Pod Insights In The Dark Blood Relatives, Episode 2 About this episode Heidi visits an unlikely group of detectives: the victims’ extended family. Their sleuthing upended the police’s original theory of the case.
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Transcript 0:01 Speaker 00 On a sunny day in April last year, I arrived outside a gabled farmhouse, deep in the Essex countryside, a place not far from Whitehouse Farm, where the Bamber family had been killed.
0:15 Speaker 00 Let's go and see what's going on.
0:20 Speaker 00 I walked through a big yard, full of tractors and other farm equipment. A row of mud-spattered Range Rovers were parked in the drive.
0:29 Speaker 00 I knocked on the door and waited on the porch of the farmhouse. Through the windows, I could see shotgun cartridges stacked against the glass. After a few minutes, I saw someone coming around the side. Is it David? Hello there. Hi. So sorry to trouble you. My name's Heidi. I wrote to you a few weeks ago. I don't know if you got my letter.
0:49 Speaker 01 No.
0:50 Speaker 00 No, you didn't.
0:50 Speaker 01 No, I'm sorry.
0:51 Speaker 00 Oh, you might have. David Bowflower is part of the Bamber's extended family, Jeremy and Sheila's cousin. He's in his 70s now, with a farmer's tan and grizzled hair. I'd written to him a few weeks earlier to ask him to talk to me about the murders at Whitehouse Farm. And I would love to talk to you about it.
1:10 Speaker 01 Oh, give me five minutes.
1:11 Speaker 00 Yeah. Oh, that's so kind.
1:16 Speaker 00 I was here to talk to David because I wanted to understand how this apparently clear-cut case of murder-suicide had turned so decisively against Jeremy Bamber. How had Jeremy gone from being the bereaved son weeping on the lawn of his family's manor to sitting in prison, convicted of their murder?
1:41 Speaker 00 And David? Well, he knew how that had happened better than almost anyone. And your family, I think, was very instrumental in finding the evidence and, you know, putting the case together, really. Because I'd learned that the people who had made sure Jeremy Bamber ended up behind bars for the rest of his life, the people who pieced together the evidence used to convict him were not police or prosecutors, but his own cousins.
2:13 Speaker 01 I think if we hadn't have done, I think he would have got away with it. I really do. I think he would have got away with it.
2:27 Speaker 00 From In the Dark and The New Yorker, I'm Heidi Blake and this is Blood Relatives.
2:34 Speaker 02 It's one of the most notorious and shocking crimes in living memory, a bloody massacre at a remote English farmhouse.
2:45 Speaker 03 One of my bosses comes up and said they've gone in and it's not good. It looks like all the family have been killed by the daughter.
2:53 Speaker 04 No one knows why the family had to die. Essex Police now say that the model Sheila Caffill could have been murdered.
3:00 Speaker 05 But all the evidence at the time, say police, pointed to suicide. In the past week, they've been working on new information.
3:16 Speaker 00 Part one, The Cousins.
3:21 Speaker 00 David led me into a pretty garden, looking out over the fields. There was washing hanging on the line and two black dogs were cavorting around the lawn. We sat down at a small table. He'd pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and we began to talk.
3:36 Speaker 01 Lovely. Do you want to know a little bit about the Bamba thing?
3:39 Speaker 00 Yeah.
3:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, I can tell you a little bit, but as I say, it's a long time ago now, really.
3:45 Speaker 00 Yeah. Growing up, David and his family had lived near the Bambas. David and his sister Anne were about a decade older than their adopted cousins. Can you tell me about Jeremy, like what you all felt about him before this awkward tragedy?
4:00 Speaker 01 Well, we didn't have a lot to do with Jeremy. He was, Jeremy was slightly younger than us, so she's not quite in our age group, if you like.
4:08 Speaker 00 David told me they didn't really like Jeremy. He could be arrogant and rebellious.
4:14 Speaker 01 He'd just be difficult, you know, always trying to be awkward. Yep. He was very good at belittling his parents, particularly his mother, not his father so much, I don't think. I don't think Neville put up with quite so much, but Auntie June had a very hard time.
4:30 Speaker 00 It wasn't just that he disrespected his parents. In the conservative world of rural Essex, Jeremy never fit in. He flouted many of the conventions of country life. Unlike David and the other young men in the family, Jeremy rarely made appearances at the Young Farmers' Club. And he was unreliable when it came to helping out on the farm.
4:52 Speaker 01 He wasn't really a farmer, and his father tried to encourage him, but he wasn't a farmer and he didn't want to work.
5:00 Speaker 00 Jeremy stayed out late with his friends at nightclubs and strip joints, smoking weed and drinking champagne, frittering away his parents' money. He hung out with bohemian characters and sometimes wore makeup. Locals whispered disdainfully that Jeremy might be gay or bisexual. In the relatives' minds, all those qualities added up to a degenerate character, someone they thought was not to be trusted.
5:27 Speaker 00 Just a few months before the murders, something else happened, something that turbocharged the family's dislike of Jeremy. There was a break-in and a robbery. It happened at a property jointly owned by the Bambas and the Bowflowers, their vacation resort on the banks of the river Blackwater. Someone stole nearly a thousand pounds out of the office, and apparently, the night before, Jeremy had persuaded his father Neville not to bother banking the cash. He'd said it would be fine to leave it overnight in the safe. So when it was stolen, everyone suspected that Jeremy was the thief.
6:08 Speaker 00 After the murders, it didn't take long for the relatives to start asking whether Jeremy also knew more about this crime than he was letting on. And do you remember when it was that you guys first thought you didn't believe the story that Sheila had done it?
6:24 Speaker 01 The second day.
6:26 Speaker 00 Second day?
6:26 Speaker 01 The second day, the grown men just started to pick in and say, "Well, hold on, this doesn't really always stack up."
6:36 Speaker 00 It was the morning after the killings, August 7th, 1985.
6:43 Speaker 00 David and his sister Anne Eaton had just heard what had happened, and they went to check on Jeremy at his cottage. They found him talking to a couple of police officers, who were taking a statement from him as a matter of protocol.
