My meetings with Jeremy Bamber, the White House Farm murderer 4th Jan 2020As an ITV drama recounts the infamous story of Jeremy Bamber, author and Telegraph journalist, Roger Wilkes tells how he was asked to help prove his innocence
“I first met Jeremy Bamber in the late summer of 1991, as I was pondering a book about his case. To my tentative first letter, Bamber had replied briskly, pointing out that I was not the first journalist to approach him about his story and asking me not to contact him again unless I was prepared to help. Convicted for the merciless shooting of five members of his family at their farmhouse in Essex in 1985, he wanted to commission a new ballistics report but had no money to pay for it. Without it there would be no prospect of a full appeal hearing, and no co-operation for me. I offered a deal; he agreed to meet.
In the visiting room at Gartree Prison in Leicestershire, in his blue sweatshirt, jeans and trainers, he was still strikingly handsome. The long dark hair of his pre-trial photos had been cropped short but prison pallor had yet to cloud his features and he returned my gaze and handshake firmly. Even before I ventured a conversational icebreaker, he told me that he did not murder his family, and that some day he would prove it.
In 1986 Jeremy Bamber had been found guilty of one of the most notorious crimes of the century – shooting dead his adoptive parents, Nevill and June Bamber, his sister Sheila, also adopted, and her six-year-old twin sons in the dead of a harvest night. Photographs of the crime scene still trouble me. The little boys had been shot in their beds in their sleep, one still sucking his thumb.
No wonder, then, that at first the police believed Jeremy when he blamed the killings on Sheila, who was mentally ill. From the start, Jeremy’s story was that his father had telephoned him in the small hours saying that Sheila had gone mad and had a gun. But a month later, Jeremy Bamber himself was arrested, questioned, tried and convicted on five counts of murder. He is now serving a whole life term.
The famous photograph at the Bamber funeral, as Jeremy appears to buckle under the weight of grief CREDIT: PA
During our handful of meetings, Bamber was always friendly and struck me as a man of immense charm, but in time I came to see him as highly persuasive and manipulative; as the twins’ father, Colin Caffell, warned me, Bamber is “an extremely seductive and charismatic person”. At the outset I was perfectly prepared to believe he was innocent, not least because that would have made a better book, especially if I could have helped him prove it. But in the end I could not.
As the adopted son of a wealthy farmer, Bamber stood to gain nearly half a million pounds (about £1.3 million today) from the death of his family. Nevill and June tenanted the 300-acre White House Farm outside the Regency village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy. Within days of their deaths, Bamber was selling off family heirlooms and planning how to spend his inheritance.
But why? When I spoke to those who knew him, it emerged that Jeremy Bamber disliked his parents, was bitterly jealous of his sister and hated his life in the village, tied to the farm. Perhaps his good looks were in themselves a kind of curse. At 24, Bamber was better-looking even than the actor Freddie Fox who plays him in the new ITV drama that begins on Wednesday night. He resented the fact that his parents had supported Sheila to live and work in London as a model before her health broke. It seems he, too, craved a more glamorous life.
At the time of their deaths, the Bambers were under huge stress. Sheila’s marriage had broken down and she was back at White House Farm with her twins. She was taking powerful medication to control bouts of psychosis in which she sometimes believed she was possessed by the Devil.
Jeremy was another worry. Employed on the farm and encouraged to manage the family caravan site to give him more income and status, he made it clear that he was bored and frustrated by the work. He’d been set up in his own cottage in a neighbouring village but was always pleading poverty, piling pressure on his father.
Nevill confided to his secretary that he was afraid that Jeremy might harm him one day. The year before the murders, after reports of intruders at the caravan park, Jeremy began patrolling the site himself, armed with a shotgun. When an uncle warned him he might shoot someone with it, Bamber smirked and remarked: “I could easily kill my parents.”
But many young men resent their families as part of a natural impulse to strike out on their own. Nevill and June had adopted Jeremy when he was only six months old. Perhaps his adoption made any sense of alienation more acute. The fact was that Bamber was ill-equipped to provide for himself and needed his work on the farm. Privately educated, he had failed his A-levels. His parents funded a gap year in Australia and New Zealand where he took an expensive scuba diving course but he always returned home, looking for funds.
Some thought Bamber did what he did because of a serious head injury he had suffered as a boy. He’d fractured his skull sliding down the stairs on a tin tray at White House Farm. Other notorious killers, Fred West among them, have hit their heads in accidents. Although as one forensic psychiatrist pointed out, thousands of people bump their heads and never hurt a soul.
At the heart of this complex story lies one simple, pivotal truth. Either Jeremy Bamber murdered his family or Sheila did. Jeremy himself ruled out any other killer. He told police his father had telephoned him to say that Sheila had gone berserk and had a gun. The Bambers were murdered with a .22 semi-automatic rifle fitted with a silencer, which was later found with blood in it in a cupboard under the stairs. The jury at Bamber’s trial was told the blood in the silencer was Sheila’s, and that, Bamber claims, is what drove them to conclude that she couldn’t possibly have been the killer. The blood sample was tested to destruction, so there is nothing to return to now.
When Bamber asked me to consult Prof Leon MacDonnel in New York, then the world’s leading authority on blood evidence, the photographs of Sheila’s body convinced MacDonnel that, like the others, she had been murdered. Sheila was shot not once, but twice under the chin. Scenes from the kitchen of the farm show Nevill Bamber slumped in a chair by the Aga after a fight to the death where he’d grappled with his killer and been bludgeoned with the butt of the rifle.
The walls were smeared with blood, the breakfast dishes, carefully laid out by June before she went to bed, lay smashed and strewn across the floor. Could slightly-built Sheila have done this? All 25 bullets fired during the killer’s rampage through White House Farm had hit their mark. Everyone I spoke to who knew Sheila, told me she had never shown any interest in guns. Jeremy, by contrast, had been a crack shot with a rifle since his days in the Army Cadets at school. Apart from her bullet wounds, Sheila had no other injuries and not one of her perfectly-manicured nails had been broken.
A year after our first meeting, my book almost finished, I was convinced that Jeremy Bamber had killed them all. To think otherwise would mean accepting that Sheila was the killer and that another young woman, Julie Mugford, Jeremy Bamber’s girlfriend at the time, caused an innocent man to be jailed for life as an act of spite and revenge.
Julie is in the famous photograph at the funeral, holding Jeremy’s arm as he appears to buckle under the weight of grief. She went to the police when Jeremy dumped her to tell them he had confessed to planning and carrying out the murders. Julie said that at the funeral, Jeremy joked that he hoped the cameras would catch his best side. “I should have been an actor,” he’d whispered.
So many questions remain, not least why Jeremy Bamber, if he is indeed guilty, continues to work ceaselessly to prove his innocence. He was naturally disappointed with my book and we ceased contact by mutual agreement. Recent pictures show a pallid, overweight, middle-aged man, scholarly in his metal-rimmed glasses, his youthful looks gone. What else can he do but struggle for redemption? He has nothing left to lose.
Blood Relations by Roger Wilkes will be reissued later this year by Robinson
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/life/meetings-jeremy-bamber-white-house-farm-murderer/
