Transcript of Blood Relatives, Episode 4

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. One afternoon, a few weeks after I first reached out to Jeremy Bamber, I opened my email and saw that I'd been sent a link, an invitation to a cloud platform. When I opened it, I found myself staring at a vast digital repository. Jeremy Bamber's defense team had given me access to the sprawling case files on the murders at Whitehouse Farm. You should know that I am a giant nerd when it comes to documents. I love borrowing through huge piles of paper, searching for anything hidden. But this was a truly bewildering morass. What I had been given was not only the evidence prosecutors presented at trial as proof of Jeremy's guilt. This repository contained a lot more than that. There were millions of pages. Police statements, typewritten memos, barely decipherable handwritten notes, witness interviews, radio and phone logs, letters and diaries panned by Jeremy's relatives, badly photocopied forensic records, autopsy reports, crime scene photos.

All night scrolled and scrolled. So much of this evidence, Jeremy Bamber had to fight to obtain. It had been hidden for years. Now, he hoped, it might finally reveal the truth. I'm Heidi Blake from In the Dark and the New Yorker. This is blood relatives. The prosecution case against Jeremy Bamber centered on his supposed staging of the crime scene.

We have a of a crime which has been very cunningly arranged.

And the silencer that his relatives found under the stairs.

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

The case was circumstantial, but it was enough to convince the jury back in 1986. It's the basis on which Jeremy Bamba has spent 40 years in prison, the basis on which he's consigned to die there. But I was hunting through all this fresh evidence that the jury never saw. And now, I'm going to tell you what I found. Part One, Crime scene. At Jeremy Bamber's trial, prosecutors showed the jury photographs of the scene to support their argument that Jeremy had staged it. In one, Sheila lies with the rifle on top of her body, a bloody Bible propped awkwardly against her upper arm. The Bible's unnatural position bolstered the prosecution's case that it had been placed there after her death by Jeremy to make it appear that she'd killed the family in a religious frenzy. But deep in the files, I found something that gave me pause. It was a sheath of handwritten notes about those photos. The notes recorded concerns that had been raised by members of the firearms squad. They were the team that first went into the manor and found the family dead. Several of them had expressed misgivings about the photographs of the crime scene that were presented at trial.

They said something was wrong with the images of Sheila's body. One officer noted that her body was, not in the same position as when I saw it, and that the Bible had not been propped against her shoulder as it was depicted, but lying at her waist. A second officer recalled that he and a colleague had raised similar concerns. They were, not happy with position of the Bible or of Sheila's body, but had been reassured that nothing was moved. I'm happy to accept this fact now, although in the back of my mind, still a shadow of doubt, he'd noted. Were we clouded by what we saw because of the tenseness of the situation? Or could they have been moved? Question mark, question mark. When I got hold of some of the firearms officers who'd raised those concerns, along with dozens of other people who'd been involved in the case, some of them were less than delighted to hear from me.

Can I stop you there?

I don't need to hear any more from you.

I don't want to be involved in it, thank you. I really wouldn't waste any of your time on that case.

I really would not.

Lord, not this again. We're not going to get anywhere with this. We're not going anywhere with this.

I was hitting a lot of walls. Still, there was one police officer I remained especially keen to talk to, Detective Inspector Ron Cook, the guy who'd overseen the inspection of all five bodies at Whitehouse Farm, including Sheila's. If anyone knew whether something had gone awry at the scene, it would be him. But when I tried to track him down, I found he'd died several years ago. Then, I saw in the files that Inspector Ron Cook had not been alone when he examined the bodies. He'd been accompanied by his deputy, Detective Sergeant Neil Davidson. When I found him, still living in Essex, he did agree to talk to me, even though he'd apparently already been warned off.

Somebody said, This is somebody called Heidi fishing for something that makes you both around, but don't touch me with a barge, Paul. But I just wanted to see what you want to know and what are you about?

Sergeant Davidson told me he was called out to Whitehouse Farm early in the morning, right after the bodies were discovered. From the start, he said, he was told what to expect.

I was called at 7: 30 that first morning. And already, I was being told, Can you come out to four murders and a Four murders and a Suicide?

