For Jeremy Bamber, 17 April is D-day. Today, he hopes his case will be sent back to the court of appeal for the second time, and his many supporters believe this will lead to his conviction for murdering five members of his family being quashed after 40 years in prison. They say this is an unsafe conviction at the very least, but maintain Bamber did not and could not have carried out the horrific crimes. Others, including most of Bamber’s surviving relatives, remain convinced that Bamber murdered his mother, father, sister and her six-year-old twin boys and should never be released.
It could also be a huge day for the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the body responsible for sending alleged miscarriages of justice back to the court of appeal. When the commission started in 1997, it was a beacon of hope for the wrongfully imprisoned – the first independent organisation set up to investigate and refer miscarriages of justice. But over the years it has fallen into disrepute, widely condemned as tardy, conservative and inept.
Bamber’s story is not simply that of a potential miscarriage of justice. It is also the story of how long it can take to challenge a conviction. Take his latest submission to the CCRC. It included 10 grounds for appeal, including new evidence showing that Bamber’s father, Nevill, rang the police 10 minutes before Bamber did so; police tampering with the crime scene; the existence of a second gun silencer when the trial judge insisted there was only one; and the fact that the police had seen signs of life inside the house while Bamber was with officers outside. So far, the commission has spent four years dealing with four of these pieces of evidence. At this rate, it would take another six years to consider the case, by which time Bamber would be 70. It is believed that the decision to accelerate his case has been made to save the CCRC from further criticism.
Bamber and I have been in touch for almost 15 years. In 2011, I interviewed him with the late Eric Allison, then the Guardian’s prisons correspondent, with whom I often worked. Allison was passionate about the case. We asked Bamber how he stayed sane in prison. His answer was either poignant or chilling, depending on your perspective. He said he walked and talked with his father, his mother, his sister and her children – the very family he was convicted of killing. “In my mind, I walk with my dad more than anybody on a daily basis and think: how would he cope with it? What would he think about it all?” He told us about a picture he had on the wall in his cell – a drawing by a friend that shows Bamber standing outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, his hands raised in triumph. “I look at it all the time,” he said.
The massacre at White House Farm
It’s 7 August 1985. At about 3.30am, the police receive a call from Bamber. Remember the time – it becomes increasingly significant. He tells them his father has phoned to say Sheila Caffell, Bamber’s sister, who has schizophrenia, has got hold of one of the Anschütz shooting rifles on the family farm. Bamber tells the police that the line then went dead. He gives them the address – White House Farm, Pages Lane, Tolleshunt D’Arcy, Essex. The police say they will attend immediately. They ask him to leave his home, three miles away, and drive to the farm, where they will meet him.
Even the most stout defender of Essex police would accept that the incident was appallingly handled. The police stood outside the house for almost four hours, unsure what to do. When firearm officers finally entered at about 7.40am, they discovered a massacre. The crime scene was then compromised in numerous ways – objects and victims appear to have been moved; evidence was burned or remained undisclosed; witness statements were changed; police trampled over the bloodied farmhouse.
Few British crimes have been covered with the salacious relish of the Bamber murders. And few have divided opinion so profoundly. The case had everything – ghoulish murders in a remote setting, a Georgian farmhouse, characters that could have been drawn from an Agatha Christie novel, fights over inheritance, religious extremism, myriad unanswered questions and a police force at war over the identity of the killer.
Nevill was a respected former RAF pilot, a successful farmer and a magistrate. His wife, June, was a much-loved mother, according to Bamber; according to others, she was a religious maniac who made the lives of her two adopted children a misery. Sheila, their 28-year-old daughter, had been a successful model known as “Bambi”. And then there was Bamber. The handsome 24-year-old was thought to have acted strangely after the massacre and was charged with murder seven weeks later.
The prosecution said he had made it look like a murder-suicide, motivated by greed and hatred of his parents. The main evidence against him was provided by Julie Mugford, a girlfriend whom he had jilted weeks after the deaths of his family. Bamber was remanded in custody and, 12 months later, convicted of all five murders on a 10-to-two majority verdict. He was sentenced to a minimum of 25 years in prison, which was upgraded in 1988 to a whole-life tariff by the then home secretary, Douglas Hurd, although Bamber was not made aware of this until 1994. Bamber has challenged the legality of his whole-life tariff. The judge at Bamber’s trial described him as “warped” and “evil, almost beyond belief”. If Bamber committed the crimes for which he has been convicted, that description is fair.