6:56 Speaker 01 And it was all rather a relaxed atmosphere, really, considering the circumstances and the gravity of it all. But my mother and father were there, I was there and my sister was there, and we were all in on listening to what he was saying.
7:11 Speaker 00 And right away, David said, he heard Jeremy say something that didn't sit right.
7:17 Speaker 01 And they were saying, you had a loving relationship with your parents. Oh, yes, wonderful relationship. And it wasn't, it was a very frosty one. And, no, it was a difficult relationship. So he was not being truthful to the police.
7:36 Speaker 00 David and Anne didn't like the way Jeremy was talking about his parents and his demeanor in the wake of his family's deaths. It struck them as all wrong.
7:45 Speaker 01 And the body language and the way Jeremy was behaving were very negative vibes. You know, he wasn't crying his eyes out all the time. You know, he wasn't, doesn't seem to show any upset.
7:58 Speaker 00 Anne was particularly sceptical of Jeremy's story. She was an angular, inquisitive woman of 35, who vehemently disliked her flashy, younger cousin. Sitting there in Jeremy's cottage, listening to his statement to police, she found a scrap of paper in her pocket and started taking notes. Anne was a meticulous scribe. She went on to cover scores of note cards with her jottings about the crime. She later turned them over to the police, and I have a copy here. "Notice Jeremy has had good appetite all time," she scribbled. That day in the cottage, the more she listened, the more certain she felt that Jeremy's story was a fabrication.
8:41 Speaker 00 She later wrote, "I became puzzled, more puzzled, then suspicious of Jeremy, and then bloody suspicious of Jeremy." She went on, "I felt on duty, wide awake and trying to catch everything."
8:57 Speaker 00 The Cousins went home that night and sat around the kitchen table, talking about what they'd heard at the cottage. The extended family didn't know much about Sheila's mental illness, but they described her privately as a feather brained girl, who could never have committed this crime. And what were the things that made you think Sheila definitely couldn't have done it?
9:19 Speaker 01 And Sheila was so incapable, and she couldn't possibly have methodically killed her body as she's supposed to have done. And she wasn't of that temperament.
9:27 Speaker 00 There was one thing that stuck in their minds as especially odd. Something about the murder weapon, which was a 22 Anschutz, a hunting rifle owned by Neville Bamber. This was the gun Sheila had been holding when her body was found. At the cottage, they'd heard Jeremy tell police that the night before the killings, he'd taken that rifle and gone out to shoot rabbits with it, and that he'd then left it in the scullery, its magazines still loaded. That really aroused their suspicions. They couldn't believe Neville Bamber would ever have allowed his son to leave a loaded weapon lying around. And even if he had, given that this weapon had been used to murder the entire family,
10:09 Speaker 00 to them, Jeremy didn't seem sorry enough about having been so sloppy.
10:14 Speaker 01 He didn't end up being the repentant son, or he didn't show any emotion.
10:22 Speaker 00 There was something else the family noticed. They knew that Neville usually kept a silencer on his rifle, a hollow metal tube about seven inches long that screwed on to the end. It made the shots quieter when he went out hunting rabbits. David actually had the exact same model of silencer for his gun.
10:40 Speaker 01 It reduces the noise by about... It just goes like that. So it doesn't frighten the rabbit. So the whole idea is that if there's more than one rabbit, you have a second chance of shooting at another one.
10:54 Speaker 00 But when the gun was found by Sheila's body, it had no silencer on it. Where was it? What had happened to it? Had someone unscrewed it after committing the murders and hidden it somewhere to cover their tracks?
11:10 Speaker 00 In the days after the murders, the Cousins kept an eagle eye on Jeremy. They watched his behaviour and analysed his every move. It dawned on them that with his parents, Sheila and the twins all dead, Jeremy had become the sole heir to the entire family fortune. He stood to inherit everything. David told me they became even more alarmed when soon after his family had been killed, Jeremy and a friend started removing valuables from the manor.
11:41 Speaker 01 And they gutted the house and started selling all the jewellery and my aunt's jewellery and they were taking furniture out, taking it up to antique shops in London and flogging it off, ten to the penny.
11:54 Speaker 00 David and Anne and the rest of the family were disgusted. To their minds, none of this was the correct behaviour of a bereaved son. They started thinking about Jeremy's expensive lifestyle. Had he killed his entire family out of greed so that he'd inherit their money and property? It was a compelling theory, but they didn't have much evidence to back it up.
12:21 Speaker 00 Still, they decided to go to the police anyway with their concerns. Two days after the murders, the Cousins went down to the station and demanded to see the chief investigator. But to their dismay, he could not have been less interested. He was convinced that only Sheila could have killed the family. After all, she'd been found inside a locked house, holding the murder weapon. He angrily dismissed the Cousins' alternative theory.
12:48 Speaker 01 Nearly kicked us out three times, three times. He said, "Sorry, show you the door, can't put up with this load of rubbish."
12:54 Speaker 00 When the Cousins kept pressing their case, the chief investigator rose to his feet, banged the table and shouted at them to be quiet. Then, he marched them out of his office. Anne later wrote, in capitals, "He was like a raving Red Bull."
13:12 Speaker 05 At the funeral of Mr and Mrs Bamber, their son Jeremy led the mourners and was weeping openly.
13:17 Speaker 00 The day of the funeral, on August 16th, nine days after the killings, Jeremy was drinking and popping Valium, cracking jokes on the way to the church. But after the service, he came out of the church crying.
13:31 Speaker 05 Afterwards, the Bambas' three coffins were carried out. The Bambas' adopted son Jeremy followed. His deep grief, obvious.
13:39 Speaker 00 Jeremy fell sobbing into his girlfriend's arms in front of a crowd of reporters. But David said that the minute he got into the funeral car...
13:48 Speaker 01 Jeremy turned around and looked at us and gave us a real chesty cat-smile. And the second before he was actually appearing to be in a terrible state. So it was a big act.
