Is Julie Mugford a murderer?
I refer to Julie Mugford, not Julie Smerchanski. In my mind, I split them into two different people. Julie Smerchanski is a respected education official and mother (probably grandmother) in western Canada. Julie Mugford is far, far behind her. Please understand that in what I am about to say, I mean no slight on Julie Smerchanski, a very different person. If offence is taken, by Mrs. Smerchanski herself (assuming she reads this) or by sensitive people who vicariously take offence on behalf of others, I cannot help that. The opening question must be asked.
A quasi-murderer, is what I mean. A murderer in the semi-formed sense that is in that twilight zone between law and impunity. A young lass, immature and suggestible, who got carried along in the excitement of her relationship with Jeremy Bamber. At least, that is the starting-point.
Admirably, Julie wanted to become a teacher from an early age, and she possessed some academic ability, but the headmistress of Julie’s secondary school reports she was an average student. Education is a fine and noble profession to enter, but it is not the most demanding course on a university campus and not known for attracting geniuses. I only say this to emphasise that we should keep Julie’s abilities in perspective. There is no shame in being an ‘average’ student, and Julie worked hard, but she was ordinary in ability. Only somewhat bright.
Jeremy was not ordinary, but nor was he extraordinary. In the autumn of 1983, at the age of 22, we find the principal heir to the Bamber-Speakman estates working at Sloppy Joe’s, a pizzeria in Colchester. Nothing wrong with that, and it does contradict somewhat the suggestions that Jeremy was not hardworking. Lazy people do not tend to take such evening jobs after a day working as a farm labourer-cum-supervisor. At Sloppy Joe’s, something important happens: he gets to know a waitress, one Julie Mugford, a plain girl but pursuing a professional career, as just mentioned. The relationship would reach its height during Julie's stay at Bourtree Cottage over the Christmas period of 1984, when Jeremy proposed to her.
Yet the engagement never had currency. Jeremy renounced it at a Mugford family get-together later in 1985, in the company of Brett Collins (who perhaps influenced things). We also know that throughout the 1983-85 period of their relationship, and especially during the first half of 1984, Jeremy was sleeping with other women and making no effort to hide it. Julie is plain-looking and lacks confidence. She was humiliated by Jeremy.
Yet she stayed with him. Why?
Explaining it first from Jeremy’s point-of-view, his relationship with Julie was important not for him, but for June and Nevill. There are signs that June did not take to Julie personally (rashly calling her a “harlot” and so on), but at the same time we can say that, broadly speaking, Julie was the type of person that Jeremy could have been expected to marry: a seemingly nice, unobtrusive, girl-next-door, who would bring stability to Jeremy. It may be that subconsciously Jeremy took to Julie in this vein, in that he wanted to appease June. In a sense, it could be argued that Julie was a facsimile of June. Suddenly Julie sees the opportunity to become a ‘Lady of the Manor’, a radical shift of gear for an ordinary middle-class girl from suburban Colchester, who aspired to a conventional career as a primary school teacher.
A major purpose of post-War mass higher education was not academic, but the socialisation of the middle-classes. It remains the case to an extent today that when young people attend university, an expectation is that they establish an initial network of social contacts who will become the basis of social, business and professional contacts in their future careers. Often graduates can boast that they met their future spouses at university. This did not happen in Julie's case. There was no steady relationship with a boring, middle-class physics undergraduate from Runcorn or some such place. Instead, she alights on Dallas: she meets Jeremy and dreams suddenly become real.
That nagging question comes up again. Was it Julie’s initiative all along? Was she the pursuer and the motive force in the relationship? Did she pick up on a vulnerability in Jeremy, something she noticed perhaps at Sloppy Joe’s? Or did Jeremy decide to leverage his “Rich Man In Waiting” spiel to secure a naïve, impressionable, suburban Colchester girl whom he knew would be more impressed by his yarns than the attractive farmers’ daughters and sundry other issue of the affluent and well-connecteds?
