He added: ‘This is not an inquiry into how you were free to commit them [the offences]. It would not be appropriate for me to comment on that. I understand the family and the public will be concerned about certain aspects of this case.’
After the sentence, prosecutor Mr Howie said outside court: ‘We welcome the sentence. This was a brutal and sadistic crime, carried out with the deliberate aim of being sent back behind bars. The sentence reflects the vile nature of the offences committed and the significant danger he continues to pose to the public.’
The case of Stephen Ayre brought about huge criticism of the parole and probation systems in the UK. The nature of his original crime and his prison record meant that he had four requests for parole refused before his release. He served 20 years against his recommended minimum tariff of 14 years laid down in 1985.
Yet when he was finally released, the Probation Service was far from rigorous in its supervision. When Ayre was caught, drunk and disorderly, in an area from which he was banned, he was given a conditional discharge when it was well within the powers of parole officers to send him back to jail. Furthermore, there is the question of how he was deemed safe to live in the community from which he abducted and raped the 10-year-old.
Despite the public outcry, it was announced in June 2007 that two inquiries into the circumstances surrounding his release by the Parole Board and the monitoring of him by West Yorkshire probation service were to be kept secret by the authorities. The reason, the Parole Board explained, was to protect Ayre’s data protection rights. As a result the public do not know the background to how he was approved for release by the Parole Board at his fifth attempt. It is also not known how the West Yorkshire Probation Service monitored Ayre after his release and whether his probation officer understood that he was depressed, having difficulty coping with life and wanted to go back to prison.
It is also not clear if the Probation Service knew that Ayre had breached the terms of his parole when he was caught drunk and disorderly in an area from which he was banned. Whether probation officers faced disciplinary action is also not known.
Norman Brennan, Director of the Victims of Crime Trust, believes that the Probation Service should be held accountable. ‘The public have an absolute right to know the details and the authorities have a duty of care to tell them what went wrong,’ he said. ‘People’s lives are being devastated because of their mistakes.’
In June 2008, the father of Ayre’s 10-year-old rape victim was informed by Secretary of State for Justice Jack Straw that the report would remain a secret, despite his repeated appeals. Appalled, he said: ‘The police, the courts and the Probation Service failed my son and ruined his life and they have not done anything to put it right, and I really think they should.’
He added: ‘For a lot of people this has passed on, but for me and my son it happened yesterday. He is a strong kid and I am very proud of him, but he deserves a lot better than this.’
‘TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT’
‘I find it difficult to foresee whether it will ever be safe to release someone who can shoot two little boys as they lie asleep in their beds.’
Trial judge Mr Justice Drake
Name: Jeremy Bamber
Crime: Mass murder
Date of Conviction: 28 October 1986
Age at Conviction: 25
At about 3.25am on Wednesday, 7 August 1985, an officer at Chelmsford Police Station answered a call from a terrified young man called Jeremy Bamber, who told him: ‘My father’s just phoned me, he said, “Please come over, your sister has gone crazy and has got a gun.”’
So began the case of the White House Farm Murders, one of the most controversial in British criminal history – and one that still makes headlines today.
After his call to police, Bamber drove to the farm in Tolleshunt D’Arcy, Essex, from his home in the village of Goldhanger, three miles away. When he arrived at about 3.50am the 24-year-old was met by three policemen who were waiting outside. He told them: ‘My sister’s a nutter. I think something terrible has happened – there are guns inside.’
Armed police arrived at 5am and at just after 7.30, they smashed down the back door with a sledgehammer. Inside the 18th-century farmhouse, they found five dead bodies. Nevill Bamber, 61, was lying on the kitchen floor. He had been shot eight times in the head and body; he had also been badly beaten. Near to him was the telephone, lying off the hook.
June Bamber, also 61, was upstairs in the doorway of her bedroom. She had been shot once in bed and a further six times as she tried to escape her attacker. One of the bullets hit her right between the eyes. Meanwhile, Sheila Caffell – Jeremy’s ‘nutter’ sister – was sprawled on the floor beside her parents’ bed with an Anschutz semi-automatic rifle in her hands. The gun was laid across her chest and she had been shot twice in the throat. A Bible lay on the floor beside her.
