August 1985, nobody entered the White House farm house for quite some time after Jeremy’s call to the local police at around 3.30 am. Once Jeremy and the police got there, he urged them to go in, but initially believing they saw a movement and that Sheila was armed and still alive inside the property, they waited for a tactical firearms unit which didn’t arrive until around 5am. During this time, Jeremy told officers that he had been shooting rabbits the night before and had left a loaded gun, Nevill’s .22 Anschutz rifle, in the kitchen.

According to Heidi Blake’s New Yorker article, Jeremy said: “Oh, God. I hope she hasn’t done anything silly.”

The tactical team tried contacting Sheila via loudhailer to surrender, but with no response and no further movement detected, they eventually entered the farmhouse at 7.30am by breaking down the back door.

Inside, a continuous nightmare began to unfold. Nevill Bamber was the first victim found, lying over a chair in the kitchen, wearing some pajama bottoms that had fallen around his knees. Along with signs of being beaten, he had been shot in the arm and shoulder and also received multiple shots to the head. The kitchen itself showed signs of a desperate struggle, with upended furniture and broken lights and crockery.

As the team carried on through the house, June Bamber was the next body to be discovered. She was lying in the doorway to her bedroom, covered in blood. She’d received a gunshot directly between the eyes as well as six more to other parts of her body. The officers found Crispy, the small family dog, alive and hiding under the bed.

Inside the main bedroom, Sheila was lying dead on the floor in her nightgown, barefooted, with the rifle positioned under her chin. She was found to have two gunshot wounds, one to her neck and the fatal one under her chin. There was a Bible next to her body, opened to a page from Psalms where the line “Save me from blood guiltiness” had what looked like a smear of blood under it.

The twins, Daniel and Nicholas looked to have both been asleep when they were killed. Daniel had been shot five times in the head and Nicholas, three.

When Jeremy was given the news outside, he broke down in tears and couldn’t process the situation, asking over and over again to speak to Nevill. When he was told again that Nevill was dead, he ran into a field to vomit and told police that “Sheila ought to be in a nuthouse for what she’s done.”

Because of her past with violent episodes and the evidence they saw at the scene, police chalked this up to Sheila having suffered a breakdown and killing her family before killing herself in one of the worst murder-suicide cases of recent times. The bodies were released and Daniel and Nicholas were buried in a private ceremony in London. The funeral for Nevill, June and Sheila was held at their local church and was a very public affair with hundreds of people turning up, as well as large numbers of members of the press. The bodies were then cremated privately with Sheila’s ashes being interred with her sons, as per the request of Colin Caffell.

In what would turn out to be a catastrophic blunder, just days after the killings, police were asked to clean up the crime scene by one of the Bamber’s relatives, more on whom later. As this had been filed away as needing no further investigation, there was apparently no issue with police cleaning up the bloody floors and walls and literally ripping out blood-stained carpet, chucking it out of the windows and burning it in a bonfire which also contained blood-soaked bedding. Maintaining the crime scene was not seen as a priority and while photographs had been taken, there had been little to no forensic examinations.

The sole remaining Bamber was left to pick up the pieces and get on with the task of sorting out his family’s large estate. And this is when his interactions and general behaviour started raising all sorts of red flags.

The Investigation into Jeremy Bamber

To begin with, police weren’t suspicious of Jeremy at all. He had called in the incident. He had been a few miles away and they overtook him on the way to the scene. He had been in shock after finding out what had happened inside the farmhouse.

He knew there had been a loaded gun in the house and agreed that his sister had seemingly had a breakdown and gone on a murderous rampage. He was going over the details again with police the day after the murders when his cousin, Ann Eaton, popped by to see him having just heard the news.

Here’s a quick genealogy sidebar as we need to introduce a bit of the extended family. June Bamber’s mother, Mabel Speakman, was still alive at the time of the murders and lived in a nice Grade 2 listed manor house called Vaulty Manor, not far from the White House farm. Between them, the Speakmans and Bambers owned a lot of property and farmland. Mabel had another daughter called Pamela, i.e.

June’s older sister. Pamela married a Robert Boutflour and the Boutflours lived on farmland owned by Mabel. They had two children—David Boutflour and Ann, who married Peter Eaton. Basically, Pamela and Robert are Jeremy’s aunt and uncle, and David and Ann are Jeremy’s cousins.

When the murders happened, Ann Eaton and her husband Peter were farming land that had been bought from Eaton’s family by Nevill Bamber.

Back to Ann popping in to see her dear cousin. Actually, you may not be surprised to hear that there wasn’t much love lost between them, as Jeremy seemed to rub everyone the wrong way. Ann’s father, Robert Boutflour, called Jeremy a “degenerate” with a “constant craving for money.” It was a bit of a delicate situation, as although the family members didn’t have much to do with one another on a personal level, they were all linked via land, property and business ownerships.

Anyway, as she sat there listening to him talking to the police, Ann started smelling a bit of a rat. She noted later: “I became puzzled, more puzzled, then suspicious of Jeremy and then bloody suspicious of Jeremy.” She began to surreptitiously take notes, upset by the way Jeremy was talking about his mother and sister and confused about his timeline of events.

Conferring with her family later that evening, they all decided the situation was very odd. What had happened to the silencer that was usually on the rifle? How could Sheila have beaten up her father so badly when he was hale and hearty and she wasn’t?

How could Sheila have physically managed this at all when usually she was so spaced out she couldn’t even pour tea without spilling it everywhere? As they mulled it over, a horrible suspicion started forming that maybe Jeremy had done something awful and blamed it on Sheila. He was the sole beneficiary of the Bamber estate and, when his grandmother Mabel Speakman died, which was imminent as she was in poor health and in her mid-90s at the time, he would also inherit half of her considerable estate as one of her daughters, June, was now dead.

The Boutflours and Eatons went to the police station, eager to get an investigation underway, but were given short shrift, with Taff Jones, the head of the investigation telling them “I can’t put up with all this nonsense!” The next time Ann stopped by Jeremy’s cottage, he was still in a state and was prescribed valium by a doctor. Ann said that she would take the key to White House Farm as Jeremy couldn’t face going back there. With access to the crime scene, the cousins first of all removed valuable items such as jewellery, guns and cash for safekeeping, then found something the police had totally missed.

Under a box of ammunition in the cupboard under the stairs, David Boutflour found the missing silencer. And it looked like there was blood on one end of it. Here’s the thing. If the rifle had a silencer on the end of it, Sheila could not have used it to kill herself, it would have been too long.

While she had sustained two wounds, she couldn’t have shot herself once, taken the silencer off, hidden it in the cupboard then gone upstairs and shot herself again. There had been no blood trail and the silencer would have been much more bloody. It looked as though someone had fired the gun with the silencer attached, killed everyone, then taken the silencer off and posed the rifle with Sheila’s body to make it look like she had done it.

The cousins took the new evidence to Detective Sergeant Stan Jones who was no relation to the aforementioned Taff Jones. This Jones was more than able to put up with all this nonsense and had his own suspicions as to Jeremy’s story. The silencer was sent off for testing and it was noted that there was also some other red material that looked like it matched the paint in the kitchen and could have got on the silencer if Nevill had been struggling with whoever was holding the rifle.

While they kept their suspicions mostly to themselves, the Eatons and Boutflours were keeping a weather eye on Jeremy Bamber. He seemed to be putting on a show of grief for the cameras at his family’s funeral, sobbing uncontrollably one moment, then slyly grinning at his cousins the next. His behaviour went off the rails after the funeral as he partied with his girlfriend and went for a windsurfing holiday, quickly followed by a trip to Amsterdam for reasons you can probably guess.