14:01 Speaker 00 Anne wrote about this moment in her notes: "Jeremy did a good knees-bend, cry, photo in paper. When the cars got out of the village, he turned and smiled, she jotted. Her husband told her, 'Little bugger, he thinks he's got away with it.'"
14:23 Speaker 00 After the funeral, the cousins looked on in horror as Jeremy let loose. He and his girlfriend Julie Mugford left the reception for a local Caribbean restaurant where they spent the evening drinking champagne and cocktails. Then they headed off on a windsurfing vacation. After that, Jeremy left his cottage in the Essex countryside and decamped to the flat where Sheila had been living in London before her death.
14:50 Speaker 00 He partied at the Notting Hill Carnival and took a boat to Amsterdam to buy marijuana.
14:56 Speaker 00 The cousins were panicking. By now, they'd convinced themselves that Jeremy had murdered his entire family for their money, and yet no one was taking them seriously. Anne wrote: "We all became extremely worried that Jeremy might realise we suspected him and come after us."
15:18 Speaker 00 If the police weren't going to investigate their theory of the crime, the Cousins decided they would do it themselves.
15:28 Speaker 00 One day, shortly after the murders, David's sister Anne got hold of the keys to White House Farm. And right away, she and David went back to the house. She later told police they'd gone back to look for clues.
15:46 Speaker 00 Anne worked through the house methodically.
15:50 Speaker 00 She stood in the kitchen and whispered, "Give us a clue, Uncle Neville."
15:56 Speaker 00 Then she noticed a pair of bloodstained underpants soaking in a bucket. Sheila had been on her period. She took the underpants over to the sink by the window, and that's when she realised, "Hmm, the kitchen window. Maybe Jeremy had found a way to escape through the window and then close it from the outside. Perhaps by banging on the glass to knock the latch into place. That could explain how the house was found apparently locked from within.
16:28 Speaker 00 Anne threw the underwear into the kitchen trash, which her notes suggest she later took home for closer inspection. Meanwhile, David was poking around too. He went upstairs and found no clues. But on the ground floor, he opened a cupboard under the stairs.
16:49 Speaker 01 And that's when I found it, straight away.
16:51 Speaker 00 Straight away?
16:51 Speaker 01 It was in a box, it was in a, just an ordinary, sort of box like that.
16:55 Speaker 00 Like that?
16:56 Speaker 01 In a box like that, and there were some cartridges in there.
17:00 Speaker 00 Inside a box of ammunition, hidden under the stairs, was a hollow metal tube, about seven inches long.
17:09 Speaker 00 David recognised what it was right away. He owned the exact same object himself. A silencer.
17:17 Speaker 01 I picked it up, looked at it and felt it, and I can remember, it probably took probably 10 minutes before I suddenly realised the consequences of what I'd got.
17:26 Speaker 00 David felt certain that this wasn't just any silencer. It was the silencer. The one belonging to the 22 Anshuts that had been used to shoot the family. The one that had been missing from the gun when it was retrieved from Sheila's body.
17:42 Speaker 01 It disappeared.
17:45 Speaker 06 My name's Heidi. I wrote to David a few weeks ago.
17:49 Speaker 00 While I was talking to David, his wife Karen emerged from the house, carrying a load of laundry. Yeah, yeah.
17:55 Speaker 01 Just clearing a few other points. I thought you weren't going to do anything. Well, I'm not doing anything, but I'm just having an informal interview.
18:02 Speaker 06 Oh dear.
18:04 Speaker 06 Hello, David. Hello, George. Because you said last time.
18:08 Speaker 01 No, I'm not doing any, I'm not doing any more than what, you asked a few questions and that will be it.
18:12 Speaker 06 Just, yeah, just a very, very.
18:13 Speaker 01 You just get the atmosphere of the understanding a bit, yeah.
18:17 Speaker 06 I really appreciate your time. Yeah, really, really. I really appreciate that, David. Thank you. But so, so you said the silencer, that's because that's obviously, that was such a crucial piece of.
18:28 Speaker 00 To my relief, David kept talking, and Karen returned reluctantly to hanging out laundry.
18:40 Speaker 00 David said that it was when he looked more closely at the silencer that he realised something sinister. It seemed to be daubed with blood.
18:52 Speaker 00 The Cousins knew this could be a major discovery. If the silencer did have blood on it, that seemed to them like proof it had been on the gun when the murders were committed.
19:05 Speaker 00 And if that was the case, Sheila couldn't have been the murderer. She couldn't very well have hidden the silencer after she'd shot herself in the head.
19:13 Speaker 01 So obviously she didn't kill herself, did she? That was the whole point. That was the point of the silencer. It couldn't be Sheila. It definitely wasn't Sheila.
19:23 Speaker 00 And if Sheila wasn't the killer?
19:26 Speaker 00 There was really only one other possible suspect.
19:30 Speaker 01 And who else would it have been?
19:32 Speaker 00 The person who'd phoned the police in the first place and told them Sheila was threatening the family with a gun.
19:40 Speaker 00 The one they'd suspected all along.
19:45 Speaker 00 Jeremy Bamber.
19:51 Speaker 00 After finding the silencer, David and Anne called the cops, and an officer came over to collect it. Meanwhile, the Cousins kept up their own detective work. They discussed everything they'd found with their father, Robert Bowflower, an imposing man with a helmet of white hair and beetle-black brows, who was married to June's sister. Robert Bowflower considered his nephew a scoundrel, with a "constant craving for money", and he too was becoming suspicious of Jeremy. He'd been there when the Cousins overheard Jeremy's statement to police, and when David found the silencer. And as he mulled over the evidence, he became convinced that Jeremy had murdered his parents for their fortune.
20:35 Speaker 00 He came up with an elaborate theory of the crime, which he later wrote down in his diary. This diary entry is three pages of dense, small text. I have a copy here. The theory it lays out is surprisingly complex and vivid. It includes a lot of dialogue, of scenes that Robert certainly was not present for. It almost reads like a kind of fanfiction of the crime.
21:06 Speaker 00 Robert figured Jeremy must have bicycled to the farm that night by moonlight, broken into the house, and worn gloves, and a wet suit, while he committed the crime. That explained why Jeremy had no sign of blood or any injuries on him, nothing on his clothing or anything like that.
