Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

  In April 2001, with more advanced forensic testing including DNA testing available, Detective Reichert, now Sheriff of King County, reopened the investigation. He was still obsessed with solving the case. All the evidence was re-examined and some semen samples found on the bodies of three victims were tested for their DNA profile. The DNA profiles were compared with samples taken from Gary Leon Ridgway in 1987. On 10 September 2001, the spectacular news came through from the lab: the profiles matched. On 30 November, Gary Ridgway was intercepted on his way home from work and arrested on four counts of aggravated murder. It was a start. At last, the man the police had been hunting for twenty years was in custody.

  Ridgway, born in Salt Lake City in 1949, was working for a computer firm when he was arrested. At the time when the murders were committed, and for a period of thirty years, Ridgway was employed as a truck painter at the Kentworth truck factory in Renton, Washington.

  Ridgway was sexually insatiable, wanting sex several times a day. He also like having sex in public areas or in woods – even in areas where his victims were dumped. Ridgway had fanatical religious beliefs and these, combined with his strong sex drive, generated the tension within him that resulted in serial murder. He had a love-hate relationship with prostitutes. He complained to neighbours about prostitutes working in the area, but was also a frequent client. He functioned in a typically psychopathic way; he did not regard his victims as real people with separate identities, but wrote them off as disposable thrills.

  I killed some of them outside. I killed most of them in my house near Military Road. I killed a lot of them in my truck not far from where I picked them up. I picked prostitutes as my victims because I hate most prostitutes and I did not want to pay them for sex. I also picked prostitutes because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught . . . I thought I was doing you guys a favour.

  How much of this plea bargain statement represents what Ridgway actually thought is hard to tell; he was picking up quite a lot from his interrogators and giving them back what he thought they wanted to hear, with a view to winning a significant favour.

  On 5 November 2003, Gary Ridgway, then fifty-four years old, avoided the death penalty by confessing to the murders of forty-eight women. Most of the murders took place in 1982–84. The deal struck between Ridgway and the authorities was that he would co-operate with them in closing these cases in exchange for forty-eight life sentences without parole. The problem with plea bargaining is that it does not necessarily lead to the truth. There is little doubt now that Gary Ridgway was responsible for some, possibly most of the Green River murders, but was he really responsible, solely responsible, for all forty-eight of them – and only those forty-eight? That was what the authorities wanted to hear, so that was what Ridgway told them. The possibility remains that someone else may have been involved. The plea bargaining has introduced the added complication that it looks as if justice is being bent, negotiated. US citizens are asking who is eligible for the death penalty if Gary Ridgway isn’t?

  Why did he do it? It was partly the enormous stress generated by the polarization of his fanatical religious beliefs and his powerful sex drive. It was also to an extent an overwhelming sense of disempowerment. The killing was exciting, dangerous and gave his dull life as a truck painter the colour it otherwise lacked. On the other hand, millions of people feel frustrated and disempowered without resorting to serial killing.

  But the pattern of the crimes does not quite add up. We are still not seeing the whole picture. We are being asked to believe by the King County officials, who want to see the case closed, that Gary Ridgway went on a frenzied killing spree in 1982–84, and then stopped killing – completely – until he murdered once more in 1990 and on one final occasion in 1998. If that is what really happened, it is unique in the history of serial killing. What usually happens is that there is a killing spree, which involves one or more murders, followed by a cooling-off period, then another killing spree, and so on, rather like cyclical pattern of activity in a volcano. If Ridgway really killed forty-six women in the space of two years, he could not have gone on for twenty years after that nourished by only two more killings. This is a case that appears to be solved, but is not. The solution is probably that Ridgway killed many more women, outside King County. These are murders which he will never own up to because it is only in King County that he has been exempted from the death penalty.