After berating his cousins for removing valuables from the farm house, Jeremy did the same, then got an appraiser in to value various artworks and antiques. He also had the family pet, Crispy, put down and tried selling nude photos of Sheila to the Sun newspaper, which he said would “show everything right down to the last detail.”

Upon examining photos of the crime scene, the Bible that had been next to Sheila was observed to be lying awkwardly by her shoulder, not where it could have been if she’d been holding it or it was already on the floor. It looked more like it had been placed there to stage the scene. The house had been locked up when police had gone to the initial call, however, the cousins believed it was possible to climb out of the kitchen window and close it from the outside. They had also found June Bamber’s bicycle at Jeremy’s cottage, and believed he could have committed the murders, climbed out of the window and cycled back to his house.

While some members of the original investigation were frustrated with the new suspicions, other investigative officers were opening a line of enquiry on Jeremy Bamber and the floodgates were suddenly blown wide open when his girlfriend, Julie Mugford, dropped an explosive statement.

To begin with, Julie had supported Jeremy and had been by his side at the funeral. In police interviews, Jeremy confirmed that he had called Julie before going to the farm on the morning of the murders, although whether he had called her before or after calling the police wasn’t consistent. A month after the murders, however, things changed.

Julie and Jeremy had split up, and Julie had a story to tell. She went to the police and said that Jeremy had been planning the perfect murder. In an interview in 1986, she said: “I remember one occasion in particular when he said to me with quite a lot of vehemence that he’d get rid of all of the family, including Sheila and the boys, and he would do so by shooting them.”

She gave further details including that Jeremy had wanted to carry out the murders himself but couldn’t bring himself to, so had paid a mutual acquaintance £2,000 to do it as a hit job instead. This man had called Jeremy from the house to say he’d done it, and Jeremy had then called Julie. When questioned as to why she hadn’t come forwards earlier with this information, Julie said she had been in love with Jeremy but had also been scared.

Now that the police had this information, Taff Jones arrested Jeremy Bamber on suspicion of murder the next morning. He dismissed Julie’s claims as being totally made up and thought she was just getting back at him for having dumped her. While he didn’t admit to the murders, he did admit that he’d stolen a thousand pounds from a safe at one of the family’s holiday spots, a crime that other family members had long suspected him of. More tellingly, he also confessed that he knew how to “jimmy” the windows at the White House farm, meaning he could potentially have accessed it even if the doors were locked.

Even though he’d made the arrest himself, Taff Jones still thought they were “barking up the wrong tree”, although he was now in a rapidly shrinking pool and, more importantly, he was no longer the lead investigator in this case. It was now being headed up by Detective Superintendent Mike Ainsley and he really didn’t like Jeremy. Notes from his case file call Sheila: “a very beautiful person, slim-build, petite, very feminine, with well-manicured hands, well-applied makeup, and well-groomed hair.”

His notes on Jeremy say that he kept “criminal and homosexual company” and the infamous: “he is considered by some who know him to be bisexual.” Hardly a crime, but this was the 80s and ever since hearing Julie Mugford’s statement that this had been a quintuple murder and not a murder-suicide, Ainsley knew Jeremy was his man.

There was a stumbling block in Julie’s story, however, as the man she named as being the hit man turned out to have an embarrassing, yet therefore convincing alibi. He was a local plumber, of all the clichés, who had been cheating on his wife, and one of his actual two extra-marital lovers confirmed they had been together on the night in question. He also apparently had zero knowledge of guns. After five days with the story falling apart, the police didn’t really have anything else substantial to tie Jeremy to the murders but he was charged with the burglary and released on bail.

He celebrated his freedom by going to Stringfellows, which was a famous London strip club which I assumed had closed down years ago but apparently is still operating. He then went on holiday to St. Tropez.

Despite Julie’s story being a load of balls, Mike Ainsley reevaluated all of Jeremy’s statements with the view that he had actually carried out the murders. He found many inconsistencies and tells in Jeremy’s behaviour, especially on the night in question. Why had he taken the time to look up the number for the local police instead of calling 999? Why had he driven so slowly to the scene that the police caught up and passed him?

Why did officers feel at the time that Jeremy was putting on a show of grief? Ainsley got in touch with Jeremy’s remaining family members who were eager to share their thoughts on how Jeremy could have done it. Jeremy’s uncle, Robert Boutflour in particular, had done a lot of work on this which Ainsley used as a jumping off point for investigators to work on.

Then, the tests on the silencer came back showing a match for Sheila’s blood type. It had been previously noted that for someone who had fired a rifle multiple times, her hands at the crime scene had been strangely clean. Her feet too, were noticeably clean, difficult to manage if she’d fought with her father downstairs, then shot her mother and walked past her to then shoot herself in the bedroom.

Paint on the silencer did indeed match the paint in the White House farm kitchen hearth where Nevill’s body was found, and scratches found under the mantel matched markings on the silencer, clearly showing signs that the silencer had been on the gun and that a struggle must have taken place there. It was, finally, all coming together.

The fact that Sheila’s blood was on a silencer that had been removed from the gun meant that she could not have shot herself, so she must have been murdered. Jeremy was the only other suspect and the motive was clearly financial—it was estimated that he stood to gain around half a million pounds in 1985, over a million and a half pounds or just over $2 million in today’s money. That was probably a conservative estimate too, given all the land and other properties the Bambers owned. Ainsley had enough.

When he returned from his latest jaunt, Jeremy Bamber was formally arrested, arraigned on five murder charges and held without bail. His trial started in October 1986.

The Trial of Jeremy Bamber

The public already had a negative impression of Jeremy going into the trial. A sometimes charismatic young man, he also came across as arrogant, with press pictures often catching him mid-smirk which didn’t do him any favours. The fact that he’d managed to almost get away with blaming the murders on his mentally ill sister also wasn’t a good look.

He was not a sympathetic character, he had not grieved appropriately and immediately after the deaths of his family, he’d spent thousands of pounds on partying and vacations. Dressed in a sharp suit when his charges were read out, Jeremy pleaded not guilty to each of the murders.

During the course of the trial, Sheila’s psychiatrist testified that he didn’t believe she was capable of harming her sons. The number of bullets used in the killings meant that whoever had used the gun would have needed to reload it at least once. The shootings were all also quite accurate. Witnesses said Sheila had little experience with guns and the prosecution stated that Sheila would not have been able to overpower Nevill.

There had been no sign of defensive wounds on Sheila and her bare feet were clean and uninjured.

The case for the prosecution went a little something like this. They called Jeremy a “skilled, cold, calculating killer”, alleging that he hated June and Nevill and was driven by financial greed. Either late at night on the 6th or early morning on the 7th of August 1985, he had used his mother’s bike to cycle on back roads from his cottage to the farmhouse.

He had entered through a window, which he knew how to open even if it was locked, and had picked up the rifle with silencer attached. He had sneaked upstairs and shot his parents as they lay in bed. June had died in the doorway but Nevill had made it downstairs where a fight ensued before Jeremy managed to shoot his father to death.

He then went back upstairs to kill his sister and murder his nephews in their beds. He then staged the scene with the Bible and gun to make Sheila look like the killer, and had removed the silencer when he noticed that she wouldn’t have been able to reach the trigger to use the gun on herself if it was still attached. He stashed it in the cupboard, might have had a shower, took the phone off the hook to make it look like Nevill had called him, then exited via the downstairs window, cycling back home still under the cover of darkness.

