Blood Relatives, Episode 1

On August 7, 1985, five family members were shot dead in their English country manor, Whitehouse Farm. It looked like an open-and-shut case. But the New Yorker staff writer Heidi Blake finds that almost nothing about this story is as it seems. New Yorker subscribers get full, ad-free access to “Blood Relatives” and every season of In the Dark. In Apple Podcasts, tap the link at the top of the feed to subscribe or link an existing subscription. Or visit newyorker.com/dark to subscribe and listen in the New Yorker app. In the Dark has merch! Buy specially designed hats, T-shirts, and totes for yourself or a loved one at store.newyorker.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:04Speaker 00

  The shoreline in this part of England is marshy and riddled with inlets and creeks. It's a pretty desolate place. This is the coast of Essex, just north-east of London, but an entirely different landscape. The tides seep in and out with eerie drama flooding the mudflats. On some mornings, mist rushes up suddenly over the marshes and forms a briny fog. I'm kind of driving in under smouldering grey cloud and just this expanse of bleak salt marshes of the Blackwater Estuary.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  And it feels so isolated. Heading inland from the Blackwater Estuary, away from the fog and the sea, I turned onto a rough dirt track with tall hedges on one side and open green fields on the other. I wound around the lane, turned down a gravel drive, and there it was. Yeah, here's the farmhouse. Big sign saying trespassers will be prosecuted. I had arrived at Whitehouse Farm, a place so infamous in Britain that I later learned reporters are specifically banned from visiting it.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  Despite its notoriety, it's a beautiful place. An elegant Georgian manor standing in open fields with a columned portico and commanding views over the salt marshes.

• 1:40Speaker 00

  And it's here that our story begins.

• 1:54Speaker 00

  The story I want to tell you is about a family whose lives once seemed nearly perfect. It centres around two siblings, a sister and brother, both blessed with charm and beauty, who grew up surrounded by the trappings of privilege in this gracious country manor.

• 2:16Speaker 00

  They appeared to have all the advantages in the world. Wealth, glamour, status. But in this family, things were not always as they seemed. By the end of the story, one of the siblings would end up dead, the other in prison for murder. And the tragedy that would tear this family apart would become one of Britain's most infamous crimes.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  One of the most notorious and shocking crimes in living memory.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  Up to that time, I'd never seen anything as horrific as that.

• 2:56Speaker 00

  It would become a story so often told and retold that it passed into public folklore.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  We have a scene of a crime which has been very cunningly arranged.

• 3:06Speaker 04

  It was one of the most sensational murder cases of the decade.

• 3:11Speaker 00

  The kind of thing that didn't need to be questioned because it seemed like there was nothing more to know.

• 3:17Speaker 03

  I felt that I was in the presence of evil.

• 3:20Speaker 05

  But obviously, we feel very sad about it all, knowing somebody that well and knowing that they're capable of committing this sort of act.

• 3:45Speaker 00

  From In the Dark and The New Yorker, I'm Heidi Blake, and this is Blood Relatives.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  Part one, the family.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  In 1951, a young couple moved into the manor at Whitehouse Farm. They were newly married and hoping to start a family.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  Their names were Neville and June Bamba. Neville and June's marriage united two distinguished lineages. Neville came from an illustrious family. One ancestor's portrait hung in the Tate Gallery in London. Another had apparently fought beside Richard the Lionheart and had even, according to family legend, killed a lion in Palestine. June's family were a sort of local dynasty. They'd been in this part of Essex for generations and they'd amassed an enviable fortune. A portfolio of country properties, farms, manor houses, even a lucrative vacation resort on the River Blackwater.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  Together, June and Neville became pillars of the rural community, like local gentry.

• 5:31Speaker 06

  They were like the squires of the village, really. They were quite important to us all and they helped us out a lot, the villages in general.

• 5:42Speaker 00

  Barbara Wilson lived for years in the village of Tolshunt Darcy, about a mile from Whitehouse Farm.

• 5:49Speaker 06

  They were two or three levels above us, us menials, you know. And everybody looked up to them, really.

• 5:58Speaker 00

  Neville Bamba was tall and dashing, a former RAF fighter pilot. He managed the family's sprawling farming business and served as a local magistrate. Everyone I spoke to told me that Neville was scrupulously kind and fair in all his dealings. June Bamber was less gregarious to Neville, a bit more enigmatic.

