The new evidence raising questions about Jeremy Bamber’s conviction

After nearly 40 years, an investigation by The New Yorker into the safety of Bamber’s conviction has brought it back into headlines

There are murder cases that fade away once the crime is solved, ultimately remembered only by a handful of family and friends of the deceased. Then there are those that linger in the public imagination, spawning television mini-series, books, podcasts and forensic journalistic revisitings even decades later. The murders at White House Farm in 1985 fall comfortably in this category. 
The story is a gruesome one, packed with ingredients guaranteed to keep it alive years after the delivery of a guilty verdict. It begins in a Georgian farmhouse in the Essex village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy, where Nevill and June Bamber, 61, their adoptive daughter Sheila Caffell, 26, and her six-year-old twins Daniel and Nicholas were found dead with gunshot wounds in the early hours of August 7, halfway through the Eighties. 
The only surviving immediate relative was Nevill and June’s adoptive son, Jeremy Bamber, then 24. Bamber was convicted in a trial in 1986 of murdering all five. Almost four decades later, he continues to protest his innocence from behind bars. He claims that Caffell, who suffered from schizophrenia, shot her family before turning the gun on herself. A tireless campaign by Bamber’s supporters to have him exonerated has helped keep his hopes alive from the outside.
Now, a new twist comes in a case that has repeatedly returned to the headlines. This week, The New Yorker magazine published a 17,000-word investigation into the infamous saga, raising fresh questions about the safety of Bamber’s conviction and a leading legal expert comparing the case to the Post Office scandal in terms of the alleged miscarriage of justice involved. 
In the aftermath of the murders, Bamber wasn’t immediately suspected. Detectives believed the case was a clear-cut murder-suicide by Caffell, a model known as Bambi. She was found with her father’s rifle across her body, her fingers by the trigger. The weapon was pointed towards a gunshot wound on her chin. Beside her, a Bible lay open, bloodstained and with a line underscored in red: “Save me from bloodguiltiness”.
It was her brother Bamber who alerted the police, calling them at 3.36am to report that his father had called him to say, “Your sister has gone crazy and has the gun”. 
But a month later, Bamber’s girlfriend Julie Mugford told police he had been planning the killings for more than a year. His adoptive parents were wealthy, presiding over a local farming dynasty, and Mugford claimed Bamber wanted the money. 
Her testimony wasn’t the only evidence used to convict him. A key part of the prosecution’s case centred on a silencer for the murder weapon, found in a cupboard three days after the massacre. It was said to bear traces of Caffell’s blood. The trial heard that her wounds would have prevented her from placing it in the cupboard before she died. The logical conclusion: she could not have killed herself.
Handing Bamber a life sentence for the murders, the judge described him as “warped and evil beyond belief”. In 1994 he was told he would never be released from prison.
Bamber has repeatedly challenged his conviction, arguing that crucial information has been withheld. It has been the subject of several appeals and reviews, all of which have upheld the verdict. 
But The New Yorker piece has brought to light several pieces of information that Bamber’s supporters hope will make a difference. One is the question of the 999 call – or calls. Scotland Yard records suggested Bamber’s had not been the only one, but that a second call to police was made at 6.09am from inside the house. By this time, Bamber was outside the house with officers. The obvious implication: that someone in the house was still alive at this time. 
Essex Police later produced a statement in the name of an officer called Nicholas Milbank, which made no mention of any 999 call at that time. But when The New Yorker spoke to Milbank recently, he said a call had indeed come in at 6.09am from “inside the farmhouse”, though the caller hadn’t spoken to him. He told the magazine he had never made the statement that was put out in his name.
“This clearly exonerates Jeremy completely because he was outside the farm and that call can only have been made by Sheila,” says Philip Walker, a spokesman for Bamber and member of the Jeremy Bamber Innocence Campaign. “If that 999 call happened, there’s no question he’s not guilty”. 
Another revelation comes from Det Sup Neil Davidson, who was deputy to the late Det Insp Ron Cook, the lead crime-scene officer. While the bodies were being examined at the farmhouse, Cook “lifted the Bible up and had a look at it,” said Davidson. He said he remembered Cook had been “fumbling” with it, before asking which page it had been open on, then replacing it by Sheila’s body before the crime scene photographs were taken. In Davidson’s words, the aim had been to “re-create what we just screwed up.”
At Bamber’s last appeal, a Court of Appeal justice said that for an “officer to disturb the scene is a moral sin.” Bamber reportedly hopes that new evidence suggesting such a disturbance might have occurred will provide grounds for another re-examination of the case.
“Whether Sheila had handled [the Bible] was quite a contentious issue at trial and it’s now proven that what was presented to the jury wasn’t accurate,” Walker said. “That [is] very important.”
There are also question marks hanging over the murder weapon’s silencer, which was found by some of Bamber’s relatives. At the end of his trial, the jury reached their verdict just 21 minutes after asking the judge to clarify if the blood on it was a “perfect match” for Sheila. They had been assured it did not match anyone else. 
The case files, it has transpired, cast some doubt over this as they show there had in fact been another match. Days before the trial, scientists discovered June’s brother-in-law, Robert Boutflour, had the same blood type as Sheila. He denied touching the silencer before the family handed it to the police, but he wasn’t cross-examined about whether his blood could have been on it.
Bamber’s team has previously claimed the police seized a second silencer too, suggesting evidence from both could have been conflated. This has long been denied by police and prosecutors, even though records indicate silencers with two different reference numbers were taken into the forensics laboratory. During the trial, Bamber’s cousin David Boutflour – who had been the one to spot the silencer in the cupboard – said police had not seized his own silencer as well. He has now told The New Yorker the police actually took it away for “months and months”.
“It has always been our contention there were two silencers”, says Walker, adding that Bamber was “very encouraged” by what the magazine has reported. 
The question now is whether the case stands a chance of being reconsidered again – and whether anything will change for Bamber.
“If it doesn’t, it would be a scandal,” says Dr Dennis Eady, director of the Cardiff University Law School’s Innocence Project. “It’s already a scandal. How long can you go on saying ‘none of this makes any difference’?”
The loss of face that would accompany a reversal of the verdict may help explain why nothing has changed so far, Dr Eady suggests.
“There’s almost 40 years of errors, cover-ups, misjudgements, whatever you want to call them,” he says. “It’s gone so far that I suspect there’s a fear that to overturn this case now will cause a lot of embarrassment to an awful lot of people.”
Comparing the case to the Hillsborough disaster cover-up and the wrongful prosecution of postmasters in the Post Office scandal, he says it is time “to come clean” nonetheless.
“For Jeremy’s sake and the sake of justice you need to do that now. You can’t just keep covering up for ever more. The campaign is not going to go away.” 
Essex Police has been approached for comment.