  A Miscarriage of Justice? The Death of Sheila Bamber

  Rural Essex. 1985. It was some time after 3 o’clock in the morning on 7 August that Jeremy Bamber was woken up by his phone ringing. He picked up the phone to hear his father, Ralph Bamber, shouting, ‘Sheila’s got the gun. She’s gone crazy. Come over quickly.’ Ralph hung up and though Jeremy tried phoning back he was unable to get through. Ralph’s phone was off the hook.

  June and Ralph Bamber lived at White House Farm in the village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy, nine miles south-west of Colchester and not far from Jeremy’s cottage. The Bambers had adopted both Jeremy and Sheila. Sheila Bamber had been married, become Sheila Caffell, and produced twin sons, Nicholas and Daniel. Now Sheila and her six-year-old twins were living with Ralph and June at White House Farm. Sheila had gone crazy before, but there had never been a gun before. Jeremy decided to ring Chelmsford Police Station and ask them to meet him at the farm. After phoning the police, he phoned his girl friend, Julie Mugford, as he was unsure whether he had done the right thing. Then he drove the short distance to White House Farm, to find the police already there. Armed police officers arrived at 5.30.

  There was a lengthy discussion about Sheila’s state of mind, the weapons in the house, and other aspects of the situation. Then, at 7.30, the police broke the door down to find a terrible scene of carnage inside. They found Ralph Bamber’s body first. He was in the kitchen, where the phone was off the hook, and it looked as if Ralph had been attempting to call for help when he was attacked. His wife June was upstairs in the main bedroom. She had been shot once while in bed, then several more times as she tried to get out of the room. The twins had been shot several times in the head as they lay in bed. Sheila was lying dead beside her parents’ bed in the main bedroom. She had died of a single gunshot wound to the throat. She was holding a .22 semi-automatic rifle.

  When the police told Jeremy what had happened, he went into shock and vomited.

  Sheila Caffell’s marriage had broken down. She became depressed and slid further into paranoid schizophrenia, having to enter hospital twice for treatment. She had in fact only been discharged from hospital days before the shootings. Psychiatric reports recorded that her mental illness was centred on the twins, and even more disturbingly that she referred to them as ‘the Devil’s children’. The psychiatrist noted that she had suicidal tendencies. Before the shootings she had stopped taking the medication prescribed to control her dangerous state of mind.

  Jeremy Bamber said that there had been a discussion the day before the shootings, during which it had been proposed that the twins should be fostered, possibly on a part-time basis, or that they needed some other care arrangements. It is quite possible that this could have triggered a schizophrenic episode; Sheila could have decided that killing the children and her parents, and then killing herself, would solve the problem. The police concluded that Sheila Caffell had murdered her sons and her parents and then committed suicide.

  It was then that something extraordinary happened, something which took the murder case into a new dimension altogether and ensured its place in the annals of criminal history. During the next few weeks the police came to a different conclusion. They decided that Sheila Caffell had not committed suicide, but that Jeremy Bamber had killed her as well as killing all the other members of the household, finally putting the murder weapon into Sheila’s hands. It was a very strange decision to make. Normal, rational people use the reasoning procedure known as Occam’s razor; this is
the principle that an explanation should entail as few assumptions as possible or, put more colloquially, always go for the simplest explanation. In this case, the profoundly disturbed Sheila Bamber was by far the likeliest suspect for this appalling crime. On this occasion, the police decided not to apply Occam’s razor.

  Bamber was arrested, questioned and released. Then on 29 September he was re-arrested and charged with the murders.

  The police had decided that Bamber had a strong motive for murder. He stood to inherit over £400,000 as well as the Bamber estate, consisting of five farms, a farming co-operative and packaging factory in which Ralph had a twenty percent share, and a caravan park with an annual turnover of about a million pounds. The lure of this considerable wealth was enough to give Jeremy Bamber a motive.

