Jeremy Bamber: Non Disclosure

After Jeremy Bamber’s failed appeal in 2001/2 judges ruled that Essex Police must provide Jeremy's legal team with certain evidence relating to his trial and conviction but which was not made available to his defence and of which the jury had not had sight .  Essex Police have continued to refuse to comply fully with the Court Orders and they have never been enforced.

In 2011 Jeremy Bamber’s campaign team unexpectedly came into possession of eighty boxes of evidence relating to the case.

On receipt of these boxes it was discovered that they contained literally thousands of pieces of undisclosed evidence.  Jeremy’s next appeal application was going to be in 2012 so it was impossible to review all of these documents and submit them to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) in time for that.

Over the intervening years the campaign team have read, scanned and saved these documents on a database.  Of extreme significance is that these boxes of evidence, over eighty in all, have HOLMES references which is a police database and refer to other documents which it is strongly believed will support Jeremy’s innocence but which have been removed from these files.  Some boxes are empty and according to referencing, twenty boxes are missing.  Previously, in 1996, despite a Court Order to the contrary, Special Branch authorised the destruction of the evidence found at the scene; these included Sheila Caffell's clothing amongst other items.

The Criminal Cases Review Commission, set up to investigate miscarriages of justice have the power to order Essex Police to comply with the Court Order but refuse to act further.

Jeremy Bamber is not asking to view everything, which is not permitted under Common Law anyway.  He his asking for specific items relating to the Court Orders. One example: there are several HOLMES references to Detective Kenneally’s report in which he concludes that all evidence points to Sheila Caffel shooting the family then herself but his actual report has been removed from the file.  The files include reports from social workers concerned about Sheila’s violence towards her twins as well as statements and names of foster carers with whom the twins had been placed previously.  Jeremy had told police that on the evening of the tragedies his parents had been discussing with Sheila the possibility of the twins spending further time with foster carers.  Police denied being in possession of any evidence supporting this.

Further reference to Sheila's health may be seen in her handwritten document which reads as a suicide letter and is believed to have been found by police on the 7^/8 August 1985 on the table in her bedroom at White House Farm.  A reference for it was entered in the exhibits list but the officer who seized it later failed to include any reference to it in his statement.  The letter then re-emerged and was documented as having been given to DCI ‘Taff’ Jones who strongly believed in Jeremy’s innocence but he was removed from his post and later died, bizarrely, after a fall from a step-ladder in his home.  Under the supervision of another senior officer the letter appears to have been filed away as ‘illegible’.

In addition, a more recent discovery taken from the Stokenchurch Enquiry carried out in 2002 reveals that at 06.09, whilst Jeremy was standing over two hundred hundred yards away from White House Farm in the company of several of the seventy three Police and Firearms Officers surrounding the house, a PC Milbank who was monitoring the line from inside the house, received a 999 call, after which ambulances were requested.  Other documents show that around half an hour previously police officers were in conversation with a person inside the house.  This document also states that PC Milbank was monitoring the line at the time of the murders. There is no evidence of PC Milbank making a statement and even his existence was withheld from the defence.  I am informed that PC Milbank has since been contacted by a journalist and confirms that he did receive the 999 call at that time.

The facts contained above must have be known by successive governments as a government minister had to review all case documents when placing them under PII before trial and at each appeal. One has to wonder what motivated a member of parliament to collude with non-disclosure in this way and in this particular case..  It is in the interest of justice for all that any cover-up and corruption be exposed.