Transcript of Blood Relatives, Episode 2

Hi, it's Madelyne. Before you tune into this episode, I wanted to remind you that New Yorker subscribers get access to the full blood relative series early. All six episodes, ad-free in the New Yorker app. It's just $1 a week to subscribe, which you can do by visiting newyorker. Com/dark. That's newyorker. Com/dark. On a sunny day in April last year, I arrived outside a gabled farmhouse deep in the Essex countryside, a place not far from Whitehouse Farm, where the Bamba family had been killed. Let's go and see what's going on. I walked through a big yard full of tractors and other farm equipment. A row of mud-spattered Range Rovers were parked in the drive. I knocked on the door and waited on the porch of the farmhouse. Through the windows, I could see shotgun cartridges stacked against the glass. After a few minutes, I saw someone coming around the side. Is it David? Hello. Hello, then. Hi. I'm so sorry to trouble you. My name's Heidi. I wrote to you a few weeks ago. I don't know if you got my letter. No. No, you didn't. Just say- You're there, bud. Oh, you might have done.

David Bowflower is part of the Bamba's extended family, Jeremy and Sheila's cousin. He's in his 70s now with a farmer's tan and grizzled hair. I'd written to him a few weeks earlier to ask him to talk to me about murders at Whitehouse Farm. I would love to talk to you about it.

I wanted to-I'll give you five minutes. That's so nice.

I was here to talk to David because I wanted to understand how this apparently clear-cut case of murder-suicide had turned so decisively against Jeremy Bamber. How had Jeremy gone from being the bereaved son weeping on the lawn of his family's manor to sitting in prison, convicted of their murder. And David? Well, he knew how that had happened better than almost anyone. And your family, I think, was very instrumental in finding the evidence and putting the case together, really. Because I'd learned that the people who had made sure Jeremy Bamber ended up behind bars for the rest of his life, the people who pieced together the evidence used to convict him were not police or prosecutors, but his own cousins.

I think we hadn't have done. I think he would have got away with it. I really do. I think he would have got away with it.

From In the Dark and the New Yorker, I'm Heidi Blake, and this is blood relatives. It's one of the most notorious and shocking crimes in living memory, a bloody massacre at a remote English farmhouse. One of my bosses comes out and said, They've gone in, and it's not good. It looks like all the family is being killed by the daughter. No one knows why the family had to die. Essex police now say that the model Sheila Caffle could have been murdered. But all the evidence at the time, say police, pointed to suicide. In the past week, they've been working on new Part One, The Cousins. David led me into a pretty garden, looking out over the fields. There was washing hanging on the line, and two black dogs were cavorting around the lawn. We sat down at a small table. He'd pushed his glasses up onto his forehead, and we began to talk. I can get back to you want to know a little bit about the Bambers thing?

Yeah. Yeah, I can tell you a little bit, but as I say, it's a long time ago now, really.

Growing up, David and his family had lived near the Bambers. David and his sister Anne were about a decade older than their adopted cousins. Can you tell me about Jeremy? What you all felt about him before this- Well, we didn't have a lot to do with Jeremy.

Jeremy was slightly younger than us, so she's not quite in our age group, if you like.

David told me they didn't really like Jeremy. He could be arrogant and rebellious.

He'd just be difficult, always trying to be awkward. He was very good at belittling his parents, particularly his mother. Not his father so much, I don't think. I don't think Neville put up with quite so much. But Auntie June had a very hard time.

It wasn't just that he disrespected his parents. In the conservative world of rural Essex, Jeremy never fit in. He flouted many of the conventions of country life. Unlike David and the other young men in the family, Jeremy rarely made appearances at the Young Farmers Club, and he was unreliable when it came to helping out on the farm.

He wasn't really a farmer, and his father tried to encourage him, but he wasn't a farmer, and he didn't want to work.

Jeremy stayed out late with his friends at nightclubs and strip joints, smoking weed and drinking champagne, frittering away his parents' money. He hung out with Bohemian characters and sometimes wore makeup. Locals whispered disdainfully that Jeremy might be gay or bisexual. In the relative's minds, all those qualities added up to a degenerate character, someone they thought was not to be trusted. Just a few months before the murders, something else happened, something that turbo-charged the family's dislike of Jeremy. There was a break-in and a robbery. It happened at a property jointly owned by the Bambers and the Bowflowers, their vacation resort on the banks of the River Blackwater. Someone stole nearly £1,000 out of the office, and Apparently, the night before, Jeremy had persuaded his father, Neville, not to bother banking the cash. He'd said it would be fine to leave it overnight in the safe. So when it was stolen, everyone suspected that Jeremy was the thief. After the murders, it didn't take long for the relatives to start asking whether Jeremy also knew more about this crime than he was letting on. Do you remember when it was that you guys first thought you didn't believe the story that Sheila had done it?

