Jeremy Bamber: Evidence of Innocence

"I'll be able to relax on a Dorset beach and watch the waves crashing, walking, hearing the birds sing, and hopefully have someone around me, or people around me, who I love and they love me. Just simple things."
Jeremy Bamber

• Eric Allison and Simon Hattenstone
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 10 February 2011 20.29 GMT

Jeremy Bamber is driven to prison in 1986 after being convicted of killing his mother, father, sister and her twin sons. Photograph: Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy

Jeremy Bamber is thinking about how he has maintained his sanity over 25 years in prison. His answer is quietly shocking. He walks and talks with his family – his mother, his sister, her twin sons and particularly his father. In short, he gets solace from the memory of the very family he was convicted of slaying 26 years ago. "In my mind, I walk with my Dad more than anybody on a daily basis and think, how would he cope with it, what would he think about it all?" He comes to a stuttering stop. You can hear the pain in his voice. "How I cope is quite an emotional thing for me to talk about."

Jeremy Bamber is one of only 38 prisoners in England and Wales serving a whole-life sentence, and the only one of them to protest his innocence. The list is as chilling as it is exclusive – Bamber is in the company of Rose West, Dennis Nilsen, Peter Sutcliffe and Ian Brady. The judge at his trial described him as "warped and evil beyond belief". If he committed the crimes he has been convicted of, he deserves his notoriety.

Yet Jeremy Bamber has always protested his innocence. The Guardian has corresponded with him over five years, during which time dozens of letters have been exchanged. His are written in block capitals, breathless in their intensity, polite, largely impersonal and almost wholly concerned with the evidence. They are not a light read. He expects those interested in his case to be as well drilled in the minutiae as he is. If Jeremy Bamber is telling the truth, he is a victim of one of Britain's worst miscarriages of justice.

To decipher the letters one has to learn the courtroom shorthand – DRB1, a reference to the "sound moderator", or silencer. PV19? A bullet fragment. RWC1, the paint sample taken from the kitchen, where Nevill Bamber was killed. And so it goes on, with references to the thousands of exhibits, documents and photographs.

Jeremy Bamber is clever and strategic. He has courted a number of news organisations over the years. He divides the evidence he has gathered and packages "exclusives" to different newspapers. The Guardian has made repeated requests to interview him, but has always been blocked by the Ministry of Justice. So it was a surprise when a member of staff at Full Sutton prison, near York, asked whether we were willing to accept phone calls from Jeremy Bamber, AKA prisoner A5352AC.

It was late January when he rang, just before he was due to hear from the Criminal Cases Review Commission whether his case would be referred for a rare third appeal. He said he had saved money so he could afford half an hour on the phone. This Jeremy Bamber sounded quite different from the letter writer – talkative, human, dealing in emotions. We didn't need to deal with all his new information – he had already painstakingly laid out how he had recently discovered evidence that suggested the crime scene had been used for training purposes by more than 40 officers from the firearms support unit just hours after the murders, which may have corrupted evidence; how bodies seem to have been moved; how freshly disclosed Essex police files appeared to challenge the assertion that Jeremy Bamber was the killer.

On 7 August 1985, Jeremy's mother, father, sister and her six-year-old boys were shot dead at the parents' farmhouse in the Essex countryside. It was a sensational story, a classic whodunit – a whole family murdered, a substantial inheritance to be fought over, complex relationships with adopted children, and a glamorous model known as Bambi at the heart of it.

Bamber in tears at his family's funeral in 1985, supported by his then girlfriend Julie Mugford. Photograph: Peter Davies/McLellan

That night, Jeremy Bamber rang the police saying he had just received a panicked call from his father Nevill saying his daughter Sheila had picked up one of his shooting rifles and had gone "crazy". By the time the police entered the house, all five were dead. The gun was found by Sheila's side, fresh blood still oozing from her mouth. It looked as if she had killed her mother and father and her twin boys before turning the gun on herself. It all seemed to make sense in a terrible way – a woman who had recently been diagnosed with schizophrenia had broken down. But then the story took an unexpected turn. Jeremy's girlfriend, Julie Mugford, whom he had two-timed, claimed he had confessed to her his plans to hire a hitman to murder the family and that hours before the shooting he had told her: "Tonight's the night." The man named was a local plumber, who was arrested with Jeremy. The plumber had a cast-iron alibi for that night and both were released.

A month after the killings, Jeremy's cousins found a silencer with flecks of blood on it in a cupboard in the farmhouse – this would have ruled out Sheila being the killer because, with the silencer on the rifle, her arms would not have been long enough to reach the trigger to kill herself, and it left Jeremy Bamber as the only suspect. Jeremy was charged and the prosecution argued he was a greedy schemer who, motivated by the prospect of inheriting the £436,000 family fortune and considerable land, had killed all five then placed the rifle in his sister's hands to make it look like a murder-suicide. He was found guilty in a 10-2 majority verdict and given five life sentences, upgraded to whole life in 1994.