Four murders and a Suicide, he was told. He met Inspector Ron Cook outside the manor. Cooke was a veteran, the lead crime scene investigator on the case. In his long career, Davidson told me that Cooke had acquired a nickname, and not the kind that an eagle-eye investigator might hope for. His colleagues called him Bumbling Ron.

Chaos reined wherever he trod. He used to call him Bumbling Ron for a reason. He was a punty sod. Oh, my God. It was a nightmare.

The officers entered the house, accompanied by the official crime scene photographer. Their job was to document the scene meticulously and then retrieve any items that might need to go to the lab: bullet casings, carpet samples, pieces of clothing. They examined Neville Bamber's body, and June's, and the twins. Davidson told me he'd just had twins of his own at the time, and the scene hit him especially hard.

It was a bit of a shock to me. It was a It was an overwhelming seat. It was overwhelming to take it all in.

When they got to the master bedroom, they saw Sheila's body on the floor beside the bed with the rifle pointed at her chin beneath a fatal gunshot wound. The Bible was lying open by her body. Davidson said he stood looking down at Sheila before the photographer captured the official images. Then, Inspector Ron Kirk did something deserving of his nickname.

Remember Bumbling Ron?

Yeah.

As I recall it, he lifted the Bible up, had a look at it, and then he said, Oh, we better put it back how it was.

He picked up the Bible and looked at it before any photos had been taken. This was a huge revelation. I did my best not to make Sergeant Davidson think twice about going on by sounding too astounded. Do you remember if he rifled the pages or closed it or just glanced at the page it was open on?

I think he was fumbling with it in his hands. He took it up. I think he had a look at it. The more I think about it, the more I think He said something like, Can you remember what page it was on? Something like that.

That's interesting. And that was definitely before the pictures were taken.

Yes. As I recall, that was in order to take the pictures to recreate what we just screwed up, so to speak. The whole thing was just shambolic.

The idea that Bumbling Ron might have briefly closed the Bible while fumbling with it was especially significant because the photographs of the Bible show a mirrored pattern of blood on its open pages. A prosecution expert later said this showed that Jeremy must have closed it after firing the fatal shot and then reopened it to prop it by Sheila's body. Davidson told me Bumbling Ron seemed to realize his mistake and hurriedly put the Bible back next to Sheila's body, making his best guess as to where it should go.

I know it was somewhere where it went back, but as to exactly where, I don't know. It was there or thereabouts, but I couldn't say exactly. He put it back best as he could remember.

The Bible repositioned best as Bumbling Ron could remember. Apparently, that was what the crime scene photographer captured that morning. Those were the images that would later be shown to the jury in the courtroom as part of the evidence that Jeremy Bamber had re-arranged the scene. I asked Sergeant Davidson if Ron Cook had disturbed anything else that day. How about the gun that had been on top of Sheila's body?

It's just a slight possibility that Ron may have picked it up and put it back.

The gun?

Yeah. But I just had a feeling that that may have happened. It was like this 'oh, shit' moment, you know, I got to put it back.

One of those 'oh, shit' moments, he said. Later, a second officer told me he'd heard at the time that Ron Cook had indeed moved the gun. I asked Sergeant Davidson about the other concern that had been raised by firearms officers, that Sheila's body itself looked like it might have been moved before it was photographed.

No, no. If anything, he may have moved the arms, but we never dragged it anyway.

What Sergeant Davidson was telling me was effectively that the crime scene had been restaged after the family was shot, just not by Jeremy Bamba. The person who'd moved the Bible and the gun, and potentially the body in the first hours of the investigation was none other than the police's own lead crime scene investigator. Ron Cooke had actually been cross-examined at trial on this very point. He acknowledged moving the gun Sheila's arm as he examined her body, but insisted that everything was properly photographed, before anything was moved or touched, so as to preserve the integrity of the scene. In the In spite of what Davidson had just told me, it seemed the jury had been flagrantly misled. And the problems didn't end there. In the days after the killings, before Anne Eton returned to the manor, she'd requested that the police clean up the worst of the gore. So Ron Cooke asked Sergeant Davidson to go back to the scene with him and deal with things.

Let's just hide in the house, and that's what we do.