However long later, he called the local police and his girlfriend, Julie Mugford, then drove slowly back to the farm to try and delay the start of the investigation. The prosecution contended that Nevill had never made that early morning call to Jeremy. He wouldn’t have been in a fit state to call if he’d been in the middle of being shot and there were no phone records to confirm the call.

Julie Mugford, Jeremy’s ex, testified on the stand that she was scared of what “Jeremy might do” which is why she hadn’t come forward sooner. Over five hours, she told a convincing tale of Jeremy’s loathing for his family and his detailed and many plots to get rid of them all for the inheritance money. Sure, the plumber he’d mentioned hadn’t turned out to be the hitman but Julie had just been an unwilling sounding board, not an accomplice. Maybe Jeremy had told her the wrong name, or maybe he’d just done it himself.

Jeremy’s main defence was that Sheila had committed the murders. He took the stand himself and mentioned that Nevill and June had told Sheila that it might be better for the twins if they looked after them for a while, or they were put into foster care, maybe sending them to boarding school. This could have sent Sheila over the edge. Regarding his demeanour and actions after the crime, if he had seemed emotionless or behaved strangely, it was because he was in shock that his entire family had just been violently killed.

While they didn’t always have the best relationship, he testified that he had loved his parents. Things he had said might have been misinterpreted by others and Julie was upset that they had split up.

There was no physical evidence he had been at the crime scene. He was not injured, as you might expect if he’d fought with Nevill. There was no blood anywhere on him or in his cottage. Jeremy’s defence team said that Sheila did, in fact, have experience with guns.

As well as having grown up on the farm, she had attended at least one shooting trip and shooting party with her uncle and cousins when she had fired a gun at least once. Jeremy didn’t help himself when, after the prosecutor said he was just making everything up, he retaliated: “that’s what you’ve got to try and establish.”

After 17 days, Judge Maurice Drake did his summing up. Here’s a bit about it from Heidi Blake’s New Yorker article: “(H)e acknowledged that Sheila was ‘quite clearly a disturbed woman’ but said there was ‘certainly no evidence’ that she was in a psychotic state on the night of the murders. She was slender, making it ‘very unlikely indeed that she fought and overcame that tough farmer father,’ and her hands and feet were so clean as to make it ‘inconceivable’ that she had committed the killings. The paint on the silencer proved that it had been on the gun during the struggle in the kitchen, he went on, and experts said that the blood inside it was ‘overwhelmingly likely’ to be Sheila’s.”

The jury deliberated over the course of two days and sent a note to the Judge asking if the blood was definitely “a perfect match for Sheila”. Judge Drake told them that it did not match anyone else which helped them make up their minds. Just over 20 minutes later, they returned a 10-2 majority verdict that Jeremy Bamber was guilty of the murders.

Judge Drake sentenced him to life in prison with the words: “Your conduct in planning and carrying out the killing of five members of your family was evil, almost beyond belief.” A nation rejoiced, safe in the knowledge that an arrogant liar had been brought to justice and that an innocent victim’s name had been cleared. And that’s about as much as most people remember about Jeremy Bamber.

The smirks, the quirks, the cold-blooded murders and the scapegoating of his sister. Out of sight and out of mind, it might surprise the public to know that he’s very much still with us and is still claiming his innocence forty years later. And there’s a growing number of people who believe him.

Investigating the Investigation

Some people might be wondering why we’re even contemplating looking at the other side of this story, but once you’ve heard some of the things we’ll talk about, the phrase “beyond a reasonable doubt” will start looming large. We’ve invoked her name a lot already, but it was journalist Heidi Blake who really brought this back to public attention recently. While there have been campaigns and other articles about Jeremy’s possible innocence in the past, Blake’s 2024 New Yorker piece titled “Did the UK’s Most Infamous Family Massacre End in a Wrongful Conviction?” and 2025 deep-dive podcast titled “Blood Relatives”, reignited the debate with some bombshell revelations in the run-up to Jeremy’s latest appeal that was reviewed in 2025.

Let’s start with a couple of incidental things. Julie Mugford, Jeremy’s ex-girlfriend, was a key witness in the case. It was she who called the police, telling them that Jeremy had spoken about murdering his family on multiple occasions and had apparently been practicing for it by murdering rats.

If this is even true, he decided he wouldn’t be able to stomach it, so hired the moonlighting plumber to do it for him. The fact that the plumber had an alibi and no knowledge of guns appears to be neither here nor there when it came to her testimony. She painted Jeremy as a bitter, money-hungry man who had been violent towards her.

In his defence, Jeremy said that Julie was extremely upset that he’d broken up with her and made the whole story up. It was basically her word versus Jeremy’s at trial, but even the judge, who seemed extremely biased against Jeremy in his summing-up, warned jurors of the “possible motive she might have to tell lies.” He had also told them that they could convict Jeremy on her evidence alone, though, so maybe that tells us something about how messed up this case got.

Here’s what the jury didn’t know. Julie was 21 when she started seeing Jeremy and was reportedly “besotted” with him, making the break up even worse. When he’d ended it, she has admitted to saying “If you were dead, you’d always be with me” and trying to suffocate him with a pillow. That’s not even particularly important, that’s just a side note.

It was Julie’s call to the police that came out of the blue, a month after the funerals, that set Mike Ainsley on the path that ended in the conviction of Jeremy Bamber. And what did Julie Mugford get out of it? The satisfaction of having seen her former boyfriend put behind bars for life? Sure, but she also got her own criminal charges dropped and a sweet £25,000 from the News of the World.

About three weeks after her initial claims about Jeremy’s guilt, the assistant director of public prosecutions at the time sent a letter to Essex police chief constable John Walker stating: “With considerable hesitation I would suggest that Mugford be advised she will not be prosecuted in respect of these matters—burglary, cheque fraud and cannabis offences. Thereafter she will be called as a witness against Bamber.” Bamber’s legal team only found out about this in a trove of documents they received in 2011. Would this have affected the way the jury viewed Julie’s statements if they’d known how she was benefitting?

She got her money for a salacious interview with the News of the World that had been reliant on Jeremy’s guilty conviction. Apparently she sold this interview “immediately” following the trial and it ran with the headline “I Tried to Smother the Sleeping Bambi Beast.” This is a really weird tack to take as it sounds like Julie’s bragging that she tried to stop a murderer by killing him in advance, but there you go. The money she received is equivalent to nearly £76,000 today, and she bought a flat with it.

Let’s get another personal angle out of the way before really digging into the main issues. There was no doubt that Jeremy did not get on with his extended family, the Boutflours and the Eatons. Before he became the subject of police scrutiny, they became increasingly worried about the effect his inheritance would have over their own lives.

Jeremy’s cousin, Ann Eaton, lived on land that had been owned by Nevill. Ann had been hoping to move into Vaulty Manor when her grandmother, Mabel Speakman passed away, however, even before the shootings, Jeremy was telling them that his family might sell the land they were currently on and buy out the rest of Vaulty Manor with the proceeds. Cousin Ann was incensed by the turn of events.

According to Heidi Blake’s New Yorker piece: “She was so furious that she tore down all the wallpaper in her bathroom. ‘What Jeremy had told me was a threat,’ she said to police.”

