Murders in England in 1985
The White House Farm murders took place near the village of Tolleshunt D'Arcy, Essex, England, during the night of 6–7 August 1985. Nevill and June Bamber were shot and killed inside their farmhouse at White House Farm along with their adopted daughter, Sheila Caffell, and Sheila's six-year-old twin sons, Daniel and Nicholas Caffell. The only surviving member of the immediate family was the adopted son, Jeremy Bamber, then aged 24, who said he had been at home a few miles away when the shooting took place.
Police initially believed that Sheila, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, had fired the shots before turning the gun on herself, but weeks after the murders, Jeremy's ex-girlfriend told police that he had implicated himself. The prosecution argued that, motivated by a large inheritance, Jeremy had shot the family with his father's semi-automatic rifle, then placed the gun in Sheila's hands to make the deaths look like a murder–suicide. A silencer, the prosecution said, was on the rifle and would have made it too long, they argued, for Sheila's fingers to reach the trigger to shoot herself. Jeremy was convicted of five counts of murder in October 1986 by a 10–2 majority verdict, sentenced to a minimum of twenty-five years, and informed in 1994 that he would never be released. The Court of Appeal upheld the verdict in 2002.
Jeremy protested his innocence throughout, although his extended family remained convinced of his guilt. Between 2004 and 2012, his lawyers submitted several unsuccessful applications to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, arguing that the silencer might not have been used during the killings, that the crime scene might have been damaged then reconstructed, that crime scene photographs were taken weeks after the murders and that the time of Sheila's death had been miscalculated.
A key issue was whether Jeremy had received a call from his father on the night of the murder to tell him Sheila had "gone berserk" with a gun. Jeremy said that he did, that he alerted police and that Sheila fired the final shot while he and the officers were standing outside the house. It became a central plank of the prosecution's case that the father had made no such call and that the only reason Jeremy would have lied about it — indeed, the only way he could have known about the shootings when he alerted the police — was that he was the killer himself.
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Bamber family.
June and Nevill Bamber.
Ralph Nevill Bamber (known as 'Nevill', born 8 June 1924) was a farmer, former Royal Air Force (RAF) pilot and magistrate at the local Witham magistrates' court. He and his wife, June (née Speakman, born 3 June 1924), had married in 1949 and moved into the Georgian White House Farm on Pages Lane, Tolleshunt D'Arcy, Essex, set among of tenant farmland that had belonged to June's father. The Court of Appeal described Nevill as "a well-built man, tall and in good physical health." This became significant because Jeremy's defence later suggested that Sheila, a slim woman aged 28, had been able to beat and subdue her father, something the prosecution contested.
Unable to have biological children, the Bambers adopted Sheila and Jeremy as infants; the children were not related to each other. June suffered from depression and had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital in the 1950s, including in 1958 after Sheila's adoption, where she was given electroshock therapy at least six times. In 1982 she was treated by Hugh Ferguson, a psychiatrist who later saw Sheila.
The Bambers were financially secure, owning property that included the farmhouse, a flat in London, 300 acres of land and a caravan site. The couple gave the children a good home and private education, but June was intensely religious and tried to force her children and grandchildren to adopt the same ideas. She had a poor relationship with Sheila, who felt June disapproved of her, and June's relationship with Jeremy was so troubled that he had apparently stopped speaking to her. Sheila's ex-husband was concerned about the effect June was having on his sons; she made them kneel and pray with her, which upset him and the boys.
Daniel and Nicholas Caffell.
Daniel and Nicholas Caffell (born 22 June 1979) were born to Sheila and Colin Caffell, who married in 1977 and divorced in 1982. Colin was an art student when he met Sheila. Both parents were involved in the children's upbringing after the divorce, although the boys were briefly placed in foster care in 1982–83 because of Sheila's health problems. For several months before the murders they had been living with Colin in his home in Kilburn, North London, not far from Sheila's residence in Maida Vale.
A week-long visit to White House Farm had been arranged for August 1985 at the Bambers' request; the plan was that the boys would visit their grandparents with Sheila before going on holiday to Norway with their father. Daniel and Nicholas were reluctant to stay at the farm. They disliked that June made them pray, and in the car on the way asked Colin to speak to her about it. In addition Daniel had become a vegetarian and was worried about being forced to eat meat. When their father dropped them off at the house on 4 August, it was the last time he saw them. The boys are buried together in Highgate Cemetery. Sheila was cremated, and the urn with her ashes was placed in their coffin.
Sheila Caffell.
Background.
Sheila Jean "Bambi" Caffell (born 18 July 1957) was born to the 18-year-old daughter of Eric Jay, a senior chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury. At his insistence, the baby was placed for adoption. Her mother gave Sheila up to the Church of England Children's Society two weeks after the birth, and the Bambers adopted her in October 1957. The chaplain had known Nevill in the RAF and selected the Bambers from a list of prospective adopters.
After school Sheila attended secretarial college in Swiss Cottage, London. In 1974, when she was aged 17, she discovered she was pregnant by Colin Caffell. The Bambers arranged an abortion. Her relationship with her mother deteriorated significantly that summer after June found Sheila and Colin sunbathing naked in a field. June reportedly started calling Sheila the "devil's child."
