this was written in 2011 .
With regard to the sequence and timings of the telephone calls on the morning of Wednesday 7th August 1985, according to the “Blood Relations” book the following is detailed on pages 290 and 291.
….. “In the spring of 1991, Jeremy Bamber listed a dozen points from the crown case that he contested or rejected outright. He supplied comments on each of them:
1 The phone call to the police.
The prosecution fixed the time that Jeremy Bamber called the police at 3.26 a.m. on the morning of the massacre. Jeremy says this timing is wrong. At 3.26, PC Michael West (who took his call at Chelmsford police control room) telephoned Malcolm Bonnet in the information room. Bonnet’s (undated) statement: ‘At 03.26 a.m. on Wednesday 7 August 1985, I received a telephone call on the internal line.” Jeremy says West made this call to Bonner after his own call reporting trouble at the farm, so this call ‘must have been between 3.15 and 3.20.’
The question of timing here is further muddled because PC West originally logged Bamber’s call at 3.36 a.m. Either the clock was wrong, or West misread it, or he simply made a slip when entering the time on the telephone log. Certainly, the log clearly shows the call timed at 0336. Jeremy suggests two possible answers: Either West received another call from someone else (‘such as my Dad alerting the police to his situation’) or West has ‘intentionally manipulated the timing of my call to Chelmsford in an attempt to undermine my evidence, knowing as we do that PC West did not write up this account until 13 September’ – 5 days after Jeremy’s arrest at Maida Vale, and more than five weeks after the killings.
2 The phone call from Nevill Bamber.
Some accounts of the case have embroidered Jeremy’s account of the phone call he claimed to have received from his father in the middle of the night. Jeremy never claimed in the course of this call, he heard a shot and the line went dead.
Jeremy says: ‘The phone conversation with my Dad did end abruptly and when I phoned him back the line was engaged. It’s hard to guess what happened with his phone. Either the socket was disconnected from the wall, or the handset replaced. I don’t specifically recall hearing a dial tone, but there could have been one, though when I phone back it was definitely an engaged signal which could have been Dad phoning for help elsewhere.’ We do know when the police entered the house, the telephone receiver was off the hook.
3 The call back.
Jeremy told PC West that after receiving the worried call from his father, the line had gone dead and he had tried to call back, only to hear the engaged tone. It’s clear that had Nevill Bamber dropped the received under attack from Sheila, the line would have stayed open. Jeremy could not have obtained a fresh dialling tone until either the receiver at the farm had been replaced, or two units of phone time had been automatically metered. At that time of night, this would have taken ten minutes.
Jeremy says: ‘No one suggests that Dad was attacked while he was speaking to me. The phone may have been replaced in the usual way or the plug disconnected from the wall. This would have cut the connection, thereby allowing me to phone from my house. I recall distinctly getting the engaged tone when I rang Dad back, which indicates that he was either making another call or his handset was off the hook. Even if it is correct that Dad just dropped the phone during his call to me, it is not true that I would have had to wait until two units of phone time had elapsed before getting a fresh dialling tone.’
Jeremy cites the statement of an engineer called Robert Cox, who tested this point on behalf of the police. They wanted to know if Caller A from Tollesbury [Nevill Bamber] had phoned Caller B at Goldhanger [Jeremy] and during the course of the call, Caller A had placed the received down but not on the hook, would caller B be able to dial out again? The answer to this question appears to be: Yes. Caller B [Jeremy] could have dialled out again provided he had replaced his receiver on the hook for a continuous period of between one and two minutes. Engineer Cox stressed that the period MUST be continuous. If Jeremy had picked his receiver even for a moment before the ‘Force Release’ period had expired, this period would begin all over again. The ‘Force Release’ period can be as long as two minutes.
Jeremy says that although he replaced his handset after the call from his father, ‘I don’t believe that two minutes elapsed before I tried phoning him back. My return call was probably inside a minute although I am guessing. I know I rang back almost straight away. Of course it’s all irrelevant if Dad replaced his handset or pressed the cut-off button.’……..