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The original senior investigator, DCI Thomas “Taff” Jones, was a tough Welshman who didn’t deal in doubt. From the moment he saw the scene, he was clear he was dealing with a murder-suicide. After all, Sheila was found with the gun, a bible by her side and a fatal wound to her throat.
In March that year, Sheila had been discharged from hospital after being treated for a psychotic episode. Colin Caffell, her ex-husband and the father of the twins, wrote to Nevill after Sheila was released, saying he feared for the “health, safety and stability” of the boys, Daniel and Nicholas, when they were with their mother. He asked Nevill to broach the subject of them coming to live with him “most of the time”. “We all know that Sheila lives in her own little world and is almost oblivious to anything but her own thoughts,” he wrote. “She’s been like that for a long time and the boys are now obviously finding this very distressing.” Colin wrote that “witnessing their mother’s religious illusions has been most traumatic for them, to say the least”. During Sheila’s hospitalisation, the boys had lived with their father in London; when the tragedy happened, they were spending a week’s “holiday” on the farm with their grandparents and Sheila.
Three days after the murders, Bamber’s cousins Ann Eaton, David Boutflour and Anthony Pargeter met Taff Jones and said they didn’t think Sheila could be the killer, because she was hopelessly uncoordinated and inexperienced with guns. (One family member, who doesn’t want to be named, says now: “Poor Sheila couldn’t pour a cup of tea without spilling it.”) They believed Bamber had killed the family for the considerable inheritance – in their wills, Nevill and June left £380,000 and £230,000 respectively, while the family business, N&J Bamber Ltd, was worth £400,000.
But the cousins’ version of events, it seems, made no sense to Taff Jones. After all, there had been sightings of movement within the house when the police had been outside with Bamber. A radio log stated that firearms officers had been speaking to someone in the house at 5.25am. By then, Bamber had been with them for well over an hour. It seemed an open-and-shut case, as newspapers reported in the days after.
But Taff had not accounted for the persistence of his junior and namesake, DS Stan Jones. Stan Jones became suspicious when he attended the house after the massacre and noticed Sheila had been shot twice in the throat. What kind of suicide victim shoots themselves twice in the throat?
The reality was more complicated – and remains a mystery. After the killings, six officers made statements saying Sheila had one bullet wound to the throat. The doctor who pronounced life extinct and the coroner’s officer referred to a single shot. In 2011, it emerged that officers carrying out training exercises moved the gun on and off Sheila’s body to ensure it was safe. Some supporters believe the police accidentally shot her a second time. It sounds unlikely – but the handling of the whole investigation was unlikely.
It appears the cousins found a more sympathetic listener in Stan Jones, who didn’t much care for the belligerence of Taff Jones. (The chief inspector was later sidelined from the investigation, then died shortly before the trial after falling from a ladder.) Eaton, who ran a caravan site with Bamber, told Stan Jones that Bamber didn’t look like a man who was grieving. She said he had been acting oddly – laughing and larking about with friends, flogging his parents’ valuables, spending money with abandon. Eaton was convinced that he shed crocodile tears at the funeral.
She discovered that the kitchen window at the farm didn’t close properly and suggested that Bamber could have escaped through it after carrying out the murders, leaving the house apparently locked from the inside. Her father, Robert Boutflour, who has since died, provided the police with an elaborate plan for how he believed Bamber carried out the murders.
By now, Stan Jones, who died in 2014, was on a mission to nail Bamber. Three days after the murders, David Boutflour contacted Stan Jones to tell him he thought he had found significant evidence in a downstairs cupboard – a silencer, also known as a moderator, that appeared to have blood on it. The blood was tested. It appeared to be a potential match with Sheila’s. Stan Jones then carried out another test. He attached a silencer to a gun and asked somebody the same height as Sheila to pretend to shoot herself. She was unable to do so. The silencer increased the length of the gun and meant she couldn’t reach the trigger. Stan Jones believed he had his killer.
Julie Mugford, the hitman and the trial
This is where Julie Mugford enters the picture. The day after the murders, she had told police that Bamber phoned her between 3am and 3.30am, saying: “There’s something wrong at home.” In her initial interview, she said she was tired and had not asked him what was wrong, even though he sounded worried. Soon after the murders, Bamber broke up with her and Mugford’s best friend, Lizzie, told her she and Bamber had slept together. On 4 September, another woman phoned him in Mugford’s presence and it became apparent that he was asking her out. Mugford smashed a mirror and slapped him. He twisted her arm behind her back.