The second day. Second day? Second day, the great major starts to pick in and say, Well, hold on, this doesn't really all stack up.

It was the morning after the killings, August seventh, 1985. David and his sister, Anne Eton, had just heard what had happened, and they went to check on Jeremy at his cottage. They found him talking to a couple of police officers who were taking a statement from him as a matter of protocol.

It was all rather a relaxed atmosphere, really, considering the circumstances and the gravity of it all. But my mother and father were there. I was and my sister was there, and we were all in on listening to what he was saying.

Right away, David said, he heard Jeremy say something that didn't sit right.

And then they were saying, You had a loving relationship with your parents. Oh, yes. Wonderful relationship. And it wasn't. It was a very frosty one, and no, it was a difficult relationship. So he was not being truthful to the police.

David Alan and Anne didn't like the way Jeremy was talking about his parents and his demeanor in the wake of his family's deaths, it struck them as all wrong.

The body language and the way Jeremy was behaving were very negative vibes. He wasn't crying his eyes out all the time. He doesn't seem to show any upset.

Anne was particularly skeptical of Jeremy's story. She was an angular, inquisitive woman of 35 who vehemently disliked her flashy younger cousin. Sitting there in Jeremy's cottage, listening to his statement to police, she found a scrap of paper in her pocket and started taking notes. Anne was a meticulous scribe. She went on to cover scores of note cards with her jottings about the crime. She later turned them over to the police, and I have a copy here. Notice Jeremy has had good appetite all time, she scribbled. That day in the cottage, the more she listened, the more certain she felt that Jeremy's story was a fabrication. She later wrote, I became puzzled, more puzzled, then suspicious of Jeremy, and then bloody suspicious of Jeremy. She went on, I felt on duty, wide awake, and trying to catch everything. The cousins went home that night and sat around the kitchen table talking about what they'd heard at the cottage. The extended family didn't know much about Sheila's illness, but they described her privately as a feather-brained girl who could never have committed this crime. What were the things that made you think Sheila definitely couldn't have done it?

Sheila was so incapable. She couldn't possibly have methodically killed her before as she was supposed to have done, and she wasn't of that temperament.

There was one thing that stuck in their minds as especially odd, something about the murder weapon, which was a 22 Antshts, a hunting rifle owned by Neville Bamber. This was the gun Sheila had been holding when her body was found. At the cottage, they'd heard Jeremy tell police that the night before the killings, he'd taken that rifle and gone out to shoot rabbits with it, and that he'd then left it in the scullery, its magazine still loaded. That really aroused their suspicions. They couldn't believe Neville Bamber would ever have allowed his son to leave a loaded weapon lying around. Even if he had, given that this weapon had been used to murder the entire family, to them, Jeremy didn't seem sorry enough about having been so sloppy.

He didn't end up being the repentant son. He didn't show any emotion There was something else the family noticed.

They knew that Neville usually kept a silencer on his rifle, a hollow metal tube about seven inches long that screwed onto the end. It made the shots quieter when he went out hunting rabbits. David actually had the exact same model of silencer for his gun.

It reduces the noise by about... It just goes like that. So it doesn't frighten the rabbit. So the whole idea is that if there's more than one rabbit, you have a second chance of shooting it another one.

But when the gun was found by Sheila's body, it had no silencer on it. Where was it? What had happened to it? Had someone unscrewed it after committing the murders and it somewhere to cover their tracks? In the days after the murders, the cousins kept an eagle eye on Jeremy. They watched his behavior and analyzed his every move. It dawned on them that with his parents, Sheila and the twins all dead, Jeremy had become the sole heir to the entire family fortune. He stood to inherit everything. David told me they became even more alarmed when soon after his family had been killed, Jeremy and a friend started removing valuables from the manor.

They gutted the house and started selling all the jewelleries and my aunt's jewelleries. They were taking furniture out and taking it up to antique shops in London and flogging it off, 10 to the penny.

David and Anne and the rest of the family were disgusted. To their minds, none of this was the correct behavior of a bereaved son. They started thinking about Jeremy's expensive lifestyle. Had he killed his entire family out of greed so that he'd inherit their money and property? It was a compelling theory, but they didn't have much evidence to back it up. Still, they decided to go to the police anyway with their concerns. Two days after the murders, the cousins went down to the station and demanded to see the chief investigator. But to their dismay, he could not have been less interested. He was convinced that only Sheila could have killed the family. After all, she'd been found inside a locked house holding the murder weapon. He angrily dismissed the cousin's alternative theory.