21:28 Speaker 00 Imagining Jeremy slaughtering his father, Robert wrote: "Neville dies after a struggle whilst the gun gets pushed out of the way. A few random shots have to be made to make it look like the work of a maniac. The magazine is emptied."
21:45 Speaker 00 He keeps going, describing June as "awake and more difficult to kill cleanly", and the twins each shot dead.
21:57 Speaker 00 Then he gets to Sheila. He writes, "Back upstairs to Sheila's room. She is in a deep sleep occasioned by the sleeping draught prescribed by her doctor."
22:10 Speaker 00 And here, Robert relates the words that he imagined Jeremy must have spoken. "Wake up Sheila, mommy wants you to say prayers with her. Lie down here darling, put the bible on your chest," he supposedly said, before shooting Sheila and laying the rifle in her hands.
22:31 Speaker 00 Robert theorized that Jeremy stole through the house in his socks to keep any footprints off the floor. After the murders were done, he figured Jeremy must have snuck out through the kitchen window, managing to close and latch it from the outside, as Anne had guessed, before climbing on his mother's bicycle, pedaling home and calling the police.
22:56 Speaker 00 Robert wrote, "I am convinced that Jeremy has sold his soul to the devil."
23:12 Speaker 00 Robert went down to the police station and pleaded with the police to take his theory seriously. But still, the police totally stonewalled him. One officer noted that he had "gone over the top" and seemed to be trying to find evidence that wasn't there. Robert was furious. He wrote, "It was clear to us the investigation was stagnant and going nowhere." But then, just when the relatives had all but given up, something happened that finally got the police's attention.
23:48 Speaker 01 Julie. Julie coming forward.
23:52 Speaker 00 Julie was Jeremy's ex-girlfriend, Julie Mugford.
23:57 Speaker 01 And blew the whistle on Jeremy. Then all of a sudden hell let loose.
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24:45 Speaker 04 Great storytelling with a twist from a true crime original.
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26:31 Speaker 00 Part Two: The Perfect Murder.
26:36 Speaker 00 Julie Mugford was a 21-year-old student teacher with a round face and a halo of dark curls. Julie and Jeremy had met at a local pizza parlor, Sloppy Joe's, and struck up a romance. By all accounts, Julie was besotted with Jeremy. But the relationship was tempestuous, and a month after the shooting, he ended it for good. That was when Julie Mugford walked into the police station and told officers something explosive. She said Jeremy Bamber had been plotting for more than a year to kill his family. She told the cops, he said he would like to commit the perfect murder,
27:21 Speaker 00 and all Jeremy wanted was money. This is Julie giving an interview the following year. I remember one occasion in particular, when he said to me with quite a lot of vehemence that he'd get rid of all of the family, including Sheila and the boys, and he would do so by shooting them.
27:50 Speaker 00 Julie told the police a strange and winding tale. She said Jeremy had told her that after he shot the family, he would arrange the crime scene to frame his sister. She told police that Jeremy had tried to toughen himself up for the killings by strangling rats, but had eventually realised that he didn't have the stomach for it. So instead, he'd hired a hitman. The assassin was apparently a local plumber, someone they both knew. Jeremy had paid him £2,000 for the murders and told him to call from the White House when everyone was dead. On the night of the murders, Julie said Jeremy had called from his cottage and told her,
28:33 Speaker 00 "The crime will have to be tonight or never." But she'd been smoking weed and had simply told him not to be so stupid. Then he called again after 3am and told her something was wrong at the farm. But she said she was feeling, quote, "dozy", and had only appreciated the significance of his words after returning to bed. Then, she told police, "I knew that Gerry had murdered his family."
29:02 Speaker 00 Some people pointed out that it was a bit odd how long it had taken Julie to come forward after the murders. A full month of sitting on the information, not to mention the year preceding the crime in which she'd known her boyfriend was plotting a mass murder and said nothing. David told me it puzzled him.
29:20 Speaker 01 That next day after the murder, I was in the house and we walked across to the pub to get some sandwiches. And she could have told me. She could have said, you know, Jeremy did it. But she didn't. She didn't say a thing, not a thing. It wasn't until several weeks later that she came forward and spilt the beans.
29:41 Speaker 00 And what do you make of that, that she kept it to herself for so long?
29:44 Speaker 01 I think she loved him. She loved him. But unfortunately, he didn't love her. And all of a sudden, she became a woman spurned.
29:54 Speaker 00 A woman spurned. It was certainly true that Julie was angry at Jeremy. She'd been so livid when he broke up with her that by her own admission, she'd actually tried to suffocate him with a pillow. "If you were dead, you would always be with me," she admitted, saying. Julie didn't respond to my many phone calls and emails, but in the past, she's denied that the breakup had anything to do with her decision to go to the cops. She said in the weeks after the murders, she was simply scared to come forward. Here she is again in that same interview.
30:29 Speaker 06 I didn't think that at that stage, anyone would believe me because it was obvious I was terribly shaken up about the whole affair. And Jeremy was also so terribly confident that nobody could do anything about it, that he said, "There was nothing I could do anyway. There was nothing I could have done to have stopped it, and there was nothing I could do now."
30:54 Speaker 00 Faced with Julie's shocking claims, the police could no longer dismiss the cousin's theory that Jeremy should be the prime suspect. They arrested him on suspicion of murder and took him to the police station, where he was interrogated over four days.
31:13 Speaker 00 Jeremy denied any involvement in the family's murders. He insisted that Julie had invented the whole story. He said, "If she could put me behind bars, then nobody else could have me." But over the course of his interrogation, he did make an important admission. He confessed to another crime. One that his relatives had always suspected him of. The burglary at the family's vacation resort. He was the one who'd stolen almost a thousand pounds from their safe. That certainly didn't look good. But meanwhile, the cops had been checking out Julie's story. And it was not holding water.
