Transcript of Blood Relatives, Episode 3

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.

Heidi, I'm only allowed 45 minutes, so we will have to schedule or schedule or whatever it needs to be done. But it's great because I'm now on the phone with you, and we can organize times, we can organize dates, meetings. But anyway, not to worry. We'll speak soon. Bye, Heidi. Happy birthday to me. Bye now.

Forty years after the murders at Whitehouse Farm, Jeremy Bamber remains in prison. He's locked up in a maximum security facility known to the press as Monster mansion. To this day, his name and photo are still splashed across stories nearly every month with headlines like Twisted Family Killers, or What the UK's most dangerous prisoners eat for Christmas dinner, full menu revealed. Despite all the fevered publicity surrounding the case, in the years since his trial, I and the rest of the public actually heard almost nothing directly from Jeremy Bamber. Prison authorities in the UK often make it hard for journalists to talk with inmates. So aside from a few quotes in the newspapers, mostly disseminated by his supporters, his own voice was lost in all the noise. So when I started looking into this story, I took a punt and sent a letter to Wakefield Prison. And to my surprise, a couple of months later, I got that voicemail.

But it's great because I'm now on the phone with you, and we can organize times, we can organize days.

I was eager to speak to Jeremy Bamber because for all these decades, while the tabloids have run their scare stories depicting him as a monster, he has steadfastly maintained that he's innocent. From In the Dark and The New Yorker, I'm Heidi Blake, and this is blood relatives.

Cocky, narcissist, psychopath, cold-blooded. Jerem was horrible. I mean, he did horrible things. Do not be followed by Jeremy Bam.

He's got away with so much. The first thing I thought when he started crying is, You're forcing that. I think nearly every police officer came into contact with him, thought he lying. I'd heard so many people talk about Jeremy Bamber. Now, I was going to hear directly from him. Part One, Prison Calls.

This call is from a person currently in a prison in England. If you do not wish to accept this call, please hang up now.

Jeremy, hi.

Hi.

The first time I spoke with Jeremy Bamber, he just celebrated a birthday.

63.

Wow, 63.

I've just put my calendar up in jail, and that's my 39th birthday.

It was the 39th birthday that he'd spent behind bars. The image I'd had of Jeremy Bamber was from photographs and footage from the '80s when he was a brash, puckishly handsome young man of 24, flashing a rebellious smile. But now, his hair had turned white and his voice was raspy. He was getting old.

I look at it, I've been awake in jail a billion seconds.

Jeremy has limited phone time every day, only about 45 minutes to divide between his lawyer and friends and now me. He was clear about how much of that he was willing to give me.

We're going to have 10 minutes. We've got to be strict, but we can have 10 minutes every day.

Perfect, Jeremy.

If you're happy with that, because I've only got 45, so you can have 10.

I'm very happy with that. That was great. I would end up talking to Jeremy almost every day for months. Morning, Hi. Jeremy. Hi. Hello. So sorry to miss your call earlier. Jeremy would call me whenever he was free, which happened at all sorts of odd hours. I've, in fact, just locked myself out of my house. He'd call me in the morning when I was rushing to get ready.

Heidi, have you got two minutes?

Absolutely, yeah. Or while I was sleeping with some urgent detail from his case that he'd just struck on.

Sorry to do this, but it's quite important. The important thing with the radio and telephone box is that they've produced a huge amount of supposing manuscript copies.

It was strange to find myself on the phone with a man considered to be one of Britain's most vicious killers. For years, I'd talks about him the same way most people do, as a cold, glib, psychopath who'd done something unimaginable relatively evil. But here I was chatting to him about ordinary things.

I went down to the hairdressing salon here.

What style have you gone for?

Well, just a normal... Short back inside That's really the old standard prison haircut.

When it came to the details of his case, Jeremy was more than ready to dive in.

I guess you've got one or two learning things you'd love to ask.

Well, I certainly have. I thought maybe the thing to do since we're going to be going at this in 10 minutes chunks is just to go through things in this somewhat chronological order, if that makes sense. I'm leaving this to you, Heidi.

You can have me fried, poached, scrambled, flambade, however you want me.

I had so many questions for Jeremy about what had happened on the night of the killings, but also about how he'd behaved in the days and weeks afterwards. In that time, Jeremy had acted in ways that his relatives, and later police and prosecutors, had found odd, and by extension, suspicious. So much so that his behavior became a big part of the case against him. It was what led prosecutors to present him so effectively as a cold-blooded villain. The way they told it in court, all the strange things Jeremy did and said added up to such a damning portrait, one that has lingered in the public imagination for decades. And so I wanted to hear how Jeremy would explain those things.