He nearly kicked us out three times. Three times, he said, Sorry, show you to the We can't put up with this load of rubbish.

When the cousins kept pressing their case, the chief investigator rose to his feet, banged the table, and shouted at them to be quiet. Then he marched them out of his office. Anne later wrote in Capitals, he was like a raving red bull. At the funeral of Mr. And Mrs. Bamber, their son, Jeremy, led the mourners and was weeping openly- The day of the funeral, on August 16th, nine days after the killings, Jeremy was drinking and popping Valium, cracking jokes on the way to the church. But after the service, he came out of the church crying. Afterwards, the Bambers' three coffins were carried out. The Bambers' adopted son, Jeremy followed. His deep grief, obvious. Jeremy fell sobbing into his girlfriend's arms in front of a crowd of reporters. But David said that the minute he got into the funeral car...

Jeremy turned around and looked at us and came as a real cat smile. The second before, he was actually appearing to be in a terrible state. It was a big act.

Anne wrote about this moment in her notes. Jeremy did a good knees bend, cry. Photo in paper. When the cars got out of the village, he turned and smiled. She jutted. Her husband told her, Little bugger. He thinks he's got away with it. After the funeral, the cousins looked on in horror as Jeremy let loose. He and his girlfriend, Julie mugford, left the reception for a local Caribbean restaurant where they spent the evening drinking champagne and cocktails. Then they headed off on a windsurfing vacation. After that, Jeremy left his cottage in the Essex countryside and decamped to the flat where Sheila had been living in London before her death. He partied at the Notting Hill Carnival and took a boat to Amsterdam to buy marijuana. The cousins were panicking. By now, they'd convinced themselves that Jeremy had murdered his entire family for their money, and yet no one was taking them seriously. Anne wrote, We all became extremely worried that Jeremy might realize we suspected him and come after us. If the police weren't going to investigate their theory of the crime, the cousins decided they would do it themselves. One day, shortly after the murders, David's sister Anne got hold of the keys to Whitehouse Farm, and right away, she and David went went back to the house.

She later told police they'd gone back to look for clues. Anne worked through the house methodically. She stood in the kitchen and whispered, Give us a clue, Uncle Neville. Then she noticed a pair of blood-stained underpants soaking in a bucket. Sheila had been on her period. She took the underpants over to the sink by the window, and that's when she realized, the kitchen window. Maybe Jeremy had found a way to escape through the window and then close it from the outside, perhaps by banging on the glass to knock the latch into place. That could explain how the house was found, apparently locked from within. Anne threw the underwear into the kitchen trash, which her notes suggest she later took home for closer inspection. Meanwhile, David poking around, too. He went upstairs and found no clues. But on the ground floor, he opened a cupboard under the stairs.

That's when I found it.

I see. Straight away. Straight away.

It was in a box. It was in just an ordinary box like that. Like that. In a box like that. There were some cartridges in there.

Inside a box of ammunition, hidden under the stairs, was a hollow metal tube, about seven inches long. David recognized what it was right away. He owned the exact same object himself, a silencer.

I picked it up and looked at it and felt it. I can remember It probably took probably 10 minutes before I suddenly realized the consequences of what I'd got.

David felt certain that this wasn't just any silencer. It was the silencer, the one belonging to the 22 anschets that had been used to shoot the family the one that had been missing from the gun when it was retrieved from Sheila's body. Hi. Hi. Hi, Le. Sorry, my name's Heidi. I wrote to David a few weeks ago. While I was talking to David, his wife, Karen, emerged from the house carrying a load of laundry. Yeah, give her that much.

We're just clearing a few little points. I thought you weren't going to do anything. Well, I'm not doing anything, but I'm- I'm sorry. I'm just having an informative view. Oh, dear.

I'm David. She was going to watch me. It's great.

Because you said last time- No, I'm not doing anything. I'm not doing any more than what… You ask a few questions and that will be it.

Yeah, just a very- That will be it.

You just get the atmosphere of the understanding of it. I'm not going to go any further.

I really appreciate your time. Yeah, I really, really appreciate that, David. Thank you. But so the silencer, because that's obviously… That was such a crucial piece then. To my relief, David kept talking, and Karen returned reluctantly to hanging out laundry. David said that it was when he looked more closely at the silencer that he realized something sinister. It seemed to be daubed with blood. The cousins knew this could be a major discovery. If the silencer did have blood on it, that seemed to them like proof it had been on the gun when the murders were committed. If that was the case, Sheila couldn't have been the murderer. She couldn't very well have hidden the silencer after she'd shot herself in the head.

