It's time to redress the balance today after having read so many posts depicting Jeremy Bamber as an ingenuous,selfless character who talks to the five victims daily in his prison cell,who is remaining strong in adversity and who knows that one day justice will prevail and he will be freed. Indeed it seems as if there is an ever-increasing number of adherents to Jeremy's cause with the relentless passage of time having dulled memories as to the horrors perpetrated 27 years ago,the indubitable mistakes made by the authorities in destroying forensic evidence,and the multifarious claims made by numerous experts in their diligent efforts to find that one piece of conclusive proof of innocence which has heretofore for some mysterious reason eluded them.
Without recapitulating my previous threads let us try to establish some common ground between the two camps. Both Sheila Caffell and Jeremy Bamber were good suspects;the former having suffered from bouts of mental illness in the past was unpredictable in her behaviour,whilst Jeremy despised his family who were not blood relations. After the murders Jeremy stood to inherit the whole of his parents' estate.
Let us firstly examine the telephone calls,or logs,which is difficult because we just don't have access to them. All these logs should be released now,so that an attempt can be made to establish whether a telephone call was made from White House Farm that morning,although that would not prove definitively that it was made by Ralph(Nevill) and indeed would not conclusively prove that Jeremy Bamber was at home at Goldhanger as he was in possession of an answering machine which would have registered the call.
Next there have been assertions that Nevill had had an alarm with a panic button in the bedroom installed several weeks prior to the murders. We have been told that this panic alarm was activated around 3:25am,and that there was therefore no need for Nevill to call the Police as a patrol car had been immediately despatched from Witham Police station,and so this is the reason why Nevill called Jeremy first,though Nevill did,according to the Jeremy supporters later did make a call to the Police,hence the excitement of the ambiguous telephone log released in 2004 which suggests a possibility of two separate phone calls to the Police,one from Nevill and the other from Jeremy.
A thought about the panic attack alarm. These had become more common in the mid-1980s as crime soared in Thatcherite Britain,but leaving that aside,as far as I am aware the panic attack alarm was installed in Nevill and June's bedroom,so all Nevill would need to do was depress a lever in the bedroom,hear that the alarm had gone off and wait inside the bedroom in comparative safety until the Police arrived. Yet with no bedroom telephone at hand,which was at this point in the kitchen,and if Sheila had "gone berserk" with a gun Nevill takes it upon himself to leave the bedroom and move downstairs to the area of the kitchen telephone to summon additional help from Jeremy.
The problem with this scenario is we have to account for a telephone call made from the kitchen. So let us say that Nevill hears a noise in the twins' bedroom sufficient to cause him to activate the alarm, comes out onto the landing and is shot there, manages to stagger into the kitchen where he takes off his watch and hides it under the rug as a clue to any investigator that he had been in that area, leaves bloodied finger marks of his left hand on the side of the kitchen worktop,but with his right hand manages to dial Jeremy's number. In this scenario he doesn't bother to dial 999 to check that Police are on their way,yet opts to dial a 7 figure number first to Jeremy's cottage at Goldhanger. He then does decide to call the Police,so has the time to dial two telephone numbers from the kitchen phone. In this second call he doesn't mention the panic alarm,which must still be sounding yet which doesn't seem to be heard at the other end,neither does he check with the Police that they are on their way.
Whilst Nevill has managed to make these calls Sheila has shot her mother several times in the bedroom and has now come downstairs to finish off Nevill. The kitchen floor area by the telephone is again heavily bloodied,suggesting that the murderer shot him several times there. Nevill this time is shot a further four times to the head,yet manages to stagger towards the kitchen door,where he is eventually found slumped over with his head in the coal scuttle. Sheila then vindictively bashes her father over the head with the rifle butt and in this scenario there is no life and death struggle involving mutual physical contact,or any possibility of the silencer scratching the mantlepiece.
Sheila then washes her hands and feet to remove the blood from these areas,as well as any gun residue from firing 25 shots,enters the master bedroom where she writes a few notes with a suicidal theme,reads June's bible one last time for solace,then shoots herself. Realizing she is not dead and looking outside from the bedroom window which is the "trick of the light" seen by the Police outside by this time,she shoots herself a second time,this time fatally.
It's all so plausible and neat.
I would suggest a different scenario. That it was Jeremy Bamber who climbed into White House Farm in the early hours of Wednesday 7th August(any forensic traces can be explained away by admitting to Police he had used this entry point several times in the past), and who in darkness immediately looked for the rifle he had left on the settle in the alcove only a few hours before. He then advances upstairs to the twins' bedroom as he knows how fractious little boys can be and he wouldn't want complications from them hearing a sound and coming out of their bedrooms. He kills them in their beds with Daniel still sucking his thumb,being put to bed possibly devoid of the care, the maternal love,the bedtime story which many a 6 year old would have come to expect. Uncle Jeremy was doing them a favour really, what life did they have being passed from pillar to post with a mentally ill mother and grandmother, and dad would manage to get regular work now he didn't have to care for them. It would simplify the inheritance with Jeremy himself being the sole beneficiary,he could sell up and move on.
With the twins slain Jeremy moves into his parents' room. Yet the panic alarm has sounded and he is taken aback. He has to hasten now or risk being discovered by outside intervention. He shoots at Nevill and manages to incapacitate him but has to reload the rifle and Neville gets past and staggers onto the landing where Jeremy fires another shot. Jeremy now has the startled June to deal with and shoots her as she is lying up in bed.
Nevill is now on the landing,but in Jeremy's scheme it has to be demonstrated that his father made a telephone call from the kitchen to Jeremy himself. Jeremy couldn't risk there being a telephone left in the bedroom in case Nevill made a call from there to the Police naming Jeremy as the killer. So Jeremy frogmarches his father down to the kitchen area,the skin on his back heated by the rifle butt,and as they approach the area of the telephone Nevill manages to make another escape towards the exterior kitchen door area,where he is shot fatally by his adopted son,this time Jeremy bashing Nevill with the rifle butt fracturing his jaw,nose and larynx.
Jeremy then proceeds back upstairs to the master bedroom where June has managed to work her way as far as the door,where Jeremy takes one last look at her by shooting her directly between the eyes. This action along with the clubbing of Nevill speaks volumes about all the torment he had suffered at their hands down the years,their demonstrable lack of love finally reciprocated in that house as Jeremy hurriedly went to fetch Sheila.
Sheila is dozing,she had been a "zombie" at 10 o'clock only the preceding evening according to Auntie Pamela,this model who was normally so fastidious in her personal grooming had not even had the mental capacity to know that her period was on the way,and it had probably been June who had to deal with the situation which prevented her from attending her usual Church meeting. She was led,mute and will-less into her parents' room,where Jeremy laid her down,placed her hands on the trigger of the .22 Anschutz rifle and shot her.
However panic sets in. Sheila is not dead and this is one point of Jeremy's plan which he cannot rehearse. Realizing that a second bullet from this weaker rifle may still not fatally injure Sheila he races downstairs to the gun cupboard where he selects one of the stronger guns from the nine available on the property which does fire the fatal shot.
Jeremy then scatters a few notes made by Sheila around the body,takes out June's bible which he tosses near the corpse, makes a phone call from the kitchen to his anwerphone,exits through the bathroom window and cycles hurriedly back through deserted farmland to his cottage at Goldhanger.