Dallas was not real. Nor were those Victorian lady and gentleman characters Julie must have read about in English literature classes at the creditable high school she attended. They were not
really real in the time of the writers who created them. A bit like J.R. Ewing being an exaggeration of real Texans, the characters of Austen, Hardy and the Brontës were, similarly, skilfully- (and sometimes, subtly-) caricatured representations of English class tensions. Yet there must have been a touch of glamour to Jeremy and a sense of future promise that attracted Julie and touched on her own material aspirations. Aside from that, Jeremy was unconventional and offered her excitement, but he was not a Mr Darcy or a Colonel Fitzwilliam (nor was Julie an Elizabeth Bennett). Relying on the guilt camp, we would say Jeremy was more of a John Willoughby character, but there are aspects of the narrative that seem as unreal as a novel, almost as if Jeremy and Julie were playing out a fantastical script for a plot only they were aware of and kept to themselves. The Julie-Jeremy story is more like a dark fairy tale.
Consider:
Jeremy decides he wants to kill his family. This was not just Jeremy blowing off. He is serious about it, to the extent that in conversations with Julie, he works through the pros and cons of various plans in quite a sophisticated way – weighing up the insurance implications, for instance.
Jeremy tests Julie’s sleeping tablets on himself to see if they might work as tranquilisers on his family.
Julie knows that Jeremy practises strangling rats to give himself the necessary courage for the murders.
Julie tells nobody of these incidents, obliquely explaining to the police later that she thought it was a “charade” on Jeremy’s part and anyway she was “besotted” with him. Julie’s explanation here is obviously not credible. We know from her own admissions that it was not a “charade” (an odd, illiterate choice of wording anyway). We can allow that a young woman might be so ‘besotted’ with her man that she overlooks flaws, covers for him in situations, tells white lies, etc. But Jeremy was plotting in detail to kill five people. It’s too big. It’s not the equivalent of, say, the Maxine Carr situation, in which Ian Huntley had lied to Carr, and on that basis, Carr told her own lie to the police. It’s worse. Jeremy wasn’t even lying to her: quite the opposite, he was revealing the deepest darkest corners of his soul to her.
To further erode Julie’s credibility, we can point to her criminal admissions: she admits selling drugs for Jeremy; she admits that Jeremy, with Julie’s help, breaks into the site office at Osea Road, steals money, and they spend it. She also admits committing cheque fraud in her own right with Susan Battersby – nothing to do with Jeremy at all, but they both tried to blame him for it anyway. Later, she receives a handsome pay-out from a seedy tabloid after posing for racy pictures.
Under cross-examination at trial, Julie is asked why she volunteered to identify the bodies lying in the mortuary. Her answer for the jury was that she believed that the dead could communicate with the living, so she wanted to give it a try and see if they would talk to her. Yet there is no mention of these beliefs of Julie’s from anybody else who knew her, either before or after the incident. Perhaps Julie’s odd confession of faith was a bit of fancy that came out unintentionally in a nervous moment under the pressure of being questioned by an experienced barrister? This is plausible. I have experienced similar situations, and also been interviewed by the media, and I can say that public speaking is a very difficult skill to master, perhaps because it is so unnatural, and it is very easy to blurt out something that you don’t mean and even say the opposite thing to what you wanted to say. It’s also well-known within the legal profession that the most truthful witnesses are often the most nervous and difficult in court. But there is also a need sometimes for ordinary people of the Julie type to insert some colour into what may otherwise be a dour, unexciting life. This is common in a culture where the work ethic is paramount. In much the same vein as her attraction to Jeremy, maybe she was offering up something that might distinguish her from the otherwise rather dull person she knew deep down she really was?