So obviously, she didn't kill herself, did she? That was the whole point. That was the point of the silencer. It couldn't be Sheila. It definitely wasn't Sheila.

And if Sheila wasn't the killer, there was really only one other possible suspect.

And who else would it have been?

The person who'd phoned the police in the first place and told them Sheila was threatening the family with a gun, the one they'd suspected all along, Jeremy Bamber. After finding the silencer, David and Anne called the cops, and an officer came over to collect it. Meanwhile, the cousins kept up their own detective work. They discussed everything they'd found with their father, Robert Bowflower, an imposing man with a helmet of white hair and beetle-black brows who was married to June's sister. Robert Bowflower considered his nephew a scoundrel with a, quote, constant craving for money, and he, too, was becoming suspicious of Jeremy He'd been there when the cousins overheard Jeremy's statement to police and when David found the silencer. And as he mulled over the evidence, he became convinced that Jeremy had murdered his parents for their fortune. He came up an elaborate theory of the crime, which he later wrote down in his diary. This diary entry is three pages of dense small text. I have a copy here. The theory it lays out is surprisingly complex and vivid. It includes a lot of dialog of scenes that Robert certainly was not present for. It almost reads like a fan fiction of the crime.

Robert figured Jeremy must have bicycled to the farm that night by Moonlight, broken into the house, and worn gloves, and a wetsuit while he committed the crime. That explained why Jeremy had no sign of blood or any injuries on him, nothing on his clothing or anything like that. Imagining Jeremy slaughtering his father, Robert wrote, Neville dies after a struggle whilst the gun gets pushed out of the way. A few random shots have to be made to make it look like the work of a maniac. The magazine is emptied. He keeps going, describing June as awake and more difficult to kill cleanly. And the twins each shot dead. Then he gets to Sheila. He writes, Back upstairs to Sheila's room. She is in a deep sleep, occasioned by the sleeping drafting draft prescribed by her doctor. Here, Robert relates the words that he imagined Jeremy must have spoken. Wake up, Sheila. Mommy wants you to say prayers with her. Lie down here, darling. Put the Bible on your chest, he supposedly said, before shooting Sheila and laying the rifle in her hands. Robert theorized that Jeremy stole through the house in his socks to keep any footprint fingerprints off the floor.

After the murders were done, he figured, Jeremy must have snuck out through the kitchen window, managing to close and latch it from the outside, as Anne had guessed, before climbing on his mother's bicycle, pedaling going home and calling the police. Robert wrote, I am convinced that Jeremy has sold his soul to the devil. Robert went down to the police station and pleaded with the police to take his theory seriously. But still, the police totally stonewalled him. One officer noted that he had, quote, gone over the top and seemed to be trying to find evidence that wasn't there. Robert was furious. He wrote, It was clear to us the investigation was stagnant and going nowhere. But then, just when the relatives had all but given up, something happened that finally got the police's attention.

Julie. Julie coming through.

Julie was Jeremy's ex-girlfriend, Julie Mugford.

And blew the whistle on Jeremy. Then all of a sudden, hell let loose.

Malcolm Gladwell here.

This season on Revisionist History, we're going back to the spring of 1988, to a town in northwest Alabama, where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control. There was this joke that said that it was easier to get forgiveness in the Church of Christ for murdering somebody than it was to be divorced.

From Revisionist History, this is the Alabama murders. Listen to Revisionist History, the Alabama Murders, wherever you get your podcast. Part Two, The Perfect Murder. Julie Mugford was a 21-year-old student teacher with a round face and a halo of dark girls. Julie and Jeremy had met at a local pizza parlor, Slopy Joe's, and struck up a romance. By all accounts, Julie was besotted with Jeremy, but the relationship was tempestuous, and a month after the shooting, he ended it for good. That was when Julie Mogford walked into the police station and told officers something explosive. She said Jeremy Bamber had been plotting for more than a year to kill his family. She told the cops he said he would like to commit the perfect murder, and all Jeremy wanted was money. This is Julie giving an interview the following year. I remember one occasion in particular when he said to me with quite a lot of fealments that he'd get rid of all of the family, including Sheila and the boys, and he would do so by shooting them. Julie told the police a strange and winding tale. She said Jeremy had told her that after he shot the family, he would arrange the crime scene to frame his sister.