Robert Boutflour, Ann’s father, was Jeremy’s uncle, having married into the family. He got his mother-in-law, Mabel Speakman, who was 95 at the time and in a very frail condition, to write Jeremy out of her will. When Mabel’s daughter, June Bamber, was killed, however, Jeremy was automatically entitled to half of Mabel’s estate as well as inheriting the land the Eatons were currently on.

Quite the pickle if you’ve got tension in the family. Quite the reasons to work the angle that maybe your sole living cousin did it for the money. Now, we’re not saying that the Boutflours and Eatons stitched Jeremy up on purpose.

But it is definitely possible that they were genuinely convinced of his guilt so all their statements in court were biased in that direction. Maybe tellingly, Jeremy didn’t have any character witnesses for his defence, so prosecution witnesses like Ann Eaton and Julie Mugford could more or less say what they wanted about him without anyone offering a counterbalance.

And on that same note, Colin Caffell, Sheila’s ex-husband gave a statement to police which was changed before the trial. Caffell handwrote a statement saying that Jeremy had sympathised with him, saying that Colin “had a rough deal all along, in respect of Sheila’s illness.” When this was typed up, it now read to say that Jeremy was saying he had had the rough deal, not Colin. Colin complained about this to Stan Jones who allegedly told him: “Whatever you do don’t say anything about it in the witness box.

It’ll cause all sorts of trouble.”

Going back to the extended family, let’s point out here that in the UK, convicted murderers cannot inherit from their victims, so once Jeremy was convicted, he lost all claim to the Bamber and Speakman estates, with the majority of it reverting to Pamela Boutflour, June’s sister. The worst fears of the Boutflours and Eatons were not realised and, in fact, Ann and Peter Eaton moved into White House Farm, the scene of a horrific family massacre, with their young children shortly after Jeremy went to prison. Not exactly a home filled with good memories, but Ann was happy with the move, writing: “I feel Auntie June & Uncle Nevill are here as well and are happy that we are here.”

In what is a really weird detail, when police went to visit the farm house in 2002 before one of Jeremy’s numerous appeals, the whole place was still largely as it had been in 1985. You would think that one might redecorate a tad, but according to Heidi Blake’s piece regarding the visit: “Searching for fresh evidence, they removed a section of carpet padding that was still soaked with blood.” This was 17 years later. Even I might have got around to changing the carpets by then.

And while we’re here, let’s take a little trip back in time to a wacky interlude provided by Jeremy’s uncle, Robert Boutflour, that we could title “Jeremy’s Big Adventure.” We talked about how the cousins became increasingly suspicious of Jeremy, which, to be fair, was pretty natural. They were not, I assume, plotting to purposefully frame him for a crime he did not commit.

They were just trying to follow their instincts in a case that they thought the police had failed to investigate thoroughly. Which they had. But back to Robert.

He became one of those people who get so fixated on one angle of a story that they will ignore all other aspects and bull-headedly continue with their train of thought, no matter how outlandish it seems. Robert put his ill-fitting detective hat on, pulled out his cracked magnifying glass and came up with some ideas that Blake calls “strikingly eccentric.” He recorded these in his diary.

According to Robert Boutflour, Jeremy had biked to the farm in a wetsuit and gloves. He had moved through the house, killing first Nevill, then June, the twins and finally Sheila. He shot them so many times to “make it look like the work of a maniac”.

He left the rifle with Sheila and exited out of the kitchen window, managing to wangle it closed behind him and cycling back to his cottage. At some point he washed the blood-soaked wetsuit off in the sea. The wearing of said wetsuit had also protected him from injuries during his fight with Nevill.

Now, a theory’s a theory, but this theory had several flaws. One, was that Jeremy didn’t have a wetsuit. He’d been windsurfing not long after the funerals, so Robert must have thought of that and had a eureka moment, but Jeremy had borrowed a friend’s wetsuit and this was weeks later, so he wouldn’t have had one at the time of the murders.

Apart from that, another major flaw was that Robert had gone so deep into the rabbithole that he even wrote down imagined conversations that had happened between Jeremy and his victims. He wrote that Jeremy said: “Wake up Sheila. Mummy wants you to say prayers with her.

Lie down here, darling. Put the Bible on your chest.” Fan fiction, anyone?

Robert had the audacity to take this to the police but thankfully they laughed him out of the station.

But wait. Once Julie Mugford made her statements about Jeremy having talked about and planned the murders, the investigation shifted into looking at him as a suspect and the new head of the investigation, Mike Ainsley, asked for a copy of Robert Boutflour’s diary entry. He appeared to take it very seriously indeed, dispatching investigators to chase down leads and noticing that the Bible in the crime scene photos was propped at an unnatural angle, mirroring what Robert had written about.

As we can tell from these scant examples so far, the investigation had not been all that rigorous or even based on real leads or facts. The cousins had beef with Jeremy, Julie Mugford had beef with Jeremy plus incentives and who knows what Robert was thinking.

Anyway, with these personal biases out of the way, let’s get into the real crux of the case—the silencer. Really there are two issues with this piece of evidence. Number one—was the silencer even on the rifle during the shootings? Number two—the blood evidence found inside the gun that said it was Sheila’s. Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen, because this small tube of metal that has kept a man in prison for over four decades is not anywhere as near a slam dunk as the jury and the public thought.

First off, the whole issue is weird. After shooting five people and staging the murder, why would Jeremy have shoved the silencer in a cupboard? Why wouldn’t he have chucked it in the sea when he washed off the wetsuit or buried it somewhere or done just about anything else? It seems a huge oversight for an otherwise allegedly well-planned crime. Putting that aside, there are a myriad of other issues.

Let’s start with the chain of custody. The Eatons and Boutflours allegedly found the silencer, also referred to as a moderator during the trial, when they were poking through the White House farm house on the 10th of August, just a couple of days after the murders. Police had supposedly also looked in this cupboard but hadn’t found it. Strangely, Ann had noted in her diary that they had told police about it in a meeting on the 9th.

Farm secretary Barbara Wilson was present when the cousins found the silencer on the 10th, but had gone to the house at their request and had the feeling at the time that the discovery had been re-staged for her to witness. The cousins have denied this. Maybe Ann just got her dates mixed up.

Instead of leaving it where they found it and calling police, the cousins took it back to Ann’s house where they all had a good old look at it around the kitchen table, then kept it in a wardrobe for two days before the police came to collect it. Detective Sergeant Stan Jones came to pick it up, put it in a paper-towel tube and had a large amount of whiskey with Peter Eaton. He drove back to the police station and put the tube in his desk instead of logging it into evidence.

The next day he gave it to Detective Inspector Ron Cook, unfortunately more on whom later. Heidi Blake writes: “Both officers noticed a gray hair caught in the muzzle end of the silencer—but by the time Cook took it to the forensics lab this bit of evidence had been lost. Nonetheless, the hair was described to the jury as an indication that the silencer had been used to strike Nevill on the head.”

I think we can see the problem here. That hair could have been picked up anywhere—at the farmhouse, the Eaton’s house, the back of Jones’s car, his desk, etc. The evidence was not correctly preserved and had been compromised to such a degree that it was probably useless.

And this wasn’t even the end of it. While tests were done to confirm the blood was human, the silencer was then returned to Ron Cook who did something with it for seventeen days but no-one knows what because he kept no records of where it was. One thing he did was dust it for prints—a futile exercise given how many people had touched it—but apparently he didn’t even find one good one.