Sheila continued with her secretarial course, then trained as a hairdresser, and briefly worked as a model with the Lucie Clayton Charm Academy, including two months' work in Tokyo. After she became pregnant again, she married Colin at Chelmsford Register Office in May 1977, but miscarried in the sixth month. The Bambers bought the couple a garden flat in Carlingford Road, Hampstead, to help Sheila recuperate. Sheila suffered another miscarriage, then on 22 June 1979, after four months of bed rest in hospital, she gave birth to Daniel and Nicholas. Colin, apparently having begun an affair just before the birth, left Sheila for five months. Sheila became increasingly upset; on one occasion, when Colin left her 21st birthday party with another woman, she required hospital treatment after breaking a window with her fist. The couple divorced in May 1982.
After the divorce, Nevill bought Sheila a flat in Morshead Mansions, Maida Vale, and Colin helped raise the children from his home in nearby Kilburn. Sheila decided to trace her birth mother, then living in Canada. They met at Heathrow Airport in 1982 for a brief reunion, but a relationship did not develop. At around this time Sheila became friendly with a group of young women who nicknamed her "Bambi", and who later told reporters that she often complained about her poor relationship with her adoptive mother. The group partook in drugs, particularly cocaine, and fraternisations with older men. As her brief modelling career had ended after the birth of the boys, Sheila lived on welfare and took low-paying jobs, including as a waitress for one week at School Dinners, a London restaurant in which dinner was served by young women in school uniform, stockings and suspenders. There were also cleaning jobs and one episode of nude photography that she later regretted.
Health.
Sheila's mental health continued to decline, with episodes of banging her head against walls. In 1983 her family doctor referred her to Hugh Ferguson, the psychiatrist who had treated June. Ferguson said Sheila was in an agitated state, paranoid and psychotic. She was admitted to St Andrew's Hospital, a private psychiatric facility, where Ferguson diagnosed a schizoaffective disorder. After Sheila was discharged in September 1983, he continued seeing her as an out-patient and concluded that his first diagnosis had been mistaken. Ferguson now believed that she had schizophrenia and began treating her with trifluoperazine, an antipsychotic drug.
Ferguson wrote that Sheila believed the devil had given her the power to project evil onto others, and that she could make her sons have sex and cause violence with her. She called them the "devil's children", the phrase June had used of Sheila, and said she believed she was capable of murdering them or of getting them to kill others. She spoke about suicide, although the court heard that Ferguson did not regard her as a suicide risk.
Sheila was readmitted to St Andrew's in March 1985, five months before the murders, after a psychotic episode in which she believed herself to be in direct communication with God and that certain people, including her boyfriend, were trying to hurt or kill her. She was discharged four weeks later, and as an out-patient received a monthly injection of haloperidol, an antipsychotic drug that has a sedative effect. From that point, the twins lived all or most of the time with Colin in Kilburn. According to Jeremy, the family discussed placing the boys in daytime foster care over dinner on the night of the murders, with little response from Sheila.
Despite Sheila's erratic mental state, Ferguson told the court that the kind of violence necessary to commit the murders was not consistent with his view of her. In particular, he said he did not believe she would have killed her father or children, because her difficult relationship was confined to her mother. Colin said the same: that, despite her tendency to throw things and sometimes hit him, she had never harmed the children. June's sister, Pamela Boutflour, testified that Sheila was not a violent person and that she had never known her to use a gun; June's niece, Ann Eaton, told the court that Sheila did not know how to use one. Jeremy disputed this, telling police on the night of the shooting, as they stood outside the house, that he and Sheila had gone target shooting together. He acknowledged later that he had not seen her fire a gun as an adult.
Jeremy Bamber.
Jeremy Nevill Bamber was born on 13 January 1961 to a student midwife who, after an affair with a married British Army sergeant, gave her baby to the Church of England Children's Society when he was six weeks old. His biological parents later married and had other children; his father became a senior staff member in Buckingham Palace. The Bambers adopted Jeremy when he was six months old. They sent him to St Nicholas Primary, then along with Sheila to Maldon Court prep school. This was followed when he was aged 9, in September 1970, by Gresham's School, a boarding school in Holt, Norfolk, where he joined the cadet force. Jeremy was apparently unhappy at Gresham's because of bullying and other factors.
After leaving Gresham's with no qualifications, Jeremy attended sixth form college, and in 1978 achieved seven O-levels. Nevill paid for him to visit Australia, where he took a scuba-diving course, before travelling to New Zealand. Former friends alleged that Jeremy had broken into a jeweller's shop while in New Zealand and had stolen an expensive watch. He had also boasted, they said, of being involved in smuggling heroin. Jeremy returned to England in 1982 to work on his adoptive parents' farm for £170 a week, and set up home in a cottage Nevill owned at 9 Head Street, Goldhanger. The cottage lay 3–3.5 miles (5.6 km) from White House Farm, a five-minute drive by car and at least fifteen minutes by bicycle. Nevill also gave Jeremy a car to use, and eight percent of a family company, Osea Road Camp Sites Ltd, which ran the Bambers' caravan site.
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