After this, she told friends he had been planning the murders for a year because he was hungry for his inheritance; he and Sheila stood to inherit 50% each of the estate, so long as he was still working on the farm. One of these friends called the police. On 7 September, a month after the killings, Mugford gave a new statement, contradicting her first. She said Bamber had hired a hitman, a local plumber, to kill the family and paid him £2,000. Mugford said Bamber had told her hours before the attack that it was “tonight or never” and that he had phoned her in the early hours to say: “Everything is going well.”
There was only one problem. When the police arrested the plumber, he had a cast-iron alibi. Mugford then changed her story and said Bamber had carried out the killings himself.
A few months before the murders, the office of the caravan park run by Bamber and Eaton had been burgled and £980 taken. Eaton suspected Bamber of the theft. The police asked Mugford whether she knew anything about the burglary. Mugford admitted that she and Bamber were responsible. The police then asked if she had anything else she wanted to confess. Mugford admitted she had carried out 13 cheque frauds and smuggled and sold cannabis.
She had put herself in a tricky situation. If Bamber was prosecuted, she could be charged as an accomplice. If he wasn’t, she could still be charged for the other offences. It seems the police agreed not to charge her if she testified against Bamber. In late 1985, the assistant director of public prosecutions, John Walker, wrote to the chief constable of Essex police stating: “With considerable hesitation, I would suggest that Mugford be advised that she will not be prosecuted in respect of these matters. Thereafter she will be called as a witness in the case against Bamber.”
After he was convicted, she did an interview with the News of the World about their relationship, accompanied by a revealing photoshoot. It later emerged she was paid £25,000 for the interview, enough to buy a two-bedroom flat and start a new life.
The trial relied on Mugford’s evidence, but it also depended on the silencer. Mr Justice Drake told the jury that if they believed the silencer was used in the murders, the killer had to be Bamber. After 16 days at Chelmsford crown court in October 1986, the jury retired to consider its verdict. The members couldn’t reach a unanimous decision. Drake told them he would accept a majority verdict. The jury wrote a note to the judge asking whether the blood found deep in the baffles of the silencer was a perfect match with Sheila’s. Drake, who died in 2014, said it was and that it didn’t match any other family member. But that wasn’t true. Shortly before the trial, forensics had shown that the blood was also an identical match with Robert Boutflour, Bamber’s uncle. This was known to the defence, the prosecution and the judge. However, for reasons that are unclear, the defence never used it. Bamber is convinced if it had been used, he would never have been convicted. In any case, the jury came back 21 minutes later and found Bamber guilty. The courtroom was silent except for the sobs of two jurors.
After Bamber was convicted, there was a vicious fight over the inheritance. June’s sister Pamela Boutflour, Robert’s wife, initially inherited the family estate, which included various business interests, property and land. However, in 1992, an out-of-court settlement was reached with Jacqueline and Anthony Pargeter (the children of Nevill’s sister) after they brought a civil suit regarding Nevill’s estate. Ann Eaton (the Boutflour’s daughter) and her husband, Peter, moved into White House Farm with their family. They still live there today.
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When I first spoke with Bamber in 2011, he had been waiting for seven years for the CCRC to respond to his second submission. A year later, they refused to refer his case back to the court of appeal.
My colleague Eric Allison and I worked as a team for many years. But it was he who was close with Bamber; he became a patron of the Bamber campaign. Since he died two years ago, I have made an effort to get to know Bamber better.
It hasn’t been easy. At times, it feels as if he speaks a foreign language. He is so focused on the minutiae: if you can’t distinguish between gun silencers, blood types in the baffles of a silencer and the significance of a call at 3.26am rather than 3.36am, you are lost. Myriad documents were disclosed in 2002 and 2011 and Bamber spends his life forensically examining and re-examining them, hoping they will prove his innocence.
But underneath the facts and figures, there is a complex person. Years ago, he told me his greatest sense of hurt was over the way his parents have been portrayed in the press as cold, controlling and dysfunctional. He says this couldn’t be further from the truth: “Mum and dad were the sweetest parents you could imagine and they took care of Sheila and I to the very best of their abilities.” In 1991, Bamber asked for a polygraph examination – also known as a lie-detector test – and, in April 2007, he was given one in prison. He passed. He hoped this might help clinch his freedom, but it made no difference.
He blames relatives for the way the family has been depicted. “They told anyone who’d listen what awful parents my mum and dad were,” he says. He believes it suited their narrative. “My relatives were happy to portray me as someone who had been abused by my dysfunctional mum and dad, instead of supporting them as the lovely, kind, generous, hard-working people that they were. They wanted to portray them as [people] who deserved to be killed by a nutter son who had suffered at their hands for all these years.” Most of our communication over the years has been by letter. The Ministry of Justice refused to add me to Bamber’s phone list or to allow me to visit him in prison. Sometimes, his friends have asked him questions on my behalf.