She told police that Jeremy had tried to toughen himself up for the killings by strangling rats, but had eventually realized that he didn't have the stomach for it. So instead, he'd hired a hitman. The assassin was apparently a local plumber, someone they both knew. Jeremy had paid him £2,000 for the murders and told him to call from the White House when everyone was He said, 'I'm not going to go to bed. ' On the night of the murders, Julie said Jeremy had called from his cottage and told her the crime will have to be tonight or never. But she'd been smoking weed and had simply told him not to be so stupid. Then When he called again after 3: 00 AM and told her something was wrong at the farm, but she said she was feeling, quote, dozy and had only appreciated the significance of his words after returning to bed. Then, she told police, I knew that Jerry had murdered his family. Some people pointed out that it was a bit odd how long it had taken Julie to come forward after the murders, a full month of sitting on the information, not Not to mention the year preceding the crime in which she'd known her boyfriend was plotting a mass murder and said nothing.

David told me it puzzled him.

That next day after the murder, I was in the house and we walked across to the pub to get some sandwiches. She could have told me. She could have said, You know, Jeremy did it. She didn't. She didn't say a thing. Not a thing. It wasn't until several weeks later that she came forward and spilt the beans.

What What did she make of that, that she kept it to herself for so long?

I think she loved him. She loved him. But unfortunately, he didn't love her. And all of a sudden, she became a woman spurned.

A woman spurned. It was certainly true that Julie was angry at Jeremy. She'd been so livid when he broke up with her that by her own admission, she'd actually tried to suffocate him with a pillow. If you were dead, you would always be with me, she admitted saying. Julie didn't respond to my many phone calls and emails, but in the past, she's denied that the breakup had anything to do with her decision to go to the cops. She said in the weeks after the murders, she was simply scared to come forward. Here she is again in that same interview. I didn't think that at that stage anyone would believe me because it was obvious I was terribly shaken up about the whole affair. And Jeremy was also so terribly confident that nobody could do anything about it, that he said there was nothing I could do anyway. There was nothing I could have done to have stopped it, and there was nothing I could do now. Faced with Julie's shocking claims, The police could no longer dismiss the cousin's theory that Jeremy should be the prime suspect. They arrested him on suspicion of murder and took him to the police station, where he was interrogated over four days.

Jeremy denied any involvement in the family's murders. He insisted that Julie had invented the whole story. He said, If she could put me behind bars, then nobody else could have me. But over the course of his interrogation, he did make an important admission. He confessed to another crime, one that his relatives had always suspected him of, the burglary at the family's vacation resort. He was the one who'd stolen almost £1,000 from their safe. That certainly didn't look good. But meanwhile, the cops had been checking out Julie's story, and it was not holding water. Police had arrested the plumber who Jeremy had supposedly hired as an assassin, but he turned out to have a solid alibi. Under questioning, the plumber grudgingly admitted that he'd been cheating on his wife with not one but two women. One of whom confirmed that he'd been in her bed on the night of the murders. After validating his story, an officer reported that the plumber had been totally exonerated. He does not know one end of a firearms from the other, the officer wrote, His sole claim to Fame is an insatiable sexual appetite. With the hitman story having collapsed and no hard evidence against Jeremy, the cops had to let him go.

He was picked up from the station in a friend's white Jaguar, and he soon set sail for a vacation in Saint-Tropez. Yet, Julie's intervention had irreversibly changed the case because in the first hours after she came forward, the original detective in charge, the one who'd thrown the cousins out of his office, had been removed from the investigation. Julie's claims seemed to blow apart the murder-suicide theory that he'd cleaved to so closely, and so he'd been replaced by a new chief investigator, Detective Superintendent Mike Ainsley. Ainsley is now dead, but his notes on the case indicate that he took a dislike to Jeremy. He'd gleaned from Julie and the relatives that Jeremy liked to keep, quote, criminal and homosexual company, and, quote, he is considered by some who know him to be bisexual. Homophobia was rife in Britain in the '80s, and it appears that to Ainsley's mind, all this made Jeremy a likely villain. Sheila, on the other hand, seemed to have made a more favorable impression. He noted that she was, A very beautiful person, slim build, petite, very feminine, with well-manicured hands, well-applied makeup, and well-groomed hair. Even after Julie's hitman story fell apart, Ainsley never returned to the murder-suicide theory.

He remained laser-focused on proving Jeremy's guilt. Ainsley called in the cops who'd been the first on the scene at the manor on the night of the crime to give fresh statements about anything suspicious they'd noticed in Jeremy's demeanor, and several of them said that his behavior had struck them as strange. For a start, there was Jeremy's call to the police reporting that his father had just phoned to say Sheila had gone beserk with a gun. I had a problem with the phone call and the way he described it. Sergeant Chris Buhs was the one who responded to Jeremy's call to the police. He's the officer who told me about arriving at the manor in the middle of the night and talking to Jeremy in the darkness outside. He told me he thought it was odd that Jeremy had called through to the local station rather than dialing the UK's emergency number, 999. Kids are brought up with the number 999 drilled into their heads.