  Why did the police change their minds? They interviewed a number of friends, relations, business contacts, some of whom had a vested interest in seeing Jeremy Bamber convicted of the murders so that he could not inherit. The police seem not to have considered that possibility that the statements they were getting might contain bias. There were also problems with Jeremy Bamber’s girlfriend’s account of his actions. Bamber had broken their relationship off after the murders and it is very hard to know how much credence can be put in her version of events. Had Jeremy Bamber really referred disparagingly referred to his ‘old’ father, ‘mad’ mother and a sister with ‘nothing to live for’? In the circumstances they were damaging remarks, but we cannot be sure that he even made them. Many people in any case refer to people of their parents’ generation as old or mad without meaning them any harm, and usually without intending any disparagement. Had he really made a phone call saying, ‘Tonight’s the night’? If so, what had had he meant by it? There are obviously serious reasons to doubt hearsay evidence against Jeremy that might have been motivated by cash, revenge, or immunity from prosecution.

  The main evidence brought forward by the prosecution was the blood found in the gun’s silencer. The victims were shot at close range, so the victims’ blood splashed back into the silencer. A test on the blood in the silencer showed that it was of the same group as Sheila’s. If that was the case, Sheila could not have committed suicide. With the silencer attached to the rifle, it became too long for anyone to shoot themselves. Obviously Sheila did not shoot herself with the silencer, then detach the silencer and put it in the cupboard downstairs before returning to the bedroom to die. The presence of Sheila’s blood in the silencer seemed to prove that someone else - Jeremy - had shot her.

  But there was another possibility, that the blood was a mixture of Ralph’s blood and June’s blood. The forensic evidence did not conclusively prove that Sheila had not killed herself. More recent tests using DNA profiling have produced an interesting result. There is no sign of Sheila’s DNA in the blood in the silencer, but there is a trace of June’s DNA and that of an unidentified male. This more advanced test proves that Sheila could have carried out the shootings herself, using the silencer, then removed the silencer, knowing that she needed to shorten the rifle in order to kill herself with it.

  A piece of evidence that could - and should - have saved Jeremy Bamber from conviction was the sighting of a mysterious figure at the window of the main bedroom at White House Farm. Both Jeremy and the police saw the figure in the bedroom when they first arrived at the house. If the figure had been either June or Ralph, surely he or she would have opened the window to make contact with the police. The figure was too tall to have been either of the twins. It could only have been Sheila, possibly wandering about in the grip of who knows what mental torment as she prepared to kill herself. If it was indeed Sheila, and it is difficult to see who else it could have been, the police who saw her knew perfectly well that Jeremy was with them, outside the house. Given that he was there, with them, he could not possibly have been responsible for Sheila’s death, and therefore not for the deaths of the others either. When the police and Jeremy saw the figure in the bedroom, they retreated behind a hedge and moved off about two hundred years along the lane. The .22 rifle does not make a loud noise, so Sheila may very well have shot herself at that moment without the police hearing anything at all.

  It was said by some witnesses that Sheila knew nothing about guns, but that was not true. She had been on a shooting holiday in Scotland and taught how to shoot. She had also seen Ralph and Jeremy load that particular gun. She had also lived on a farm most of her life, and would have known perfectly well how to load and fire guns.

  Two witnesses claimed that the bathroom window was open, implying that an intruder, Bamber, had broken in, but the police investigators found all the doors and windows secure. On 7 November 1985, Detective Superintendent Ainley wrote in his report,

  There was no apparent entry to or exit from the house, Detective Chief Inspector Jones did in fact examine the inside of all the ground floor windows and noted that they were all shut and secure on their latches. . . It seems, however, that after the inspection by DCI Jones some person partially opened the transom window in the kitchen and also opened the catch on the ground floor bathroom window. I have been unable to discover the person responsible.

  This is of course a very revealing comment. Someone – after the murders had taken place – was making it their business to make it look as if there had been an intruder. That person is very unlikely to have been Jeremy Bamber, as he was the prime suspect if the killings had been carried out by an intruder.

