The Bamber murders do have a certain resonance in my mind with the C.S Lewis children’s fantasy story with its darker tinges of turning people to stone, killing them with knives, all confined within a snowy English wood with flowery language under strong religious overtones. One wonders whether June would have approved of her children reading the novels, those two adoptees who could well have been the evacuees in the story from London settling into what turned out to be a foreign environment, the alienation they suffered a contributory cause of their disaffection with their lives and which led to the ultimate tragedy.
Nevill in his role as natural figurehead of the family, unquestioned and supported wholeheartedly by June, possibly harbouring a lifelong feeling of guilt in not providing him with a natural heir, dropping her adopted son Jeremy on the head as a baby and one unable to this day to ascertain just what damage that caused the boy. As Ann Eaton maintained in her statement Nevill would have assumed the role of the lion tamer in the kitchen that morning in facing his attacker, and whether the ceiling light was smashed along with the cereal bowls before Jeremy pumped lead into him leaving their telltale bloodstains on the landing wallpaper, Nevill remained true to type in fighting like a lion to the end.
What of Sheila,the adoptee who might well have written the inscription “I hate this place “ in a bedroom cupboard, who had told student Helen Grimster she had got to get rid of evil in the world and who had frightened an electrician all in the week of the murders? Could she really see her father Nevill reading Little Red Hen to his grandchildren as the incarnation of evil, the man who talked to her for hours on the telephone from Maida Vale and who was the one stabilizing influence in her life? Was this White Witch really capable of murder, or was it more likely she went through the motions of existence having neither the energy nor the wherewithal to influence events?
It was this inertia which Jeremy used to his advantage. If only he could have access to money whilst he was young as he told Liz Rimington in one of his nightclub haunts, where cannabis and cocaine removed him from the humdrum existence of the farming lifestyle which was so alien to him, born as he was a city boy, feeling intuitively the torpid faculties of gaping rustics whom Jeremy would only despise as a Gresham’s graduate, yet who proved himself as much a misfit in the world of academia and common sense of his father, from whose perceived yoke he would be released for a time by his actions that August morning.
The dirty work done Jeremy could regain a control over his life, one which did not involve farming in any shape or form. With June and Nevill’s heirlooms spread out before him in the master bedroom Jeremy took delight in letting Ann know which pile was worth the most, just as he had boasted to Colin several days before how many pages his statement to Police had amounted to. Of course any writing from Jeremy was couched in those uncouth block capitals which he in no way found disconcerting as he put pen to paper, yet which gives any normal person the willies every time he reads them. Ann sensibly took Granny Bamber’s jewellery out of the wardrobe with the help of Basil Cock and took it back to Oak Farm for safe keeping; Jeremy meanwhile after admiring his plunder emptied the wardrobe of Nevill’s clothes and threw them onto the back of a trailer to be burned.
It was in the light of these events that the silencer was found in the cupboard by David Boutflour on 10th August 1985. Jeremy’s inability to see others as they saw him led to this inevitability. Robert and David, Peter and Ann knew that Sheila, a girl who could not even drive a car through no fault of her own could not have carried out the massacre. It was this realization that Sheila could not have been responsible which led to Jeremy being suspected, and not Jeremy being framed as some have subsequently alleged.