If something's wrong, call 999.

You don't look up the local police station's number at 2: 00 in the morning or whenever it is. Back then, no digital records existed that could confirm whether Jeremy had really got a call from Neville that night, as he'd claimed. But now that police were seriously considering the idea that Sheila had been murdered, Jeremy's story about that phone call took on a new significance.

Jeremy's story about his father phoning up, saying, your sister has gone mad with a gun, seals it. If that can be proved not to be true, then he's obviously lying.

Why is he lying? Because he's done it himself. Sergeant Buhes thought about how Jeremy had been so eager for him and his colleagues to go into the house as soon as they arrived. Now it seemed as if Jeremy just couldn't wait for them to find the family dead. He wanted us to see as soon as possible that the house was dead people, so we could play out a scene with dead bodies and him reacting to. Even things that had looked at first, like signs that Sheila was the shooter, seemed to wither away to nothing. Like the movement Sergeant Buhes had seen in the master bedroom window that had sent him sprinting back to the patrol car, calling for backup. I don't know if it was some fault in the glass or just the angle, the reflection of the moon changed slightly, and that gave the impression of movement. At that moment, when he'd broken the news to Jeremy that Sheila had killed his whole family.

He looked at me and he started to cry.

Buh said that even at the time, that reaction looked like crocodile tears.

You're forcing that because you think I'm expecting to cry.

Other officers thought Jeremy seemed oddly devoid of emotion. In the hours after learning of his family's fate, he'd made strange comments, talking about getting the harvest in and about buying a sports car. Some officers said they'd suspected him right away, others only in hindsight. Either way, they all came to the same conclusion in the end.

He's lying.

I mean, it's a classic detective novel thing, Agatha Christie or whatever.

I'm going to kill my family, so I inherit all the money.

As the investigation gathered pace, The theories laid out by the relatives that had once seemed so far-fetched now seemed strikingly prescient. The day he took over the inquiry, Superintendent Ainsley visited Robert Bowflower and asked for a copy of the diary in which he'd outlined the way he imagined Jeremy carrying out the murders. Ainsley dispatched investigators to chase down many of Robert's theories. And suddenly, this speculative document became a blueprint for the police case. The house locked from the inside? Well, that was a classic ploy, plumped straight from the pages of any number of whodunits. Jeremy must have escaped through the kitchen window, as Robert and Anne theorized, somehow deftly fastened it from the outside and made a way on his mother's bicycle. The Bible, found next to Sheila's body, an open to that passage from Psalms about blood guiltiness? What if it had been placed there, just as Robert had imagined, to make it appear that she'd killed herself in a religious frenzy? A scene carefully arranged, but not quite carefully enough. Photos showed the Bible propped at an awkward angle against Sheila's upper arm in a place where it wouldn't have fallen naturally if she'd shot herself.

A clue perhaps, that revealed Jeremy Bamber's master plan. The pieces seemed to be falling into place, but still, It was all circumstantial, less evidence than conjecture. Then, finally, came the single biggest breakthrough in the case. The forensic tests came back on that silencer, the one David Bowflower had found stashed under the stairs at the manor. The silencer was daubed with drops of human blood, blood that investigators said matched Sheila's. The results seemed to confirm everything the family had suspected from the very beginning. If the silencer had been on the gun when Sheila was shot and had then been removed and hidden under the stairs, that was proof that she couldn't have killed herself. She had been murdered. Nearly two months after the shootings, Jeremy Bamber was arrested again. This time, he was charged with murder. Jeremy Bamber was brought to the court from the cells at Chalmsford Police Station, where he's been questioned since his arrest. At trial the following year, prosecutors said the finding of Sheila's blood in the silencer proved beyond doubt that Jeremy was a quite skilled, cold, calculating killer. He had murdered his sister and then staged the scene to frame her, almost exactly as Robert Bowflower had speculated in his diary.

All he had to do was shoot all of them and then convince police that his sister had gone beserk with the gun. The crime had been motivated by greed. That was evident from how quickly Jeremy had begun his parents' possessions. She said that Jeremy Bamber was searching around the house for money left by Mr. Bamber. His weeks of drinking and partying and vacationing since the killings proved that he had no remorse. Jeremy Bamber joined them for a meal that night. She said he seemed cheerful. He talked about buying a new car, a Porsche or a Ferrari. Julie Mugford trembled and sobbed as she spent five hours in the witness box. Even though her hitman story had been disproven, she was still a star witness describing how Jeremy had told her for months before the crime that he longed to see his family dead. Ms. Mugford said that Jeremy deeply resented the way his parents controlled his life. During In these deliberations, the jury sent a note to the judge asking for a point of clarification. Could the blood in the silencer have come from anyone other than Sheila? The judge told them, No, that it, did not match anyone else.