We are all like this. Admit it. You are. You like to pretend, to ‘larp’, in the lingo of today’s disaffected teenager. To pretend that your life is more interesting than it is or that you are more interesting that your own life will allow. Maybe you told a little lie to that attractive woman who got your pulse racing at the café? Or you invented something minor on a CV? Or you have pretended to have a hobby that you only vaguely know anything about, just to seem more interesting? In the past, the young men and women of provincial England would seek out the city lights and, in a few cases, they would be ensnared by those lights and the dangerous but alluring life that the darkness of the city promised. Perhaps that was Sheila? Yet, whatever her motivation for the confabulated conjuring of a Spirit World at trial, Julie had not been living a pretentious existence with Jeremy, nor was she larping. The boring suburban Julie was, in fact, very much grounded and living in her own hyper-reality in 1984 and 1985. It was real, very real, but a living real-life exaggeration of the real. Secret murder plots, illicit drug dealing, country houses, foreign trips, farming families full of old Essex characters, and variegated Bonnie & Clyde antics - like something out of a novel in which she is one of the main characters, but not as exciting for the reader as the mainstay, ‘Jerry’ himself. Was she implicated more than she officially admits? The sleeping tablets, tales of euthanised rats, and discussing the finer points of home contents insurance, all seem at one remove, where she is more the passive agent than active collaborator, whereas the caravan robbery and drug peddling has her assisting Jeremy willingly. But is that all there is to it? Or was she directing Jeremy at times? During the Osea Road robbery, Jeremy goes back to the car to ask for her help to reach for a key left in a letter cage behind the door. That seems like an odd thing to do, as she would not be any more capable of such a feat than Jeremy; indeed, Jeremy manages it himself in the end. It’s as if Jeremy has returned to the car to tell her he can’t do it and they’d better go, and Julie decides instead to lend a hand, so to speak. She also seemed to have no objection when it came to spending the money taken from the site office. Had the earlier murder plots gone ahead, would Julie have accepted that money too and stepped effortlessly into her new role as feoffee of White House Farm?
Throughout the natural history of our species, violence - the threat and fear of it as much as the actuality of it – has been used as a means of constraint and control over individuals and general populations. Civilisation gradually pushed violence to the margins, and technological civilisation has made us observers of violence and subject only to the magisterial threat of violence through sovereign law rather than day-to-day threats of a tribal chief or thug. We are so used to living under a bourgeois social order that promises to assure peace under law that when, exceptionally, violence happens to us, it almost seems like a fissure in reality itself, rather than merely something outside the norm, as if we have caught a glimpse through a keyhole of a distantly primeval time. The more distant we are from actual violence, the more other-worldly real violence seems and the more important the second-hand and virtual portrayal of violence becomes to us. Media violence - news clips, Hollywood films, and the like – present us with a contrived and remote reality that we cannot experience but that reinforces the threat of, and instils in us a fear of, violence and other people and helps to ensure conformity.
The French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, critiqued the passive experiences of Man in advanced civilisation, in which tools and technique have replaced natural experience and created a reality in which life is no longer a series of personal experiences but an emulation of experience, and everyday people are deprived of authentic experiences in their lives. This is a concept of hyper-reality that is slightly different to the fiction-come-alive-as-reality of Julie’s experiences with Jeremy, but Baudrillard’s hyper-reality is closely-related to it in that a world of emulation and simulation is vulnerable to fictive narratives that, instead of coming alive as reality, simply are superimposed on a remotely-observed reality through distortion and manipulation: a Hyper-Reality that is false, virtual or simulated, depending on the precise context. Here we arrive at a possible explanation for the propounding of organised, even system-wide, falsehoods that are not only condoned, but genuinely shared as truth and believed, and may not even represent an engineered reality, per se, rather could be lies that arise organically from mutually-reinforcing deceptions. Deprived of authentic situations, we invent a reality for ourselves that simulates experiences – that is to say, a hyper-reality, but of a somewhat fictive variety. This pseudo-reality becomes reinforcing and shared to the point that it is indistinguishable from ‘real’ reality – a post-reality, if you like, that drugs the liar and turns him into a truthteller, but a truthful teller of lies. The ‘truth-lie’ could be a murder, a political scandal, a sensational legal trial or even an entire war (one of Baudrillard’s books is called
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place – I recommend it).