Inside the house, Cooke and Davidson found walls, carpets, and bedding drenched with blood. They started mopping up the bloody floors and ripping out the blood-stained carpet. Carpets.

Ron said, Right, we got to get rid of the rest of the blood on the carpet. So we just cut a big piece of carpet out where the blood was, and that's what we burnt in the garden.

They hurled the carpets and bedding out of the upstairs windows and had them burned. A literal bonfire of evidence right there on the farm.

Burning the bedroom carpet still.

Oh, my goodness.

He just said, Whoosh. And then it went.

Right. So you burned that.

I know he's crazy. It's all wrong. I always thought it was wrong. I heard yourself saying it, but that's the way it was then.

It was all wrong, Sergeant Davidson told me. But that's the way it was then. He said, You have to understand, it didn't seem like there was really much to investigate. By that point, the chief investigator had already declared that this was an open and shut case of murder-suicide. The idea that Jeremy Bamberg would become a suspect in these murders hadn't even entered their minds. So Davidson said, preserving the crime scene didn't seem all that important.

It was never taken seriously as a crime scene as such. It was never taken into whodunit. For those that were at the time at the scene, it was who else but a mad woman could do this. It was such a believable story. It was crazy to think anything else other than what we were presented with.

But then, that believable story suddenly flipped on its head. Julie Mugford came forward. The detective in charge of the case was replaced, and Jeremy became the prime suspect. Sergeant Davidson told me the shit hit the fan big time. The crime scene investigators were under new orders to find any piece of forensic evidence that connected Jeremy to the killings. He said Inspector Ron Cook spent weeks, quote, chasing around red in the face, trying to put right what he'd botched.

He was trying to dig himself out of the hole big time. He was panicked, 24/7 panicked. What can we salvage? What can we resubmit?

The problem, Sergeant Davidson said, was that hardly anything from the scene had been preserved.

Because everything had been either burnt or destroyed or gone along with the first wave of attack, as it were.

The Bamba's bodies had been cremated, and the carpets and bedding had been burned. The house had been cleaned. They hadn't even dusted it for fingerprints. The only article of forensic evidence that the police had to go on was something that hadn't been found by crime scene investigators at all. Something that had instead been discovered days later by Jeremy Bamber's cousins. Bamber's fate was sealed when his cousins handed over to the police, a silencer, with blood on it. If you're a reader or even an aspirational reader, I hope you'll join us on Critics at Large from The New Yorker. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. And because we're culture critics, we just love to go back to the text. Yes. So if books are for you, Critics at Large just might be for you as well. Join us on Critics at Large from New Yorker every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. Part 2, The Silencer. The Silencer was the single most important piece of forensic evidence against Jeremy Bamber. At his trial in 1986, the jury was told that scientists found blood inside the silencer's barrel.

Blood of a type that matched Sheila's and nobody else's, and which must, therefore, have come from that fatal moment when she was shot through the throat. So the prosecution logic was this. If the silencer was on the gun when Sheila was shot, that meant she couldn't be the killer. She clearly couldn't have shot herself and then unscrewed the silencer and placed it in a box under the stairs. It must have been Jeremy who'd murdered the family and hidden the silencer because he was the one who'd called the police to report that Sheila was on the loose with a gun. Even on the face of it, all this struck me as a bit of a logical stretch. For one thing, if Jeremy Bamber was a killer cunning enough to meticulously stage the scene and then call the cops, why would he go ahead and stash the bloodied proof of his guilt under the stairs? Knowing what I just learned about bumbling Ron and the mess that had been made of the crime scene, now I had even more questions about the silencer. Now, I want to prepare you for what I found when I dug into the documents, because the story I'm about to tell you about the silencer is a long and winding ride.

But it's crucial because this is the only tangible piece of evidence that can be said to tie Jeremy Bamber to this crime. And a piece of forensic evidence so pivotal ought to be painstakingly preserved. But spoiler alert, that is not what happened in this case. So buckle up. Here it is, the story of the silencer from the top. The saga began when Jeremy's cousins, David and Anne, found the silencer stashed in the cupboard under the stairs.

That's when I found it. I see. Straight away. It was in a box. It was in just an ordinary box like that.