There was something about Jeremy Bamber that made him unsympathetic to the public. He was handsome in a rather cruel, caddish way – he seemed to exude arrogance and indifference. In court, when the prosecution accused him of lying, he replied: "That is what you have to establish." Like Meursault in the Camus novel L'Etranger, he did not seem to display the appropriate emotions. Or at least not when the press had its lens fixed on him. More tales emerged about his callousness – how he had spent money with abandon after his parents' death, how he was living the life of a playboy. And then there was his sister, the other suspect – Sheila (known as Bambi) was so blessed with her beauty, so vulnerable with her illness, few people wanted to believe she could have been the killer.

Jeremy Bamber in 1988, just before the first appeal against his conviction. Photograph: Today/Rex Features

So Jeremy Bamber went to jail, and ever since he has told anyone who would listen that he is innocent. He sieved his way through myriad documents, trying to piece together another version of what could have happened that night at White House Farm. He became a legal expert, stayed up into the early hours every night reading his own case notes, he courted sympathetic journalists, wrote to legal experts, challenged the very basis on which he had been convicted.

And gradually it emerged that the investigation had been, at best, flawed: the police had not searched the farmhouse properly; a call from Jeremy's father to the police, saying his daughter had gone "berserk", had not been disclosed to the jury; officers had said they had seen somebody moving inside the house before they entered while Jeremy was standing next to them. How had the police failed to find a silencer in the cupboard? Why was it not revealed that the people who did find it – the cousins – stood to benefit from Bamber going to jail by inheriting the property. Why had so many people been allowed to trudge through the crime scene, contaminating so much of the evidence? Why did scratch marks on the kitchen mantelpiece that suggested a struggle not exist in the original scene-of- crime photos?

The new evidence on the marks is perhaps the most compelling. The trial judge, in his summing up, told the jury: "On the evidence of the scratch marks alone you may find Mr Bamber guilty." But the photographs they were shown were taken after the silencer was discovered. Photographs taken on the day of the shootings and not disclosed at trial have emerged showing there were no scratch marks, which contradicts the evidence of a struggle – a completely different picture to the one presented to the jury.

Jeremy Bamber appealed for the first time in 1989 on the grounds that the judge had summed the case up unfairly. He was finally granted a second appeal in 2002. Jeremy's team argued that vital evidence had not been disclosed or had been fabricated, most of it relating to the silencer and the blood testing. The silencer was found to contain blood, but it could not be established if it was human or animal. But in a 522-point judgment, the three judges concluded that no conduct on behalf of the police or the prosecution would have adversely affected the jury, and that the more they examined the details, the more they thought the jury had reached the right conclusion.

When he lost that appeal, Jeremy says, it was "as if the light had gone out". How did he feel? "Desolate. I felt abandoned. It was just before Christmas that they gave me that decision and I remember that Christmas Day I had jam and toast because I'd not put in menu slips for my dinner." He had expected to be home for Christmas. "I felt I was the laughing stock of the jail in that I had told people I was going to win and I didn't. I felt friendless."

His case should be referred back to the appeal court imminently. And Jeremy Bamber is convinced that, this time, his conviction has to be overturned. "I shall feel hope again. I shall feel that maybe, finally, my position, which I've held for 26 years, will be validated."

Jeremy Bamber was 24 when he was convicted, and has been in prison more than half his life. He is fit, but he is only too aware of life passing him by. "I'm an old man now. I'm 50 and I feel it," he says. If this is a miscarriage of justice, it is the worst kind of double whammy – not simply convicted of murder, but of murdering those you love. Has he managed to grieve for the family he is convicted of killing? "I think what helped is that I was out for their funerals. It wasn't until almost two months later that I was arrested, so I have grieved to some degree, but I'm not sure I have grieved enough. But I cope . . . I just have happy memories."

If he is cleared, he says, he will feel he has defended the family's honour. "I will feel proud that if Mum and Dad were around, they would be proud that I had the self-discipline and staying power to keep with this as long as I have." And this is when you realise just how complex his relationship is with his family. In finding him guilty of the massacre, he believes the court besmirched his family name. If his sister is guilty, it does not in any way lessen the horror, but it is less shaming because she was ill.

Nevill and June Bamber adopted Jeremy when he was six weeks old. He was the son of a vicar's daughter who had an affair with a married army sergeant. (His sister Sheila was adopted a few years later.) He was sent to a private boarding school in Norfolk, then went to college in Colchester and, after spending time in Australia and New Zealand, he returned to work on the farm for £170 a week. At the time of the murders, he lived in a cottage owned by his father three miles away from the family farm.

What was life like on the farm? "Idyllic," he says. "It can be quite a solitary life, but I am a person who's quite happy with my own company. Mum and Dad were wonderful people, very kind, very gentle, very honest people. I loved them with all my heart and they were my mum and dad. I resent the 'adopted child', because I never saw myself as an adopted child."

If he is lying, he is a disturbingly good actor. Five years ago, he took and passed a lie-detector test. He has seen numerous therapists and psychiatrists in his time in prison, none of whom has suggested that he is mentally unstable, let alone a psychopath.

He says he and Sheila were close when they were growing up. "She looked after me, she cared for me and when I was 14/15 and she was modelling, I loved going up to London, staying with her and going out with all her modelling mates."