Let us also look through the Fourth Wall and consider reader observation, as literary theorists would call it. True crime could be considered a hyper-reality in that it is an exaggerated representation of reality, for literary purposes. We see it from the comfort of our computers. We don’t
actually see or feel it. We don’t experience it, the blood, gore, tragedy, loss. It is an academic escape, entertainment and hobbyism. Maybe this helps explain why Julie had to ‘observe’ and ‘touch’, and visit the mortuary? This hyper-reality had to be really real for her. Perhaps, in her head, she then confused the Real Hyper-Reality of her varied escapades with Jeremy with a more fictive or wishful version in which the killer is Jeremy. Verbal suggestion and inference may also have entered the picture. Jeremy does hate his family and tells her 'this and that' about himself and his parents. That morning, he tells her, “I should have been an actor”, not because he is the killer, but because, under pressure, with lots of family and official people around him, he was expected to go through the motions emotionally and visibly mourn a family for whom he felt almost nothing. Yet Julie takes “I should have been an actor” and various other utterances as incipient admissions that he, Jeremy, is the killer. Two weeks later, she pursues the topic further and Jeremy kids her on that he paid Matthew McDonald a ridiculously derisory sum of money to kill his entire family of five, including two six year-old boys. Unexpectedly, Julie either interprets this as a confession by Jeremy of his involvement, or twists it into one when she later talks with the police.
When true crime buffs purport to ‘solve’ cold cases, it may fill them with a false sense of skill in that, very often, all the amateur detective has done is make sense of clues arranged in a certain way to fit a solution arising out of his or her own preconceptions or prejudices. Julie claimed to have solved the crime, having direct experience of Jeremy and relaying to the police his confession and various other suspicious incidents; but, was she telling the plain truth or lying? Or was she working in that grey area between truth and lies, rearranging a complex jigsaw to make the facts fit a solution that had been preconceived by her or imposed by the police, or a bit of both? She wasn’t on the payroll of Essex Police, she was an amateur, a witness of fact indeed; but, she was their standout detective.
Can we believe Julie?
There are five possibilities:
1. Julie is telling the absolute truth and Jeremy is guilty. This means she was immature and Jeremy was a deranged lunatic. Case closed.
2. Julie is telling the truth up to a point. Jeremy is guilty, but Julie was involved in the murder plot in some way and has created a ‘prisoners' dilemma’, knowing that Jeremy cannot point the finger at her without incriminating himself, and also knowing that as time goes on, the courts will give little credence to accusations from a future repentant Jeremy. An additional possibility is that the police were aware of Julie’s involvement and that was the basis of her co-operation, thus the 1986 trial was a sham (see one of my threads about this theory, here:
https://jeremybamberforum.co.uk/index.php/topic,10296.0.html).
3. Julie is misrepresenting or exaggerating actual conversations with Jeremy. In other words, Jeremy is lying, but he is innocent. He may have essentially said the things she claims, but she has taken it out of context. She may have done this for either innocent or malicious reasons. Jeremy may have joked with her, both before and after the incident, about killing his family. This sounds strange, but it would be consistent with Jeremy’s character, personality and teasing nature to do this.
4. Julie is lying, but Jeremy is guilty. She lied because she knew or rightly suspected he was guilty. This is still perjury, and her lies make the convictions unsafe. It is also possible she was put up to it by the police. A further possibility, which is a variation on the ‘prisoners' dilemma’ theory, is that Julie has lied in an effort to save Jeremy and herself, by deliberately making up an unlikely version of events involving Matthew McDonald, knowing that it can easily be disproved by the police. This plan has then backfired and Julie had no choice but to stand by her story.
5. Julie is lying and Jeremy is innocent. Her motives for lying may have been a variation on 3 above and the police may have assisted her in the genuine belief that Jeremy was guilty, or it may have been purely malice. Either way, the result is the same.
In deciding between these possibilities, we can note the following:
(i). Everything that Julie has said is uncorroborated. There are no witnesses who confirm overhearing Jeremy say the things Julie claims Jeremy told her. There are also no witnesses who confirm Julie was even speaking to Jeremy at the relevant times, with the exception of the conversation in the bedroom at Bourtree Cottage, as Stan Jones confirmed where they were at that point in time.