His mother has been depicted as a religious zealot. He says this is untrue. “She didn’t ram it down people’s throats, as people said. As children, she liked us to say our prayers at bedtime, but she didn’t go on about it all the time. I think her Christian faith and studying of the Bible was more because of her frustration at not having enough to do. She would love to have gone to university. Her religious fascination was more the philosophical studying, though she did believe strongly in it.”
If he is innocent, it’s hard to absorb the scale of the injustice – imprisoned for the murder of five family members he claims to love. All the time, he is aware of the ticking clock. “I’m an old man now,” he told Allison and me 14 years ago. “I’m 50 and I feel it.” He had already spent more than half his life in prison. That was when he first alluded to the importance of clearing his parents’ name. “If Mum and Dad were around, they would be proud that I had the self-discipline and staying power to keep with this as long as I have,” he said. In finding him guilty of the massacre, he believes the court besmirched his family’s name. If his sister was the perpetrator, it doesn’t dilute the horror, but it is less shaming, because she was ill.
As for Sheila, he says she developed a religious fervour, but believes that was part of her schizophrenia. Again, he talks of happy childhood memories – his big sister looking after him, then visiting her in London when she was a successful model and hanging out with her glamorous friends. “Sheila was wonderful as a sister, but as her mental illness started to kick in, it became difficult to engage with her, because we didn’t understand schizophrenia. She was a very kind and gentle child, that’s all I can say, really.”
When she was found, the blood-stained Bible next to her was open at Psalms 51-55. (“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion, blot out my transgressions.”). The theologian Susan Gillingham prepared a report for Bamber’s first submission to the CCRC on the significance of the psalms in relation to Sheila’s mental state. Gillingham said anyone who knew the psalms well would turn to them as a means to express “their own penitence at the evil within themselves and outrage at the evil words and actions performed against them by others”.
Hugh Ferguson, Sheila’s psychiatrist, gave evidence at the trial. But in a statement in 2002, he said he had been unaware the Bible was open at the psalms. In 2011, having read them, he said: “They contain in them the themes which, over time, I knew were exercising Sheila Caffell. In short form, the struggle between good and evil, or God and the devil.” Ferguson had also been unaware of the letter Colin Caffell had sent to Nevill, suggesting he broach the subject with Sheila of the children living permanently with their father. If Nevill had pleaded Colin’s case to Sheila, it could have had a “potentially catastrophic effect on her”, said Ferguson. “She may have projected on to her father a concept of evil.”
As I work my way through hundreds of documents – a tiny fraction of the total – I wonder how Bamber can be so phlegmatic if he is innocent. “Knowing how my family died, and why, makes it much easier, because I haven’t got someone to hate and despise,” he tells me. “I just understand mental illness can manifest in really horrific ways. There’s also time. Forty years ago, I felt very different. But today I feel much more empathy with Sheila than maybe I ought to. But I just do. I’ve come to terms with it and feel sad for everyone.”
Bamber was taken into police custody on 8 September, a day after Mugford said he was the killer. He was interviewed over a period of five days, the first two of them informally by Taff Jones, without a solicitor. Among other things, he said the night before the murders there had been a debate at the dinner table between Sheila and their parents about the twins being put into foster care.
For the next three days, he was forcefully interrogated by Stan Jones. Bamber was asked whether he murdered five members of his family and told they had proof that Sheila had been killed, yet appeared to be asked few specifics about the murders – for example, where were his blood-spattered clothes (none were found) and whom did he kill first?
Instead, he quizzed Bamber about the order of his phone calls. Eventually, Bamber says, he got confused and gave inconsistent replies about whether he had phoned Nevill or Mugford first. But he still did not believe he was the prime suspect: “At the end, DCI Taff Jones stormed in and said: ‘This is a load of nonsense; we don’t believe Julie.’” On 13 September, Bamber appeared at Chelmsford magistrates court and was granted bail on charges of burglary of the caravan park office. He then went to St Tropez for 10 days with a friend. On his return, he was greeted at Dover docks and charged with five counts of murder.
Was Bamber convicted more on character than on the strength of the evidence? He came across – or was made to come across – as unlikeable: the playboy cad who couldn’t wait to inherit the family money, who had slept with his girlfriend’s best friend, who started selling the family treasures and took himself off to the south of France for a luxury holiday just after his family died, who smiled smugly after the funeral and as he was being driven to prison in the police van. A villain from central casting.