We assume the silencer was used in the crime because, when using the rifle to shoot rabbits, the silencer was usually attached. Jeremy says he went out to shoot rabbits, then left the gun in the kitchen. If he’d put it in the case, he would have removed the silencer as it wouldn’t fit in otherwise.

If he’d left it out, he likely would have left the silencer on. It’s not clear which of these he did. Let’s also note that even without the silencer, the gun was pretty quiet as it used subsonic ammunition.

There wouldn’t have been loud bangs when it was fired, so other people hearing the noise was unlikely and the twins hopefully slept through it. Red paint flakes that could be seen with the naked eye were found on the silencer, and scratches on the kitchen hearth led to the assumption that there was a struggle between Nevill and Jeremy for the rifle, which got scratched by hitting the underside of the mantlepiece. Fine.

Red paint was found in the initial testing done, but it was tested again later, after it had been in Ron Cook’s possession for over two weeks. Heidi Blake reports:

“Later, the silencer was returned to the forensics lab, and scientists noticed a piece of tape covered with paint flakes stuck to the barrel. They were told that Cook had placed it there to protect the silencer during his fingerprint tests. Nine layers of paint were then removed from the silencer’s knurled end, containing not only red but also blue, green, white, and gray flakes, all of which matched those recovered from the hearth. Yet the records of the earlier laboratory examination make no mention of any flakes of multicolored paint.”

What was going on with the thing? When Heidi Blake started looking through all the documentation for this case, she saw that during the 17 days Ron had sole custody of the silencer, he’d gone back to White House farm. This is also when the scratches were found. By him.

So, when the silencer was first examined, there was a tiny bit of red paint on it. Then it disappeared for nearly 3 weeks, only to be returned to the lab with tape and lots more paint flakes on it. Ron Cook’s nickname at the force at the time was “Bumbling Ron”, with colleagues referring to him as a “nightmare” and he plays another starring role later on. For now, I think we can agree that as far as evidence goes, the silencer has been mightily screwed up.

But there was evidence of blood on it, a “considerable quantity” it was said at trial. It was tested and that’s when we found out that the blood was Sheila’s, correct? No. The judge specifically told the jury that the blood could not belong to anybody but Sheila.

Because of that, they quickly found Jeremy guilty by a majority decision. But the testing done at the time could only reveal the blood type, or group, and while Sheila belonged in this group, so did 8% of the population, including old uncle Robert Boutflour. A hunter himself, he would have been very familiar with rifles and silencers.

According to a 2026 piece for The Guardian, Simon Hattenstone wrote: “Essex police announced that they had found a ‘heavily bloodstained silencer hours after the gruesome massacre’ at a press conference on 16 September 1985. This was reported in at least a dozen newspapers, including on the front page of the Daily Mirror. The police now claim they never said this.”

In reality, the amount of blood was very small, the silencer was not covered in it, it was a tiny amount found between two parts. Despite this, a ballistics expert for the prosecution testified that it had been spatter from the shot to Sheila’s neck and the only other way it could have got inside the silencer would be by someone “dripping it very carefully inside.”

Now, we know nobody could have done that, right? Well, here’s another weird detail involving Ann Eaton. When she’d first gone to the farm house, she found a pair of Sheila’s bloody underwear soaking in a bucket.

Presumably Sheila had had her period and was trying to get the stains out. The police hadn’t done anything with them so instead of, I don’t know, just leaving them there, Ann put the underwear in a bag and took them home. Then for some reason she mentioned the period pants to Mike Ainslie, the lead investigator, who said she “could be accused of contaminating the silencer.”

Ann was later found to have written: “he told me that when it comes to the trial, they, the defence, will allege that I put the blood inside the silencer, and that Sheila’s underwear could be a source of that blood. I must point out that I had never thought of that possibility, and I certainly did not plant blood of any description inside the silencer, and to my knowledge, neither did any other member of my family.” Luckily for Ann, this extremely concerning alternate source of Sheila’s blood in a location where the silencer was known to have gone i.e.

Ann’s house, was never brought up at trial.

In 2001, when testing was more established, a DNA test was run on the silencer and while at least two other profiles were found which have never been identified, Sheila’s was not. They couldn’t test her blood again, though, because that and other physical evidence had been accidentally, allegedly, destroyed in 1996 by a police officer who thought the case was closed.

When looking at the documents released in 2011, Heidi Blake also noticed that early tests on the silencer had also found another blood sample whose type didn’t match Robert Boutflour or Sheila. It did match David Boutflour, though, Robert’s son and Sheila and Jeremy’s cousin. When interviewed by Blake about this, David was extremely open in that he could have easily got his DNA on it when the family were examining it at Ann’s house.

When quizzed whether he could have cut himself, he said “I did screw it. I tried to turn it quite hard.” This brings up yet another point of contention.

The Eatons, Boutflours and Bambers were all used to hunting rabbits and birds and having various firearms around, so there was also more than one silencer in the mix and, in fact, David had one that was the same as the one allegedly attached to the murder weapon. In his interview with Blake, David makes a never-before-heard admission. Here’s a quote from her New Yorker article:

“Bamber’s team has repeatedly raised suspicions that the police seized two silencers, suggesting that the jury was misled with evidence conflated from separate devices. The police and the prosecution have always denied those suggestions—despite records that appear to show silencers with two different reference numbers passing through the forensics lab. David said during the trial that the police had not seized his silencer, but now he told me that they had in fact taken it away, for ‘months and months.’”

Here’s another angle that didn’t come up at the trial. In 2025 or 2026, the Guardian commissioned the president of the European Council of Legal and Forensic Medicine, Professor Jason Payne-James, to take a look at the crime scene photos of Sheila. Here’s his conclusion: “The pattern imprint on the skin is not large enough to suggest that a silencer was used, either at very close range or in contact with her body.

These are close-range bullet holes, and the nature of the moderator or silencer is such that you’d expect some form of pattern imprint equivalent to the diameter of the silencer if it was used in contact or at very close range.” So there you go. Payne-James’s opinion states that the silencer was not used.

Therefore the silencer found in the cupboard had nothing to do with the crime and should not have been entered as evidence that the jury convicted Jeremy on.

Moving on, it’s time for “Bumbling” Ron Cook to make another calamitous cameo. According to an eyewitness account from former crime scene investigator Neil Davidson, when they were in the main bedroom after the murders, Ron Cook had picked up the Bible, closed and re-opened it to try and find the correct page and placed it back by Sheila’s body. This was before any photos of the scene had been taken.

Davidson told Heidi Blake: “As I recall it, he lifted the Bible up, had a look at it, and then he said, ‘we better put it back how it was’.” It wasn’t just Davidson saying this, either. Members of the tactical firearms team also noted that they remembered the Bible being in a different place when they entered the room, Sheila’s waist, as opposed to what the photographs later showed—Sheila’s shoulder.

So it didn’t look staged because Jeremy had staged it. It looked staged because a police officer had moved it. I suppose we could still say that Jeremy had staged it first, but Ron touching it blows most of its evidentiary value out of the water.

The firearms team also thought Sheila’s body position and the gun position had changed between them entering and what the photographs showed.

Yikes. So here’s the scenario presented by the prosecution. Jeremy takes his gun with the silencer on it, shoots Nevill upstairs then follows him downstairs and fights with him where the silencer sustains some knocks and scratches the fireplace. Jeremy goes back upstairs, shoots June and the twins, then gets Sheila to go into her parents room, shoots her in the neck, then under the chin and removes the silencer to make it look like a suicide.