Across the landing, Sheila’s six-year-old twins, Nicholas and Daniel, were murdered while they slept. Nicholas was shot three times in the head and Daniel five times. Daniel still had his thumb in his mouth when police found them. When officers outside the farmhouse told Jeremy Bamber of the slaughter of his family, he threw up and went into a state of shock.
Essex police were convinced they had an open-and-shut case. Sheila, a 28-year-old former model nicknamed ‘Bambi’, had a history of mental illness. Two years earlier, she was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic and underwent treatment at a psychiatric hospital. Her condition worsened after her recent split from the twins’ father, sculptor Colin Caffell. She had expressed thoughts of killing herself and her children and she had a very difficult relationship with her strict, God-fearing adoptive parents (both she and Jeremy were adopted). Sheila was also in the habit of forgetting to take her medication.
Detectives were convinced she had lost control and had acted on her schizophrenic urges. All the evidence pointed to her killing her family before finally turning the gun on herself. When police checked the doors and windows after finding the bodies, they discovered that they were all locked from the inside. As far as they were concerned, the killer’s identity was not in question.
Consequently, the house was not treated as a proper crime scene and much forensic evidence was obliterated or never gathered in the first place. Some 20 police officers were allowed to traipse in and out of the house and bloodstained bedding and carpets were destroyed.
At his family’s funeral, nine days later, Jeremy Bamber was a mess. ‘He was terribly distraught through the service and could barely walk behind the coffins,’ recalled his cousin, David Boutflour. ‘But when we were 100 yards down the road, out of sight of the [press] cameras and other people, Jeremy looked back at us and gave us the biggest grin. It was chilling. Peter, my brother-in-law, turned to me and said, “He did it, didn’t he?”’ Earlier that day, Bamber had commented that he hoped the press cameras would capture his good side.
After a tearful display at the graveside, Bamber took his friends out for a meal to celebrate. At the party afterwards the champagne and drugs were on him. He continued partying for several weeks, selling off his parents’ furniture at London antique shops to fund his playboy lifestyle until his inheritance came through. Later, he treated a group of friends to a £6,000 holiday to Holland and flew one friend out to St Tropez for a five-star jaunt. As the funds from his parents’ furniture ran dry, Bamber even touted soft-porn photos of his dead sister around the Sunday newspapers.
There were four people who, from the very outset, refused to believe the murder-followed-by-suicide story. Pamela Boutflour, June Bamber’s sister, her husband Robert, and their children, David Boutflour and Anne Eaton, were convinced Sheila was not responsible. Their tenacity helped change the course of the inquiry.
On the evening of Friday, 9 August 1985 – three days after the slaughter – Essex police gave David and Anne the keys to the farmhouse. They went there the next morning, mainly to retrieve valuable items before Jeremy had the chance to sell them. But, as Anne E
aton would later say, they had another reason for visiting the crime scene: ‘I wanted to look around the house because I didn’t believe the story that was going around. I wanted to look for myself, I wanted to look for clues.’
Her brother found a silencer, neatly wrapped in cloth, in Nevill Bamber’s gun cupboard. He recognised it as belonging to the murder weapon and he was stunned. ‘I thought every inch of the house would have been turned over and anything of relevance removed,’ he said. ‘It was a huge surprise to us to find such an essential piece of the gun left behind.’ It would later turn out that no fewer than six police officers had checked the gun cupboard without noticing the silencer.
David saw that the silencer’s outer plating had been damaged and that a small particle of red paint was lodged in the end of the barrel. The paint matched exactly the crimson paint on the kitchen mantelpiece where a recent indentation had been made. He deduced that the silencer had come into contact with the mantelpiece during some kind of struggle in the kitchen, probably while Nevill was fighting for his life.