  At Jeremy Bamber’s trial, the prosecution alleged that he planned to buy an expensive new Porsche. This, they argued, showed that Bamber knew that he was coming into a lot of money shortly. But what Bamber planned to buy was not a Porsche, which would indeed have required a massive windfall, but a replica Porsche kit car; this would have cost him about £2500, a sum he could have afforded without murdering his parents. Indeed, if he had been planning to kill them for their money, he would have aspired to something more ambitious than a kit car.

  Another ‘telling detail’ the prosecution utilized in the trial was the evidence of a struggle in the kitchen. Ralph Bamber was six feet two inches tall, far too big a man for Sheila to have fought with. The evidence of the struggle clearly showed that Ralph was grappling with a male assailant moments before he was shot. But the signs of disorder that were interpreted as evidence of a fight were explained at the police enquiry in 1991. Walter Cook said then, ‘I am aware that [the photographs] might suggest such a struggle, but at the time it did not appear that way to me. I could only see two things broken, one was a lampshade and the other was a plate. There was also brown sugar on the floor, but it was confined to one small area. I later learnt that the chairs and the brown sugar had been knocked over by the firearms squad when they rushed about the house looking for Sheila.’ So there was no struggle. Sheila could after all have shot her father, just by taking him completely by surprise.

  It has become clear over the twenty years that have passed since the appalling events of August 1985 that the jury at Jeremy Bamber’s trial did not hear all the evidence. Nor did the jury hear the evidence straight. The evidence was carefully adapted and selected in order to produce a conviction. It was not only a miscarriage of justice; there were clear signs that attempts were being made, for more than one reason, to frame Jeremy Bamber and get him convicted.

  On 29 October 1986, Jeremy Bamber was convicted at Chelmsford Crown Court for the murder of five members of his adoptive family. The judge, passing sentence on him, described him as ‘evil almost beyond belief’ and recommended that he serve no less than twenty-five years. In 1994 the Home Secretary, Michael Howard, wrote him a letter telling him he would never be released. Jeremy Bamber became one of a small, élite group of convicted murderers whose crimes are deemed so appalling that they can never be released. Bamber has consistently protested his innocence and has tried to have his case reviewed. Two appeals have been rejected, one in 1989, one in 2002.

  Did Jeremy Bamber cycle over to his parents’ house that August morning
, climb in through the bathroom window, shoot his entire family, cycle home, phone the police and then return to White House Farm in his car? Or did Sheila, known to be mentally ill and on the verge of losing her two sons, finally lose control of herself and shoot the family before committing suicide? The open, bloodstained bible beside Sheila’s body is consistent with a deranged and suicidal state of mind. But it is not a clear-cut case, and it needs re-hearing. Jeremy Bamber himself has said, ‘Let no-one doubt that, in years to come, justice will be achieved and my conviction quashed.’

  If he is telling the truth, and he is innocent, then Jeremy Bamber has been the victim of a very serious miscarriage of justice, and the sooner it is put right the better.

  The Missing Estate Agent: Suzy Lamplugh

  The body of Suzy Lamplugh has never been found. Her killer has never been identified. There seems, even so, little doubt that she was murdered shortly after she vanished in July 1986. It is rather surprising that after more than twenty years, we still don’t know what happened to her.

  Suzy Lamplugh was a twenty-five-year-old estate agent. It was her job to show strangers round properties that were often unoccupied. On one of these routine assignments she disappeared. On a normal working day, she left her office in Fulham, west London, to meet a man calling himself Mr Kipper and show him round a house. It was a Victorian property valued at £130,000. When she did not return to the office, and did not return home either, the police launched a large scale search to find her.

  At first it seemed likely that she would be found relatively quickly. She had been seen by witnesses getting into a black car driven by the man, Mr Kipper, whom she had met at the house. The neighbours who saw her go were able to give enough information about the driver for a photofit picture of him to be constructed.