Bamber takes me through these points. Yes, he did have a liaison with Mugford’s best friend. Yes, it was bad behaviour. But no, it wasn’t the seduction that was depicted. “All three of us were friends. Lizzie said to Julie: ‘When you were away, Jeremy slept with me.’ Well, it was her sleeping with me, that’s the way it was.” He sounds embarrassed. There is no dignity in his argument, but it’s important to him in the way things played out. “Julie always said: ‘If I ever find out you slept with Lizzie, I will kill you,’ and that is why she tried to kill me.” Mugford admitted to the police that, after learning about Bamber and Lizzie, she had tried to smother him with a pillow, saying: “If you were dead, you would always be with me.”
As for selling off the valuables, he says he sold things only once he realised Ann Eaton, who had a key to the farm, had taken valuables without his permission. She has always said she took them for safekeeping because she didn’t trust him.
He laughs off the idea he was a man about town. For one thing, he says, he was too mean. “The only nightclub I ever went to was Peter Stringfellow’s, because Sheila used to take me and Peter would let me in for free because he remembered me as a 14-, 15-year-old sneaking in with Sheila and her friends. I was too tight to spend all that money in fancy nightclubs. It’s just not my thing.”
In the 2020 ITV drama series White House Farm, he is shown living it up by the pool in France, drinking cocktails. He admits he spent one night in a hotel, paid for by an older woman with whom he had a fling. The rest of the time he was in a caravan. Why did he go on holiday just after his family had been killed? He says his head was all over the place and he was desperate to get away. It wasn’t a good look. “We all cope with grief in different ways. Normally, relatives and especially grandparents would have raced around and supported me.” The only relatives he had left believed he was a murderer.
Then there is the infamous smile. Bamber tells me it is easy for photographs to lie without the benefit of context. “I’d been crying profusely, sobbing embarrassingly, because we’d been brought up not to show that kind of depth of emotion. I got back in the funeral car and people asked how I was and I did that smile to reassure them.”
The “incriminating” photograph used most frequently shows him smiling as he is driven off in a police van. “They use that all the time. My friends were on the pavement and I was just smiling at them and waving goodbye. Again, it was to reassure them.” He says that is his character: he has never wanted people to worry for him. He didn’t want it when his parents were killed, nor when he was charged with their murders; neither does he want it when people visit him in prison. “I’m not sobbing and feeling sorry for myself, because I’m not that kind of guy. I want to reassure people that I’m OK – and most of the time I am OK. I don’t want people to leave the visits and see me sobbing my eyes out and feeling sorry for me. I want people to go away saying: yeah, Jeremy’s strong and he’s doing OK.”
The creation of the CCRC
In 1997, 12 years after Bamber was jailed, the CCRC was established. Before then, alleged miscarriages of justices were dealt with by a shady Home Office department known as C3, which was neither independent nor well resourced. The CCRC was created after a series of high-profile cases from the 1970s were exposed as miscarriages of justice. In 1989, the convictions of the Guildford Four were quashed, followed by those of the Birmingham Six and the Maguire Seven in 1991. These cases featured a mixture of false confessions, police misconduct and nondisclosure, the last two of which Bamber claims have led to his wrongful conviction. The idea was that the CCRC would hire a group of well-paid experts with the drive, expertise and time to thoroughly investigate suspect convictions and order them to be returned to the court of appeal where necessary.
By the time the CCRC was established, Bamber had already been refused the right to appeal by the Home Office. Prisoners can apply for permission to appeal a crown court decision and usually have to do so within 28 days of conviction. Bamber had argued that the judge had misdirected the jury in his summing up of the trial. In 1989, three years after being found guilty, he was told his submission had been rejected and would not be returning to the appeal court.
The creation of the CCRC gave Bamber new hope. He had entered a second submission three years earlier to the Home Office, which was now transferred to the CCRC. He was convinced that, with its statutory investigative powers, the commission would expose the many inconsistencies and failings in the investigation and trial and refer the case back to the appeal court. Sure enough, in 2002, it did.
“I had to wait until DNA testing became advanced enough to test the sound moderator for traces of blood,” he says. “The DNA test was eventually done on the baffle plates inside the sound moderator and it was shown that there was none of Sheila’s DNA present. The next day, my case was referred to the court of appeal.” Bamber also argued that his conviction was unsafe due to police misconduct, including alleged corruption, failure to disclose crucial evidence, destruction of evidence, concerns about witness credibility and inheritance-related motives not being disclosed.