Meanwhile, Anne was carrying out a thorough check of the upstairs rooms. She discovered that the fanlight of the kitchen window could be opened from the outside of the house, allowing an intruder access to the catch on the main opening section of the window. Her discovery flew in the face of Essex Police’s assertion that all the doors and windows had been locked from the inside when the killings took place. ‘Anyone could have got in there,’ she said.
That afternoon, David noticed what appeared to be a tiny speck of blood on the muzzle rim of the silencer. There was also a grey hair attached to the device. Excited by the find, he immediately rang the police but it was two days before an officer came to collect it. The grey hair stuck to the silencer was lost on the way to the forensic laboratory. Home Office tests on blood found inside the barrel proved that it was of the same type as Sheila’s. With the silencer fitted, the rifle would have been too long for anyone to have used it to commit suicide. In any case, Sheila could hardly have shot herself once in the throat, removed the silencer, taken it downstairs, wrapped it, put it in the gun cupboard and then made her way back upstairs to lie down close to her mother’s corpse and shoot herself a second time.
The post-mortem examination of her body found that she had in her system a drug called Haloperidol, a tranquiliser with which she was being injected as part of her treatment for schizophrenia. The effects of the drug would have severely impaired her ability to accurately fire the gun no fewer than 25 times. Furthermore, the paint on the silencer matching the mantelpiece in the kitchen suggested her father had at one point grabbed the barrel of the rifle and struggled desperately before he was killed. Although 61-years-old, Nevill Bamber was a fit man and would have overpowered his waif-like, sedated young daughter with ease. The prospect of her battering the 6ft 4in farmer to death seemed remote.
A fortnight after the funerals and a month after the killings, Jeremy Bamber finished with his girlfriend, Julie Mugford. Soon afterwards she discovered that he had slept with one of her best friends. Fuelled by hurt and anger, she went to the police and told them that Bamber hated his parents and had repeatedly told her how he wanted them dead. She said he had made murderous threats – which she had previously dismissed as fantasies – about his ‘old’ father, his ‘mad’ mother and his sister who ‘had nothing to live for’. On the night of the massacre, Bamber had phoned her and said simply, ‘Tonight’s the night.’ She said he rang her again at around the same time as he called the police, saying: ‘Everything is going well.’ When she arrived at the farmhouse after the killings, Bamber took her to one side and said: ‘I should have been an actor.’
After Julie Mugford’s testimony and the detective work by Bamber’s family, senior investigating officer, DCI Thomas ‘Taff’ Jones, was taken off the case for what were described as ‘operational reasons’. The new police team took a different view, believing Bamber had killed everyone to claim his inheritance and then tried to frame his sister for the murders.
The original investigation team appeared to attach no significance to the condition in which Sheila Caffell’s body had been found. Despite blood being all over the floor in the kitchen, on the stairs and in the master bedroom, her bare feet were spotless. The ex-model’s long, manicured fingernails were in salon-perfect condition – hardly those of a woman who had pulled a trigger 25 times and reloaded a magazine, holding 10 rounds, at least twice during the course of the killings. Forensic tests on her hands and nightdress found no significant traces of lead or gun oil, which would have been in abundance had she been the killer.
The Boutflour family told police that Sheila had no experience of firearms. ‘She didn’t know one end of a gun from another,’ said Anne. In fact, only one person said she had used a gun before, and that was her brother.
Jeremy Bamber was arrested on 8 September 1985 as he returned from his holiday to St Tropez. In October of the following year, after 13 months on remand, his murder trial began at Chelmsford Crown Court.
Anthony Aldridge, QC, for the prosecution said that the blood inside the rifle silencer found at the farmhouse was the ‘giveaway damning evidence’ that Sheila Caffell could not have killed herself. He said: ‘Sheila can’t have taken off the silencer because she would have been dead after the second shot. It’s far more likely that someone had shot everyone with the silencer on, then when he tried to fake the suicide by placing the rifle on the body, he realised she could not have shot herself. So, he removes it. There is only a small amount of blood on the outside – the size of a pinhead. He wouldn’t have appreciated the giveaway, damning piece of evidence inside.’