Come on, then. Let's go. We'll have to rack some brain cells to go back 40 odd years to get some meat on the bone here.

I know. It's a long time ago. Let's see how we get on. Just tell me what comes to you naturally.

Okay.

I'm wondering if you can take me back to the day before the crime on the sixth, when you You were harvesting all day out on the tractor. Yeah. It had been harvest season, the busiest time of year on the farm, and Jeremy said he had spent the day helping his father, Neville, bring in the crops. That evening, he'd spotted some rabbits by the potato shed. On the farm, they were considered pesky vermin. So Jeremy said he hurried back to the manor to grab father's rifle, a 22 & Shirt.

So nipping back for the rifle and thinking, Oh, yeah, I'll get these. And by the time I'd gone back, they'd gone.

No rabbits that day. As dusk settled over the fields, Jeremy said he headed back to the manor to return his father's rifle and say good night to his parents and his sister, Sheila, who was up from London with the twins. He said he paused when he walked in the house and propped the rifle at the end of a bench in the scullery.

I think there were some flowers there and some bits and bobs. I just rested it against that. I remember taking the magazine out, putting it on the... I think it was a cushion or something there.

Everyone was in the kitchen. His parents were sitting at the table with Sheila, and Jeremy said the atmosphere was tense. He said June and Neville were telling Sheila that she was too ill to take care of her boys since her most recent schizophrenia breakdown, and they were suggesting that she should place them in foster care. This scenario, losing her children, was Sheila's worst nightmare. Tell me, how did Sheila strike you that day?

She was looking just lost, if the words be right. Just that, she used to smoke these little charu cigars. I remember she was puffing a lot of those when she came down this time, as if she'd got that need to just get that nicotine fixed, which I think she didn't like being told what to do.

Jeremy's account of this conversation about fostering the twins was familiar. He'd told police about it on the night of the murders, and it had come up at trial. Prosecutors claimed he'd invented it to make it appear that Sheila had flown into a rage at the suggestion that the boys should be taken away, and that was why she'd murdered the family. But to me, Jeremy's memory of the last time he saw his family didn't make Sheila sound scary, just small and quiet and sad.

That's the last view I had of them. Mom in her normal seat, sitting there eating her tea, dad in his normal seat, sitting there eating his tea, and Sheila at the other end of the table. I remember her being quite hunched over and small, looking back into the room as I left and just said, Good night, everybody, and off I went. And that was it until dad phoned me.

Jeremy said he drove home to his cottage a couple of miles from the manor. He watched a bit of TV and went to bed. That night, around 3: 30 AM, Jeremy said he was woken up by the phone call from his father, Neville.

He sounded distressed and rushed and distracted.

Jeremy recalled Neville saying, Your sister has gone beserk, and she's got a gun.

Sheila's got one of my guns. Please come over. I must have said something, but I don't remember saying anything. Dad, what's up? Or, Dad, how can I help? Or, What do you want? Or, I must have said something, but I don't remember responding, Dad, what is it? Or, Dad, And then the phone just went dead or cut off.

He said he tried calling back, but he couldn't get through. The line was busy.

And then that left me just wondering what to do.

Jeremy told me that this call was worrying, for sure, but not totally out of the ordinary. His family was used to dealing with Sheila's schizophrenic episodes. She'd lashed out before and thrown things. And when this thing happened, it usually blew over. By all accounts, Neville was an intensely private man who hated the idea of involving strangers in his family's business. But Jeremy said as far as he knew, Sheila had never grabbed a gun before. So after this call from his father, he said he wasn't sure what to do next. Should he call the police? Or would that seem like a big overreaction?

I didn't have any idea that it would spiral like this because it's never done before.

Right.

So thinking, Oh, well, I'm heading towards gunfire and mayhem, I didn't think that at all. I thought I was going to get there. Dad was going to come and say, For fuck's sake, you brought the police. All I wanted was you to come over because I'm panicking a bit because she was just a little bit more out of control than normal.

He told me he wondered if part of him was even feeling a bit annoyed with Sheila for making a scene.

It's the inevitability of mental illness that it goes up and down, and it's quite emotionally tiring for those around.

