Hi Neil I think it's become complicated with Jeremy Bamber's team sowing the seeds of doubt in everybody's mind over the years which they have every right to do,but notwithstanding I think it's a tactic they're employing at every opportunity with every piece of evidence in the hope that the authorities will just want to rid themselves of this troublesome case and let him go,which they won't.
In my opinion the defence since the trial hasn't done a bad job,and I recall that at the original trial this was the only question which the jurors asked about the blood in the silencer,about whether it could only have been Sheila's or a mixture of the parents' blood. The jurors were told at the time if I remember rightly that the blood on the silencer was Sheila's. Since the 1986 trial forensic evidence has emerged that the blood could have been a mixture of June's and Ralph's(Nevill's) and that June's DNA was on the silencer,but they couldn't be sure whether Sheila's was.
We just don't know whether Jeremy did use a silencer that morning,though it would have made sense had he killed the twins first and didn't want to rouse the suspicion of other occupants of the house. Jeremy knew he couldn't kill so many people outright with the first round of ammunition so after he killed the twins he shot June in bed and possibly Nevill in the bedroom or on the landing. This would account for the ten shots of the first load of ammunition after which Jeremy would have to reload,whereupon Nevill seized his chance and fled downstairs to try and reach the telephone in the kitchen.
I'm going off the point slightly but I do believe a silencer was fitted to the rifle,and Andrew Hunter MP came to the same conclusion in his book draft. The point about the silencer evidence in court was that as Jeremy was by necessity in such close proximity to Sheila when he shot her with the silencer that backspatter lodged in the silencer,which Jeremy then cleaned and replaced in the gun cupboard. It was less dangerous in his mind to put the silencer back there than to remove it from the farm altogether as he had nowhere to hide it and I believe the drains were also searched by Police.
Of course the Jeremy supporters claim multifarious things;either there was no silencer used in the crimes in the first place so the silencer was irrelevant,or there was a silencer but there was contamination,or a flake of Sheila's blood was deliberately placed in the silencer by the relatives to incriminate Jeremy.
Of course, you would say these things, and that...
You forget to consider and mention that one DS "Stan" the man, Jones, seized or took four exhibits from the scene on the morning of the shootings (SBJ/4, SBJ/3, SBJ/2 and SBJ/1). Just to remind you and everybody else, he seized these exhibits on the morning of 7th August 1985, and one of them was a photograph of the downstairs toilet where Anthony Pargeter always kept his .22 bolt action rifle with its Parker hale silencer attached to its barrel. He also took possession and control of a silencer 9SBJ/1) which himself and DCI "Taff" Jones spoke to and questioned Jeremy about at his cottage ion the afternoon of 9th August 1985, before the police handed the keys to whf over to Ann Eaton (later that evening). So, first of all, get your facts right about when police seized or took possession of the silencer, if there was only ever one silencer in police possession and under their control from the scene at any stage. Let me remind you of something that you and everybody else from the camp on the opposite of the fence, appear to keep overlooking, how could DS "Stan" Jones, find and take possession of the silencer (SBJ/1) from the scene on 7th August 1985, and how could he and DCI Jones speak to Jeremy about its possible use on the rifle, when they asked him about this on 9th August 1985, if the silencer (SBJ/1, DB/1 or DRB/1, or whatever you want to call it), was not found by David Boutflour until 10th August 1985, and it did not get handed over to DS Jones by Peter Eaton, until the evening of 12th August 1985? You see, it just doesn't add up or make any sort of sense that there was only just the one silencer, you do not have to be a supersleuth to work that out, it should be obvious to anybody and everybody, that there has been and is something very dodgy going on here, relating to the silencer, or these silencers? You cannot wrongly label a silencer by the identifying mark of SBJ/1 on 7th August 1985, and later claim it was the same silencer which david Boutflour found in the gun cupboard on 10th August 1985, which did not get handed to DS Jones until the evening of 12th August 1985, and make out there was just some simple problem with the way the silencer was originally labelled for identification purposes, and this was why the silencer ended up having three different exhibit references, SBJ/1, DB/1 and DRB/1, at one stag e or another? Police and relatives have set out to deliberately make this into a one silencer, one rifle, bullets from one batch of ammunition crime - but it is all disturbingly untrue...
Another thing...
One of the four exhibits (SBJ/4, SBJ/3, SBJ/2 and SBJ/1) taken by DS "Stan" Jones that morning (7th August 1985) was a photograph of the downstairs toilet at the scene (whf) - yet we have been told that only PC Bird (SOCO) took photographs inside the premises that morning? Funny how the truth eventually comes out to expose the lies told by the police regarding who took pictures at the scene, and what of?
The silencer evidence is dodgy, it should never have been allowed in as evidence, and now that it has been and is, there should be an appeal to remove its influence from the case, which I am afraid leaves the prosecutions case with nothing at all to sustain these convictions any further by. You and anybody else can continue to rely upon such dodgy evidence to say this proves this and that, but it will always be dodgy evidence, and it should not have been allowed in as evidence as part of the prosecutions case for all the reasons given previously...