• 6:18Speaker 06

  Mrs. Bamber, she used to come to most of the functions in the village, like teas and things like that, and she helped in the church a lot. And I found that she was very quiet, but very pleasant. She always had a smiley face, and her eyes used to smile as well, so you knew it was genuine, really.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  For a long time, Barbara Wilson saw the Bambas the way everyone in the village did. Kind, in a patrician way, but remote and untouchable. But one day, she had a chance encounter that would offer her an inside seat, right at the heart of the Bambas' family home.

• 6:59Speaker 06

  I was coming back from taking my daughter to primary school, and Mr. Bamber came along and stopped his van and said, "Barbara, would you be kind enough to give me a hand with some office work?" And I said, "Yes, sure." And that's how it started.

• 7:17Speaker 00

  Neville asked Barbara to come to work for him several days a week, managing his farm accounts in his study at the family manor. The office was a jumble of old papers and golf clubs and back issues of Farmers Weekly, but the rest of the house was neat and cosy. It was a real working farmhouse, where the agar stove was always burning, surrounded by gardens that blossomed with budleia and honeysuckle.

• 7:42Speaker 06

  It was nice to go in the summertime, because June always seemed to be happy and smiling, and Mr. Bamber would always be jolly. He'd come in from the farm, and he'd make some sort of joke or something, so it was a happy sort of atmosphere then.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  But Barbara came to learn that life was not as simple as she'd imagined for the Bambas.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  Despite their serene exterior, June and Neville had long been plagued by a private sorrow. They couldn't have a baby. June in particular was haunted by this. After years of trying, the thing she wanted most in the world remained out of reach. So one day, the couple turned to the Church of England. They told officials at the church's children's society that they wanted to adopt a child. And a few months later, in 1957, the church presented them with a baby. A girl with a pale face and wisps of dark hair. And then after a few more years, another baby. This time, a boy.

• 8:54Speaker 00

  The children were named Sheila and Jeremy.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  At first, the siblings seemed to grow up in perfect harmony, running around the farm with the family's yellow Labrador, Jasper.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  There's a photograph of the two kids, sitting on the lawn in front of the manor. Jeremy in a knitted jumper with Czech trousers, Sheila in a pleated skirt with a page boy haircut. Jasper sitting between them, almost as if guarding them.

• 9:28Speaker 00

  It seemed from the outside like the family was finally complete.

• 9:35Speaker 06

  They wanted to give the impression, I think, that everything's fine, but underneath, you know, there's turmoil.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  Privately, June had never recovered from her grief at being unable to conceive her own biological child. She struggled to accept Sheila in particular as her own daughter, and often treated her coldly, rarely hugging her or kissing her.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  June became severely depressed, and she started disappearing for long stretches of time. Barbara Wilson remembered the moment when she first learned what was going on.

• 10:14Speaker 06

  Mr. Bamber had a word with me and said that she had to go away. And then we set up the money to send to pay for her keep. That was basically, you know, that she wasn't very well. And we've put her somewhere where, hopefully, she'll be looked after and get better. I assume that, you know, they do whatever they do.

• 10:43Speaker 06

  Use electric shock and things like that, don't they?

• 10:46Speaker 00

  June had been committed to a psychiatric hospital, and she did undergo multiple courses of electroshock therapy there. But it didn't seem to help. She kept being sent back again and again. In the end, she was diagnosed not only with depression, but also with psychosis and paranoia.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  As her mental health kept deteriorating, June became more and more fixated on religious ideals. She'd always been involved in the church, but now she was obsessed with notions of good and evil, holy and unholy.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  By now, June's daughter Sheila had grown into an arrestingly beautiful teenager. She was so striking that people would come up to her in the street and ask to take a photo with her.

• 11:38Speaker 00

  June was troubled by the attention men paid to her daughter. She saw Sheila's flirtations as a mark of wickedness. Once, she found Sheila sunbathing naked in a field with a boyfriend and flew into a fury, screaming at Sheila that she was the devil's child.

• 11:58Speaker 00

  Sheila was anxious to get away from her mother. When she was seventeen, she moved to London to start a modeling career. And at first, it was a success. Sheila got a big job in Tokyo and appeared in a Bacardi ad. More jobs followed. She became known in the press as Bambi. In one black and white photo from the mid seventies, she's dressed for the seashore, wearing a bande bikini top and skirt, gentle waves of dark hair framing her face, big, wide eyes, smiling at the camera.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  In London, Sheila soon fell in love with an artist, and they moved in together. But it was a turbulent relationship.