31:56 Speaker 00 Police had arrested the plumber who Jeremy had supposedly hired as an assassin. But he turned out to have a solid alibi. Under questioning, the plumber grudgingly admitted that he'd been cheating on his wife. With not one, but two women. One of whom confirmed that he'd been in her bed on the night of the murders. After validating his story, an officer reported that the plumber had been "totally exonerated." "He does not know one end of a firearm from the other," the officer wrote. "His sole claim to fame is an insatiable sexual appetite."
32:37 Speaker 00 With the hitman's story having collapsed, and no hard evidence against Jeremy, the cops had to let him go. He was picked up from the station in a friend's white Jaguar, and he soon set sail for a vacation in Saint-Tropez. Yet Julie's intervention had irreversibly changed the case. Because in the first hours after she came forward, the original detective in charge, the one who'd thrown the cousins out of his office, had been removed from the investigation. Julie's claims seemed to blow apart the murder-suicide theory that he'd cleaved to so closely. And so he'd been replaced by a new chief investigator. Detective Superintendent Mike Ainsley.
33:23 Speaker 00 Ainsley is now dead, but his notes on the case indicate that he took a dislike to Jeremy. He'd gleaned from Julie and the relatives that Jeremy liked to keep "criminal and homosexual company" and "he is considered by some who know him to be bisexual."
33:43 Speaker 00 Homophobia was rife in Britain in the 80s, and it appears that to Ainsley's mind, all this made Jeremy a likely villain.
33:52 Speaker 00 Sheila, on the other hand, seemed to have made a more favourable impression. He noted that she was "a very beautiful person, slim build, petite, very feminine, with well-manicured hands, well-applied makeup, and well-groomed hair." Even after Julie's hitman story fell apart, Ainsley never returned to the murder-suicide theory. He remained laser-focused on proving Jeremy's guilt. Ainsley called in the cops, who'd been the first on the scene at the manor on the night of the crime, to give fresh statements about anything suspicious they'd noticed in Jeremy's demeanour, and several of them said that his behaviour had struck them as strange.
34:36 Speaker 00 For a start, there was Jeremy's call to the police, reporting that his father had just phoned him to say Sheila had gone berserk with a gun.
34:44 Speaker 03 I had a problem with the phone call and the way he described it.
34:48 Speaker 00 Sergeant Chris Bues was the one who responded to Jeremy's call to the police. He's the officer who told me about arriving at the manor in the middle of the night and talking to Jeremy in the darkness outside. He told me he thought it was odd that Jeremy had called through to the local station, rather than dialing the UK's emergency number, 999.
35:09 Speaker 03 Kids are brought up with the number 999 drilled into their heads. If something's wrong, call 999. You don't look up the local police station's number at 2 o'clock in the morning or whenever it is.
35:25 Speaker 00 Back then, no digital records existed that could confirm whether Jeremy had really got a call from Neville that night, as he'd claimed. But now that police were seriously considering the idea that Sheila had been murdered, Jeremy's story about that phone call took on a new significance.
35:42 Speaker 03 Jeremy's story about his father phoning up, saying, "Your sister has gone mad with a gun", seals it. If that can be proved not to be true, then he's obviously lying. Why is he lying? Because he's done it himself.
36:02 Speaker 00 Sergeant Bews thought about how Jeremy had been so eager for him and his colleagues to go into the house as soon as they arrived. Now it seemed as if Jeremy just couldn't wait for them to find the family dead.
36:15 Speaker 03 He wanted us to see as soon as possible that the house was sort of dead people, so we could play out a scene with dead bodies and him reacting to it.
36:26 Speaker 00 Even things that had looked at first like signs that Sheila was the shooter, seemed to wither away to nothing. Like the movement Sergeant Bews had seen in the master bedroom window, that had sent him sprinting back to the patrol car, calling for backup.
36:40 Speaker 03 I don't know if some fault in the glass, or just the angle, the reflection of the moon changed slightly, and that gave the impression of movement.
36:52 Speaker 00 And that moment, when he'd broken the news to Jeremy that Sheila had killed his whole family.
36:58 Speaker 03 He looked at me and he started to cry.
37:03 Speaker 00 Bews said that even at the time, that reaction looked like crocodile tears.
37:08 Speaker 03 You're forcing that because you think I'm expecting you to cry.
37:13 Speaker 00 Other officers thought Jeremy seemed oddly devoid of emotion. In the hours after learning of his family's fate, he'd made strange comments, talking about getting the harvest in and about buying a sports car. Some officers said they'd suspected him right away, others only in hindsight. Either way, they all came to the same conclusion in the end.
37:38 Speaker 03 He's lying.
37:41 Speaker 03 I mean, it's a classic detective novel thing, Agatha Christie or whatever. "I'm gonna kill my family, so I inherit all the money."
37:54 Speaker 00 As the investigation gathered pace, the theories laid out by the relatives that had once seemed so far-fetched now seemed strikingly prescient.
38:05 Speaker 00 The day he took over the inquiry, Superintendent Ainsley visited Robert Bowflower and asked for a copy of the diary in which he'd outlined the way he imagined Jeremy carrying out the murders. Ainsley dispatched investigators to chase down many of Robert's theories. And suddenly, this speculative document became a blueprint for the police case.
38:30 Speaker 00 The house locked from the inside? Well, that was a classic ploy, plucked straight from the pages of any number of whodunnits. Jeremy must have escaped through the kitchen window, as Robert and Anne theorized, somehow deftly fastened it from the outside and made a way on his mother's bicycle. The Bible, found next to Sheila's body? An open to that passage from Psalms about blood guiltiness? What if it had been placed there, just as Robert had imagined, to make it appear that she'd killed herself in a religious frenzy? A scene carefully arranged, but not quite carefully enough.
39:15 Speaker 00 Photos showed the Bible propped at an awkward angle against Sheila's upper arm, in a place where it wouldn't have fallen naturally if she'd shot herself. A clue, perhaps, that revealed Jeremy Bamber's master plan.
39:38 Speaker 00 The pieces seemed to be falling into place. But still, it was all circumstantial, less evidence than conjecture. And then, finally, came the single biggest breakthrough in the case. The forensic tests came back on that silencer, the one David Bowflower had found stashed under the stairs at the manor. The silencer was daubed with drops of human blood, blood that investigators said matched Sheila's.
