An excellent find Slaters! +1
Bob Woffinden makes these points extremely well, i think it is worth repeating them...
The telephone that moved downstairs is the key to solving the White House Farm murders.Why? Because the phone which was normally on Nevill Bamber’s bedside table was the principal obstacle to Jeremy Bamber’s hopes of fulfilling an ambition he had confided to Julie Mugford, his girlfriend: that of committing the perfect murder.
Someone in the house had only to call 999 and identify him as the gunman for his entire plan to be foiled. Once we recognise this it becomes possible to reconstruct events.
Bamber had developed an intense hatred of his family, in particular his ultra-strict mother. A few months earlier, as he would later admit to the police, he and Julie had burgled a caravan site the family owned, stealing £970 and making it look like an outside job.
For Bamber, however, this was only a beginning. He wanted the family fortune and devised a calculated scheme to get it. It involved killing not only his parents and his sister, but also the twins, who would otherwise inherit half the estate.
On the evening of the murders, he drove home from the farmhouse at around 10pm to his small cottage nearby in Goldhanger village. He returned on his mother’s bicycle. The first thing he did on entering the house was to take the kitchen phone off the hook. By doing this he disabled every phone in the house.
He would already have put on some kind of protective clothing, in all probability a wetsuit. If he showered in it afterwards, there would be no danger of his clothes being spattered with tell-tale bloodstains.
Taking his father’s rifle, whose ten-bullet magazine he had loaded earlier that evening, he crept upstairs. It seems almost certain that he shot the children first. He then crossed the landing to his parents’ bedroom.
This was where his plan began to go awry. Nevill, who had earlier confided in Barbara Wilson, the farm secretary, that he suspected Jeremy was planning to kill him, was woken by the noise. He would have tried to call the police from the bedside phone, then realised that a phone downstairs was off the hook.
So when Bamber came into the room, Nevill was at least partly ready for him. Although hit by four bullets, he avoided any lethal injury. Then, after Bamber wounded June, the gun clicked empty. Nevill seized the opportunity to go downstairs.
Bamber pursued him. At all costs, he had to stop his father reaching that phone and calling for help. There was no time to reload the gun. Instead Bamber, battered his father into unconsciousness with the rifle butt.
He then re-loaded, fired four bullets into Nevill’s face and head, and went back upstairs. Sheila had by now moved into her parents’ bedroom to tend to her wounded mother. Bamber shot June dead. Then came the really difficult task: shooting Sheila.
This time there had to be only one bullet, directed at such an angle that it would appear to be suicide. However, the bullet didn’t kill Sheila. He had to shoot her again — another potentially serious mistake.
To simulate a crazed attack he fired more bullets into the bodies of the twins. He then showered in his wetsuit and put clean clothes back on.
But he did have a major problem. What if investigators asked why Nevill or June hadn’t dialled 999 from the bedroom? And why Nevill’s body was in the kitchen? Bamber had to improvise. So he plugged the ivory bedroom phone into the kitchen socket — hastily hiding the kitchen phone under magazines.
For Bamber’s purposes, this would explain why Nevill was found downstairs. And it would provide an explanation as to what had happened to the phone everyone knew was usually next to Nevill’s bed.
There was still the anomaly of why the kitchen phone was not plugged into its usual socket — but Bamber thought he could argue it was not working. However, for quarter of a century, even though one police inquiry did address the issue, no one did unravel what had happened. If Bamber’s sister Sheila had killed her family in a psychotic episode before shooting herself, she would obviously not have re-arranged the telephones. That’s why the phone that moved is the final piece of evidence in the case for Bamber’s guilt.
There is, of course, one remaining question. Why did Bamber himself call the police? The answer is that this ensured they accepted his version of events. He primed them with the false information that Sheila was familiar with guns; he hid the fact that, because of her prescribed drugs, she had neither the strength nor co-ordination to re-load an automatic rifle, let alone defeat her 6ft 4in physically fit father in a fight."
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