• 12:43Speaker 00

  They had explosive rows and he slept around. Eventually, Sheila got pregnant, and her mother June insisted that the couple get married. But then, soon after the ceremony, the baby was stillborn.

• 12:59Speaker 00

  After that, Sheila became increasingly preoccupied with trying to have a baby. But then she had another miscarriage, and some of her mother's dark thought patterns seemed to surface within her.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  She seemed to see these losses as a sort of divine punishment. And she told people that she thought she exuded an evil aura.

• 13:23Speaker 00

  She wrote in a letter, "I've never felt so confused and unable to control my brain.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  It's almost as if I'm schizophrenic or something. I feel so sick of people and stale."

• 13:41Speaker 00

  Finally, in the summer of 1979, Sheila carried a pregnancy to term.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  She gave birth to healthy twin boys, Nicholas and Daniel.

• 13:55Speaker 00

  They were beautiful babies, Bonnie with snowy blonde hair and their mother's big wide eyes. It was everything Sheila had hoped for. But June, who'd struggled for so many years with her own infertility, found it hard to welcome her grandson's arrival.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  When she visited Sheila in hospital, instead of congratulating her or giving her a hug, June stood in the doorway and said frostily, "Who's a clever girl then?"

• 14:26Speaker 00

  Sheila was crushed.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  Then, a few months after her twins were born, Sheila's husband abandoned her for another woman, leaving her alone in her London flat with the babies.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  Barbara Wilson remembers that when Sheila would come up from London to visit White House Farm around this time, she seemed quiet and withdrawn.

• 14:54Speaker 06

  And we'd sit around the table and chat and have coffee. When I first started to see her, she was quite...

• 15:05Speaker 06

  Normal, and she'd chat and smile, not a great deal, but she would be normal. But latterly, she did say some odd things.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  Sheila was quietly unraveling. She started hallucinating and resorting to self-harm. Then she started telling people that she was scared she might even hurt the twins. Eventually, her father Neville intervened. He arranged for Sheila to be sent away to the same psychiatric hospital where June had undergone electroshock therapy. Once again, Barbara Wilson was deputised to pay the bills.

• 15:44Speaker 06

  I used to write the cheques out for her hospitals that she used to go to, have to go to. And because she just kept on having breakdowns and, and.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  Did you get a sense of sort of what was wrong with Sheila?

• 16:00Speaker 06

  Oh, yes, I knew that it was probably due to drugs.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  Sheila had been doing a lot of drugs while she was in London, but her troubles went much deeper. As she'd feared, Sheila went on to be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. At the hospital, she was prescribed an antipsychotic. But when she got out, she quickly began skipping her meds, instead smoking marijuana and doing cocaine. She'd call the manor from her London flat late at night, rambling about being the Virgin Mary or Joan of Arc. Barbara said that by now, the strain of it all was hard for the Bambas to hide.

• 16:41Speaker 06

  They were always fairly jolly and such like, but gradually you could tell that their mood was changing.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  It wasn't only Sheila weighing on her parents' minds. The couple were also having trouble with their younger child, their son.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  Jeremy had been sent away at the age of nine to board at Gresham's, one of the country's most prestigious schools. He'd been a rebellious student. He brewed beer in his dorm and sneaked out at night to watch punk bands. And when he left school and came back to the farm at 17, he rubbed everyone the wrong way.

• 17:20Speaker 06

  And with Jeremy coming home and not being very nice, Mrs. Bamber in particular was very nervy. And Mr. Bamber was more crush about things.

• 17:33Speaker 00

  Jeremy was handsome and debonair, with dark hair and fine features, kind of an incongruous figure on the back of a tractor. And when he came home, he quickly caused a scandal by striking up an affair with a married mother of three. Then he started growing marijuana behind the cattle shed. And though he did pitch in on the farm, as the years went by, he continually infuriated his father by taking off to go travelling and flirting with more enticing careers as a cocktail waiter or scuba diver.

• 18:07Speaker 00

  Barbara said Jeremy could be charming.