But ultimately, he says, when she became ill they weren't close enough. "Schizophrenia, especially if it's coupled with paranoia, can be the most devastating illness. I certainly take my share of the blame for not supporting her. And I wish I had visited her when she was in hospital. I was growing up and starting relationships and building a life for myself and I probably didn't listen and care and learn enough about Sheila's condition and give her the support I should have done. Had I done, maybe she would have been able to cope with the world – I don't know."

Sheila married at 20 in 1977, sons Daniel and Nicholas were born two years later, and by 1982 she was divorced. In 1983, suicidal and paranoid, she was hospitalised and put on anti-psychotic drugs. In March 1985, she was readmitted – delusional, obsessed with the nature of good and evil and admitting to disturbed ideas about her mother. (June Bamber had also suffered a mental breakdown when Jeremy was in his late teens – her illness, coupled with her religious fervour, created a rift between mother and adopted daughter). Again, Sheila was put on anti-psychotic drugs. Four months later, she was dead.

Her Bible was found by her side, open at pages containing Psalms 51-55. Eminent theologian Susan Gillingham has prepared a report on the significance of these psalms, in relation to Sheila's mental state and religious mania. She says anyone who knew the psalms well would turn to them as a means of "expressing their own penitence at the evil within themselves and outrage at the evil words and actions performed against them by others". Astonishingly, the bloodstained Bible was never forensically examined, nor produced at trial, despite repeated requests from Jeremy Bamber's solicitor. So the jury was not aware of the significance of the psalms. Photographs also showed a handwritten note sticking up from between the pages of the Bible. The words at the top of the note are "love one another" – the same words were written on a banner on a wall in a room in Jonestown, Guyana, where 909 people died in 1978 in a mass murder-suicide. But the evidential value of what was inside the Bible cannot now be gauged; Essex police have informed Jeremy Bamber's lawyers that the note has been destroyed.

Bamber in a picture taken in prison, 2009. Photograph: Guardian

Hugh Ferguson, Sheila's psychiatrist, gave evidence at the trial. In a statement made in 2002, he says he was unaware that the Bible was open at the psalms at the time he gave evidence. Having read them, he says, "they contain in them the themes which, over time, I knew were exercising Sheila Caffell. In short form, the struggle between good and evil, or God and the Devil."

Nor was Ferguson, or the jury, aware of another factor that may have influenced Sheila to carry out the killings. At the trial, Bamber said his sister was upset at the prospect of losing her children, but the prosecution accused him of making this up.

Last week, the Guardian was passed a letter, written by Sheila's ex-husband, Colin Caffell, to Nevill Bamber. In it, Caffell expresses deep concern about Sheila's mental state and asks his father-in law-to "try and convince Sheila that it would be better for her and the boys if they stayed with me most of the time". Ferguson says if Nevill had pleaded Caffell's case to Sheila, it could have had a "potentially catastrophic effect on her". As a result, he says, "she may have projected on to her father a concept of evil".

How does Jeremy Bamber feel about his sister today? "I don't blame her, and I still love her." For somebody who protests his innocence so vehemently, he shows a remarkable lack of bitterness. "Oh, I have been terrible, but I don't feel it now. That just eats you up, fills you full of hate, gives you ulcers and lines around your eyes and you look horrible. I have resented Sheila and hated her over the years, but I don't any more. I understand."

One of the things that seemed to sway public opinion against Jeremy Bamber was a photograph of him smiling outside the court, apparently without a worry in the world. "I was smiling because my mates were on the pavement and they were all cheering me on. And I was giving them that encouraging smile, 'I'm OK, lads, don't worry.' I understand a picture tells a thousand stories, but we all know the media can snap that split second and not put it in context." It's one of the things that seems to upset him most – the idea that he is universally reviled.

When he was first convicted, he was convinced he would be out in no time. Nine years later, he was told that he would never be released. How did that feel? He stammers his way towards an answer. "I . . . I . . . just found that incredible that they could hand you a death sentence using old age as the tool when I'd already been sentenced to 25 years in jail." Even then, he says, he never believed he would be in jail for good. "I have never contemplated the thought that I'm not going to win."

But there is, of course, every chance that Jeremy Bamber won't win – there is a small possibility that he will not win the right to his third appeal, and the greater possibility that the conviction will be upheld at appeal. Well, if that happens, he says, he'll just have to continue fighting. He claims he's holding back some new evidence just in case he needs to fight for another appeal.

And if he is released? "I'll be able to relax on a Dorset beach and watch the waves crashing, walking, hearing the birds sing, and hopefully have someone around me, or people around me, who I love and they love me. Just simple things." He would like to write a book on motivational techniques – to help people to cope, not just in prison but with illness and bereavement.

All this is a long way from the playboy image. "I've never been a playboy," he says quietly. "I've only been to a few nightclubs in my life. I've only had a few girlfriends in my life."