He was so convinced he would be a free man by Christmas 2002 that he didn’t bother ordering a Christmas lunch. He told anyone who would listen that his conviction was about to be overturned. But, in a 522-point judgment, the three appeal court judges concluded that no conduct on the part of the police or the prosecution would have adversely affected the jury; the more they examined the details, they said, the more they thought the jury had reached the right conclusion.
In 2004, Bamber made a new submission to the CCRC. He was convinced he had compelling new evidence. Scratch marks on the kitchen mantelpiece, which the jury had been told suggested a struggle between Bamber and his father, did not appear to exist in the original crime scene photos. “On the evidence of the scratch marks alone, you may find Mr Bamber guilty,” the trial judge had said. Experts had also concluded that the wounds were consistent with “the rifle not having a silencer attached”. Again, the jury had been told use of the silencer was enough to convict Bamber.
This time, the CCRC did not refer Bamber’s case back to the appeal court. It stated that the new evidence and legal arguments presented were “matters of pure speculation and unsubstantiated allegations”. Bamber was devastated. He argued that the CCRC had failed to thoroughly investigate his case and that there was a conflict of interest, because its then investigations adviser, Ralph Barrington, was formerly the head of criminal investigations at Essex police.
Over the years, the CCRC has become increasingly enfeebled. Critics have suggested it is not truly independent of the MoJ. In 2013, full-time commissioners who had been on salaries of nearly £94,000 were put on minimum one-day-a-week contracts at the insistence of the MoJ. At one point, the CCRC had only nine commissioners, although by statute it is required to have at least 11.
In 2018, Allison and I, with our colleague Owen Bowcott, reported that a group of prominent lawyers had deemed the commission unfit for purpose. The lawyers had found that a record low of 0.77% of cases seen by the CCRC had been referred to the court of appeal in 2016-17. “Almost all the cases being prepared by professionals working in this field are being refused,” said Matt Foot, then of the civil liberties law firm Birnberg Peirce, now a co-director of the miscarriage-of-justice charity Appeal.
Last year, Andrew Malkinson had his rape conviction overturned after serving 17 years in prison. He had first applied to the CCRC 15 years earlier. Writing in the Guardian, Malkinson said: “It was left to my legal team at the charity Appeal to do the work the CCRC should have done long before. Appeal commissioned further DNA tests and uncovered disclosure failures that finally forced the CCRC to send my case to the court of appeal in January 2023.” He was exonerated in July 2023. In January 2025, the head of the CCRC, Helen Pitcher, resigned. She claimed she had been scapegoated over the Malkinson failings and pointed out that the organisation was under-resourced.
When asked about Bamber’s case, a spokesperson for the CCRC said: “Mr Bamber has now made three applications to the CCRC. Following a review, the first application in 1997 led to Mr Bamber’s case being sent to the court of appeal, and his conviction was upheld. The second application to the CCRC in 2004 did not result in a referral. A third application received in 2021 is currently under thorough review. It would be inappropriate to comment any further while this review is ongoing.
“The CCRC has received more than 33,000 applications in its 28-year history and made more than 850 referrals to the appellate courts. We employ a range of staff from many backgrounds, with skills and experience appropriate to the difficult work they do.”
The New Yorker and new evidence
Bamber’s legal team made its third submission to the CCRC in 2021. Again, they were obliged to find new evidence to prove his innocence. Bamber has always believed his father contacted the police to say Sheila had “gone crazy” and got hold of a gun. In fact, it had been part of the previous submission. But the CCRC concluded the argument was unconvincing. This time, Bamber believes he has proof of the calls.
In 2011, he received 347,000 pages of documents initially withheld by Essex police under public interest immunity laws, which no longer apply after 30 years. In this mass disclosure, he came across an incomplete rolling police log. It starts with an entry at 3.26am stating that “Mr Bamber” had called from White House Farm at that time. It reads: “Daughter Sheila Bamber aged 26 [sic] yrs has got hold of one of my guns.”
Neither the jury nor Bamber’s legal team had knowledge of this document. What they had seen was the note of Bamber’s report to the police. “Father phoned (age 62) ‘Please come over your sister has gone crazy + has the gun’ Phone went dead.” This was timed at 3.36am, 10 minutes after the call apparently from his father. At the trial, it was suggested to the officer who had taken the call from Bamber that he had intended to write 3.26am, rather than 3.36am. He reluctantly agreed that this could have been the case.