• 18:10Speaker 06

  He was absolutely lovely at times. You could really, really like Jeremy when he was, you know, to start with when you first got to see him and he'd laugh and joke and be very friendly.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  But she also saw a side to him that she found unsettling. She felt like he was always trying to antagonise his parents.

• 18:31Speaker 06

  I mean, he did horrible things. He rode on Mrs. Bamber's bicycle. She got a bicycle. He rode round and round in tighter circles round her. And she'd flinch. Oh, Jeremy, don't do that. But he would do it and laugh and odd things like that. And he used to make up because it used to annoy Mr. Bamber. Wear makeup? Yeah. He used to wear lipstick and I don't know whether it was eye makeup. And he'd come up in the office. It was just to embarrass me, really, and to embarrass Mr. Bamber.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  To Barbara and others in the village, a man wearing makeup seemed strange. It was just not the done thing. Tolshun Darcy was a pretty reactionary place.

• 19:20Speaker 00

  But that wasn't the only thing Barbara objected to. She said Jeremy could be cruel. Once, she claimed, he'd even put a bag of rats in her car. She said he hid them inside a sack of potatoes.

• 19:32Speaker 06

  It was a big sack, a paper sack. And I went to get in my car and it rustled. And so I jumped and I was petrified. I'm petrified of mice and rats.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  It seemed to Barbara that Jeremy was turning into an embarrassment, maybe even a menace. And as for Sheila, she was declining rapidly. Her modeling career had crumbled and she was working as a cleaner, turning up to jobs disheveled, staring blankly into space.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  In the spring of 1985, when Sheila was 27, she seemed to hit a breaking point. She was home with the twins in London when she flew into a frenzy, battering the walls with her fists and accusing anyone who came near of trying to kill her. Neville came down to London and had Sheila readmitted to the psychiatric hospital, where she stayed for a few weeks before being discharged again, this time with new antipsychotic medication. Her doctor gave instructions for it to be administered monthly by injection, so she wouldn't skip a dose.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  That August, Sheila came to stay at the manor with Nicholas and Daniel. The twins were six years old by now. Sweet, tousled-haired boys, all knees and elbows. Nicholas was chatty and fascinated by nature. Daniel was shyer and more sensitive. He carried a baby doll everywhere and told people he wanted to be a mummy.

• 21:14Speaker 06

  The boys always used to come up into the office and Mr. Bamber always gave them a peppermint.

• 21:21Speaker 06

  And they used to chat and say what they'd been doing and things like that. And we'd probably have about 10 or 15 minutes talking to them and they'd go down quite happily.

• 21:33Speaker 00

  Around that time, Barbara remembered being called down to join the family for coffee in the kitchen, as usual. She could see that Sheila was in a bad way.

• 21:43Speaker 06

  She was dressed all in black and she didn't look well, I must admit. She just looked vacant that last time.

• 21:57Speaker 06

  I sat one end of the table and Mrs. Bamber was at the top and so was Sheila. And we were just sort of chatting in general. And that's when Sheila said, "The devil and everything is black. And all men are evil."

• 22:25Speaker 00

  "All men are evil," Sheila said. "Everything is black."

• 22:30Speaker 06

  But we didn't, you don't say, "Well, why?" Because you just knew that she wasn't herself.

• 22:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, she was a poor thing really towards the end.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  That was the last time Barbara Wilson would ever see Sheila.

• 22:54Speaker 00

  Forty years later, as I sat with her in her comfortable living room, watching crows wheeling over the fields beyond the window, she told me she's haunted, to this day, by that scene and everything that followed.

• 23:10Speaker 06

  It took me a long time, a long, long time, to get over it.

• 23:16Speaker 06

  Before this happened, I was just a normal person, but I'm different. I know I'm different.

• 23:45Speaker 03

  If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body. But soon they'll find it. He acted friendly. He talked friendly. He sounded friendly.

• 23:59Speaker 06

  They all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff. And they said, maybe she'll find out where this girl is. I saw him, Violet. Backhanded her. Pow!

• 24:11Speaker 03

  Listen to The Devil's Quarry, Season Two, in the Bone Valley feed, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 24:28Speaker 05

  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 Biletti. 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.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  And Vogue's YouTube channel.