40:13 Speaker 00 The results seemed to confirm everything the family had suspected from the very beginning.
40:20 Speaker 00 If the silencer had been on the gun when Sheila was shot, and had then been removed and hidden under the stairs, that was proof that she couldn't have killed herself. She had been murdered.
40:34 Speaker 00 Nearly two months after the shootings, Jeremy Bamber was arrested again. This time, he was charged with murder.
40:42 Speaker 02 Jeremy Bamber was brought to the court from the cells at Chelmsford Police Station, where he's been questioned since his arrest.
40:50 Speaker 00 At trial the following year, prosecutors said the finding of Sheila's blood in the silencer proved beyond doubt that Jeremy was a quote "skilled, cold, calculating killer". He had murdered his sister and then staged the scene to frame her, almost exactly as Robert Bowflower had speculated in his diary.
41:15 Speaker 02 All he had to do was shoot all of them and then convince police his sister had gone berserk with the gun.
41:21 Speaker 00 The crime had been motivated by greed. That was evident from how quickly Jeremy had begun selling his parents' possessions.
41:29 Speaker 02 She said that Jeremy Bamber was searching around the house for money left by Mr. Bamber.
41:36 Speaker 00 His weeks of drinking and partying and vacationing since the killings proved that he had no remorse.
41:42 Speaker 02 Jeremy Bamber joined them for a meal that night. She said he seems cheerful. He talked about buying a new car, a Porsche or a Ferrari.
41:50 Speaker 00 Julie Mugford trembled and sobbed as she spent five hours in the witness box. Even though her hitman story had been disproven, she was still a star witness, describing how Jeremy had told her for months before the crime that he longed to see his family dead.
42:06 Speaker 02 Miss Mugford said that Jeremy deeply resented the way his parents controlled his life.
42:11 Speaker 00 During deliberations, the jury sent a note to the judge, asking for a point of clarification. Could the blood in the silencer have come from anyone other than Sheila? The judge told them no, that it quote "did not match anyone else".
42:31 Speaker 00 The jury returned their verdict 21 minutes later. Guilty.
42:38 Speaker 07 Justice Drake told him, "Your conduct was evil almost beyond belief." The judge said, "I find it difficult to foresee whether it will ever be safe to release someone who has killed five members of his family, shooting two small boys asleep in their beds."
43:07 Speaker 00 Outside the court, Robert Bowflower gave a triumphant speech. He described Sheila as a "fun-loving girl" and thanked the police for their painstaking and diligent work on the case.
43:20 Speaker 00 For decades, until his death in 2010, he would refer to his nephew only by his prisoner number, L12373. "We cried with absolute relief," Anne wrote after the conviction. To mark the occasion, senior officers threw a luncheon for the family at police headquarters.
43:47 Speaker 00 And from then on, whenever this story was told and retold in books and documentaries and then fictional crime dramas, the relatives would be depicted as heroes. So, you don't think Sheila did this? No, I don't. Brave and perspicacious. So Jeremy's lying? And there's only one reason why he'd lie about that, isn't there? Who saw what the police failed to see. It's the silencer for the anxious, and there's something red on it. And took justice into their own hands.
44:52 Speaker 07 Comprehensive.
44:52 Speaker 02 Witty.
44:53 Speaker 07 Speculative.
44:54 Speaker 02 Critical.
44:54 Speaker 07 Insightful.
44:55 Speaker 02 Profound.
44:56 Speaker 07 Wide-ranging.
44:57 Speaker 02 Hopefully, it doesn't take itself too, too seriously.
45:00 Speaker 07 I'm David Remnick, and each week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, my colleagues and I try to make sense of what's happening in this chaotic world. I hope you'll join us for The New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you listen to podcasts.
45:13 Speaker 02 The thoughtful.
45:14 Speaker 07 Exquisite.
45:15 Speaker 02 Just, you know, real.
45:24 Speaker 02 I'm Vincent Cunningham.
45:25 Speaker 06 I'm Nomi Frye.
45:26 Speaker 02 I'm Alex Schwartz, and we host Critics at Large from The New Yorker. Each week, we pick a starting point. The new novel you can't stop thinking about, the movie everybody's seeing this weekend, and we kind of go galaxy brain with it. Right. We take the ideas at the center of these things and trace them across history, across mediums, all to get to the bottom of why this particular text is important right now, in politics and culture, and also in your everyday life.
45:52 Speaker 06 We go highbrow, we go lowbrow, we go everything in between.
45:56 Speaker 02 Food culture to meme culture, Charlie XCX to Toni Morrison.
46:00 Speaker 06 K-pop to the Kennedys.
46:02 Speaker 02 From horror movies to heated rivalry.
46:04 Speaker 06 From the Oscars to the Met Gala.
46:06 Speaker 02 The Golden Bachelor to Wuthering Heights, great expectations to Desperate Housewives. That's what we're talking about over here. We're having fun.
46:13 Speaker 06 It's Critics at Large from The New Yorker, every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.
46:22 Speaker 04 From Vanity Fair, I'm Mark Aducci, and I want to tell you about our new show, Fair Game. On every episode of Fair Game, I'll sit down with a leading character in our culture, from the worlds of Hollywood, politics, style, Silicon Valley, and beyond. Fair Game is a deep dive into some of the personalities that shape our world and the stories that you need to hear. Think everyone and everything that you'd read about in the pages of Vanity Fair. So join me, Mark Aducci, on YouTube, VanityFair.com, and wherever you listen to podcasts. It's all Fair Game.
46:57 Speaker 00 Part three. The spoils.
47:03 Speaker 00 As I sat with Jeremy's cousin, David, admiring the view in his pretty garden, there was one thing he said that struck an odd note.
47:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, you've got a lovely place. I'm surviving. I have a small income from the farm here. I'm down to my last four Range Rovers. No, never mind about that. But my sister has taken full advantage of her situation. Pretty like that.