Or he takes it off before shooting her under the chin—either way. He then puts the Bible next to her, puts the rifle on her chest, puts the silencer in a cupboard and leaves the house.

Here’s an alternate scenario from all the things that have been uncovered since the trial. This is just speculation, obviously, think of it as Robert Boutflour’s diary entry but from the other side. Sheila has a psychotic episode and grabs the loaded gun that’s in the kitchen.

She shoots her father and mother in their beds. Nevill staggers downstairs but is badly wounded so either is injured by falling into things or tries to wrestle Sheila but she is able to overpower him and shoots him again. In this scenario the silencer is not attached.

She then kills her mother if she hadn’t died from the original attack, shoots her sons, possibly to, in her mind, spare them from being separated from her. She may have washed herself after this which can’t be ruled out as no sinks or showers were tested for gunshot residue or blood. She maybe wanders around for a while, then when the police turn up she tries to shoot herself but doesn’t quite manage it the first time but has enough strength to try again.

The Bible forms part of the religious delusions she was having and it falls to the floor or she intentionally lies beside it. She has clean feet because, according to the files released in 2011, some socks covered in June’s blood were found next to her. When the police enter the room, Ron Cook moves the Bible and the gun before official photos are taken, making them look a little out of place.

Well, we don’t have to imagine that part. The Boutflours then allegedly find a silencer that had nothing to do with the crime. Ron Cook gets it and, when the investigation starts looking at Jeremy, returns to the crime scene and whacks it around the fireplace a few times, either reenacting something or, who knows, making sure the prosecution will have a decent story.

He’d already chucked out all the bloodstained carpet and bedding so maybe was scrambling to find more convincing evidence of a murder. Another silencer is confiscated as part of the investigation and the two get muddled up, making it impossible to know whose DNA is on what and if Sheila’s blood was on either in the first place.

While neither story is airtight, we know that so many mistakes were made, the official sequence of events must be open to question.

The Nick Milbank Sidebar

Here’s another weird little thing. When police were outside White House farm, they thought at first that there was movement inside i.e. Sheila was still alive and armed.

At trial when this was mentioned, the police decided it must have been a “trick of the light”. But what if there had still been someone alive inside? If they were moving, this had to have been Sheila, the shooter.

All the other victims were judged to have died almost instantly from their wounds and this was hours after the police had first been called. During her investigation, Heidi Blake found a record of an Essex police officer called Nicholas Milbank who had taken over the monitoring of an open telephone line to the farmhouse during the night of the murders in 1985. The statement, which had a typewritten signature, not a handwritten one, stated that he had heard nothing over the line until police entered.

What seems to have happened is that Nevill called Jeremy, then the phone was left off the hook until an operator took over, who then transferred it to the police station and Nicholas Milbank.

However, there are also records from Scotland Yard indicating that at 6.09am, there was a “999 call made from White House Farm.” If this was the case, someone inside made the call and it couldn’t have been Jeremy or the police as they were all still waiting outside. Was Milbank hearing the open line from Nevill’s call or a direct call from the house?

Unfortunately, this is too deeply shrouded in mystery to come to any definite conclusion. Milbank told Heidi Blake that he had heard signs of movement over the line, indicating that somebody was “obviously” still alive. Nobody had spoken to him about this since the 80s and he was sure he hadn’t signed that original statement as he always used his initials in his signature, not his full first name.

Apparently, it took around 30 minutes for the police to find Sheila’s body after they’d entered the house and blood was described as “leaking” from her mouth. No examination was done for rigor mortis or body temperature, so it seems possible that she might have killed herself while the police were outside or starting to enter the house. They had to break the door down, so a couple of subsonic shots would easily get lost in the mix.

When Heidi Blake sent Milbank a copy of the statement he supposedly signed in 2002, he confirmed he had no recollection of it and pointed out many issues with it that made it seem like a forged document. After that, though, he went quiet and Essex police seem to have tried to cover the whole thing up. Milbank released a statement disavowing any contact with Heidi Blake, which was easy to disprove as she had many records of their conversations and he had previously been fine with her using his information for a podcast.

There was also a different version of his 2002 statement that suddenly appeared with the apparent correct signature on it, but the handwriting was different and his surname was spelled wrong. Unfortunately, before any more of this could be worked out, Nick Milbank died, taking potential evidence of Jeremy’s innocence with him to the grave.

Other Loose Ends

So let’s talk about all of Jeremy’s suspicious actions around and after the murders. He partied. He put the dog down. He tried to sell valuables from the house and nudes of Sheila.

He put on fake displays of emotion for the cameras. Well. While some of these things are pretty unsavoury, they can be explained by several things. Jeremy was 24 and fairly unserious.

His world had been turned upside down and he had no idea how to react. He was also taking valium and who knows what else. He said that after the murders, the dog, a Shih-Tzu called Crispy who was found under the bed, was completely disturbed and kept biting people so Jeremy had to have him put down.

Regarding the photos of Sheila, he agrees this was “just stupid” and said he’d been drinking and taking valium when talking to a reporter. Sheila had been a model for a brief period but this was long in her past by the time of the shootings, even though she was referred to as a “model” and “top model” by the media. He also tells Heidi Blake: “But I also justify in my own head, I must have been feeling really angry at Sheila—having just killed everyone, killed herself, and ruined my life.”

There was also a mystery about why Nevill had allegedly called Jeremy and not the police when Sheila first got hold of the gun. Jeremy says that Sheila had been mentally unwell for a long time and the family were used to dealing with it themselves and his dad would have wanted to keep the whole thing under wraps. When asked why he didn’t call 999, Jeremy says that he thought at the time it would be more efficient to just call the local station directly instead.

He had to look up the number but didn’t realise that Sheila was on such a rampage. He drove slowly as he was anxious and also didn’t want to arrive before the police because he didn’t really know what to do.

Regarding selling off all the valuables, he admits that he did take things out of the house because he’d seen his cousins doing the same and wanted to grab what bits he could so they couldn’t get them. It was actually Nevill Bamber’s accountant who had requested a meeting with Jeremy and who set up the appraisals.

While there are reports from some police from the time who didn’t believe he was genuinely sad, there are plenty of others who reported him crying, retching and generally not being suspicious at all. Friends said things like: “He looked shattered. His eyes were popping out of his head.” While he did go out drinking, it was at other peoples’ request and for the most part he just sat there quietly.

As far as his public-viewed persona as a master manipulator, psychiatric tests done on Jeremy over the years have consistently found this not to be the case, with even his less attractive traits all falling within a normal range. One report concluded: “It is hard to sustain the view that Jeremy Bamber is so expert in deceptive self-presentation as to maintain this front over a variety of different assessors, different assessment instruments, and different times.”

So called body-language experts have picked apart photos of Jeremy from the funeral, saying things like his mouth is not in a natural shape, or his eyes weren’t soft enough to be experiencing real sadness. These people are going off a couple of press photos which are just snapshots, a millisecond or two of what Jeremy’s face was doing during the funerals of his parents and sister, so I don’t think we need to give them much attention.

People also repeatedly mentioned Jeremy smiling in a creepy or smug way, often at inappropriate times when they believed he should have been 100% distraught, 100% of the time. He told Heidi Blake in interviews that if he was smiling at people, for example when he was arrested, it was to try and reassure people who he thought were on his side, that he was ok and was coping alright. I mean, that’s what a sociopath would say but it’s also a believable answer.