There is a classic image of people who have had their convictions quashed – say, the Guildford Four or Birmingham Six – standing on the steps of the court of appeal, triumphant. Does Jeremy Bamber ever imagine himself in that pose? "Absolutely," he says. "I've got a drawing that a friend did for me of me standing on the steps with my hands raised. It's on my wall, and I look at it all the time and visualise the day."

Attrib: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/feb/10/jeremy-bamber-innocent-of-murder-appeal?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter Edits PAM

Jeremy Bamber: 'No Offence' guest blog

Re-blogged from http://www.no-offence.org/content.php/161-Guest-Blog Attrib:Jeremy Bamber

An Independent Police Complaints Commission: sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? But who will guard the guards themselves? 

Roman society wrestled with the same question that today’s society cannot answer: who polices the police? The public have always required protection from corrupt or negligent police officers and in today's society this protection is supposed to come from The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). 

Police corruption is a growing problem and in the last five years alone investigations handled by the IPCC rose from 30 to 150. The IPCC needs to cope with their ever-increasing work load, but it also has to address how to make their investigations more successful. Police corruption not only affects the standards of policing, and undermines public faith in this service but the tactics employed by the IPCC and Police to maintain wrongful convictions have wider repercussions for us all.

Only at the end of July this year the IPCC wrote in a letter to me “we are completely independent of the police service and are responsible for making sure that the police complaints system in England and Wales works effectively and fairly (Letter dated 31^st July 2012 from the IPCC to Mr J Bamber).

This statement suggests that they are autonomous, self-reliant and unconstrained when they investigate complaints against serving police officers. But the IPCC have no powers to investigate the actions of retired police officers, which is why so many retire when they face an IPCC investigation. Quite why police officers should be granted immunity from investigation upon retirement is unknown. No other criminal is given immunity from investigation, even if they have been law abiding for twenty years. Even the Metropolitan police are currently looking to bring charges 27 years after the murder of PC Keith Blakelock in a remarkable turn of events since the original conviction of Silcott, Braithwaite and Raghip in 1987, which was overturned in 1991 when forensic tests suggested fabricated interview records. There is no statute of limitation for ordinary criminals, even if they have retired from a life of crime many years previously. Police officers on the other hand gain immunity from investigation as soon as they retire which effectively allows a serving police officer to act corruptly or negligently with impunity.

I believe that police officers should still be responsible for their actions upon their retirement. Under the current system the IPCC are the only organisation which can investigate the actions of serving police officers, but the IPCC doesn’t actually do this itself. They state, “our role is to forward your complaint to the relevant police authority........for them to consider (Ibid).

In the process of investigating how a miscarriage of justice has occurred, a large amount of documents are filtered through by the Defence and evidence accumulated, and a cyclic process then begins. For example in my case between 1991 and 2012, there have been over 100 complaints made against Essex police in relation to my case, 24 made during 1991 alone. Further complaints have been made in the past ten years including seventy nine in the last 18 months. On each occasion recently the IPCC have accepted the advice from Essex police not to discipline or prosecute any of the police officers that have had complaints lodged against them. On many occasions Essex Police have applied for a “dispensation” on grounds that my complaints were not lodged within 12 months of the alleged offence, which is tricky given that the complaints could only be made after disclosure was granted by the police themselves, many years after the date of the offence. Another excuse for “dispensation” has been that the officers have retired. In some cases the IPCC have waited for considerable periods with a complaint lodged and during this time the offending officer has retired.

The IPCC therefore have instructed Essex police officers to investigate themselves, which goes against the grain of being 'completely independent'. All police complaints are investigated within the same police authority, except on the rare occasion when the complaint is so serious as to warrant an investigation by police officers from a different authority.

It is quite possible that a police officer facing a complaint will be investigated by a colleague, a friend of a friend, or a friend of a family member. This is especially so in my case which involved over two hundred police officers from the Chelmsford area all being investigated by Chelmsford officers themselves. Therefore, police officers would potentially be able to discuss the nature of the complaint at their leisure. The public should not be surprised when their complaints are not upheld. Often evidence has been 'lost' or 'mislaid' making it impossible for an investigation to reach a conclusion.

The IPCC’s work is closely tied to other MOJ Departments including that of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC). I am sure that I am not the only person who has lodged complaints with the IPCC, and the progress of the complaint was deliberately stalled until the CCRC made an announcement, the defendant then finds that his or her complaints are dismissed very suddenly. These government departments are clearly dependent on one another for decision making. And yet the CCRC claim that their role is not to investigate the conduct of police officers and the IPCC maintain that they are not to be used as leverage to overturn a conviction.

This dimension is employed by the police to avoid having to investigate complaints, the IPCC say that the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has already investigated matters. In a letter from Charles Garbett, the Acting Chief Executive and Treasurer of the Essex Police Authority, dated 2^nd August 2012, he states: “the documents held by the Force in regard to your complaints were available to the CCRC and no issue has been raised by them in respect that the Force has not co-operated with them” (Letter dated 2^nd August 2012 from Charles Garbett to Jeremy Bamber).