47:26 Speaker 00 "My sister has taken full advantage of her situation," he said. He was talking about Anne, the note taker, who'd worked tirelessly alongside David and their father to send Jeremy down.
47:42 Speaker 00 David told me that back then, he and Anne used to be close, but not anymore.
47:47 Speaker 01 I have no love for my sister at all. She actually, ever since, has sort of, um, rather taken over the reins. She's taken most of the family money and everything else that came with it, yeah. Oh, really? Oh, she's done, she's done very nicely for herself. My sister's done very, very financially, very well out of it all, yeah. She's, um, she's catching all the balls and I'm not, and I'm not catching them, but never mind.
48:14 Speaker 00 The family money he was referring to turned out to be the Bamba family fortune.
48:22 Speaker 00 There's a law in the UK that bars murderers from inheriting money from their victims. So after Jeremy was convicted, the family estate had passed into the hands of the very people who'd done everything in their power to put him behind bars: his cousins.
48:39 Speaker 00 David said that what had torn him and his sister apart were disputes over how to divide up all that money and property.
48:47 Speaker 01 It's all very, it's very sour grapes, very, very sour grapes. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that, gosh. I think she's a very ambitious lady.
49:02 Speaker 00 I'd already written Anne a letter with detailed questions about her part in the case, but I'd never heard back. So now I decided to just show up. Just driving up the gravel track here. At White House Farm, the house where the murders happened. Because the Bamber family manor is where Anne Eaton now lives.
49:31 Speaker 00 At the time of the shootings, Anne and her husband had been in a precarious financial position. They were heavily in debt and farming land that was owned by Neville Bamber.
49:43 Speaker 00 But a few weeks before the killings, Jeremy had told Anne something that alarmed her: that he and his father intended to sell that land and use the proceeds to buy the mansion where his grandmother lived down the road, a beautiful white-fronted property called Vaultie Manor. Anne had always dreamed of living at Vaultie, and she was so enraged by what Jeremy had said that she went home and tore down all the wallpaper in her bathroom. She later told police, "I felt that what Jeremy had told me was a threat."
50:18 Speaker 00 When the murders happened, Neville and June's sudden death only heightened Anne's financial precarity, because it meant that Jeremy Bamber was set to inherit all the Bamber properties, including the land that Anne was farming. But after Jeremy Bamber was convicted, all those troubles went away. The inheritance passed to his relatives, and soon after, Anne and her family moved into the manor at White House Farm.
50:49 Speaker 00 Now, as I pulled into the driveway at White House Farm, a stooped figure approached.
50:58 Speaker 00 It was Anne's husband, Peter.
51:01 Speaker 06 Is it Peter?
51:02 Speaker 01 Yes.
51:02 Speaker 06 Oh, Peter, hello. My name's Heidi and I sent you a letter, you and Anne.
51:08 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
51:08 Speaker 06 A few weeks ago, just to say, I don't know if you received it.
51:11 Speaker 01 Thank you very much for calling, but Anne, I mean, that's thirty odd years ago now, isn't it?
51:16 Speaker 06 I know, I mean, it's an awfully long time and I'm really sorry to be bothering you with it.
51:19 Speaker 01 No, no, you didn't have to.
51:20 Speaker 06 I always feel awkward knocking on people's doors, but I'm sort of obligated to try and talk to everybody who was involved and...
51:25 Speaker 01 It's private, it's our family.
51:28 Speaker 00 Peter was standing off at a distance, eyeing me suspiciously. Then he leaned in closer for a moment, as though to tell me something secret.
51:37 Speaker 01 Do not be fooled by Jeremy Palmer, who's got away with so much by talking to pretty girls like yourself. You, take it in. I never had that charm.
51:52 Speaker 06 I wouldn't say that.
51:55 Speaker 00 We stood on the gravel driveway chatting for a few minutes as farm trucks and sprayers trundled in the fields behind the cow shed. By now, the sun had pierced the grey clouds, lighting up the yard and the manor, so that the scene looked uncannily cheerful. When Anne and Peter moved in here, a lot of people in the community were taken aback. And when police officers called by the property during a review of the case, six years after the murders, they noticed that the house appeared largely unchanged from the crime scene photographs. Inside, it was almost as if the place was frozen in time. A museum to the awful events of August 7th, 1985.
52:38 Speaker 00 Anne told them that she'd even kept the trash bag that she'd taken from the kitchen at the manor the morning after the crime, the one into which, her notes suggest, she'd thrown Sheila's bloody underpants. And she also appeared to have kept the nightdress Sheila was wearing when her body was found. She told police that Sheila's dress was in a laundry basket in her bedroom, still unwashed. Upstairs, the officers found carpet padding still soaked with blood.
53:11 Speaker 00 But Anne told the police she was content living there. "I feel Auntie June and Uncle Neville are here as well and are happy that we are here," she told them.
53:22 Speaker 00 Peter told me Anne was out, but that she wouldn't want to talk to me anyway. "It was her auntie that was murdered here, wasn't it?" he told me, gesturing back at the house.
53:33 Speaker 06 "I just really wanna make sure this is balanced."
53:35 Speaker 00 "Blowed it our life. It's never been the same since."
53:39 Speaker 06 "Really?"
53:40 Speaker 00 "Yeah, it really has. Horrible."
53:42 Speaker 06 "Well, I just..."
53:43 Speaker 00 "Don't upset Anne, really."
53:44 Speaker 06 "I don't wanna upset Anne. I really don't. You know, I really, I wanna kinda give you a proper hearing."
53:49 Speaker 00 "You're a bright girl, you know what went wrong. You can't make any more of a story than that bastard that killed those poor children just for money." "Gosh, awful."
54:02 Speaker 06 "It's the most appalling crime. It's the most horrific crime, absolutely."
54:06 Speaker 00 Just then, a Land Rover crunched to a halt. The door opened and out wafted a cloud of floral perfume, followed by a petite woman with green eyes and chestnut-tinted hair. It was Anne. She hurried inside with Peter.
54:23 Speaker 06 "Anne has just got back, and Peter is talking to her about whether she'd be willing to talk to me."