Years later, it became apparent why this was crucial for the prosecution. The first police car was sent out at 3.35am, a minute before the time given for Bamber’s call. This makes sense only if Nevill had called 10 minutes earlier, at 3.26am. Another document that Bamber came across through bulk disclosure revealed that the officer was still on the phone to him at 3.37am.
In 2016, a documents expert, Dr Chris Davies, studied the new evidence and concluded the most likely reason for the inconsistencies was the obvious one – there were two phone calls. “I consider that this would be my preferred explanation for them,” he said. If Nevill did call at 3.26am, it puts Bamber in the clear. It would be impossible for him to travel the three-and-a-half miles home, over the sea wall and moonlit fields on his mother’s “sit up and beg” bike, as the prosecution claimed he had done after the murders.
Last July, the New Yorker published an exceptional 17,000-word article by Heidi Blake about the Bamber case. Blake had done the investigating the CCRC had seemingly failed to do in the four years since Bamber’s most recent submissions. She interviewed surviving officers, including Nicholas Milbank, who had been monitoring the open line into White House Farm.
Milbank is one of the great mysteries in the case. He never made a statement for the investigation or the trial. His only appearance was in a 2002 inquiry, known as Stokenchurch, by the Metropolitan police into the original investigation. In the Stokenchurch inquiry, there is a reference to a 999 call that had come from the farmhouse at 6.09am. Underneath is a statement attributed to Milbank saying he had monitored the open line, but heard nothing until the police entered. There is no mention of a 999 call. Surprisingly, the statement is unsigned.
Blake got in touch with Milbank, who still works for Essex police. He told her that a 999 call had come in at 6.09am from inside the farm and that he had heard human movement. Blake asked him if that suggested somebody was alive in the house. “Well obviously,” he replied. She said he was taken aback when she told him there was a statement in his name saying he had heard nothing. He had given no such statement, he said, and nobody had asked him for one.
Soon after publication, Bamber wrote to me. He was delighted by the piece and once again convinced he would soon be a free man. “The real crime is that from 6.09am on 7 August 1985, Essex police knew someone else was alive and inside the farm and that they made a 999 call. That fact was concealed from the courts, the public, the media et al. My view is that this is what I’ll win my freedom on, the falsifying of a police officer’s witness statement, without his knowledge.” But his self-belief camouflaged a more muted realism. In saying that ultimately he believed this would clear him, he also acknowledged that he might have a much longer wait. The CCRC is not considering the evidence uncovered in the New Yorker article.
In response to Bamber’s allegations, a spokesperson for Essex police said: “In August 1985, the lives of five people, including two children, were needlessly, tragically and callously cut short when they were murdered in their own home by Jeremy Bamber. In the years that followed, this case has been the subject of several appeals and reviews by the court of appeal and the CCRC – all of these processes have never found anything other than Bamber is the person responsible for killing his adoptive parents Nevill and June, sister Sheila Caffell and her two sons Nicholas and Daniel. Essex police have continued to comply with all legal requirements in this case and will continue to assist the CCRC as required.”
But already something positive has come out of the New Yorker article. Although the CCRC still has six grounds to investigate, it is expected to rule on the first three or four grounds today. He believes the decision has been expedited by media reports about the commission’s failings and the New Yorker article. Bamber says if his case is not referred back to the appeal court, he will have the decision judicially reviewed immediately. He tells me he is getting ever closer to restoring the reputation of his parents.
I find it hard to comprehend. A man who has spent 40 years in prison for murdering his family says he is more interested in clearing his parents’ names than his own. I think of what he said to Allison and me all those years ago about spending time in his head with his mother, father, sister and nephews. Does he think of his family as much these days? “As time goes on, my memory fades,” he tells me. “But yes, of course, I think of them, particularly on birthdays. I was thinking about my mum and what we used to do on Mother’s Day. Dad and I would go off to get chocolates and cards and it was fun. We’d give Mum breakfast in bed. So it does still come back, but it’s not as strong as it was 40 years ago. Sadly, memories fade. They just do.”
Would somebody who had murdered his family admit that his memories of them were fading? Would somebody who told his girlfriend that he was planning the murder and that it was “tonight or never” finish with her a few weeks later? Surely he would be wedded to her in guilt and their terrible shared secret for life?
The second silencer
It’s 4 November 2024. Bamber’s style of letter writing has not changed over the years: big block capitals on lined prison paper sent from HMP Wakefield. Today, there is no disguising his excitement. “Before I answer all your questions, I am going to share some breaking news with you.” He says he has found definitive photographic proof that there were two silencers, something the police and prosecution have always denied. Since day one, he has claimed there were two. (Bamber believes the silencer has always been a red herring – that Sheila shot the family without using a silencer.)