And, well, Jeremy just has a bit of a creepy smile. He was and still is, a bit of an odd duck, prone to saying off-colour things and enjoying bending people out of shape but Jeremy was having quite the good old time as a 24 year old, so transitioning to being behind bars for the rest of his life probably affected his personal development somewhat. And being a bit of a dick does not mean you are a mass murderer.

We’ve largely left Sheila out of this but let’s bring her back in now. The press depicted her as a fragile young woman, not strong enough to fight with her father and not capable of harming her twins. The fact is, Sheila had had many breakdowns and friends had reported being scared of what she could do.

Sheila herself had always worried she would hurt her sons and they had been taken out of her care for a year to live with Colin Caffell when they were toddlers. She had a bad relationship with her mother, June, especially with them both skewing very religious, and in the weeks before the killings, Sheila had started showing signs of entering a psychotic episode, with witnesses noting she wasn’t caring for herself and was agitated and distant. Talk of her parents taking charge of her sons, which was confirmed by farm secretary Barbara Wilson, might have worsened her spiral and we also know she hadn’t been given her full dosage of medication that last month.

Documents released years after the trial include some written by Sheila in what Heidi Blake describes as “pages of chaotic scrawl”. They didn’t have any dates on them so it’s unclear how close to the murders they were written, but they include lines like: “As soon as the dirt is dug up and the public no then my Darling Mummy will my Babys and me go to our rest.” And: “Oh Mummy don’t you think I have feelings also in this floating space I am in”. Heartbreaking, and also a huge red flag as to Sheila’s mental state.

Let’s look at the bigger picture for a second. If you remove the blood evidence from the picture, Jeremy Bamber was convicted on nothing more than a spurned lover’s testimony and the fact that his relatives didn’t like him. There were enough cops with tunnel-vision or making really dumb mistakes that if this case was put forward correctly today, there doesn’t really seem like there is enough evidence to convict Jeremy Bamber.

Jeremy Bamber Today

Jeremy appealed immediately after his sentencing but it took almost two years for the appeal application to even be heard and it was then dismissed. He did get another chance in 1989 where his lawyer argued that as well as Julie Mugford’s testimony being suspect, the judge had been biased against Jeremy in his summing up and had put his personal theories into his instruction to the jurors. A few days later, this appeal was also denied.

During the 1990s, Jeremy and his legal team kept busy trying to obtain information from the investigation and get his appeals heard, despite roadblocks from the Essex police force and the Home Office. In 1996 it was reported that evidence from the trial had been accidentally destroyed. This included the blood evidence that could have been used for future DNA testing. In 1997, Jeremy’s case was passed to the newly established Criminal Cases Review Commission who referred it back to the Court of Appeal in 2001.

In 2002, three judges confirmed that Jeremy’s guilty verdict should be upheld.

In 2008, Jeremy appealed against his whole-life tariff, now known as a whole-life order, which meant he would never have a chance of parole. He lost this appeal in 2009 but tried again by appealing to the European Court of Human Rights in 2013. This court did confirm that whole life terms with no prospect of release can constitute inhuman and degrading treatment, therefore contravening the human rights act.

However, because there are “exceptional grounds” under which prisoners under these sentences could be released, it has been established that UK whole-life sentences are technically compatible with the rights convention. No harm, no foul, sorry Jeremy, you’ll have to try harder than that.

Well, he did carry on trying with his team lobbying the Criminal Cases Review Commission between 2009 and 2011, only for the application to appeal being rejected again for lack of new evidence. There was a bit of an oopsie in 2013 when it was revealed that one of his lawyers wasn’t actually a lawyer and that man was himself jailed for 14 years for fraud.

Hundreds of thousands of documents were released to his team in 2011 and after the New Yorker published Blake’s article in July 2024, Jeremy’s legal team were hopeful that all the new revelations brought up in public would finally lead to an appeal when they petitioned the CCRC again. Unfortunately though, they were once again denied. It seems that the CCRC contacted the New Yorker to ask for its sources, which they declined to give as, you know, most journalists with any integrity will protect their sources.

What the CCRC could easily do, however, was contact the many people named in the article directly as they were the sources. Which they never did. Neil Davidson who had witnessed Ron Cook moved the bible to a position that swayed the jury’s opinion—not contacted.

David Boutflour who confirmed he could have contaminated the silencer—not contacted. Nick Milbank who could have received a call from the house which confirmed Sheila was still alive inside—not contacted.

They didn’t really do anything, just went back over the established facts with the new ones and didn’t think there was enough doubt to move forward with the appeal. When it comes to the chain of custody of the silencer, the most crucial piece of evidence, we know that multiple people handled it, it was treated roughly and had different things on it every time it went to the lab. According to the CCRC though, this was not “relevant to the factual matrix in this case”. Not sure what this “factual matrix” is, exactly, as it wasn’t even proven that Sheila’s blood was inside it.

The fact that David Boutflour had confirmed his DNA could easily be one it was noted as: “the comments appear flippant and suggest that David Boutflour was frustrated by the journalists’ questions and did not take them seriously.” They never asked him personally about it, just read his words. Maybe they should have listened to the podcast as it’s difficult to judge how flippant things are from the printed word.

Regarding the moving of the Bible by Bumbling Ron, the CCRC said: “the apparent statement by former DS Davidson that DI Cook picked up and then incorrectly repositioned the Bible, if accurate, does not, in the CCRC’s conclusion, change the previous understanding of the crime scene to such a degree that it is possible to conclude that the jury might have reached a different verdict if they had known of it.” Does anyone beg to differ? This was a huge reveal, as the supposed staging of the scene was one of the only pointers of guilt in Jeremy’s direction. Let’s remember that there was no physical evidence of him being there and he had no wounds or blood on him.

Regarding the whole Nick Milbank phone call—the Essex police investigated it, not the CCRC. Milbank was still a police officer at the time he died and it could be considered a conflict of interest that the party accused of hiding this evidence decades ago was the party later charged with investigating it.

Jeremy Bamber can apply to the CCRC any time new evidence emerges, but there’s probably not much left to find and it seems difficult to believe they’ll change their minds in the future after all the previous times they’ve denied him.

For some people, Jeremy Bamber is the personification of evil and his continued claim of innocence is just another tack he’s using to antagonise them. His cousin, Ann Eaton, wouldn’t talk to Heidi Blake but did give her a typed statement which said: “Jeremy Bamber has caused so much grief and pain to this family that we find it almost impossible to deal with and rarely speak about it. He continues to try and cause pain to the family from the safety of his cell.”

Mike Oliver, who carried out the investigation into the Milbank call said: “Bamber will continue to make spurious allegations until the day he dies.”

Has the system failed Jeremy Bamber? Would a change in his sentence be too big a blow to the establishment? If they got it wrong in so big a case, how many other cans of worms could it open? We can’t prove absolutely that Jeremy Bamber is innocent, nor are we necessarily saying that he is. But in court, you just have to prove guilt, and in this, one of the most famous cases in modern UK history, most of that alleged “proof” of Jeremy’s guilt has not stood the test of time.

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Key Takeaways

• Jeremy Bamber was convicted in 1986 for murdering five family members at White House Farm, after initially blaming his mentally ill sister Sheila.
• Key evidence included a silencer with Sheila’s blood type and ex-girlfriend Julie Mugford’s testimony, but both have faced serious credibility challenges.
• The silencer’s chain of custody was severely compromised: found by biased relatives, improperly stored, and possibly contaminated with paint and DNA from multiple sources.
• Police officer Ron Cook moved the Bible before crime scene photos were taken, undermining prosecution claims that Jeremy staged the scene.
• Recent forensic analysis suggests no silencer was used on Sheila, and a possible 999 call from the farmhouse indicates she may have been alive when police arrived.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happened at White House Farm on August 7, 1985?

