It has befallen me to elucidate a few points on the two cases and members will already know where I stand: the defendants are guilty as charged.
The copycat nature of the crimes cannot really be gainsaid: five victims in each case, a .22 rifle as the murder weapon with silencer, a perpetrator damaged (to what degree is moot) and harbouring a sense of entitlement within the family unit, an alibi concocted which doesn't really stand up to scrutiny, and a convenient scapegoat with which to exculpate and allow the assassin to start afresh and gain sympathy along the way.
I'll be briefer dealing with Jeremy Bamber, as the site is named eponymously and the material here far more extensive than that involving David Bain. A plan was devised in his mind, which may well have remained theoretical to this day, to extirpate his immediate family in order to gain a £436,000 inheritance at 1985 values along with a two-bedroom flat in a fashionable area of London. His sister, Sheila, was living there mostly alone at the time of the tragedy, with her twin sons visiting at weekends.
Colin Caffell, the father of the twins, was due to take them to Norway to visit his sister following the White House Farm visit, so it was really a courtesy call on the grandparents before that trip. Sheila, who suffered from schizophrenia and was taking medication for the condition, was not fully aware of events at the best of times, and the Haloperidol made her drowsy and uncoordinated, though she liked to keep up appearances and even on occasion hold court, as evidenced by a conversation a few weeks previously with a distant cousin, Helen Grimster, during which suicide was mentioned.
It's important to lay all the facts on the table, or as many of them as possible which can be established as facts. Therefore, when considering Robin Bain's culpability, it would be wise to acknowledge that he was going through a bad patch: he had been banished from the family home on Every Street, Dunedin, to a caravan in the garden, where he had resided for the past three years, during the week he slept in another dilapidated camper van on the school grounds in Taieri Beach, often reeking of body odour by the end of the week. He had published some inappropriate stories from pupils in the school magazine. A wad of correspondence from the Local Authority remained unopened on his desk in the office.
It is these circumstances which the two defendants took advantage of. David had been poisoned by his mother's vitriol towards her husband, describing him as Belial, synonymous with the Devil in the epistles of Paul. The four children had been running wild in the compound in Papua New Guinea, Margaret unable to cope and relying on the firstborn to take charge, as Margaret herself in her turn had been put upon by her mother, being the eldest of four daughters.
The mother, to her credit, knew there was a problem. She enlisted the assistance of psychologist Wendy Maitland, who interviewed the family in 1987. She states:
"I was worried by the magnitude of the problem. David was then 15, but all the children were affected. It's like a tragedy that is perpetuated through the generations. I didn't foresee a tragedy of this kind, but it was clear to me that if they didn't seek help the children would become mentally ill. There would be psychological damage, havoc."
