I found the transcipts online for HB's 'Blood Relatives'. Don't think it has been posted previously? Here's the section re her phone conversation with NM re the so-called 999 call
:
00:00:28
Speaker 01Hello?
00:00:29
Speaker 11Oh, hi. Is that Nick Milbank? It is. Hello, my name's Heidi Blake. I'm a writer for a magazine in New York, The New Yorker, and I'm doing a long-ish piece about an old Essex police case from the 80s, the Jeremy Bamber case. When I made this call, I'd been wading through the White House Farm case files for a few weeks, and honestly, by this point, I was overwhelmed. There's just so much, I mean, there's so much documentation, it's just like, it's completely bamboozling. Yeah.
00:00:58
Speaker 11I just stumbled upon an especially perplexing detail about this guy, Nicholas Milbank, a long-time Essex police officer, and a 999 emergency call that he'd apparently received on the morning of the crime from inside the manor at White House Farm. A call that, unless I was very much mistaken, should have been impossible. I understand you had some involvement with sort of monitoring the phone lines on the night
00:01:27
Speaker 11of the crime. Basically, I'm just, I was wondering whether you might be willing to have a chat with me about it and just make sure I'm not completely barking up the wrong tree with the stuff I'm looking at.
00:01:36
Speaker 03Yeah, to be honest, yes, I was. I was on the telephone, but it was back in the 80s. My recollection of it, I mean, I'd taken millions and millions of phone calls then, and to be honest, in those days, it was just another phone call.
00:01:55
Speaker 11Just another phone call, he said. But that moment, right there, when Nick Milbank began to tell me about this call, that was when my whole understanding of this case started to shift. Because if this call had really been made at the time I'd seen referenced in the case files, that could mean only one thing.
00:02:22
Speaker 11Jeremy Bamber could not have committed this crime. From In the Dark and The New Yorker, I'm Heidi Blake. And this is Blood Relatives.
00:02:43
Speaker 10It's one of the most notorious and shocking crimes in living memory. A bloody massacre at a remote English farmhouse.
00:02:52
Speaker 01Who 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.
00:03:01
Speaker 02He's lying. I mean, it's a classic detective novel thing. Agatha Christie or whatever. I'm going to kill my family, so I inherit all the money.
00:03:16
Speaker 13I didn't murder my family. I mean, I promise you, no matter how many times we slice up this case, I'm always innocent.
00:03:34
Speaker 11Part 1. The 999 call. The line in the documents mentioning this phone call was buried amid thousands of pages of police memos from a review of the case by Scotland Yard, codenamed Operation Stokin Church. The review was conducted in 2002, right before Jeremy Bamber's last appeal,
00:03:56
Speaker 11and the memos refer, in passing, to a, quote, 999 call made from White House Farm at 6.09 on the morning of the murders. The case files contained hardly any detail about this call, beyond revealing that it had been received by police constable Nick Milbank. Prosecutors had certainly disclosed nothing about it to the jury at Jeremy Bamber's trial.
00:04:21
Speaker 11But when I reached Nick Milbank, still working at Essex Police all those years later, as it turned out, he was willing to tell me all about it. It's obviously hard to dredge it all up from all of that time ago. Yeah, yeah.
00:04:36
Speaker 03And from what I can remember, it was a case of someone playing the 999 and me answering it, and then it was just hearing background noises and police entering the room. I don't think there was any actual conversation, but I really don't remember much about it at all, to be honest.
00:04:54
Speaker 11Oh, interesting. OK. This was another one of those moments in my reporting when I was trying my best not to let my astonishment show. But it was hard. Because at 6.09am, when the memo said this call had come in, Jeremy Bamber had already been waiting outside the house with police for hours. And so were you in the control room and picked up a 999 call?
00:05:20
Speaker 03Yes. Yeah. Yeah, in the central control room in Chelmsford.
00:05:25
Speaker 11Milbank's shift that morning had just started at around 6am.
00:05:29
Speaker 03No, I do dispatch you most of the time, but on that occasion I was call-taking. And, but yeah, obviously came through on the 999 system.
