Sunday, November 27, 2011
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
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Friday, April 22, 2011
Sheilas 'suicide'
I do not believe for one moment Sheila commited these crimes , it was Bamber, who is cold calculating, a liar and master manipulator.
Had Sheila killed her family and then herself it would not have concerned her to hide the silencer, why would she do this ?...and as you can see from the link suicides are hardly in a position to shoot themselves twice but Bamber and his 'groupies' would have us believe Sheila shot herself, hid the silencer ,which makes no sense whatsoever and shot herself again.
http://www.peopleforchange.net/index.php?showtopic=19128
Had Sheila killed her family and then herself it would not have concerned her to hide the silencer, why would she do this ?...and as you can see from the link suicides are hardly in a position to shoot themselves twice but Bamber and his 'groupies' would have us believe Sheila shot herself, hid the silencer ,which makes no sense whatsoever and shot herself again.
http://www.peopleforchange.net/index.php?showtopic=19128
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Jeremy Bamber - Guilty As Charged?
For the purposes of a prosecution, the decision concerning what account of events to accept is one to be decided, once and for all, by a magistrate or jury.
If the case later winds up in a higher court, it will generally be so that a point of law can be decided. Only in certain circumstances can a dispute over the facts form the basis for an appeal.
But the imagination of anyone with an interest in criminal law is easily captured by infamous past cases, particular those where someone has been convicted of serious offences against the person, but doubts have emerged as to their guilt.
Jeremy Bamber is one of 39 prisoners in British jails serving sentences that will keep them behind bars for the whole of their natural lives. He is the only one who protests his innocence.
Might Bamber really have served half his life in jail for a crime he did not commit?
_______________
Tuesday 6 August 1985, and the south Essex coast was cool for the time of year. Temperatures overnight dipped to 11 degrees and there were brief rain showers.
At approximately 03:30 the next morning, an officer at Chelmsford police station answered the phone to a young man identifying himself as Jeremy Bamber of Head Street, Goldhanger. The caller had dialled the station directly, instead of being patched through after ringing 999.
Bamber told PC Michael West that a few minutes earlier he’d been woken by the sound of his phone ringing. It was his father, calling from the family farm in Tolleshunt D’Arcy. “Please come over, Jeremy” Nevill Bamber had urged his adopted son, “you sister’s gone crazy and she’s got the gun”.
Sheila was Jeremy’s 28-year-old sister and the divorced mother of twin boys, custody of whom was principally in the hands of their father. She had been adopted by the Bambers a few a years before Jeremy (himself adopted) was born, and the two were not related by blood. A former model, she had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and spent time at St Andrew’s Hospital, Northampton.
Bamber wanted police to collect him on their way to White House Farm, but West urged him to make his own way there and rendezvous with officers who would be in attendance outside.
The constable then contacted Witham station, which was seven miles closer to Tolleshunt. At 03.35, patrol car CA7 was despatched from Witham. Although he lived just a few minutes drive from his parents’ property, Bamber was overtaken by the white Ford Sierra as it sped towards the village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy.
At 03.48 the three occupants – Sergeant Bews and PCs Myall and Saxby – reached Pages Lane, the private road leading to White House Farm. A few minutes later, Bamber arrived at the scene. The three officers were parked a short distance into the lane; Bamber pulled up behind them and left his silver Astra to speak with them. After identifying himself, he was asked to clarify what his father had managed to tell him before being abruptly cut off. The young man reiterated that Nevill, sounding very distressed, had asked him to come over at once because his sister Sheila had gone crazy and got hold of a gun. Sheila (whose married name of Caffell he couldn’t recall), was “a nutter” and recent psychiatric in-patient. As was to be expected, there were a number of guns on the farm, and Sheila was capable of handling them. Bamber told the officers that his mother June also lived at the house, and Sheila’s children, six year old Daniel and Nicholas, were staying on the farm.
Two adults and two children were therefore at the mercy of a mental patient wielding a firearm which she may or may not have discharged. The officers’ first step would be to approach with caution and make a visual assessment. Ideally, Nevill would now have control of the situation and would emerge from the farm house to greet them. The police could then decide whether Sheila needed medical assistance or should be taken into custody.