The jury returned their verdict 21 minutes later. Guilty. Justice Drake told him your conduct was evil, almost beyond belief. The judge said, I find it difficult to foresee whether it will ever be safe to release someone who has killed five members of his family, shooting two small boys asleep in their beds. Outside the court, Robert Bowflower gave a triumphant speech. He described Sheila as a fun-loving girl and thanked the police for their painstaking and diligent work on the case. For decades, until his death in 2010, he would refer to his nephew only by his prisoner number, L12373. We cried with absolute relief, Anne wrote after the conviction. To mark the occasion, senior officers threw a luncheon for the family at police headquarters. From then on, whenever this story was told and retold in books and documentaries and then fictional crime dramas, the relatives would be depicted as heroes.

So you don't think Sheila did this?

No, I don't. Brave and perspicacious.

So Jeremy's lying.

And there's only one reason why he'd lie about that, isn't there? Who saw what the police failed to see. It's the silencer for the anxious, and there's something red on it. And took justice into their own hands. Hi, it's Madelyne. I'm excited to tell you that In the Dark has merch. There's a hat, a shirt, and a tote bag, all with the new In the Dark logo. They're modern and high quality, and you can get them by going to store. Newyorker. Com. Part three, The Spoils. As I sat with Jeremy's cousin, David, admiring the view in his pretty garden, there was one thing he said that struck an odd note. Yeah, you've got a lovely place.

I'm surviving. I have a small income from the farm here. Down to my last four Range Rovers. Oh, my goodness. No, never mind about that. But my sister has taken full advantage of her situation. Put it like that.

My sister has taken full advantage of her situation, he said. He was talking about Anne, the note taker, who'd worked tirelessly alongside David and their father to send Jeremy down. David told me that back then, he and Anne used to be close, but not anymore.

I have no love for my sister at all. She actually, ever since, she's rather taken over the reins. She's taken most of the family money and everything else that came with it. Oh, really? She's done very nicely said herself. My sister has done very, very financially, very well out of it all. She's catching all the boards, and I'm not catching them, but never mind.

The family money he was referring to turned out to be the Bamba family fortune. There's a law in the UK that bars murderers from inheriting money from their victims. So after Jeremy was convicted, the family estate had passed into the hands of the very people who'd done everything in their power to put him behind bars, his cousins. David said that what had torn him and his sister apart were disputes over how to divide up all that money and property.

It's all very... It's very sour grapes. Very sour grapes.

Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.

I think she's a very ambitious lady.

I'd already written Anne a letter with detailed questions about her part in the case, but I'd never heard back. So now I decided to just show up. Just driving up the gravel track here. At Whitehouse Farm. The house where the murders happened. Because the Bamber family manor is where Anne Eton now lives. At the time of the shootings, Anne and her husband had been in a precarious financial position. They were heavily in debt and farming land that was owned by Neville Bamber. But a few weeks before the killings, Jeremy had told Anne something that alarmed her, that he and his father intended to sell that land and use the proceeds to buy the mansion where his grandmother lived down the road, a beautiful white fronted property called Vulty Manor. Anne had always dreamed of living at Vulty, and she was so enraged by what Jeremy had said that she went home and tore down all the wallpaper in her bathroom. She later told police, I felt that what Jeremy had told me was a threat. When the murders happened, Neville and June's sudden death only heightened Anne's financial precarity because it meant that Jeremy Bamber was set to inherit all the Bamber properties, including the land that Anne was farming.

But after Jeremy Bamber was convicted, all those troubles went away. The inheritance passed to his relatives, and soon after, Anne and her family moved into the manor at Whitehouse Farm. Now, as I pulled into the driveway at Whitehouse Farm, a stuped figure approached. Okay, so I'm going to hop out. It was Anne's husband, Peter. Is it Peter? Yes. Oh, Peter. Hello. My name's Heidi. I sent you a letter, you and Anne, a few weeks ago, just to say, I don't know if you received it. Thank you very much for calling me Anne. That's 30 odd years ago now, isn't it? I know. I mean, it's an awfully long time, and I'm really sorry to be bothering you with it. I always feel awkward knocking on people's doors, but I'm obligated to try and talk to everybody who was involved. It's private. It's our family. Peter was standing off at a distance, eyeing me suspicious seriously. Then he leaned in closer for a moment, as though to tell me something secret. Do not be full by Jeremy Bammer. He's got away with so much by talking to pretty girls like yourself. You take it in. I never had that charm.