It's quite difficult.

To keep that level of concern and love, and sometimes you can just think, For fuck's sake, put yourself together. Sometimes it can just wear you down.

That night, despite his hesitation, Jeremy did decide to call the police. But rather than dialing the emergency emergency number, 999, he found a telephone directory and looked up the number for the local station. Prosecutors would later point to this decision as evidence that Jeremy was making up the whole story. Sergeant Chris Buhes, the first officer on the scene that night told me it had immediately struck him as odd. 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. I asked Jeremy about that. The decision not to dial 999, I guess I'm curious, do you remember considering doing that and then thinking, No, that's silly. I'll just look up.

It never occurred to me to phone 999. It wasn't an emergency. She's dealt with these things before. So no, I didn't. I didn't think of 999.

Jeremy said that as he drove to the manor to meet the police, he was a bit apprehensive. But it wasn't until he got there and found the house eerily silent that he said he started to become really concerned. The only sound from inside was the winding of the family's dog, a shitsu named Krispi. Everything else was still. That was when he'd started urging the police to go into the house. Sergeant Buse had told me he thought this, too, was suspicious.

He 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.

Like, Jeremy just couldn't wait for the police to go inside and find his family's bodies. But when I put Sergeant Buse's theory to Jeremy, he felt that that was a sign that you already knew what was in there, and you just wanted them to go in and find it quickly, so the whole thing was over. Jeremy said That was ridiculous.

I did try and push him to go in the house. Of course I did. And he wouldn't. But that's him. That's him being frightened. I mean, obviously, we wanted to go in the house. I wanted to go in the house to save my family or to help them.

Jeremy sat and waited in a patrol car for hours for armed police to arrive, then for hours more as they surrounded the property and called for Sheila to surrender. He said he kept waiting anxiously while the raid team entered the house.

It's probably as frightening a situation as anyone could be in. And yet I had no one there holding my hand or giving me any reassurance.

After a while, Sergeant Buse came over to him to break the terrible news.

He just came up. I think he tapped on the window and wound it down and said, You know, they're all dead. Everybody's dead.

Jeremy broke down in tears when he heard the news, a reaction that struck Sergeant Buse as big act. But Jeremy told me he was in shock, so much so that he thought at first that the police had killed his family.

I went, What? You've shot them all. You've killed them all. Why have you shot them all? I remember being really distressed at the police for having done it because I genuinely believe that because there were so many armed police, I genuinely believe they'd killed everybody. I remember saying that over and over to them. I remember one of the senior officers coming over to say, No, we haven't We haven't shot them. No.

When Jeremy told me this, I was skeptical. I wondered if he'd come up with this story in order to undermine the prosecution's narrative that he set out from the start to frame his sister. But later, I found an officer's handwritten notes confirming that Jeremy had voiced this suspicion at the scene. The officer wrote, I put that comment down to him being distraught. Jeremy told me that however scared he'd been for his family's safety up to that point, it had still never really occurred to him that Sheila had actually killed them.

There was no sense of what on earth could have unfolded in the house because It's not like I would have imagined that Sheila would have shot everyone. I had no concept whatsoever that it was going to end like this. That would have never, ever entered my mind that we were going to enter the house to find everybody dead. Not even 1% of my thought thought that.

From the officer's notes at the scene, it seemed at first like Jeremy was unable to accept that his family was gone. He kept begging to speak to his father, and when the cops reminded him that Neville was dead, he broke down afresh. Then, finally, he muttered, Sheila ought to be in a nut house for what she's done. Shortly afterwards, he was seen wretching in a field. Can you tell me a bit of what was going through you, going through your mind as you were processing this news that your sister had done it?

Do you know, selfishly, absolutely selfishly, I remember selfishly How on earth am I going to fucking cope? How am I going to manage this on me own? And that, genuinely, I remember it, and I can feel the feel now, and I'm crying now. Just that instant, how the fuck am I going to cope? And I... It was really frightening.

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Part Two, Scrutiny. In the days after crime, police records show that a doctor prescribed Jeremy some Valium to calm his nerves, and he started washing the pills down with alcohol. It was after that that he did and said many of the things that seemed to his relatives so unbefitting of a grieving son, like cracking jokes after the funeral. How do you feel looking back on those moments? Do you look back at that and think, Oh, God, I wish I hadn't said that. That just didn't look great.