Yet, interestingly, as I pored through the police records, I saw that a few days earlier, Inspector Ron Cook and several other officers had looked inside that very same cupboard, the one under the stairs at the manor, and they hadn't seen it. It was three days later that the cousins went back to the manor to look for clues and said they made their discovery. That was on August 10th. But curiously, buried in Anne's notes, I found a list she'd apparently written before that, ahead of the cousin's unsuccessful meeting with police on the ninth of August. The first item on her list read, Look at Silencer. Blood? So before the family claimed to have found the silencer, Anne was apparently already aware of its existence and planning to examine it for blood. I talked about this with Barbara Wilson, the Bamba's Farm Secretary. She's the one who told me how unwell Sheila seemed right before the murders. Barbara was actually there when the cousins found the silencer.

I think it was Anne. I can't remember who actually phoned me and said, Would I go in?

They'd summoned her to the manor ostensibly to help them find some of Neville's papers. But soon after she arrived, they started rummaging under the stairs.

They fished out this shoe box. About that long it was, and there was a silencer. They pulled out and said, I think it was David Blofa. I said, It's a silencer, and I think there's some blood on the end here.

Barbara testified about witnessing the discovery at trial. But when I talked to her about this, she confided something she didn't tell the jury, that she'd had the feeling all along that the discovery had been staged for her benefit.

It just seemed to be augustrated.

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

My theory is that they must have found it, but they wanted proof that they'd found it and not put it there themselves.

I wrote to Anne Eton asking detailed questions about the circumstances in which the silencer was found, but she declined to comment. David insisted that, quote, never was there a restaging. After finding the silencer, the relatives told police they'd loaded it into the trunk of Anne's car with a trove of guns and jewelry they'd gathered up from the manor and then took it home to her farmhouse, where they sat around the kitchen table having a closer look. David even tried to unscrew it to look inside. He told me he'd abruptly realized this wasn't such a great idea.

All of a sudden, things clicked together and we suddenly thought, Oh, my God, we shouldn't be touching this. Then, of course, it had all my prints on it, didn't it? But anyway.

Even then, they didn't call the cops right away. Instead, they stashed the silencer at the bottom of a wardrobe, and two more days passed before police learned of its existence. It wasn't until August 12th, five days after after the murders, that a detective drove out to Anne's farmhouse to collect the silencer. He didn't have an evidence bag handy, so he stuck it inside a paper towel tube before stopping to share a bottle of whiskey with Anne's husband Peter Eton. Then, he tossed the silencer into the back of his car and drove away.

It rolled up and down in the back of a police officer's car before it finally ended up at the right place.

Back at the station, the detective failed to enter the silencer into the police property log. Instead, he locked it in his desk drawer. The next morning, he handed it over to the lead crime scene investigator, none other than Bumbling Ron. Inspector Ron Cook had a look at the silencer for himself. The records show he and the detective who'd collected it from the family both noticed a single gray hair hair caught in its muzzle. But then, the hair vanished. The scenes of crime officer Inspector Ronald Cook admitted that when he received the silencer, it had a gray hair on it, and when he delivered it to the forensic science laboratory, the hair had been dislodged and couldn't be found. That didn't stop prosecutors sighting the hair at trial the following year. They suggested it could have been Neville's hair, an indication that the silencer had been used to strike him on the head. So there was no hair for scientists to test at the forensic lab, but they did find two other things, a small red stain that appeared under a microscope to be paint and something highly significant. They analyzed the blood that the relatives had spotted, and the tests confirmed that it was human.

With a discovery like that in a murder investigation, you'd think such a crucial piece of evidence would be locked down for further testing under tightly controlled conditions so it couldn't be further contaminated. Instead, the scientist gave the silencer back to Bumbling Ron. Inspector Ron Cook took it with him back to the station, and no one can say what happened to it next, because for the next 17 days, Cooke failed to keep records of its whereabouts in the police property log. And this big gap in the of custody records is where the silences journey gets even weirder. Because when Ron Cooke eventually returned it to the forensics lab on August 30th, more than three weeks after the crime, scientists found something new. They now recovered flakes of blue, green, white, and gray paint from its tip, as well as the red they'd already seen. Nine layers in total, which turned out to match a sample taken from the mantle above the hearth in the manor. The colors corresponded with the many hues the wall had been painted over the years. Police said they'd also made another discovery. Silencer-shaped scratches on the mantle that matched the grooved pattern on its end where the flakes of paint had been found.