(ii). If Julie was going to invent a confession by Jeremy, would she include Matthew McDonald? Defenders of Julie say that she must be telling the truth, as a motivated liar would not self-negate her own narrative by picking out a random person in this way to include in a fictitious story. Admittedly, this is a strong point in Julie’s favour, but a response to this is that by including McDonald, it would seem more plausible than if she simply pointed the finger at Jeremy. Maybe she also hoped that the whole thing would be quickly dismissed when the police inevitably discovered McDonald had nothing to do with it. (Indeed, that is what initially happened: Taff Jones decided she was just a silly girl talking nonsense).
(iii). She admits she was besotted with Jeremy but there is evidence the relationship was weakening and Jeremy was sleeping with other women and making no secret of doing so. This would have humiliated Julie, who was plain and probably lacked confidence. Hence she had a motive to resent Jeremy and maybe, in an emotional outburst or an effort for attention, she could have made something up about him or exaggerated real conversations.
(iv). Her details of the crime could have been gleaned from (among other sources):
- an innocent Jeremy, who overheard or gathered the information from the police;
- relatives;
- friends and acquaintances of hers who had heard and read things;
- police officers;
- newspapers and TV.
(v). Julie had direct contact with the family and could have been influenced by them.
(vi). The farmhouse itself is a black box. This is a case with no single piece of evidence that is incriminating or exculpatory and it is not rationally possible to prove or disprove the guilt or innocence of either the two major suspects.
(vii). Julie’s interactions with the police are also a metaphorical black box: we don’t know what she discussed with the police. Normally, we wouldn’t care as it wouldn’t be relevant. A witness’ discussions with the police are not normally considered ‘material’ to a criminal case or subject to disclosure. The reason we care in this case is that Julie’s interactions with the police were so unusual, the entire case rests on her evidence together with the blood in the silencer, and she was involved in criminality herself, including assisting Jeremy in a burglary of the office at the Osea Road caravan park. It is also noted that she stayed at the police college during her initial co-operation with the police, which again is unusual.
(viii). The controversy over whether it was Julie who approached the police or someone else. It has been speculated that she was arrested. It is alleged that the police and CPS refuse to release more information on the basis that the material is immune from disclosure due to public interest.
(ix). The improbability of strangling or euthanising rats.
(x). The absence of any explanation of why the sleeping tablets were left at Bourtree Cottage.
(xi). The 3 a.m. (approx.) phone call and Julie giving police the wrong information about who answered.
(xii). Julie's claim at trial of a belief in spiritualism as a reason for why she wanted to identify the bodies.
(xiii). Julie's conduct after the trial – posing for racy pictures.
(xiv). Julie's post-facto rationalisation for not reporting Jeremy's murder plans: it was, she believed, a “charade” and she was “besotted” with him. Yet a discussion of the finer points of insurance suggests seriousness, not a charade.
(xv). Each of the two key pieces of evidence, the blood in the silencer and Julie’s evidence, is weak on its own. Each only takes on strength in conjunction with the other. Without the silencer, acceptance of Julie’s evidence requires a leap of faith, as it can only stand on her own account. There is no corroboration. In an effort to lend support to Julie’s evidence, friends of hers, and in one instance, Robert Boutflour, gave evidence claiming they had heard Jeremy say things that – even if he did actually say them - he may not have meant or that may have been taken out-of-context.
(xvi). Related to (xv) above, Julie fails to mention the silencer in her own statements, thus the two key pieces of evidence against Jeremy have no connection to each other. This is crucial as it means each piece of evidence can be viewed in isolation, ergo each piece of evidence can be dismissed in isolation to the other.
Decide for yourself. My conclusion from all this is that if Jeremy was involved in the killings, then so was Julie, and the 1986 trial was a sham. She is like an inescapable antithesis to him as they move through time together. Here, in this piece, I have attempted a synthesis. He cannot name her without implicating himself, thus he has to pretend that she is lying entirely.
If, on the other hand, Jeremy is innocent, then Julie Mugford is very probably lying rather than exaggerating real conversations.
Either way, Julie Mugford is wicked and while I appreciate it is possible to defend her on the basis that she did assist in the conviction of Jeremy Bamber, who is widely believed to be guilty, a more realistic appraisal of her must acknowledge and condemn her on the basis of her probable involvement in these crimes.
She got off lightly.