It's just my stupid personality, honestly. Just being a dick. Actually, I could dick and say things I shouldn't have said, but I need to own it. I have to own it.

I had noticed that Jeremy could be a bit of a scrooble. Like that moment in our very first call when we were about to start talking about the murder of his family, and he said, You can have me fried, poached, scrambled, flambade, however you want me. That seemed so flippant. Or another time when we talked about the family shitsu, Krispy, the one who could be heard whining inside the manor. The dog had been jumpy after the shootings and had taken to biting people. So Jeremy sent him to the vet to be put down and presumably cremated.

I made a joke the other day about Krispy, and I said, he was in the end, Krispy. Is that too soon? Is it too soon, 40 years later? It probably is too soon.

You can hear me laughing along awkwardly, as I did other times, too, when he'd make sexist jokes or be a bit boredy, and I'd think, Really? Read the room, Jeremy. I'd imagine him sitting around the Sunday dinner table with his relatives, David and Anne, and their father, Robert, back in the '80s. It wasn't hard to see how he'd rubbed them the wrong way. His uncle, Robert, wrote, I loathe boy and couldn't bear being anywhere near him. Even Jeremy's own barrister seemed to take against him. In private notes before the trial, he described his client as, quote, spoiled brat, or brat who would have liked to have been spoiled more. It was strange, this gaucheness, coming from a man who'd been so widely depicted as an arch manipulator, a charming and highly persuasive sociopath.

Do not think for Jeremy Boundler.

Who'd deceived so many people. We have a scene of a crime which has been very cunningly arranged. Then, as I waded through the evidence files, I found a document that seemed to offer an explanation, a psychiatric report that outlined multiple assessments Jeremy has undergone over the years at the request of prison authorities or his lawyers. None of those evaluations had detected any evidence of psychopathic traits or any sign that Jeremy had a personality disorder. He was a little vain, a little flamboyant, a little compulsive, but all within the normal range. The report also placed him within the low to normal range for impression management, meaning that he was not an artful manipulator. He was below average in his ability to assess or influence the way others perceived him. The psychiatrist concluded, It is hard to sustain the view that Jeremy Bamber is so expert in deceptive self-presentation as to maintain this front over a variety of different assessors different assessment instruments, and different times. In the weeks after the murders, Jeremy was under relentless scrutiny. His cousins were watching him closely, taking copious notes about what he said and did. Many of their observations would feature prominently at trial when prosecutors pointed to his behavior as evidence that he was a cold, remorseless killer.

But Jeremy told me he was pretty much oblivious to all of this. He had no idea his behavior was being picked apart. Like the moment at his parents' funeral, for instance, when he broke down crying, which his cousin, David flower had told me, seemed so suspicious. Did you feel under a microscope at the time? Did you feel like people were watching? No. You didn't?

No, not at all. I didn't see the cameras. I didn't see people. I didn't see any of it. I was wrapped up in the few people that were around me and my own self-indulgent sadness, I suppose.

I asked about that famous footage of him, breaking down outside the church, and how some people thought he was acting.

Yeah, but that's just... I mean, come on. It hurts when people... I was crying yesterday. Come on. I'm an emotional person who I'm sorry. I know everyone thinks I'm a psychopath and can't cry and don't have any emotion, but it's just not true.

Then there was that moment afterwards that Jeremy's cousins found so sickening when he turned and gave them what David called a Chesa Cap smile. Jeremy remembers that, too, but he says he was just trying to reassure them that he was all right.

Smiling and trying to put forward a united front that I'm okay and don't worry. We got through the funeral and it was tough. But having got through it, I felt, Well, great, we're through it.

What about all that partying and vacationing? The way he'd been knocking back champagne and cocktails at a Caribbean restaurant after the funeral, and then holding court at his girlfriend's birthday dinner, visiting strip clubs and sailing off to Amsterdam and Saint-Tropez. I asked Jeremy what that was all about.

Trying to feel things, maybe. Trying to get people to like me more, or like when we were going down to the Caribbean cottage and I was trying to be the life and the soul at Julie's birthday or whatever. You force it.

What do you think you were seeking, how you were comforting yourself in those actions, of all of those things you did?

Love and kindness and support and friendship and an end to my sadness and trying to figure out that life It's worth living, I suppose.

These criticisms of Jeremy for failing to perform his sorrow convincingly were later presented as evidence at trial that he was lying about everything. As though no innocent person who'd just lost his whole family would conceivably behave the way he did. But this aspect of the case troubled me because grief can manifest itself in all sorts strange and unbecoming ways.

