Jeremy Nevill Bamber (born 13 January 1961) was convicted in England in 1986 of having murdered five members of his adoptive family—his father, mother, sister, and her six-year-old twin sons—at his parents' home at White House Farm, Tolleshunt D'Arcy, Essex, in the early hours of 7 August 1985. He was sentenced to five life terms with a recommendation that he serve at least 25 years, and in 1994 the Home Secretary ruled he must spend the rest of his life in jail. Bamber has protested his innocence over the years, believed to be the only prisoner in the UK serving a whole-life tariff to do so.
The Times wrote that the case had all the ingredients of a classic whodunit: a massacre in the English countryside, overbearing parents, an unstable daughter, a scheming son, a jilted girlfriend, and bungling police.
The police at first believed Bamber's sister, Sheila Caffell—diagnosed with a schizoaffective disorder—had shot her family then turned the gun on herself. Her sons had been living with their father, but had been visiting the Bambers with Sheila when the killings occurred. According to Bamber, she feared she would lose custody of them; she also told a psychiatrist two years earlier that she thought the devil had taken her over.
When an ex-girlfriend stepped forward weeks after the murders to say Bamber had implicated himself, the police view swiftly changed, though some of the forensic evidence had already been compromised or destroyed. The prosecution argued that, motivated by a large inheritance, Bamber had killed the family and placed the gun in his unstable sister's hands to make it look like a murder-suicide. A silencer the prosecution said was on the rifle when it was fired would have made it too long, they argued, for her fingers to reach the trigger to shoot herself.
Bamber has several times asked the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) to refer his case to the Court of Appeal; a referral in 2001 saw the conviction upheld. In 2004 and 2009, his defence team submitted what they said was new evidence to the CCRC, including a report from a photographic expert, who said that scratch marks on a mantelpiece—said to have been caused during a struggle for the gun—were not in the crime-scene photographs, but were visible only in photographs taken 34 days later.
Their submissions also included the log of a phone call made to police on the night of the murders, during which a Mr Bamber said his daughter had gone "berserk," and had stolen one of his guns. Bamber had told police that he had received a similar call from his father, but was unable to prove it; it became a central plank of the prosecution's case that the father had made no such call, and that the only reason Bamber would have lied about it was that he was the killer himself.
In February 2011 the CCRC provisionally rejected the latest submissions. Bamber's extended family have said they remain convinced of his guilt.
The Bambers
The deceased
Nevill and June Bamber
Ralph Nevill Bamber (known as Nevill), aged 61 when he died, was a farmer, local magistrate, and former RAF pilot. He and his wife, June (also 61), married in 1949 and moved into White House Farm, a Georgian house in Tolleshunt D'Arcy, Essex. Unable to have biological children, they adopted two, Sheila and Jeremy, who were not related to each other. Nevill was described in court as 6' 4" tall and in good physical health, a point that became significant because Bamber's story is that Sheila, a slender girl of 26, was able to beat and subdue her father, something the prosecution contested. The Times writes that the couple was wealthy and gave the children a private education, but they took their Christian beliefs to the point of zealotry, and the children reportedly faced harsh discipline. June suffered from depression and was treated in a psychiatric hospital in 1982, and the court heard that her interest in religion had become obsessive.
Sheila, Nicholas, and Daniel Caffell
Sheila Jean Caffell (born 1957, aged 28 when she died) was adopted a few years later than Bamber. She attended secretarial college, then worked in London as a model, living in a flat in Maida Vale that Nevill and June paid for. She married Colin Caffell in May 1977, and the twins Nicholas and Daniel were born in June 1979. The couple divorced in May 1982.
Like June, Sheila was intensely religious. Her GP had referred her on 3 August 1983 to Dr Hugh Ferguson, a psychiatrist at St. Andrew's Hospital in Northampton. Ferguson said she was in an agitated and psychotic state and admitted her, diagnosing a schizoaffective disorder characterized by disturbance of thinking and perception. He said she was paranoid, struggling with the concept of good and evil, and believed the devil had taken her over and given her the power to project evil onto others, including her sons; she believed she could make them have sex and cause violence with her. She also believed she was capable of murdering them, or of getting them to kill others. She spoke about suicide, though he did not regard her as a suicide risk. She was discharged on 10 September 1983 and treated with Stelazine, an anti-psychotic drug. Because of her mental-health problems, her sons lived with their father, though she continued to see them.