The case documents total approximately three and a half million pages, three hundred and forty thousand of which are concealed behind a Public Interest Immunity certificate (PII). A good analogy would be: it’s as difficult as trying to find a single needle in a haystack. Firstly, the CCRC needed to be looking for the needle and my complaints have been made since my submissions to the CCRC, who therefore cannot possibly have looked amongst the documents for my specific complaints and secondly the CCRC may have had access to the 'haystack' but the fact that they didn't find the 'needle' doesn't mean that the 'needle' didn't exist!

The IPCC have been provided with two DVD's which contain all the documents and case photographs that the CCRC couldn't find, but which prove specific police complaints. The IPCC have now been given that 'needle' from the 'haystack', and I wonder what excuse will be given by Essex police for not investigating these current police complaints.

The public may believe that the IPCC actually police the police, but they do not. The police actually police themselves. Most of the time police complaints even fail to be investigated. When an investigation does occur they are rarely upheld as a police officer can avoid scrutiny by simply retiring. This loophole has been slightly tightened recently, but not made entirely obsolete. Retired police officers are still immune from an IPCC investigation.

Just as Juvenal wondered who is to 'Guard the Guards' themselves, it is likely that he would be equally dissatisfied with the actions of the IPCC, were they to be responsible for 'guarding the guards', just as the public are today with how the IPCC police our police, some two thousand years later.

Until police complaints are investigated by a truly independent organisation, corrupt or negligent police officers will continue to avoid being properly investigated. The Home Affairs Select Committee is due to report on the effectiveness of the IPCC in September 2012. It is to be hoped that this immunity for officers, whether they are in service or retired, becomes a thing of the past and equally it must be correct and lawful that all officers should be accountable for their misconduct. 

Jeremy Bamber: 'If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything'

The quote above by Mark Twain has been proven by Jeremy Bamber.  Jeremy has never once changed his story but it's worth taking note of the amount of times  PS Bews has changed his about who-saw-what in the window, and in the video at the end of this blog he seems to be saying it was 'Steve ...?'

Listen to Jeremy's interview with Eric Allison here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/audio/2011/jan/30/jeremy-bamber-murder-appeal-audio?popup=true

Jeremy is completely innocent of this crime as these statements show. Evidence suggests that Sheila Caffell was downstairs in the kitchen, she had possibly already shot herself once there, she fled upstairs where she was 'officially' found. The evidence below shows that Sheila appears to have moved from the kitchen to the bedroom.

White House Farm had three staircases, it seems very likely that Sheila was unconscious in the kitchen when the police broke into the house and they left her unattended. She then regained consciousness and went upstairs to the master bedroom where she shot herself and died.

You must be asking, how did Jeremy get blamed for the killings if the police knew Sheila was alive? Remember that the original Inspector on the case Taff Jones was adamant that Jeremy was innocent. He knew the truth, that the firearms team had bungled the raid on the house, they  probably had failed to notice that Sheila was still alive with one gunshot wound to the tissue in her neck (the pathologist confirmed in court that this first shot wouldn't have killed her and that she would have been able to walk around with this injury.)

The police then drafted in large numbers of officers for police training exercises where they used Sheila Caffell to practice taking the gun on and off of her body. This is shown in the photographs. This is the secret Essex police have tried to hide for 26 years in the name of British Justice. 

If the officers had realised she was still alive then maybe they could have saved her life. Sadly Taff Jones died in an accident at his home before the trial. His pocket book has never been released to the defence. Also remember that the original documents from the first case number (the murder/suicide) have been withheld from the defence.

The following is evidence which is presented in chronological order put together like this you see how clear and compelling the evidence is which shows that Jeremy is innocent without question.

Nevill’s Call to Police (3.26) and Jeremy's call to police (3.36) 

Jeremy has always maintained that his father called him to tell him that Sheila had a gun and he wanted him to come over. It has now been proven that Jeremy was telling the truth as his father DID call the police. The fact that the police failed to disclose both Jeremy and Nevill's call to them prevented Jeremy from getting a fair trial. The jury should have been made aware of both calls. Click here to read more

PC West's Statement regarding Jeremy's call (3.36) 

In his 8th August 1985 statement he says "I then spoke again to Mr Bamber and told him that a police car was attending his fathers address from Witham. I also asked him to attend and liase with police officers on his arrival, this he agreed to do" The car which had already been dispatched as a result of Nevill's call to the police was sent at 3.35 (CA07), PC West organised for a second car to be sent - (CA05) which was owing to Jeremy's call.


Bews, Myall & Jeremy see movement in the window (after 3.45am) 

When Jeremy and the police arrived at White House Farm they saw movement in the master bedroom. Below is an extract from PS Bews trial transcript:

Rivlin: "Do you remember at some stage early on, this happened that one of your Police Officers said that you thought you could see a shadow and you all jumped?"

Bews: "Yes, that is when we first went to the house with Mr Bamber. We had gone round what I thought was the back. We had seen the kitchen door with the light on. We then went into a field which is at the side of the farm house and went went round to where what is -   I believe is the front door and above that is a window. As we moved away I thought we saw something else move, a shadow, something like that. We looked up and after looking for a couple of minutes I was satisfied that it was a - - perhaps a part in the glass that just shone the light slightly as you looked at it."