This seemed to be the clearest evidence yet that the silencer had been on the gun on the night of the murders and had scratched the half during a struggle with Neville. But these paintflakes struck me as a perplexing finding because I could see in the files that when the lab had first examined the silencer before Ron Cook took it away for 17 days, That paint didn't seem to have been there. The records of that examination, under a microscope, don't mention multiple flakes of different colored paint. Just that one small red mark. Where had these other paintflakes come from? One thing I could see in the records was that Ron Cooke had gone back to the manor during that mysterious 17-day gap. It was Cooke who took the paint sample from the half and reported finding scratches under the mantle while he had sole charge of the silencer. It was only after that, when he returned the silencer to the lab, that scientists found the paintflakes that perfectly matched the half. Ron Kirk was later asked in a review of the case years after the trial, whether he'd used the silencer to scratch the mantle that day.

This simply did not occur, he said. The only time I saw the silencer was while it was on police premises, he went on, never anywhere near the house. But the gap in the chain of custody records makes that statement impossible to verify. We will never know what exactly Ron Cooke did with the silencer in those 17 days. I asked Sergeant Davidson about Cooke's failure to keep records of the silencer's whereabouts.

I didn't even know he'd done that. It's common practice for evidential purpose is to sign stuff in and out, so it remains its integrity. It retains its integrity. That's the whole point of it. But again, that who runs MO he was not that strict on himself, really, or on the system.

So on the silencer, so far, paint that mysteriously appeared, a hair that mysteriously disappeared. And then there was the blood. 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. Back in the 1980s, DNA testing was not yet widely used, but investigators could analyze blood samples to determine their type. When they tested the blood inside the silencer, they found that it matched Sheila's. This, prosecutors would tell the jury, was dispositive. It proved that Sheila could not have shot herself, and therefore, she had been murdered by her brother. But I now learned that police actually harbored some private concerns about the integrity of the blood evidence. The prosecution's ballistics expert had concluded that the blood in the device was back batter from Sheila's neck wound. The only other way it could have got in there was by someone, quote, dripping it very carefully inside. Before the trial, the chief investigator, Mike Ainsley, learned that Anne Eton had access to a source of Sheila's blood.

Remember, she'd found Sheila's bloody underpants soaking in a bucket in the Whitehouse kitchen and had apparently thrown them into a trash bag that she'd taken home with her for closer inspection. She'd noted, Sheila had a period, blood, knickers, I threw out and brought here. When Ainsley learned Anne had done this, he warned her that she could be accused of contaminating the silencer. She later wrote, He told me that when it comes to the trial, they, the defense, will allege that I put the blood inside the silencer and that Sheila's underwear could be a source of that blood. I must point out that I had never thought of that possibility, and I certainly did not plant blood any description inside the silencer, and to my knowledge, neither did any other member of my family. At trial, Anne was never cross-examined about the possibility that she or anyone else could have contaminated the silencer. The blood evidence proved decisive. When the jury was deliberating, they wrote a note to the judge asking him to clarify whether the blood was a perfect match for Sheila. The judge assured them it did not match anyone else. They returned their guilty verdict 21 minutes later.

But as I scoured the records, I came across a piece of paper that starkly contradicted the judge's words. The piece of paper that caught my eye was a letter from the Government Forensic Science Lab dated September 1986. It showed that scientists had belatedly tested blood samples from Jeremy Bamber's relatives just a week before his trial. The letter contained a statement from the scientist who'd done the testing. He said, Judged by these grouping results alone, the blood from the sound moderator could have come from either Sheila fell, or R. W. Bowflower. There had been another match. R. W. Was Robert Bowflower, David and Anne's father, the man who'd written that elaborate diary entry, imagining how Jeremy might have committed the murders. It turned out that Robert had the same blood type as Sheila, which meant that blood found in the silencer's internal baffles, it matched him, too. There was never any allegation that Robert was actually involved in the murders, or any of the other relatives, for that matter. Everyone agreed that the crime could only have been committed by Jeremy or Sheila. But Robert was with David and Anne when they found the silencer, and the family had kept it for at least two days before it was turned over to the cops.

