Bamber case: new blood evidence

On 7 August 1985, five people were found dead at White House Farm in Essex, England: 28-year-old Sheila Caffell (familiarly known as Bambi); her six-year-old twin sons Daniel and Nicholas; and her adoptive parents, June and Nevill Bamber. All five had been shot with a rifle. Caffell’s 24-year-old brother, Jeremy Bamber, who was also adopted, had alerted Essex police to a disturbance inside the farmhouse – he said his father had called to tell him – and was outside with the police for four hours before the bodies were discovered. Caffell, who had recently been hospitalised with schizoaffective disorder and is said to have feared her children were going to be taken into foster care, was found with the rifle lying on her chest, pointing towards her neck. There were two gunshot wounds to her neck and chin, and a bloodied Bible by her side.

The case was initially thought to be open and shut, a tragic murder-suicide committed by Caffell. But a month later, Jeremy Bamber was arrested, after relatives went to the police to voice their suspicions about him, and his former girlfriend, Julie Mugford, then told police he had confessed the murders to her. The relatives went on to inherit from Nevill and June Bamber’s considerable estate after Bamber’s conviction. It was later discovered that Mugford had agreed to sell the story of their relationship to the News of the World for £25,000 if Bamber was convicted. Essex police and Crown prosecutors had also agreed to drop charges against her for burglary, chequebook fraud and selling cannabis, because “prosecuting her could jeopardise her availability or credibility as a key witness”.

Bamber has now been in prison for 41 years, and questions have always been asked about the safety of his convictions. These have grown recently. The proper body to examine these questions is the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), but it has already taken the CCRC four years to consider less than half the evidence that Bamber has submitted to it, and it has concluded that the four points (out of 10) in the submission that it has so far considered do not meet the high evidentiary threshold to refer the case back to the Court of Appeal. In the second piece in our series considering discrete pieces of evidence, the Guardian commissioned forensic biologist Sue Carney-Gannon to analyse the bloodstain patterns at the crime scene for the first time.

Forty years ago, the jury at Jeremy Bamber’s trial was given a binary choice. Either the 24-year-old son of well-to-do farming stock had killed five members of his adoptive family, including his sister, Sheila Caffell. Or Caffell, 28 – also adopted, but from a different family – had killed their parents and her six-year-old twin boys before turning the gun on herself.

What became known as the White House Farm massacre was a horrific case: brutal, chaotic, shockingly policed and, to this day, hugely controversial. On 28 October 1986, Bamber was convicted of the five murders in a 10-2 majority verdict at Chelmsford crown court, Essex, England.

But now a leading forensic biologist has presented evidence that Caffell took her own life. After analysing the crime scene’s bloodstains for the Guardian, Sue Carney-Gannon has concluded that the patterns on the clothing and body of Caffell point to suicide. “In my opinion, if Sheila Caffell took her own life using the rifle, as the defence for Jeremy Bamber assert, then this explains the distribution of blood on her nightdress and right arm,” she writes in her report. “In my opinion, these findings are accounted for by her having taken her own life with the rifle; blood from the wound under her chin running down the upper right front of her clothing and splashing on to her right forearm, then veering to her right side as her body and arms fell.”

Carney-Gannon’s conclusion challenges the prosecution case, which maintained that Bamber meticulously staged Caffell’s suicide after he shot their parents, June and Nevill Bamber, and her twins Nicholas and Daniel.

Read the full article at The Guardian.