• 25:07Speaker 05

  Wired has always put a microscope on the people, power, and forces shaping our world. Uncanny Valley brings that same fearless reporting straight to your feed. Is Doge finally over? Will AI actually democratize American healthcare? Each week, Wired journalists from across the newsroom are going to unpack where politics, technology, and Silicon Valley collide. From conversations with tech leaders across Silicon Valley, internet fandom investigations, and government crackdowns on rigged gambling, we're taking you all over the news cycle, going straight inside the priorities, pressures, and power plays driving today's biggest decisions. Uncanny Valley tackles the questions keeping you up at night and helps make sense of the

• 25:48Speaker 05

  future taking shape right now. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 26:00Speaker 00

  Part two. August 7, 1985.

• 26:06Speaker 00

  Police Sergeant Chris Buse had been stationed in rural Essex for about a year. It was mostly an uneventful job. In this intensely traditional community, local people like to keep the cops out of their private business.

• 26:20Speaker 03

  It's the way British country life is. Got lots of little villages, lots of outlying farms. A lot of, you know, we'll sort our own problems out. It's the way country people deal with things.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  Sergeant Buse spent much of his time going out on street patrols, responding to the occasional petty theft.

• 26:40Speaker 03

  Not a lot of crime at all. Police force is probably 90% boredom, 10% adrenaline.

• 26:48Speaker 00

  But on August 7, 1985, that was about to change.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  Sergeant Buse was on duty in the early hours of that morning. He and two colleagues were patrolling an industrial park where there'd been a space of break-ins, hoping to catch the thief in the act.

• 27:07Speaker 03

  We were sitting in bushes and creeping around the industrial estate. When I get a call on my personal radio to go back to the station, urgent, so. Drop what you're doing, get back there right away.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  There's a guy called Jeremy Bamber's phone, who said there's something going on at his parents' house, Whitehouse Farm.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  Jeremy Bamber had phoned the station from the cottage where he lived nearby at around 3:30 a.m. to report that he'd just received an alarming call from his father Neville at the manor.

• 27:43Speaker 03

  Phone call from his father, who sounds very panicky, who tells him it's Sheila, she's gone mad.

• 27:54Speaker 00

  His sister Sheila had gone berserk, Jeremy said Neville had told him. The twins were asleep upstairs and Sheila had a gun.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  And he said, and then the phone just cut off.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  Jeremy told police he'd tried calling back, but the phone at the manor seemed to be off the hook. Sergeant Bews and two colleagues jumped into a patrol car and sped through the countryside towards Whitehouse Farm.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  And it's all very dark country lanes, no road lighting, anything like that.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  Hedge rows either side and I wonder what the hell I'm gonna find at the other end.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  When they reached the farm, they stopped at the end of its winding driveway and climbed out of the patrol car. The manor lay around a bend, hidden by tall trees, and the scene was strangely quiet. The only sound was the faint whining of a dog.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  Firearms incident where someone's got a gun, you're gonna get noise.

• 28:58Speaker 03

  There's no noise in the house at the moment.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  Well, it's ominous, isn't it?

• 29:04Speaker 00

  Soon a silver car pulled up behind them and out climbed a tall, slender figure. It was Jeremy Bamber.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  Youngish guy, puffy hair, and he spoke quite a refined accent, not a localist accent. He said, have you been in there yet? I said, no. And he said, well, can't he go in and look? I said, no. I said, the last thing we're gonna go is go in there and confront someone with a gun.

• 29:35Speaker 00

  Regular police in Britain don't carry guns, and Sergeant Bews was not prepared to go in without armed backup. But he asked Jeremy to follow him up the driveway to take a look at the house from the outside.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  They tiptoed through the darkness until it came into view. Lights were shining in three windows, the kitchen, the bathroom, and the bedroom where Sheila's twins were sleeping. But the house was totally still.

• 30:12Speaker 00

  Sergeant Bews said the scene unnerved him, and he wondered if bringing Jeremy this close had been a miscalculation.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  I was thinking, isn't that good an idea bringing in with me? Because if there is someone in there that sees us and takes a pot shot at us, I'm actually putting a civilian at risk by doing this.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  Still, he gestured for Jeremy to follow him through a field to the front, where light was filtering through the curtains of the master bedroom. And suddenly, a shadow seemed to loom in the window.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  I saw out of the corner of my eye, I caught a movement.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  The men ducked behind a hedge and braced for shots, but none came. Then they raced back to the patrol car, and Sergeant Bews radioed for backup. From their notes that night, it seems like the awful significance of what might be happening with Sheila was starting to dawn on Jeremy. "Oh, God," he said, "I hope she hasn't done anything silly."