00:05:37
Speaker 11And so there was a call came in and it was from the farmhouse itself? Yeah. No one spoke when Milbank answered the phone, he said. But the police department's policy when this happened was that the call taker would just stay on the line, listening.
00:05:53
Speaker 03If you get a phone call where it's technically an abandoned call because people either aren't speaking or there's someone who's obviously in fear of danger or whatever, our policy is to stay on the phone with them until the police arrive. And then as the police officers would get there, they'd pick up the phone and say, yeah, we're here now. And so I could then hang up the phone call and go straight on to the next 999 call.
00:06:18
Speaker 11Right, right. OK, that makes sense. Totally. So Nick Milbank said that's what he did that morning. He just sat there listening in to what was happening inside the manor.
00:06:29
Speaker 03And so I just sat there with the phone open to see if anyone did say anything or I heard anything.
00:06:35
Speaker 11And like you could hear sort of movement in the background, did you say? Or what exactly?
00:06:39
Speaker 03As far as I can remember, there was, yes, a movement or voices in the background. I'm not sure they actually spoke to anybody.
00:06:48
Speaker 11So Nick Milbank was saying not only did someone dial 999 from inside the manor that morning before police entered the property, but when he answered, he heard apparent signs of life inside. Movements. Maybe even speech. I'm just sort of piecing through the records and because I was thinking, oh, like a 999 call from inside the house. I didn't know that. I hadn't seen that before, but that's sort of interesting. Huh.
00:07:15
Speaker 03Yeah. So who actually made the phone call? I don't know.
00:07:20
Speaker 11This conversation was becoming more and more surreal. Not least because Nick Milbank didn't seem to realise the gravity of what he was telling me. I'm just trying to get my head around some of this new stuff and that it does seem like if it's true that, because, you know, the way it all went down was apparently, you know, Jeremy claims there was a call from his dad to him at three in the morning saying, come round, your sister's gone berserk with a gun.
00:07:48
Speaker 11And he went round to the farmhouse and they got there at about 3.48 in the morning. And then from that point on, he was stood outside with the police and the police didn't enter till 7.30 a.m. So if there was a call inside the farmhouse, it sort of doesn't quite make sense that, you know, that would have happened. Because that would indicate someone was alive in there, basically, you know, they're all dead by the time.
00:08:10
Speaker 14Well, obviously. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:08:13
Speaker 11Well, obviously, Nick Milbank said, someone was alive in there. Needless to say, that was a gobsmacking thing to hear a police officer say. Because if the prosecution's story was true, that Jeremy had murdered everyone himself, shooting all five members of the family in the head before cycling home,
00:08:41
Speaker 11cleaning himself up and calling the cops at around 3.30 a.m., there was no way anyone could possibly still be alive inside the house all those hours later at 6.09. According to the pathologist, they would have died all but instantly. The police hadn't entered the property until 7.30 a.m.
00:09:06
Speaker 11So Milbank had been listening in for an hour and 21 minutes before the bodies were found. And he'd heard noises that might have been crucial clues to what was going on in there. And so did it sound like, because I think there was meant to be a bit of a struggle in the kitchen at some point, did it sound like a commotion or did it just sound like, you know, didn't sound like a fight?
00:09:28
Speaker 03No, it was just movement, you know, movement really. I don't know, I can't remember, but I'm guessing, sort of either a door opening and closing or a chair being moved or, you know, there was some noise of some sort of movement. And then all of a sudden, you know, there were sounds of police. I think someone picked up the phone and said, it's OK, we're in now or we're here now, whatever. And I said, that's fine, I'll put the phone down.
00:09:55
Speaker 11Huh, OK, interesting. So someone said, someone said we're here now.
00:09:59
Speaker 03Yeah, so it was obviously, I'm guessing it was the police officer that picked up the phone. And so obviously there was no longer the need to leave the 999 call open.
00:10:15
Speaker 11Who could have made this call? Neville, June and the twins had all been shot in the head at close range. If someone was alive inside the house after the police turned up, it could only have been Sheila, who was found dead inside the locked manor, holding the murder weapon.