On 3 March 1985 she was re-admitted to St Andrew's, apparently very disturbed. She again spoke about good and evil, this time related to religious ideas, and not with reference to her children or parents. She was discharged on 29 March 1985, and thereafter received monthly injections of Haloperidol, an anti-psychotic that also has a sedative effect. After the killings, Ferguson said that kind of violence was not consistent with his view of her, though he said she had expressed disturbed feelings towards her mother. June's sister, Pamela Boutflour, testified that Sheila was not a violent person, and said she had never known her to use a gun. June's niece, Ann Eaton, said Sheila "would not know one end of the barrel of a gun to another". Bamber disputed this, telling police that he and Sheila had gone target shooting together, though he acknowledged in court that he had not seen her fire a gun as an adult. Her ex-husband said she had been prone to outbursts that had involved throwing pots and pans, and occasionally hitting him, but to his knowledge she had never harmed the children.
Sheila and her ex-husband, Colin Caffell, had joint custody of the boys (born 22 June 1979, aged six when they died), though he had complained that her mental health was affecting her ability to look after them, and that he was doing 95 percent of the work. He also disliked the effect June Bamber's religious ideas might be having on them; she apparently made the boys kneel and pray with her, which upset him. The boys had been briefly placed in foster care in 1982 and 1983 in Camden, London, near Sheila's home, an arrangement the court heard had caused no problems, and according to Bamber, the family discussed doing the same thing again during their evening meal on the night of the murders, with little response from Sheila.
Jeremy Bamber
Bamber (born 1961) was the son of a vicar's daughter who had an affair with a married army sergeant, and subsequently gave her baby up for adoption when he was six weeks old. Nevill and June sent him to Gresham's School, a boarding school in Norfolk, then college in Colchester. He spent time in Australia and New Zealand, then returned to England to work on his father's farm for £170 a week. The Bambers also ran a lucrative caravan site, but according to The Times they would not let Bamber work there, saying he had no business sense. He set up home in a cottage at 9 Head Street, Goldhanger, three to three-and-a-half miles from his parents' farmhouse. Nevill owned the cottage and Bamber lived there rent-free. It took five minutes to drive by car from the cottage to his parents' home, and by bicycle 15 minutes at least.
Extended family and financial considerations
The Bamber family was wealthy, and the financial ties and the issue of inheritance within the immediate and extended family caused further complications. The prosecution's case was that Bamber had killed his family to inherit their estate, which included £436,000, the farm house where the murders took place, 300 acres (1.2 km2) of land, and a caravan site in Essex called Osea Road Camp Sites Ltd. Because of his conviction, the estate passed instead to his cousins, some of whom were involved in finding the crucial evidence against him—the gun's silencer in the farm's gun cupboard with a fleck of blood on it. The prosecution said this showed the silencer was on the gun during the attack, and that Sheila's arms were not long enough to reach the trigger to kill herself with the silencer on it; therefore she must have been murdered.
That evidence, which Bamber contests, proved crucial, and as a result of his conviction the cousins inherited the estate. One cousin on his mother's side, Ann Eaton, now lives in White House Farm, and she and several others—Sarah Jane Eaton, Pamela Boutflour, and Robert Woodwiss Boutflour—own the caravan site.
Bamber has alleged that these financial considerations meant the extended family, specifically two of the cousins whom he has named, wanted to see him convicted, and may even have set him up. The cousins have responded that Bamber is a psychopath, that his allegations against them over the years are part of an attempt to harass and vilify them, and that the allegation that they set him up is "an absolute load of piffle."
Bamber has launched several unsuccessful lawsuits to recover some of the money. In 2003, he began a High Court action to recover £1.2m from his adoptive grandmother, Mabel Speakman's, estate. He told the court he should have inherited Speakman's home at Carbonnells Farm, Wix, near Clacton, and that he was owed 17 years back rent for the property from his cousins who were living there. Speakman cut Bamber out of her will when he was arrested, and most of the inheritance went to Pamela Boutflour, June Bamber's sister, who subsequently moved into Carbonnells Farm with her husband Robert.
In 2004, Bamber went back to the High Court to argue he had been unfairly frozen out of the profits made by the caravan site. Although at that point no longer a shareholder, he had retained shares after his conviction, but had sold them to pay legal costs in connection with the 2003 attempt to claim his grandmother's estate. The High Court ruled that he was not entitled to any profit from the caravan site because of his conviction.