All these are retrospectively trying to figure out ways to, I don't know, just portray me slightly strangely. And it just hurts me a little bit. But these are all nothingnesses. But accumulatively, people think that this is the narrative. Yeah. It's really not.

As Jeremy tells it, in his grief, he didn't even notice that his relatives were growing suspicious of him. He said he felt grateful for their presence. He thought they were being supportive. At one point, he even sent his cousin Anne Eton, a bunch of flowers.

I did, yeah. I sent her some flowers. Thank you for all your loving. Thank you for everything you're doing. I was happy to have some support from people come around and care for me.

Anne recorded this moment receiving Jeremy's flowers in her notes. She wrote, The card which came with them said, 'Thank you for all your loving. ' It wasn't until later that Jeremy started to realize that something was amiss between him and his relatives. It was when he finally went back to the manor for the first time after the murders that Jeremy suddenly noticed various things were missing. He said he was shocked to find that David, Anne, and their parents had started making off with some of the valuables from the manor.

They wanted Mom and dad's possessions, jewelry, paintings, things. They just wanted stuff. When I went round the house and they'd loaded everything into their cars and taken it back to their houses, I just couldn't believe it. I thought, What on earth is going on here? They were just going in the house and taking what they wanted. In Mum's house, Mom and Dad's house, they were just taking things and taking them home. What would happen in a huge world? Do you go into someone's house of the deceased and start taking possessions? I mean, come on.

This was true. That day, the cousins went into the manor and found the blood-spattered silencer that soon became a crucial piece of the case against Jeremy. They'd also scoured the property for cash and other valuables, the family treasures, as Robert Bowflower called them in his diary, filling the trunk of Anne's car with guns and jewelry that they wanted to take away, for safekeeping. It was actually only after this, when he realized his relatives were taking things, that he started to move the family's valuables out of the house himself, an act that led his cousins to allege that he was emptying the house of treasure, or as David Bowflower put it, flogging it off 10 to the penny. Jeremy told me he sold only a handful of items, a few bits and bobs. But this allegation played into the prosecution case that he'd murdered the family out of greed. There was one possession, in particular, that Jeremy was especially concerned with. It was his mother's engagement ring, a beautiful band studded with gemstones.

It was a Three sapphires and two diamonds. Sapphire at the end, diamond, sapphire, diamond, in a row. Lovely. Yeah, it sounds beautiful. Yes, it was. And Mom loved it. And she treasured it, not for its value, but because it was dad's.

His mother, June, wore it always, ever since he could remember, she never took it off.

Even when she trapped her hand in the door and her ring finger was damaged, and she still wouldn't take the ring off. She'd never taken her engagement ring off, and she never would.

The engagement ring was a valuable item. Right after the murders, the relatives had told Jeremy they wanted to keep it. Anne even wrote about this. I asked Jeremy before I left about Aunt June Bamba's engagement ring because my mother wished to have something of her late sister's, she noted. But Jeremy had told her no. He wanted his mother's ring to be cremated with her. Jeremy told me his mother had always said that she would take the ring to her grave, and he insisted that the family follow his mother's wishes. He didn't care about the ring's value. But in the end, that's not what happened. Unbeknownst to Jeremy, the ring was removed from June's body during the postmortem and handed over to the relatives.

Mom would have been absolutely, absolutely devastated by that. It breaks my heart. They did that to my mom. It breaks my fucking heart. She used to say that to me so often.

You really wanted to honor that wish that she wanted to- It was what she said.

She must have said it a thousand times to me in her life, that she was so honored to wear dad's ring. I I just feel really distressed. For a moment. God.

Yeah, it's really hard.

Sorry, Heidi, I just If you could pinpoint one thing that they did that broke my heart was him.

I

The ring was given to Anne's mother, and she kept it. 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 3, Conviction. As the weeks and months passed after the murders, and the cloud of suspicion continued to form around Jeremy, he still refused to believe he was really a suspect. Even after he broke up with his girlfriend, Julie Mugfoot, and she came forward with damning accusations against him. 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. Jeremy told me he assumed she was just angry and wouldn't stick with her story.

I thought, typical. That's just typical. You just I don't want to go out with you anymore. Then you go to the police and say, Jeremy's paid a him man two grand to kill the family because you're really angry that he split up with you. I just thought, The police aren't going to believe that nonsense. She's just angry.