• 31:11Speaker 00

  He told the officers that his sister was mentally ill and that she'd been distressed earlier that evening by a fraught conversation with their parents.

• 31:22Speaker 00

  Neville and June had told Sheila that she was no longer fit to look after her sons, he said. And they'd urged her to have the boys placed in foster care. He worried that this might have tipped her over the edge and he begged the officers again to go into the house. But again, they refused. Jeremy kept pleading, "They're all the family I've got", they noted him saying. But Sergeant Bews was adamant.

• 31:51Speaker 03

  No, Jeremy, I've explained to you several times now, we're not going in because of the dangers. If unfortunately there's something serious going on in there, we don't want to make it worse by having two or three dead policemen added to it as well.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  I asked Sergeant Bews about that, how he weighed his fears for his own safety and that of his fellow officers, against the fact that there were two little kids inside that house.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  Obviously a concern for everybody in there, and I'm a father. If I'd heard a kid calling for help, I'd have definitely gone in. But it's easy for me to say, "I would have done this, I would have done that", that's not what happened.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  It was almost five in the morning before a van thundered up the farm track, carrying a squadron of armed officers. But even then, they didn't enter the house straight away. Instead, they mustered inside a cattle barn, facing the back of the property. Then, they spent two and a half hours calling through a bullhorn for Sheila to surrender. Still, there was no response. Finally, at 7.30, the raid team was authorized to go in. The back door was locked, and it took several blows with a sledgehammer to open it. When the officers finally burst inside, they found a harrowing scene.

• 33:18Speaker 03

  Neville Bamber was found in his dressing gown, lying amidst a load of ransack furniture, effectively.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  Neville lay slumped over an upturned chair by the kitchen hearth, with his face resting inside a coal scuttle. He'd been shot repeatedly in the head, and blood had pooled on the floor.

• 33:41Speaker 00

  He'd also been shot in the shoulder and the arm, and he seemed to have been battered in a struggle. There was shattered crockery and shards of a broken light fixture scattered on the floor.

• 33:53Speaker 00

  The raid team continued through the house.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  They went up the stairs, found June in the doorway of her bedroom,

• 34:05Speaker 03

  obviously shot. Went into that room and found Sheila lying on the floor with rifle going lengthways up the body.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  Sheila was on her back in a turquoise nightgown and jewellery, with a fatal bullet hole through her chin. Beside her lay a bloodstained bible, open to a passage from Psalms. There was a streak of red in the middle of the page, under a line that said, "Save me from blood guiltiness."

• 34:43Speaker 00

  Down the hall, in the twins' room, officers found the boys in bed. Daniel was curled on his side with his thumb in his mouth. Nicholas lay on his back, the covers pulled up to his chin. Five bullets had been fired through the back of Daniel's head. Nicholas had been shot three times in the face.

• 35:06Speaker 00

  The firearms officers paused in the doorway, briefly stricken. Then they radioed through the news.

• 35:14Speaker 00

  Outside, a senior officer walked over to Sergeant Buse and told him what had happened.

• 35:19Speaker 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.

• 35:30Speaker 03

  And you don't like telling people, giving people bad news. But unfortunately, it's part of the police officer's job. So I went to Jeremy, I said, unfortunately, I've now made entry and unfortunately, everybody is dead. I said, I don't know the circumstances, but everybody's dead. And he looked at me and he started to cry.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  News of the killings tore through the sleepy rural community of Tolshunt, Darcy. The next day, the massacre filled the front pages of the national newspapers with headlines like Farmhouse of Death and Top Model Massacre's Family.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  Police in Essex are investigating a bizarre shooting in which Late on Tuesday evening, something happened which triggered the deaths of all five of the Bamba family. Police said they had all died together from gunshot wounds. No one knows why the family had to die. The only remaining member of the family was Mr. Bamba's adopted son, Jeremy.

• 36:40Speaker 00

  As police conducted their investigation, what happened at White House Farm seemed beyond doubt.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  All the details added up. People close to Sheila told police that she talked about hearing voices and being chased by the devil. One who'd witnessed her most recent breakdown said he was extremely scared for everyone's safety. Sheila behaved like a person possessed, he said, and she'd claimed she could hear the voice of God.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  Sheila's psychiatrist told officers that she'd had bizarre delusions. She thought her sons would seduce her and saw evil in both of them, he said. Her worst fear was that she might be capable of killing the boys.