At trial, Robert insisted that he hadn't touched the silencer. And amazingly, he was never cross-examined about whether the blood in the device could belong to him. And even that wasn't the end of the problems with the blood evidence. There was another record in the most recently disclosed material that muddied things still further. It was another lab record, and this one indicated that a second blood sample had been found inside the silencer. This second sample was a different blood type entirely. It didn't match either Sheila or Robert, but it did match David Bowflower, the person who found the silencer, to begin with. When I spoke to David that day in his garden, I asked him about this, whether it was possible his blood could somehow have got into the silencer. So they're apparently they also found a little bit, one little sample in there that seemed to match the blood sample they took from you. And what I was wondering was, is it possible, do you think, could you have, when you were unscruing it, could you have cut yourself?

Yeah, I could have had a bit of DNA on it. Of course I could.

David's wife, Karen, was hovering nearby. No, that never, ever came up. It was never queried with us. No, they never are. They definitely never are. It never came part of the story. But I think everybody, it's such probably a small sample in that thing. David threw up his hands as if in surrender.

I'm ready to go. I'm ready to own up to it all.

No, definitely. No one's suggesting that. A little bit of humor sometimes. No, absolutely. All I was wondering was whether just could Could that be explained by when you were on screwing it?

Yeah, it would have been. I did screw it. I put my hand on it and get quite hard. I doubt it. I tried to turn it quite hard before I realized the- I don't think you cut yourself.

No. Do you think you could have nicked yourself just a little bit?

I'm fairly thick skin. I wouldn't have thought so. No. The skin tissue could have been there, couldn't it?

To sum up, forensic tests back in the 1980s found blood in the silencer that could have belonged to at least three people, not just Sheila, but also David and his father, Robert. But at the trial, the jury was told that the blood matched only Sheila. In 2000, 15 years after the killings, investigators retested the silencer at the request of Jeremy Bamba's lawyers. By then, forensic testing methods had grown more sophisticated, and the silencer was finally tested for DNA. When the results came back, they were shocking. The tests had found none of Sheila's DNA on or inside the silencer at all. That was so revelatory that it got Jeremy Bamber a fresh hearing at the Court of Appeal back in 2002. Bamber has always maintained his innocence, but it was only last year that the Criminal Cases Review Commission agreed to refer back to the Court of Appeal based on the new DNA claims. But the judges quickly dismissed it. They said that all Sheila's blood could have been swabbed away during forensic tests or degraded over time. The tests had revealed DNA from two unidentified people, but the court concluded that probably just came from scientists and others who'd touched it over the years.

David and Robert Bowflower Sheila's DNA, meanwhile, had apparently not been tested. The court's reasoning immediately struck me as very strained. From what I know about DNA, it shows up after even minimal contact. If there had really been a considerable amount of Sheila's blood inside the silencer, as the jury was told in 1986, how could all trace of it completely disappear? I called a DNA expert to ask about it, a forensic scientist named James Clarey, who's appeared as an expert witness in scores of criminal cases all around the world. Well, what they concluded was that it was possible that a silencer had been dismantled by these forensic scientists who did various swabbing tests and that their DNA may have ended up inside the silencer as a result of the touching of it. But it just seemed odd to me that you would say that DNA left behind by touching would have survived, but that DNA from a large amount of blood wouldn't have survived.

Yeah, agreed. If there was a lot of blood there, because blood is a rich source of DNA, unless they swabbed every single bit, then you would expect some to remain, but it's possible. But it's then just a bit of an oxymoron, I suppose, where they did get a DNA from at least two other people and not the victim. It's a bit suspect. It That wouldn't make sense. That wouldn't be a reasonable proposition.