Rivlin: "It could have been a trick of the light?"

Bews: "I think it was a trick of the light"

It has been stated in a recent interview by PS Bews that the movement was just 'the moon',  however, Saxby's police statement maintains that PS Bews along with PC Myall and Jeremy "came running back from the direction of the farmhouse and PS Bews contacted information room and requested armed assistance and gave a situation report".  Did Bews really call the firearms team out as a result of seeing a reflection of the moon?  During the 80's firearms teams would only have come out if the police were seriously threatened by armed persons. If this was a trick of the light - what light source caused it? It was still dark at this time and the moon was on the other side of the house. This was a lone house in a rural area there was no light from external sources. In addition Geoffrey Rivlin QC clearly did not question the witness properly, in this extract the Defence barrister is actually making the suggestion that the witness didn't see a shadow at all but a trick of the light. 

One of the key features of miscarriages of justice is often poor legal representation. PS Bews recently altered his story again for the ITV Tonight programme shown on the 29th of March 2012, he said in this version that Jeremy noticed the figure in the window. This implied that Jeremy was leading officers into thinking they saw something, however this has never been suggested in any of the case documents or at trial as you can see from the above transcript. We will leave you to draw your own conclusions about the movement in the window. ITV also misled viewers by suggesting that the firearms team were called out before they saw the figure in the window, which is incorrect.

PC Myall Major Incident Report (3:45am) 

Myall reported seeing an 'unidentified male' at this time which ties in with the figure moving in the master bedroom. At court this was dismissed as being a 'trick of the light'. Discrepancies between which rooms had lights on (between 4am and 7.34am). There were a number of contradictory reports from different officers stating which rooms were lit therefore suggesting that the lights in the house were on and off at different times which would be consistent with Sheila Caffell being alive in the house when the police were outside.

Message Log (5:25am) 

There is evidence to suggest the police having been in conversation with Sheila Caffell ‘Firearms team are in conversation with someone from inside the farm’.  It has been suggested this is referring to Jeremy Bamber, but he was referred to by his name or 'the son' and not as an unknown person. Nor was he 'inside the farm', in all instances ‘inside the farm’ was repeatedly used by the police to mean ‘inside the farmhouse’.

Statement of WPC Jeapes (after 7:30am) 

She says that she saw the rifle leaning up against the window frame of the tiny room between the master and the twins room which were connected by doors, this was between 7:30am and when she left the scene at 9am. How did this rifle move from the window to Sheila’s body if she had been killed by Jeremy Bamber before 3:30am as the prosecution stated? The same rifle was seen lying on her body by 8:30am and mysteriously at 10.20am the same gun was back in the window of the main bedroom where she was found. The police never made any reference to the gun in this small room, and there is not a single photograph of this room in the crime scene photographs which is very curious.

Statement of PC Brown (after 7am)

He also details what he believed to be a gun in the window of the small room off the master bedroom, supporting the evidence of WPC Jeapes. How could sightings by two firearms officers, who were located separately and both watching the house using the telescopic sight of a firearm be mistaken about seeing the gun in the window?

In his statement DI Cook said that the first time the rifle was moved from Sheila was 11:10am, the photographing started at 10:00am and finished at 10:50am. Statement of PC Hall (7:00 to 7:34)

Hall states that PC Collins “reported that he could see the body of who he thought was a woman in the kitchen” before the firearms team broke into the house. PC Hall also states later when they broke into the house "I immediately heard a noise upstairs and began to challenge up the stairs I was covering, I was calling to Sheila Bamber to make her whereabouts known to me."

Statement of APS Manners (after 6.45) 

Manners states that PC Collins looked into the kitchen through the window before they broke into the house and “reported seeing what he thought was the body of a female just inside the kitchen door.” Nevill Bamber was found to the centre of the room by the Aga.

Manners also states later when they went upstairs to the master bedroom that Sheila Caffell had blood ‘leaking from both corners of her mouth.’

There are also photographs of Sheila still bleeding at the scene and further pictures taken at the mortuary show even more blood had flowed from her mouth and nose and was widely spread onto her face.

Message Log (7:37) 

“One dead male and one dead female in Kitchen”

Message Log (7:40 am) 

“The police entered the premises and found 1 male dead and 1 female dead.” We also see at 8:10am on the same log, that the police found a further three bodies upstairs. This clearly contradicts the official line that they found one male downstairs and a further four bodies upstairs.

Extracts from DS Davidson’s pocketbook (7:45) 

He states that he was told it was ‘one murder and one suicide’ which suggests that there were only two bodies found at this point and that they were both in the kitchen together. (This would support the above Message Log (7:40 am). If the police had found one body downstairs at this point, why did they report a murder and suicide and not just one murder? We see that by 8.42am he was told it was 4 murders and a suicide.

It must also be noted that the firearms team did not search upstairs at the front of the house until after 7:55am.

PC Hall between 7:34 and 8:15am

One of the first officers in the house, part of the firearms group, said that he had heard a noise upstairs, and yet the noise was put down to another officer who was not directly above the room, he was in another room at the top of another staircase on the other side of the house, the raid team said they used stealth in their approach. He said: “I immediately heard a noise upstairs and began to challenge up the stairs I was covering, I was calling to Sheila Bamber to maker her whereabouts known to me.” Many of the raid team stated that they expected to find Sheila alive and armed.