• 37:34Speaker 00

  Though the psychiatrist had prescribed her a monthly injection of her antipsychotic so that she couldn't skip it, when she'd received her last shot, a month before the murders, she'd cajoled a different doctor into giving her a half-dose. It seemed clear that Sheila had suffered a psychotic breakdown, a horrifically violent episode in which she'd killed everyone, her parents and her two sons, and then turned the gun on herself. There was the story about the panicked call Jeremy had received from his father, saying Sheila had gone berserk with a gun. There was Sheila lying dead, holding the rifle, a bloody bible beside her body.

• 38:19Speaker 00

  And there was the house, which had been securely locked from the inside. It all cohered into a dark, logical narrative. As one police officer who was there that night said to me, "It was all so believable. What other explanation could there be?" He told me, "The story had ended. It started and finished on that day."

• 38:59Speaker 06

  If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body. But soon they'll find it.

• 39:07Speaker 03

  He acted friendly. He talked friendly. He sounded friendly.

• 39:12Speaker 06

  They all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff, and they said, "Maybe she'll find out where this girl is."

• 39:19Speaker 03

  I saw him violent. Backhanded her a pow. Listen to The Devil's Quarry, Season Two, in the Bone Valley feed, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Wired has always put a microscope on the people, power, and forces shaping our world. Uncanny Valley brings that same fearless reporting straight to your feed. Is Doge...

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Finally over? Will AI actually democratize American healthcare? Each week, Wired journalists from across the newsroom are going to unpack where politics, technology, and Silicon Valley collide. From conversations with tech leaders across Silicon Valley, internet fandom investigations, and government crackdowns on rigged gambling, we're taking you all over the news cycle, going straight inside the priorities, pressures, and power plays driving today's biggest decisions. Uncanny Valley tackles the questions keeping you up at night and helps make sense of the future taking shape right now. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 40:33Speaker 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.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  Part Three: Master Criminal.

• 41:14Speaker 00

  The shooting at White House Farm happened a year before I was born, so I grew up hearing about it. My mom would sometimes read out snippets of murder stories from her newspaper, and this story was all over the papers.

• 41:28Speaker 04

  Huge, huge, huge story. It was like being in a movie almost sometimes, you know, that you were the center of something that everyone else is reading about.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  David Woods covered the story of the murders from the beginning for the Colchester Gazette, a local paper in Essex.

• 41:46Speaker 04

  Digging, digging, and digging. There was... Like a feeding frenzy on trying to find out what you could.

• 41:53Speaker 00

  Not only were mass shootings exceedingly rare in Britain, but the story had all these tantalising elements.

• 42:00Speaker 04

  You got everything, big family, money. It was seen as, you know, living the ideal life of being pillars of the society they live in.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  And Sheila, the doe-eyed model turned killer.

• 42:14Speaker 04

  Bambi, with great nickname, beautiful, tragic. She fitted a lovely narrative, didn't she, for the press? So there was a feeding frenzy on her as well.

• 42:26Speaker 00

  But then, the narrative, which had seemed so clear, began to change.

• 42:34Speaker 00

  Exactly one month after the murders at White House Farm, came a sudden, astonishing turn in the case.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Essex Police now say that the model Sheila Caffill could have been murdered. But all the evidence at the time, say, police pointed to suicide.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  In the past week, they've been working on new information.

• 42:54Speaker 00

  Police now suspected that the crime had been carried out by an assassin, who shot the whole family, and then arranged the scene to make it appear that Sheila had fired the gun.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  And Sheila would be the scapegoat because of her mental illness. He would make it look as though she had killed the family and then committed suicide.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  And now, the prime suspect in the case was none other than Sheila's own brother, Jeremy Bamber.

• 43:23Speaker 00

  New witnesses had come forward and new evidence had been found, and now police were convinced Jeremy had been plotting for months to murder his family.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  They said he was a killer so cunning that he'd staged a crime scene that fooled dozens of detectives. So manipulative that he had bamboozled them all with his performance at the scene. And so shameless that he'd used his sister's mental illness to make her a scapegoat. And he'd done it all for his family's fortune, to which he became the sole heir.