When he learned about the blood-spattered silencer under the stairs, he dismissed it, saying someone must have planted it. It was as if the gravity of his situation just hadn't sunk in. Even when he was charged with murder and driven away to jail, he says he caught sight of a group of friends across the street and grinned at them through the window.

When I was smiling at my friends at the court case, I just tried to reassure people, Look, I'm Okay, mate, don't worry. So I smile and wave, and I'm fine. But you have to put on a brave face.

This was how the press captured that photo of the accused killer grinning in the back of a police van that became such an infamous image. When he went to trial in October of 1986, this tendency of his to fail to read the room, it proved a gift to the prosecution. There was this one famous moment during cross-examination when the prosecutor pushed him on one point in particular about his story of going out to shoot rabbits on the night of the murders. If Jeremy's story was true, the prosecutor said, that meant he'd left a rifle lying around the house, a dangerous thing to do with children present. Jeremy kept taking gulps of water. I wish I hadn't done it, he said. He added in a whisper, I was being lackadezical. Then the prosecutor changed tack, accusing him of making the whole story up, and Jeremy snapped back, That's what you've got to try and establish. Everyone I spoke to who attended the trial remembered that as a devastating moment. This is David Woods, the reporter who covered the case for the Colchester Gazette.

The court went absolutely quiet. Everyone knew it'd slipped up there because that's the first time you thought, You cocky son. So You couldn't resist that little taunt. I said it. It's just that frustration. Look, I did. I went out and I saw the rabbits and I got the gun and put it back. That's the truth. It's for you to prove I'm lying.

When that came out, tell me about what you sensed in the courtroom.

I felt it. I thought, That just sounds so cocky and arrogant and stupid.

I just wonder what you were feeling at that point, because having left the rifle there potentially played a very significant part in all of this. I just wonder whether if you were- Of course, because I was being made to feel a guilt that I felt was unwarranted.

But did you- And then I couldn't say, Well, look, my dad was just so laxedaisical. We guns, really. He has to take some blame, and I couldn't say that. What on earth was he doing, allowing Sheila and the boys to come to the house where there are half a dozen, a dozen guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition and all the single things locked up?

That felt like something you couldn't say because that wouldn't go over well.

Yeah, I couldn't say it, could I? I bristle sometimes when I get made to feel blame and guilt for things that I'm not allowed to defend myself on. Because I can never say anything bad about Mom and dad, can I? Because I'm not allowed to.

Yeah, that must be difficult.

Because people say, Oh, yeah, there There you go. You see, that's why you wanted to kill him.

Jeremy's trial lasted 17 days before the jury retired to deliberate. So did you sit there with a sinking feeling, realizing this isn't going my way, or did you not realize until the moment it- I didn't realize.

I still thought right at the end that the jury would come back and not guilty.

You did? Mm-mm. Tell me about that moment when they came back in and read the verdict.

It was surreal because it was like it was an out-of-body experience. How can they say that? Just shock. Just that. What? As if I'm not hearing it Did I hear that right? What? Guilty? You mean not guilty? It was just devastating. I thought telling the truth would be enough. I genuinely believed if I was truthful and honest and open that this would be a not guilty and would all go away and everyone would understand what really happened. And I've been waiting 40 years for that.

Morning, Heidi. Hi, Jeremy. How are you doing today?

I'm doing okay. It sounds like you're outside. I could hear a sea god.

Oh, you know what? I've just got my window open. I will close it.

No, that's fine. There we It's lovely to hear. Are you like it? It's one of the things that I... I often just think, God, I've not been on a train for 40 years, not been on a plane for 40 years. I've not walked in a straight line for 40 years. I've not done so many things, and it's just hearing seagulls. I never hear seagulls.

Well, yeah, they are noisy, but I can't imagine what it must be like to be deprived of all those ordinary things.

Well, you just don't miss them in the end because you don't even remember what they were, strangely.

Over those 40 years, a lot has changed. In his early years in prison, Jeremy got into trouble a lot. Though he always maintained his innocence, he was angry and he acted out. He brewed moonshine, smoked heroine, and got into fights.

You got to remember, I came in very early at 24. This exposed an awful lot of things in jail that I never saw outside. Everybody inevitably ends up dabbling in a few drugs in jail and a bit of drink. It's the same as life outside when you're a young boy experimenting with things.

