Excerpt by
David James Smith during a speech given at the University of Sussex Crime Research Centre (CRC) Annual Public Lecture on Wednesday 28 July 2021 on mass murderer and child killer Jeremy Bamber ⬇️
‘Just over a decade ago I went to interview Jeremy Bamber in prison. His story was recently told in a television drama White House Farm. He was 60 this year and he is currently serving a Whole Life Tariff for the five murders of his mother, father, sister and her two young sons one night in 1985, when he was 25.
Jeremy Bamber is one of those celebrated causes. He has protested his innocence since his conviction. He has had two appeals – both failed, obviously – and his fourth application to them is currently being considered by the Criminal Cases Review Commission.
Bamber has an entire campaigning organisation on the outside, who believe unwaveringly in his innocence and promote his cause in the media, at injustice conferences and other events. They wear Jeremy Bamber t-shirts. They are protective of Jeremy Bamber’s public image, acting as a kind of gatekeeper for his outside interests.
My interview with Bamber was sanctioned, after a bit of a legal battle it must be said, by the Ministry of Justice. Legal precedent, known as the Simms/O’Brien ruling, has determined that serving prisoners claiming to be the victims of a miscarriage of justice should be allowed to put their case to the public via the media. It is commonly accepted that media campaigns can be influential in overturning wrongful convictions, though how much impact they have on the minds of Court of Appeal judges, I cannot say. Of course, sometimes investigations by the media can uncover new evidence.
I promised Jeremy Bamber an opportunity to put his case – which was the stated purpose of the interview – and assured him I would be objective. In my heart, I think, looking back, my reading of the evidence was such that I doubted his claims of innocence, but if you read now the article I wrote then, I am confident you would feel I had told his side of the story.
If Jeremy Bamber didn’t kill his entire family, that night, in an attempt to secure his parents’ estate for himself, only one other person can be responsible. As he relentlessly claims, his sister Sheila killed them all and then turned the gun on herself.
The major fly in the ointment of that case is that a rifle silencer was found in the back of a cupboard after the killings with blood that is almost certainly Sheila’s inside it. If the silencer was on the rifle when Sheila was shot under the chin, while lying down, the weapon was too long for her to wrap her fingers around the trigger. She could not have shot herself. And also, how did the silencer find its way into the back of the cupboard when she was already dead?
The prosecution case was that Jeremy Bamber planned to blame Sheila, shot her himself and then, when it came to dress the scene made the awkward discovery about the weapon and hurriedly removed and hid the silencer, neglecting to clean it first.
If that is true he is in the right place. If it is wrong he has been unfairly locked up for 36 years.
Bamber has made multiple claims over the years about the lies of witnesses against him, misconduct by the police, including non-disclosure, and collusion to frame him by his relatives.
I remember saying at the end of the article I wrote that I had no idea of his innocence or guilt. I had put the case for and against and now it was up to readers. “Reader you decide”, I wrote quite grandly.
The Bamber case echoes around the world of miscarriages of justice, just as much as it has echoed around the walls of the Criminal Cases Review Commission.
The barrier to investigating his case – as to investigating many other cases – is the weight of the evidence against him.
He told his girlfriend he was going to murder his family. Or so she said. He showed his contempt, even hatred for his family to many. And of course he was – apparently - caught out by the silencer.
Any evidence of police misconduct or of mistakes or lies would have to be of a substantial nature to overturn that conviction. He thought he had found an answer in 2002 when the Commission referred the case for a new appeal on the basis of DNA evidence, but that was rejected by the Court. Bamber has since focused his efforts elsewhere.
I believe he now claims there were two silencers in the case, not one. The CCRC will no doubt examine and form its own view of that alleged new evidence.
Here is a difficult question: Is Jeremy Bamber an innocent man because he says he is? Is his case for innocence enhanced by the persistence of his claims?
You could say, he is sitting in his cell, going nowhere, with nothing better to do than try to find a way out of the hole he is in. Or you could say, he is fighting desperately to prove the truth and be justifiably free.
A fascinating thing about him that I always cite, is that Jeremy Bamber has no diagnosis of being mentally ill or a psychopath. To all intents and purposes he is as normal as you and me. He charms people still and wins them over to his cause. He is a fascinating study of the essence of investigating miscarriages of justice. He is what it’s all about. The claim and counter claim, the obscuring of the truth, the complexity and ambiguity of the evidence, the lingering suggestion of police impropriety.
Did he, didn’t he.
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/crime/newsandevents