• 44:04Speaker 00

  But his crime had finally caught up with him.

• 44:09Speaker 00

  Jeremy was arrested and arraigned on five counts of murder.

• 44:16Speaker 00

  As he was driven away from the courthouse in handcuffs, Jeremy was photographed smiling broadly out of the window. The resulting picture of the accused killer grinning in the back of a police van became one of the most iconic images of the crime.

• 44:33Speaker 00

  For David Woods and the rest of the press pack, Jeremy turned out to be the ideal tabloid villain.

• 44:39Speaker 04

  A womanizer, bit of a cad really. I mean, you have to say, he was a good-looking guy and he appears to have had a lot of charm. Somebody thought a lot of himself, I think. Cocky, narcissist, psychopath, and also cold-blooded. He didn't exactly get a good press, did he?

• 44:59Speaker 00

  In 1986, the year after the killings, Jeremy Bamber was convicted and sent to prison for life. The murders at White House Farm became Britain's most notorious family massacre. And Jeremy Bamber became one of the country's most despised villains.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Tonight, is this man evil beyond belief?

• 45:21Speaker 00

  This was the version of the story I grew up hearing about. When I got my first job in journalism decades later, the case was still a tabloid favourite. The infamous case of the White House Farm murder. It was rehashed over and over again in books, documentaries, and hit TV dramas. Neville Bamber called Jeremy, told him Sheila was going crazy with a gun.

• 45:43Speaker 03

  If you believe Jeremy. The phone call he said his dad made to him, it doesn't make sense. So you're accusing him now, are you? Eh? The son.

• 45:51Speaker 00

  But I personally never had a reason to think too deeply about it. Until one day, a couple of years ago, when I heard something about the murders at White House Farm that did intrigue me.

• 46:04Speaker 00

  I got a tip that this most famous of crimes might still be unresolved. That the narrative that had been presented to the jury and then been repeated in countless retellings might be completely wrong.

• 46:23Speaker 00

  So I dug in. I began looking into the murders. And as I learned more, I became preoccupied with trying to figure out how the whole case had turned so decisively upside down.

• 46:38Speaker 00

  What had happened to transform Jeremy Bamber, in the eyes of the police and the public, from a grieving son, weeping outside a locked manor where his whole family lay dead, into a cunning mass murderer?

• 46:57Speaker 00

  The more I found out, the clearer it became that nothing about this story was as it seemed.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  And what I began to uncover would challenge what I thought I knew. Not only about the murders at White House Farm,

• 47:14Speaker 00

  but also about the police, the judiciary,

• 47:19Speaker 00

  the whole British legal establishment.

• 47:33Speaker 00

  Coming up next, on Blood Relatives.

• 47:39Speaker 05

  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.

• 47:50Speaker 00

  Do not be fooled by Jeremy Bamber, who's got away with so much. And your family, I think, was very instrumental in finding the evidence and putting the case together, really.

• 48:03Speaker 03

  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.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  Blood Relatives is written and produced by me, Heidi Blake, and lead producer Natalie Jablonski. 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 Julin 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 Batoni and Ben Murray.

• 49:09Speaker 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.

• 49:46Speaker 04

  One of the best parts for me about hosting Reveal, you know, your favorite weekly investigative podcast, is the interviews. I love to sit down with people and try to gain a perspective that gives me and our listeners a new way of seeing the world, which is why we're launching More to the Story with me, Al Ledson. It's a place where I can talk to some of the most intriguing people to bring some context to our changing world. Follow the Reveal podcast feed and look for More to the Story every Wednesday.

• 50:18Speaker 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.

• 50:31Speaker 03

  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.

• 50:56Speaker 03

  I'm Vincent Cunningham.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  I'm Nomi Fry. I'm Alex Schwartz, and we host Critics at Large from The New Yorker.

• 51:01Speaker 03

  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 brand with it.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  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. We go highbrow, we go lowbrow, we go everything in between.

• 51:27Speaker 03

  Food culture to meme culture, Charlie XCX to Toni Morrison.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  K-pop to the Kennedys. From horror movies to heated rivalry. From the Oscars to the Met Gala. The Golden Bachelor to Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations to Desperate Housewives.

• 51:41Speaker 03

  That's what we're talking about over here. We're having fun.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  It's Critics at Large from The New Yorker, every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.