Police Message Report (7:48) 

Request for the police surgeon to examine ‘two bodies’ at the scene – this suggests that the police had found Sheila and Nevill in the kitchen, and reported this before moving upstairs.

PC Wright (after 9am) 

“I believe that the gun had been removed from the body of Sheila when I saw her” he states. Officially the gun was not supposed to have been found lying on Sheila Caffell and was not removed until the photographing process had finished at 10.50am. In his statement DI Cook stated that the first time the rifle was moved from Sheila was 11:10am.

Statement of DS Jones (9:15 am) 

Sheila was mysteriously now in the bedroom, Jones describes her as having ‘blood running’ from her body – so we know that she can’t have been dead for very long, certainly not for seven hours or more.

DI Millar’s Pocketbook (9:30 am) 

On describing the scene in the master bedroom he states: “In same room far side of bed daughter with .22 rifle by her right side” And yet Sheila Caffell was supposedly found with the rifle lying on her body where it stayed until after the photographing process which started at 10:00am so how can this be.....?

....and that is just 'the tip of the iceberg' of what is proving to be the greatest miscarriage of justice in the UK. There are thousands more documents evidencing incompetence and corruption on every level...
More documents here: http://twitpic.com/photos/Bambertweets#type=gallery

For further information and to view evidence, offer support, or If you were one of the Police Officers on duty, or involved in this case, or maybe you were a colleague or family member or friend, and know something of the truth of what happened that night, please listen to your conscience and do the honourable thing.  Speak up. This could happen to you or one of yours.

Contact Jeremy's Campaign Team: http://www.jeremy-bamber.co.uk/home

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EDp_tqUysI&feature=player_embedded

'An injustice that won't go away' (Déjà vu Jeremy Bamber)

Attrib:TOM MANGOLD The Independent: Edited

 

 

SUNDAY 12 AUGUST 2012

On St Valentine's Day 1988 Lynette White, a Cardiff prostitute, was murdered by one of her clients, Jeffrey Gafoor, in a row over sex and money. He had repeatedly stabbed and almost decapitated her. The crime led to one of the biggest on-going scandals in British criminal history – "the largest scale of injustice in a single case", according to the eminent QC Lord Carlile. Keith Vaz MP, chairman of the powerful home affairs committee, says simply: "If this case had been written as a work of fiction, people would not believe it."

Two investigations, one by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) and one by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) into the judicial debacles that have continued to haunt the case for close on a quarter of a century, are due to conclude early next month.

The murder was investigated by the South Wales Police CID. Blood stains were found on the dead girl's clothing, and evidence pointed clearly to a single white male assailant. There were no outstanding complexities to the case beyond the inevitable problem of finding the killer, probably a random punter in Butetown, Cardiff's then seedy docklands area.

The CID team did everything by the book, including a BBC Crimewatch appeal for a lone white man.

Several dockland "characters" – prostitutes, pimps, small-time criminals, gays and drifters – were interviewed, but none could identify the killer. However, the detectives did come up with a prime suspect, dubbed Mr X. But DNA tests ruled him out and eight months after the murder, the team had got nowhere.

Then, on 19 October, Violet Perriam, a secretary at the local yacht club – a place where detectives who worked out of Butetown police station used to drink – told detectives she suddenly remembered having seen four black people outside the gloomy flat where Lynette had been murdered. A month later, she gave two names to detectives.

Within days, the direction of the investigation had been turned on its head. Gone was the single white male and, in his place, emerged five black and mixed-race Butetown locals, including Stephen Miller, Lynette's pimp/boyfriend. By 12 December, after a new fast-track investigation, the five men were charged.

The CPS gave the go-ahead even though the police had no forensic evidence, no weapon had been found, and no motive or opportunity established. Some of the five barely knew each other. The crown's evidence was heavily dependent on the alleged confession of Miller, and the alleged corroborating evidence of, among others, two prostitutes – Leanne Vilday and Angela Psaila – a couple of unemployed gay men and Ms Perriam. A further witness came forward later, a criminal already in prison hoping for parole, who claimed one of the accused had confessed to him while on remand.

On 22 November 1990, three of the accused (Stephen Miller, Tony Paris and Yusef Abdullahi) were found guilty, and two were acquitted.

In February 1992, the producer Toby Sculthorp and I investigated the case for Panorama and highlighted a string of inconsistencies that plagued the case. A media campaign followed, and on 10 December that year, the Court of Appeal quashed the Cardiff Three's convictions, and they walked free. It transpired that Miller had been mercilessly interviewed, shouted at and bullied by detectives during 19 sessions of questioning. He had denied involvement on 307 occasions, but eventually broke down under the remorseless pressure and "confessed", incriminating himself and the others.

Nevertheless, South Wales Police declined to reopen the case unless new evidence was obtained. However, advances in DNA profiling and continued media pressure led to a thorough and efficient re-investigation of the murder and the arrest of Jeffrey Gafoor, a security guard. He promptly admitted being the murderer, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment in July 2003.