54:29 Speaker 00 She reemerged moments later, holding a piece of paper.
54:33 Speaker 06 "Hello, Anne." "I did receive your letter. I'm not going to speak to you, I'm just going to give you this." "Okay." "Because journalists are not supposed to come round here."
54:41 Speaker 00 She pressed the paper into my hands.
54:43 Speaker 06 "Is that right? I didn't, I didn't know that. I didn't know, I'm sorry, I didn't know that that was the case." "But I just, having been talking a bit to just Peter, I guess what I was just saying to him was, "You know, I'm doing this review of the case and..." "I don't want to speak about it. I'm going to unpack my bags now and I might go for a swim this afternoon." "Oh, that sounds lovely. How wonderful. In the river? Oh glorious." "Just look at all my statements and, and that is a pretty true record." "Your statements. But Anne, just before you go, can I just..." "I'm sorry, I don't, because if I do, another one comes, another one comes. If I don't, then I don't."
55:22 Speaker 00 Anne was heading back towards the house now. The chance of talking to her was slipping away.
55:29 Speaker 06 "I don't think it's happened to you, please." "It must have been awful. No, I can't..."
55:34 Speaker 00 I can't imagine.
55:37 Speaker 00 Do something good in the world, Peter shouted. Then Peter and Anne disappeared inside the manor.
55:47 Speaker 00 Standing there, in the shadow of White House Farm, I looked down at a piece of paper she'd given me. It was a typed statement that said, Jeremy Bamber has caused so much grief and pain to this family that we find it almost impossible to deal with and rarely speak about it. He continues to try and cause pain to the family from the safety of his cell.
56:15 Speaker 00 Next time on Blood Relatives.
56:18 Speaker 06 This call is from a person currently in a prison in England. All calls are logged and recorded and may be listened to by a member of prison staff. If you do not wish to accept this call, please hang up now. Morning, Heidi. Hi, Jeremy. How are you?
56:48 Speaker 04 If you ever needed to be persuaded that bad things can happen anywhere, then take a journey with us. From compelling mysteries to in-depth investigations, our Dateline episodes are available as podcasts. You can hear the latest stories every Tuesday. Just search Dateline NBC on Amazon Music. Great storytelling with a twist from the True Crime original.
57:20 Speaker 04 From Vanity Fair, I'm Mark Aducci, and I want to tell you about our new show, Fair Game. On every episode of Fair Game, I'll sit down with a leading character in our culture, from the worlds of Hollywood, politics, style, Silicon Valley, and beyond. Fair Game is a deep dive into some of the personalities that shape our world and the stories that you need to hear. Think everyone and everything that you'd read about in the pages of Vanity Fair. So join me, Mark Aducci, on YouTube, VanityFair.com, and wherever you listen to podcasts. It's all Fair Game.
57:55 Speaker 04 Hi, I'm Nicole Phelps, Global Fashion News and Features Director at Vogue and co-host of the Run Through Podcast. Each week on the show, our listeners get an all-access pass into the world of Vogue. On Tuesdays, join me as I interview influential designers like Calvin Klein, Rachel Scott, and Simone Bajat. On Thursdays, join Chloé Maou, Head of Editorial Content at Vogue US, and Choma Nadi, British Vogue's Head of Editorial Content, as they explore fashion through the lens of culture with guests like Doja Cat and Margot Robbie. Listen and watch the Run Through with Vogue wherever you get your podcasts and Vogue's YouTube channel.
58:50 Speaker 00 Blood Relatives is written and produced by me, Heidi Blake, and lead producer Natalie Jablonsky. It's edited by Alison McAdam. Samara Fremark is the managing producer for the series. Additional editing by Madeline Barrett, Willing Davidson, and Julia Rothschild. Additional production by Raymond Tungakar. Theme and original music by Alex Weston. Additional music by Chris Julian and Alison Leighton-Brown. This episode was mixed by Corey Shreppel. Our art is by Owen Gent. Art direction by Nicholas Conrad and Aviva Michaelov. Fact-checking by Naomi Sharp. Legal review by Fabio Betoni and Ben Murray.
59:35 Speaker 00 Our managing editor is Julia Rothschild. The head of global audio for Conde Nast is Chris Bannon. The editor of The New Yorker is David Remnick. If you have comments or story tips, please send them to the team at [email protected] . And make sure to follow In the Dark wherever you get your podcasts.
1:00:24 Speaker 02 Comprehensive. Witty. Speculative. Critical. Insightful. Profound. Wide-ranging. Hopefully doesn't take itself too, too seriously.
1:00:32 Speaker 05 I'm David Remnick, and each week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, my colleagues and I try to make sense of what's happening in this chaotic world. I hope you'll join us for The New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you listen to podcasts.
1:00:45 Speaker 02 The thoughtful.
1:00:46 Speaker 05 Exquisite.
1:00:47 Speaker 02 Just, you know, real.
1:00:55 Speaker 05 From Vanity Fair, I'm Mark Aducci, and I want to tell you about our new show, Fair Game. On every episode of Fair Game, I'll sit down with a leading character in our culture, from the worlds of Hollywood, politics, style, Silicon Valley, and beyond. Fair Game is a deep dive into some of the personalities that shape our world and the stories that you need to hear. Think everyone and everything that you'd read about in the pages of Vanity Fair. So join me, Mark Aducci, on YouTube, VanityFair.com, and wherever you listen to podcasts. It's all fair game.
1:01:30 Speaker 04 Hi, I'm Nicole Phelps, Global Fashion News and Features Director at Vogue and co-host of the Run Through podcast. Each week on the show, our listeners get an all-access pass into the world of Vogue. On Tuesdays, join me as I interview influential designers like Calvin Klein, Rachel Scott, and Simone Biles. On Thursdays, join Chloé Maou, Head of Editorial Content at Vogue US, and Chou Manati, British Vogue's Head of Editorial Content, as they explore fashion through the lens of culture with guests like Doja Cat and Margot Robbie. Listen and watch The Run Through with Vogue wherever you get your podcasts and Vogue's YouTube channel.
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