I wouldn't say that. I'm a country boy that's there. I wouldn't say that. We stood on the gravel driveway chatting for a few minutes as farm trucks and sprayers trundled in the fields behind the shed. By now, the sun had pierced the gray clouds, lighting up the yard and the manor so that the scene looked uncannily cheerful. When Anne and Peter moved in here, a lot of people in the community were taken aback. When police officers called by the property during a review of the case, six years after the murders, they noticed that the house appeared largely unchanged from the crime scene photographs. Inside, it was almost as if the place was frozen in time, a museum to the awful events of August seventh, 1985. Anne told them that she'd even kept the trash bag that she'd taken from the kitchen at the manor the morning after the crime, the one in to which her notes suggest she'd thrown Sheila's bloody underpants. She also appeared to have kept the night dress Sheila was wearing when her body was found. She told police that Sheila's dress was in a laundry basket in her bedroom, still unwashed.

Upstairs, the officers found carpet padding still soaked with blood. But Anne told the police she was content living there. I feel Auntie June and Uncle Neville are here as well and are happy that we are here, she told them. Peter told me Anne was out, but that she wouldn't want to talk to me anyway. It was her Auntie that was murdered here, wasn't it? He told me, gesturing back the house. But I just really want to make sure this is balanced. It's bloated our life. It's never been the same since. Really? Yeah, it really has. Horrible. Well, I just- Don't upset Anne, really. I don't want to upset Anne. I really want to give you a proper hearing. You're a bright girl. You know what went wrong. You can't make any more of a story than that bastard that killed those poor children just for money.

Awful.

It's the most appalling crime. That's the most horrific crime. Absolutely. Just then, a landrover crunched to a halt. The door opened and outwafed a cloud of floral perfume, followed by a petite woman with green eyes and chestnut-tinted hair. It was Anne. She hurried inside with Peter. Anne has just got back, and Peter is talking to her about whether she'd be willing to talk to me. She reemerged moments later, holding a piece of paper. Hello. I did receive your letter. I'm not going to speak to you. I'm just going to give you this. Because journalists are not supposed to come round here. She pressed the paper into my hands. Is that right? I didn't know that. I'm sorry, I didn't know that that was the case. But I just haven't been talking a bit to Peter, I guess what I was just saying to him was, I'm doing this review of the case. I don't want to speak about it. I'm going to unpack my bags now and I might go for a swim this afternoon. Oh, that sounds lovely. How wonderful. In the river? Yes. Oh, glorious. Just look at all my statements, and that is a pretty true record.

The statements. But Anne, just before you go, can I just- I'm sorry. Because If I do, another one comes, another one comes. If I don't, then I don't. Anne was heading back towards the house now. The chance of talking to her was slipping away. I'm sorry, I don't know if it's happened to you? Please. It must have been awful. No, I can't imagine. Do something good in the world. Do something good in the world, Peter shouted. Then Peter and Anne disappeared inside the manor. Standing there in the shadow of Whitehouse Farm, I looked down at the piece of paper she'd given me. It was a typed statement that said, Jeremy Bamber has caused so much grief and pain to this family that we find it almost impossible to deal with and rarely speak about it. He continues to try and cause pain to the family from the safety of his cell. Next time on blood relatives. This call is from a person currently in a prison in England. All calls are logged and recorded and may be listened to by a member of prison staff. If you do not wish to accept this call, please hang up now.

Morning, Heidi. Hi, Jeremy. How are you? If you're a New Yorker subscriber, you can listen to the rest of blood relatives now. Visit newyorker. Com/dark to subscribe for just a dollar a week and listen to all six episodes in the New Yorker app, ad-free. For non-subscribers, new episodes will be released every Tuesday. Blood Relatives is written and produced by me, Heidi Blake, and lead producer, Natalie Jablonsky. It's edited by Alison MacAdam. Samara Freemark is the managing producer for the series. Additional editing by Madelyne Barr, Willing Davidson, and Julia Rothschild. Additional production by Raymond Tunkerkar. Theme and original music by Alex Weston. Additional music by Chris Julen and Alison Leighton-Brown. This episode was mixed by Cori Schreppel. Our Art is by Owen Jent. Art Direction by Nicolas Konrad and Aviva Mikalow. Fact Checking by Naomi The Dark. Legal review by Fabio Betoni and Ben Murray. Our managing editor is Julia Rothschild. The head of global audio for Condé Neste is Chris Banon. The editor of The New Yorker is David Remnik. If you have comments or story tips, please send them to the team at inthedark@newyorker. Com. And make sure to follow In the Dark wherever you get your podcasts.

From PRX.