Mr Aldridge said that as Sheila was not responsible for the killings, Bamber made a ‘fatal mistake’ when he rang police to tell them of the phone call he’d had from his father in which he described his sister ‘going crazy’ with a gun. The barrister explained: ‘If the telephone call occurred, it meant Sheila was running amok with a gun. If he didn’t get the call and he was lying, it meant it was Jeremy Bamber who did it and he was trying to cover it up.’
Bamber’s ex-girlfriend, Julie Mugford, proved to be a star witness. The 22-year-old teacher gave evidence for more than five hours, often trembling and frequently sobbing. Throughout her appearance, Bamber avoided her occasional glances in his direction, but frequently shook his head as she spoke. She told the court that in late 1984 – about a year after they met – Bamber began telling her that he wished all his family were dead and that he had devised a plot to kill them. He told her that his father was getting old, his mother and sister were mad, and the twins were emotionally disturbed by their upbringing. He said that he would be doing the boys’ father, who was divorced from his sister, a ‘favour’ by killing them.
Miss Mugford said that at first she did not take her boyfriend seriously but she was disturbed when his plans grew more elaborate. She told the court that by the summer of 1985, he had decided on shooting them and making it appear that his mentally ill sister was responsible. She said: ‘Jeremy killed some rats on the farm with his bare hands to see if he could kill his family, and after doing so, he said he thought he could.’
She described how she spent the next few weeks in Bamber’s company. ‘He used to ask me if he was behaving OK, particularly in public,’ she told the court. ‘I said in respect of what had happened he was looking far too happy.’ She could not understand how he was coping so well, but he told her that he had done everyone a favour and that there was nothing to feel guilty about.
Cross-examined by Mr Geoffrey Rivlin, QC, defending, Miss Mugford insisted she was not a ‘scorned woman’ seeking revenge but she agreed that the relationship had deteriorated in the weeks after the killings and that ‘a barrier’ had gone up between them. Asked why she took a month before going to the police, she said she understood the police were sure Sheila Caffell was responsible and that it was a closed case.
In his summing-up at the end of the 18-day trial, Mr Justice Drake told
the jurors that if they believed the blood on the silencer was Sheila’s they should convict. After considering the evidence for nine-and-a-half hours, the jury of seven men and five women found Jeremy Bamber guilty of the murders on a majority verdict of 10 to two.
Sentencing him to a minimum of 25 years in prison, the judge said: ‘Your conduct in planning and carrying out the killing of five members of your family was evil almost beyond belief. It shows that you, young man though you are, have a warped, callous and evil mind concealed beneath an outwardly presentable and civilised manner.’
He added: ‘I believe you did so partly out of greed because although you were well-off for your age, you were impatient for more money and possessions. But I believe you also killed out of an arrogance in your character which made you resent any form of parental restriction or criticism of your behaviour.
‘I find it difficult to foresee whether it will ever be safe to release into the community someone who can plan and kill five members of their family and shoot two little boys asleep in their beds.’ Douglas Hurd, the Home Secretary at the time, ruled that Bamber should never be released.
Essex police, who were severely criticised for their handling of the initial investigation, admitted after the trial that senior officers had shown a serious lack of judgment in the early stages of the inquiry. Deputy Chief Constable Ronald Stone said that the crime had been ‘very cunningly arranged by a very cunning man’ and admitted his officers deduced precisely what Bamber had intended. He told reporters: ‘With the benefit of that perfect science hindsight, it could be said that judgments made at the scene of the crime by senior officers were misdirected.’
From the moment he was jailed, Jeremy Bamber has protested his innocence and has twice appealed against his conviction. His most recent appeal, in December 2002, focused on DNA evidence from blood on the silencer. Bamber’s legal team had the blood tested, using DNA-related techniques not available at the time of the original investigation. The fresh evidence pointed to DNA belonging to June Bamber – not Sheila – being found on the silencer. Yet, when forensic scientists investigated the inside of the silencer still further, they found DNA which matched Sheila’s, so flooring his argument. Rejecting the appeal, Mr Justice Kay said: ‘In our judgment, the more we examined the detail of the case, the more likely we thought it to be that the jury were right.’
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