This clearly left the South Wales Police and the CPS with a dilemma. How had their collection of evidence and witnesses against five wholly innocent men come about? What had led to the flaky prosecution and just how many witnesses and detectives may have lied on oath to secure the convictions ?

It might have been sensible to place this colossal can of worms into the hands of an independent, outside police force for the inevitable further criminal investigation. Instead, the IPCC, which was charged with allocating the inquiry, promptly invited South Wales Police to investigate itself, a baffling decision that may defy logic and common sense but was taken, I understand from a primary source, to "try to help restore the battered morale of the SWP".

This led first ,in February 2007, to three of the witnesses who had given evidence on oath against the innocent men being charged with perjury. They admitted lying, but somewhat revealingly the judge told them: "You were seriously hounded, bullied, threatened and abused and manipulated by the police during a period of several months … as a result you felt compelled to agree to false accounts suggested to you." They were each sentenced to 18 months.

The three witnesses and the five innocent men had one thing in common: they were humble people, they lived on the edge of the law as minor criminals, and were vulnerable to any intimidation by the police.

The evidence thus pointed towards the possibility of a miscarriage of justice perpetrated by detectives who may have perverted the course of justice to secure homicide convictions against innocent men.

A new investigation was begun by the South Wales Police. The officer in charge of this deeply complex and highly sensitive case was Detective Chief Superintendent Chris Coutts. His task included investigating Dick Powell, a senior officer who, according to a former police officer, had been DCS Coutts's colleague and superior. This potential conflict of interest appears to have been ignored.

South Wales Police refused to co-operate with Panorama both in 1992 and for tomorrow night's fresh examination. Not one retired officer involved in the case would talk publicly, nor would anyone from the CPS or the IPCC. Mr Coutts has retired and is writing a book on the affair. His publicity officer asked if we were prepared to pay for an interview with him.

Mr Coutts's thorough investigation eventually led to the arrest in March 2009 of 13 former police officers and two civilians, including Ms Perriam, whose initial testimony had changed the entire direction of the investigation. All were variously charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice or perjury. All pleaded not guilty.

An extremely long and detailed opening statement by Nick Dean QC for the prosecution laid out the case. He claimed the prosecution would show that Ms Perriam's new evidence "was lies" and that the story of the five men murdering Lynette White was "absolutely extraordinary … almost entirely a fabrication and was largely the product of the imagination and then the theories and beliefs of police officers".

Mr Dean's allegation was simple and devastating if true – a conspiracy to fit in evidence "so that it implicated those people the police had decided were guilty". In other words, Mr Dean claimed he would show that, in the absence of any firm evidence, the detectives created a murder scenario and then made witnesses and the men they charged fit snugly into the fiction. "The police had moved away from investigating a murder and were instead busy trying to implicate people in that murder – people who were actually completely innocent," Mr Dean told the jury.

Sadly, we never got to hear the prosecution's full case nor any of the defence. What happened next strains belief. There had been increasing problems over the vital business of monitoring and producing some of the one million documents connected to the case. Nearly £500,000, a special software system and two dedicated police officers had been set aside by the judge. Their sole function was to ensure there were no mistakes in this vital documentation process known as "disclosure".

But as it became obvious during the trial that document cock-ups were increasing, the judge decided to perform "an acid test", calling on the prosecution to produce some relevant files. The documents were not produced and a deeply embarrassed prosecution told the judge the documents had been destroyed without proper authorisation. The two disclosure police officers gave vague evidence of the documents having been destroyed, apparently on the orders of Mr Coutts himself.

At this stage, it might have been sensible for the Crown to have Mr Coutts confirm that he had indeed ordered the destruction of the documents. Instead, the hapless CPS decided to bow out of the case. The judge ended the trial there and then with formal verdicts of not guilty. The newly exonerated police officers left court punching the air.

A few weeks later, the missing documents turned up. Mr Coutts (in a comment for which he received no payment) told me if he had ordered the destruction of the documents they would have been destroyed.

Cock-up or conspiracy? I am inclined heavily to the former. This was one more demeaning episode in a 25-year-old scandal that just keeps on giving, and taking. Current cost to the taxpayer: somewhere around £30m. The IPCC has been busily investigating South Wales Police and itself for a report on its role in the myriad cock-ups, which it will publish next month. I understand the words "honest mistakes" will figure in the document.

The CPS is undergoing independent investigation. If the 13 accused Cardiff detectives had been found guilty, presumably all their previous cases – hundreds – would have had to be reopened and re-examined. Instead, they are now considering suing the South Wales Police.
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My opinion?
A cock-up may have initiated the farce but conspiracy is very evident in the cover-up. 
So what else is new?
Tricky Dicky; Mmm? I'm reminded of D.I Cook 'The Books' Vis-à-vis  Jeremy Bamber

'Justice Denied: The Greatest Scandal?' produced and directed by Toby Sculthorp will be shown on Panorama on BBC1 at 8.30pm Monday 13 August