He tells me he is not giving the exclusive of the new silencer to the Guardian; he owes it to another media outlet that helped him track it down. But he sends me pictures and trusts me to keep the news under my hat. The silencer shown in the new pictures looks much like the previously disclosed silencer, except there is a piece of yellow tape wrapped around one end.
In 2018, Frank Ferguson, the head of special crimes at the Crown Prosecution Service, wrote to Bamber’s lawyer Mark Newby, saying: “Any evidence that suggests that there was or may have been another silencer for the rifle would raise the possibility that the other silencer was used during the shooting and not the one alleged by the prosecution. Such a possibility would significantly undermine the case against JB and any material supporting such a possibility would plainly be material which casts doubt on the safety of the conviction.”
March 2025, Hove. I visit Philip Walker, one of Bamber’s campaign team and a semi-retired finance manager. Walker splits his life between work and Bamber. Has he fought for a miscarriage of justice before? “No, never,” he says. What drew him in? “I was adopted through the church, like Jeremy, so I was interested when I read about him. And his father was a big character, well known locally, and so was mine. Then I read a book about him and came to the conclusion that the case was fatally flawed.” He started to read more and more about Bamber. “In one of his blogs, he wrote about his father and it struck a chord. The way he spoke about him, I thought: that is not somebody who’s pumped eight bullets into his dad.” Seven years on, Walker could be a Mastermind contestant with Bamber as his specialist subject.
Bamber phones when I am with Walker, who asks questions about his daily life. How does he fill his days when not researching his case? “Just doing normal jail,” Bamber says. “I go to work in DHL, packing bags for the prisoners’ canteen. I do a bit of gym. It’s very basic stuff. I go to work, I get visits, use the phone, write letters to people and that takes a lot of time. Keeping up with correspondence. All the lovely people who support and love and care for me while I’m in jail.”
In many miscarriages of justice there is a good reason for prosecutors to pursue the suspect: a false confession, made under duress; suspicious behaviour; an unrelated crime. Bamber thinks the caravan park burglary gave the police grounds to suspect him of the murder. “It was a stupid thing to do and I didn’t think it through, but when they asked me about it I admitted it straightaway. And they used that to say: ‘Well, if you’re prepared to do that…’” He trails off.
Bamber insists he was taking back money he believed belonged to him. He also says he wanted to prove to Ann Eaton, after a series of break-ins, that they needed security cameras. He succeeded in making his point, he says, and she agreed to install CCTV.
Ann Eaton and her brother David Boutflour declined to talk to the Guardian for this article. They have always insisted that they have no doubt about Bamber’s guilt and denied that their suspicion of Bamber was motivated by financial considerations.
Mugford, who has rarely spoken publicly about the case since selling her story to the News of the World, later worked at a primary school in Canada. In 2001, she said: “As far as I am concerned, nothing has changed – I sincerely believe he is guilty. Do I stand by my original story? Yes, absolutely. I always assumed he would be in jail for life.” She did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.
Bamber believes that, after confessing to crimes in her police statement, Mugford was trapped. “You think to yourself: well, you’d have never been a teacher if all that had come out. And that pressure – if you don’t give evidence against Jeremy we’ll probably charge you with doing it with him … And all those other criminal activities you’ve done without Jeremy we’ll charge you with them.” Bamber was initially charged with burglary of the caravan site, but the case was later dropped. Mugford was not charged with any crime.
Bamber hopes the CCRC will refer his case, but he is already planning for the next stage if he is knocked back. His capacity for seeing the glass half full has always amazed me. How does he keep going? “I’ve got fantastic support. I’ve got people who love me and people who I love. Even though I’m in jail, in life, I’ve been very lucky to have that, because many people don’t. I have had a good life in many ways because the experience I’ve had and the people I’ve met have been so interesting.” It’s an astonishing thing to say – jailed for 40 years and yet, in some ways, he still feels lucky.
Bamber says his conscience is clean. “I know I didn’t murder my parents. What’s happened to me has happened to me, and I’ve just gone away and coped with it and lived the life I’ve lived and I’m OK. Of course, seeing me recognised as innocent is important, too. But that motivated my campaign for only a few years – I don’t need to prove I’m innocent, I just am. Now, what motivates me is showing that my mum and dad were loving and generous and wonderful to me and Sheila and that this whole thing was a tragedy, not a murder.”
He may not need to prove his innocence to himself, but he needs to prove it to others. Whether the CCRC believes he has done enough to merit another appeal remains to be seen.
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