The absence of Sheila's DNA just didn't make sense. What could explain it? The answer might lie in one of the strangest and most baffling things about this case, and that is that it's actually very unclear how many silences the police had in their possession as they investigated this case, what did with them, which ones were tested, and what they really found. In other words, the silencer I've just been telling you about, it might not be the only one. In the reams of documents I had in front of me. There were records from tests on what appeared to be at least two different silences. Documents show different reference numbers as the silencer passes through the forensics lab. Diagrams seem to depict devices with different grooved patterns, and there are examination notes that appear to show two nearly identical devices being inspected at the same time by different scientists in separate departments as part of this case. Jeremy Bamba's lawyers have alleged that the cops had more than one silencer in their possession and were running tests on each of them and potentially conflating the results to fit their theory of the crime. It's a bold allegation, and Essex police have always flat out denied this.

They said they never had more than one silencer in evidence as part of this case. To be honest, at first, this argument of Jeremy's seemed a bit far-fetched to me, too. But when When he talked to David Bowflower, he mentioned to me that both he and his father owned silencers like the one they'd found under the stairs at the manor. You had also the identical silencer, exactly the same?

Exactly the same. Yeah, exactly the same. I've got a couple of silencers. I'm a shooting man, and my dad was as well. My dad had a silencer on his gun, and I had one.

Then David told me that after the murders, the police had come by his house and taken them. They'd taken both his silencer and his dad's.

They took them all. They took all the silences away just to inspect them, to make sure there wasn't any foul duggery, or I hadn't actually put the silencer and made it. What's the right word? In other words, it hadn't been... I hadn't been dishonest.

Like contaminated in some way?

The question was, you could argue that I placed the silencer there, couldn't I?

The fact that police had removed David's silencer from his possession seemed like an important admission, not least because at trial, David had been asked if police had taken his silencer away, and at that point, he'd denied it. Now, he told me not only had police taken the silencers, but they'd kept them for so long. He thought they might never get them back. Do you remember how long did they keep him for?

Oh, months. Months, really. Oh, months and months, yeah. When did you get them back? When did you get them back? Really? Yeah.

So David was saying something new, that police did have more than one silencer in their possession for considerable amount of time during the investigation. And the gap in the chain of custody records makes it difficult to say for sure which was which and what was done to them and where the blood and pain evidence that was presented at trial really came from. What was left then of the theory of the crime that had been presented to the jury at trial? There were the allegations Julie Mugford had made shortly after Jeremy had broken up with her. But even the trial judge who told the jury the silencer alone was enough evidence to find Jeremy guilty. Even he cautioned them against relying on Julie's testimony because of the motive she might have to lie. There was the theory laid out in Robert Boflower's diary, that vivid tale about how Jeremy had committed the murders wearing a wetsuit, escaped through the kitchen window and used his mother's bicycle as a getaway vehicle, which had heavily influenced the story prosecutors told the jury at trial, but which really amounted to little more than wild conjecture. There was all that character evidence about how Jeremy had behaved in the weeks after the crime, his partying and drinking, but none of that could be said to prove that he was a murderer.

Now, I had all this new information. My reporting had found that these two central pieces of evidence, the bloodied Bible, the storied silencer, were in fact hopelessly compromised. When those fell away, it seemed to me that the case against Jeremy Bamber lay in tatters. Then there was one more thing I saw, digging through all those hundreds of thousands of documents, a single line of text that led me to a new witness, someone who had brand new information about what had happened on the night of the murders. As police surrounded the manor, and Jeremy Bamba sat waiting in a patrol car. This person had vital testimony to offer about what was going on inside the manor at the height of the standoff, and his story had been buried for 40 years. Well, I certainly didn't give anyone a statement, but no one's spoken to me about it since the 1980s, other than you. That's next time on blood relatives. 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 It's written and produced by me, Heidi Blake, and lead producer, Natalie Jablonsky. It's edited by Allison MacAdam. Samara Freemark is the managing producer for the series. Additional editing by Madelyne Baron, Willing Davidson, and Julia Rothschild. Additional production by Raymond Tunker car. Theme and original music by Alex Weston. Additional music by Chris Julin and Allison Leighton-Brown. This episode was mixed by Cori Schreppel. Our Art is by Owen Jent. Art Direction by Nicolas Conrad and Aviva Mikhalov. Fact Checking by J. L. Goldfine. 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.

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