In the early hours of August 7, 1985, five people were found dead at White House Farm in Essex, England: Nevill Bamber (61), June Bamber (61), their daughter Sheila Caffell (28), and Sheila’s twin six-year-old sons Daniel and Nicholas. Everyone had received multiple gunshot wounds at close range except Sheila, who had two gunshot wounds (one to the neck, one beneath her chin). Sheila was found with a rifle and Bible next to her, open to Psalms with ‘Save me from blood guiltiness’ underlined in a red smear. Initially, it was determined that Sheila, who had schizophrenia, had murdered her family before killing herself.

Why did suspicion shift from Sheila to Jeremy Bamber?

Suspicion shifted to Jeremy Bamber due to his behavior after the murders, which was considered inappropriate for a bereaved person. He was booking holidays, partying with friends, selling his parents’ possessions, putting the family dog down, and offering nude photos of Sheila to newspapers. Photos and videos showed what appeared to be fake grief. A tip-off from ex-girlfriend Julie Mugford, who claimed Jeremy had told her he was planning to kill his family, led to his arrest on September 29, 1985.

What was the silencer evidence and why was it significant?

The silencer (also called a moderator) was found by cousins David Boutflour and Ann Eaton under a box of ammunition in a cupboard under the stairs at White House Farm. It was significant because if the rifle had a silencer attached, Sheila could not have used it to kill herself—it would have been too long for her to reach the trigger. The silencer had what appeared to be blood on it and paint flakes matching the kitchen hearth. This suggested someone else had committed the murders, removed the silencer, and staged the scene to look like suicide.

What problems have been identified with the silencer evidence?

Multiple problems with the silencer evidence have been identified: (1) The chain of custody was severely compromised—cousins took it home for two days before police collected it, and Detective Sergeant Stan Jones put it in his desk rather than logging it into evidence; (2) Detective Inspector Ron Cook had sole custody for 17 days with no records of where it was, during which time additional paint flakes appeared that weren’t noted in initial examinations; (3) A gray hair found in it was lost before testing; (4) Early blood tests could only determine blood type, not DNA—Sheila’s blood type matched 8% of the population including Robert Boutflour; (5) In 2001 DNA testing found at least two other unidentified profiles but not Sheila’s; (6) David Boutflour admitted his DNA could be on it and that police had seized his own identical silencer for months; (7) Professor Jason Payne-James concluded in 2025-2026 that crime scene photos showed no pattern imprint from a silencer on Sheila’s body, indicating it wasn’t used.

What was Julie Mugford’s role in the case and what issues surround her testimony?

Julie Mugford, Jeremy’s ex-girlfriend, was a key prosecution witness who testified that Jeremy had planned to kill his family and had hired a hitman (later disproven— the named plumber had an alibi). Issues with her testimony include: (1) She came forward a month after the murders following their breakup, during which she had tried to suffocate Jeremy with a pillow and told him ‘If you were dead, you’d always be with me’; (2) She received immunity from prosecution for burglary, cheque fraud and cannabis offences in exchange for testifying; (3) She was paid £25,000 (equivalent to nearly £76,000 today) by News of the World for a post-trial interview; (4) The jury was warned of her ‘possible motive she might have to tell lies’ but was also told they could convict on her evidence alone.

What did police officer Ron Cook do that compromised the crime scene evidence?

According to former crime scene investigator Neil Davidson, Detective Inspector Ron Cook picked up the Bible found next to Sheila’s body, closed and re-opened it to find the correct page, and placed it back by her shoulder before any photos were taken. Members of the tactical firearms team also remembered the Bible being at Sheila’s waist when they entered, not her shoulder as shown in photographs. This compromised the prosecution’s theory that Jeremy had staged the scene. Cook also had unrecorded custody of the silencer for 17 days, during which additional paint evidence appeared, and he was nicknamed ‘Bumbling Ron’ by colleagues.

What was the Nick Milbank phone call controversy?

Essex police officer Nicholas Milbank monitored an open telephone line to the farmhouse during the night of the murders. His typed statement (with a typewritten signature, not his usual handwritten initials) said he heard nothing until police entered. However, Scotland Yard records indicated a 999 call was made from White House Farm at 6:09am—when only someone inside could have made it, as Jeremy and police were still outside.

Milbank told Heidi Blake he had heard signs of movement indicating someone was ‘obviously’ still alive, and that he hadn’t signed the original statement. When sent a copy in 2002, he pointed out issues suggesting it was forged. He later disavowed contact with Blake (disprovable), and a different version of his statement appeared with apparent correct signature but wrong handwriting and misspelled surname.

Milbank died before this could be resolved.

What was Sheila Caffell’s mental health history?

Sheila Caffell had severe mental illness including paranoid schizophrenia with religious delusions. After her twins were born, she became extremely fearful she would hurt them and was hospitalized at St. Andrew’s Hospital when the boys were four. She heard voices of God, thought she was being chased by the devil, called herself the Virgin Mary or Joan of Arc, and had violent outbursts where she accused people of trying to kill her.

She frequently skipped her anti-psychotic medication and also used cocaine and marijuana. In the weeks before the murders, witnesses noted she was agitated, distant, not caring for herself, and had convinced her doctor to give her only half her usual medication dosage. Documents with undated ‘chaotic scrawl’ included lines like ‘As soon as the dirt is dug up and the public no then my Darling Mummy will my Babys and me go to our rest.‘

What was the outcome of Jeremy Bamber’s legal appeals?

Jeremy Bamber’s immediate appeal was dismissed after almost two years. A 1989 appeal arguing judge bias and unreliable testimony was also denied. In 1997 the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) referred his case to the Court of Appeal, which upheld his conviction in 2002.

He lost appeals against his whole-life order in 2009 and at the European Court of Human Rights in 2013. CCRC applications in 2009-2011 and after Heidi Blake’s 2024 New Yorker article were both rejected. The 2024 rejection was criticized for: not contacting key sources named in the article (Neil Davidson, David Boutflour, Nick Milbank); dismissing chain of custody issues as not ‘relevant to the factual matrix’; judging David Boutflour’s comments as ‘flippant’ without interviewing him; and finding that Ron Cook moving the Bible wouldn’t have changed the jury’s verdict.

What potential motive did extended family members have to suspect or incriminate Jeremy Bamber?

Extended family members (the Boutflours and Eatons) had property and inheritance tensions with Jeremy. Ann Eaton lived on land owned by Nevill and hoped to move into Vaulty Manor when her grandmother Mabel Speakman died, but Jeremy had threatened that his family might sell that land. When June Bamber was killed, Jeremy became automatically entitled to half of Mabel’s estate and would inherit the Eatons’ land. Robert Boutflour got Mabel to write Jeremy out of her will before the murders.

After Jeremy’s conviction, he couldn’t inherit, and the majority of estates reverted to Pamela Boutflour (June’s sister), with Ann and Peter Eaton moving into White House Farm. Ann Eaton wrote: ‘I feel Auntie June & Uncle Nevill are here as well and are happy that we are here.’ Colin Caffell’s police statement was also altered before trial to make Jeremy appear more self-pitying.

Sources

• Original Casual Criminalist video: The Family Massacre That England Got Wrong
• Hero image source by JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ, M.D. / openverse, by-sa.

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