The murder weapon
Nevill kept several guns at the farm. He was reportedly careful with them, cleaning them after use, and made sure not to leave them lying around. The murder weapon was a .22 Anschütz semi-automatic rifle, model 525, which Nevill purchased on 30 November 1984, along with a Parker Hale silencer, telescopic sights, and 500 rounds of ammunition.
The rifle used cartridges, which were loaded into a magazine that held ten cartridges. Twenty-five shots were fired during the killing, so if it was fully loaded to begin with it would have been reloaded at least twice. The court heard that it became progressively harder to load as the number of cartridges increases; loading the tenth was described as exceptionally hard. The rifle was used to shoot rabbits with the silencer and telescopic sights attached.
The court heard that a screwdriver was needed to remove the sights, but they were normally left in place because it was time-consuming to realign them. Nevill's nephew, Anthony Pargeter, visited the farmhouse around 26 July 1985, and told the court he had seen the rifle with the sights and silencer attached in the gun cupboard in the ground floor office. Bamber testified that he visited the farmhouse on the evening of 6 August, and loaded the gun, thinking he heard rabbits outside, then left it with a full magazine and a box of ammunition on the kitchen table.
White House Farm, 7 August 1985
Sheila's visit and proposed fostering of the boys
On August 4, three days before the murders, Sheila took the boys to spend a week at the Bambers' farm. The farm's housekeeper saw Sheila on 5 August and noticed nothing unusual, and she was seen the next day with her children by two farm workers, Julie and Leonard Foakes, who said she seemed happy.
One of the photographs taken by police—but which the defence said in the December 2002 appeal that it could not recall seeing—shows that someone carved "I hate this place" into the cupboard doors of the room the twins were sleeping in. Authorship was not established, but the Court of Appeal accepted that it was probably Sheila who wrote it.
Bamber visited the farm on the evening of 6 August, and told the court his parents had suggested to Sheila that the boys be placed in foster care, because of her mental-health problems. The idea was to do this temporarily, perhaps with a local family near the farm who could help with the children. Bamber said Sheila did not seem too bothered by the suggestion, and had simply said she would rather stay in London.
Her psychiatrist, Dr. Ferguson, told the Court of Appeal in 2002 that the suggestion would have provoked a strong reaction: "I would have expected her, were this to be put to her suddenly, to be a very substantial threat and I would have expected her to react very strongly to what to her would be the loss of her children. I would not have expected her to be passive about that." He added that, had the fostering suggestion been confined to day-time help, Sheila might have welcomed it. The boys had been in temporary foster care before in London, which had not appeared to cause a problem.
Barbara Wilson, the farm's secretary, telephoned the farmhouse at 9.30 p.m. that evening and spoke to Nevill. She said he was short with her, and Wilson was left with the impression that she had interrupted an argument. Pamela Boutflour, June Bamber's sister, also telephoned the house that evening at about 10 p.m. She spoke to Sheila, who she said was quiet, then to June, who seemed normal.
Telephone calls
There was one telephone line and four telephones at the farm, including two in the kitchen: a cordless phone that had a memory recall feature, and a digital phone. The cordless had been sent away for repair, and a phone that was normally in the bedroom had been moved into the kitchen; this was the one found with its receiver off the hook, the implication being that someone—Nevill, according to Bamber—had been interrupted mid-call.
A central issue is whether Nevill telephoned Bamber before the murders to say Sheila had gone crazy and had a gun. Bamber said he did receive such a call, and that the line went dead in the middle of it, which would be consistent with the phone being found off the hook. The prosecution said he did not receive such a call, and that his claim to have done so was part of his setting the scene to blame Sheila. This was one of three key points the jury was asked to consider by the trial judge during his summing up.
Telephone log 1 (caller self-identified as Mr Bamber)
The police log of a telephone call purporting to be from Nevill to a local police station at 3:26 a.m. on 7 August does exist (see image, right), and appears to have been entered as evidence at the trial, but it was not shown to the jury, or indeed seen by Bamber's lawyers until at least 2004.
The log is headed "daughter gone berserk," and says: "Mr Bamber, White House Farm, Tolleshunt d’Arcy—daughter Sheila Bamber, aged 26 years, has got hold of one of my guns." It also says: "Mr Bamber has a collection of shotguns and .410s," and it includes the telephone number 860209, which was the number at the time for White House Farm. If this telephone call was made by Nevill Bamber, it would confirm Bamber's story. The log shows that a patrol car, Charlie Alpha 7 (CA7), was sent to the scene at 3.35 am.