But after a while, he told me, he reached a turning point when he met a prison officer who seemed to believe in him.

I met an officer called Mr. Robinson, and he said, What you need to do, you do have to decide whether you want to stay in here for the rest of your life and get involved in the prison, or whether you want to fight your case and prove your innocence. He said, You need to make the decision. I said, Right. Then I just dug in and gone with case papers and I'd file them all and looked through them all, and here I am now.

Since then, Jeremy has applied himself with single-minded zeal to clearing his name. He's filled his cell with case documents, piles and piles of three-ring binders. Are you sitting there now surrounded by- When I look against my wall, I have a stack of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

They're about five feet high each stack.

He spends hours each day rifling through them, scouring them for some new thing, some overlooked fact that might turn the whole case on its head.

I can't help it. I'm trying to cling onto, I suppose, small pieces of floating debris in the sea to try and stay afloat. And these little things helped to keep me afloat.

Over the years, Jeremy Bamber has fought to overturn his conviction on dozens of grounds, including that his relatives had a financial motive to frame him, that key witnesses, like Julie Mugford, lied, and that police botched the forensics at the crime scene. But the justice system has blocked him at every turn. The appeal courts have upheld held his conviction not once, but twice. His case has also been re-investigated twice, first by City of London Police and then by Scotland Yard. But so far, every attempt to clear his name has failed. Every authority that has ever examined the murders at Whitehouse Farm has reached the same conclusion. Jeremy Bamber is guilty. But he has not given up. The way the justice system in the UK works, Jeremy has one more potential path to proving his innocence through a watchdog that investigates potential miscarriages of justice. It's called the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the CCRC, and it has the power to order the Court of Appeal to rehear a case if fresh evidence comes to light. When Jeremy was preparing for his last appeal, his defense lawyer discovered a mountain of new material. Police had gathered millions of pages of evidence, only a 10th of which had been available to the defense at trial.

Back in 1986, police and prosecutors had wide discretion about what they were obliged to disclose, so a lot of evidence got held back, and a lot more had been gathered since Jeremy's conviction during the various police reviews and reinvestigations of the case. Now, Jeremy had got hold of hundreds of thousands of those files, a vast trove of evidence, a lot of which the jury had never heard about. Jeremy's defense team began combing through those records, and in 2021, they filed an application to the CCRC, outlining several grounds on which they said his conviction should be overturned. But when I began talking with Jeremy in January last year, it seemed like the case had stalled. So now, Jeremy gave all that fresh evidence to me. I hope you find something. Yeah. He said maybe there was something he'd missed, something that finally revealed the truth.

Truth, truth. Truth is always truth is, truth is. It is what it is, and You can't undermine it. I didn't murder my son. I mean, I promise you, no matter how many times we slice up this case, I'm always innocent.

I spent months talking to Jeremy, weighing his version of events against the claims of his relatives and those of the prosecution, trying to understand the complex characters the tangled family dynamics at the heart of this case. For what it's worth, my sense of Jeremy, after all those hours of conversation, was very different from the way he's been portrayed. He gave imperfect answers to my questions, made oddball jokes, and he could be reflective and self-deprecating. Sometimes he talked about his family's deaths with an uncanny detachment. Other times, he seemed overwhelmed by his grief. But all of this is character evidence. None of it is proof of anything everything. As an investigative reporter, what I'm really interested in, above all else, are plain hard facts. It was time to put all of these questions of character aside and look at the tangible evidence. A bloody Bible propped at an unlikely angle. A manor locked from the inside. And the linchpin of the case, a silencer. Hidden under the stairs and daubed with blood. Coming up on blood relatives.

It was such a believable story. It was crazy to think anything else other than what we were presented with. It just seemed to be orchestrated.

Augustrated? Why do you think they would have done that?

It was panic, 24/7 panic. What can we salvage? What can we resubmit?

Yeah, they could I thought it had a bit of DNA on it. Of course, they could. No, that never, ever came up. If you're a New Yorker subscriber, you can listen to the rest of blood relatives now. Visit newyorker. Com/dark to 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 Tunker car. Theme and original music by Alex Weston. Additional music by Chris Julin, Alison Leighton-Brown, and Gary Meister. This episode was mixed by Cori Schreppel. Our art is by Owen Jent. Art Direction by Nicolas Conrad and Aviva Mikalow. Fact Checking by Naomi Sharp. 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.

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