With Saxby remaining in the vehicle to monitor the radio, Bamber and the remaining officers walked down the lane together in the direction of the property. They stealthily approached the front door, at one point crouching behind a hedge in an effort to remain inconspicuous. It was nearing 04:00, but dawn would not break for another 90 minutes. At the right side of the house on the first floor was Jeremy’s parents’ bedroom. Lights were blazing here and in several other rooms.
Suddenly, there seemed to be movement upstairs. The trio retreated and a decision was made to summon the Tactical Firearms Group. As the group waited next to the patrol car, armed support was an hour away and several decisions had yet to be weighed up.
Accounts of what happened in the hours that followed have been revisited many times in the intervening quarter century. At his trial Bamber didn’t challenge the police timeline or account of events, but when he later gained access to additional material recounting the officers’ experiences that morning, he identified several statements and pieces of information that he claims help exonerate him from responsibility for the murders.
It is common ground that the firearms team entered the farm house shortly after half past seven and reported that everybody was dead.
More than three hours prior to this, Jeremy Bamber and the officers were at an impasse, and faced seeing out what was left of the night in a frustrating wait.
An additional patrol car arrived from Chelmsford, and British Telecom were asked to perform a check against phone number 0621 860209 (there were multiple handsets at the farm but only one line). The operator reported that the phone was off the hook. Sending a signal to clear the engaged tone, she was able to listen in to sounds inside the property, and told the police that the only thing audible was the sound of a barking dog (the Bambers’ Shih Tzu Crispy was later found cowering under their bed). The line could be monitored continuously from this point.
A radio operator was recording details of transmissions made by the officers using their CBs, and this later served to provide a running accounts of events.
The Tactical Firearms Group arrived close to 05:00, and, giving the farm house itself a wide berth, everyone repositioned themselves inside a barn at the rear, which allowed them to scan the back of the property and prepare their next move. With the sun due to rise in barely half an hour, the logical thing for the armed response team to do was to bide their time.
Shortly before 05.25, a challenge was issued using a loudhailer to anyone inside the property.
The wireless operator pre-empted events and recorded “Firearms team are in conversation with a person inside the farm”. However, the call to persons inside met only with silence. The wireless operator updated the log at 05.29 – “From CA7 – Challenge to persons inside house met with no response”
Additional firearms officers arrived at 06.45 and were greeted by Sergeant Bews. Fresh on the scene, PC Woodcock from the Firearms Training Department was told by his colleagues that a siege was underway and a young woman with mental health issues was presumed either to have killed everyone or to be holding them hostage. Whatever had taken place, there had been no response from anyone in the farm at any time, and because of this the group were preparing to force entry into the property.
Inspector Montgomery and Police Sergeant Adams put together the raid team, consisting of PCs Collins, Delgado, Woodcock, Hall, Alexander-Smart and acting Sergeant Manners. The team, working from a plan of the building sketched by Jeremy, divided the property into “White”, “Green” and “Black” zones. Woodcock was nominated to break down the rear door using a sledgehammer. Collins and Delgado lined up on one side of the door. To their right was the kitchen window. Collins peered inside and reported seeing the body of a woman.
The door gave way when Woodcock pounded it several times with the sledgehammer. As the armed officer led the others into the property, he turned into the kitchen and saw the same person witnessed by Collins, obviously dead. In fact it was not a woman but 61-year old Nevill Bamber. A chair was on its side to the left of an Aga oven, and Nevill’s corpse was sat awkwardly on one edge of the backrest. He was slumped forward with arms at his side and his head fully inside a silver-topped bucket – in fact a coal scuttle. Blood had run thickly down the sides of this hod. The body was facing the window Collins had looked through, and all that was visible of Nevill’s head was a dishevelled shock of grey hair. This was why Collins had mistaken farmer Bamber for an old woman.
With Collins having stated over his police radio that he’d seen a woman in the kitchen, and Woodcock now reporting the body of a man, the wireless operator made the following entry at 07.37:
“one dead male and one dead female in kitchen”.
The error was insignificant in itself, but when Bamber obtained a copy of the log in 2005, he quickly sought out anything that could be represented as an inconsistency and manipulated to support his claim that he’d been framed for the crime.
At this stage Hall was covering a set of steps that led upstairs from the kitchen, Manners covered the hallway and Alexander-Smart was also occupied in a monitoring capacity. An additional officer entered the premises, and Woodcock, Collins and Delgado made a brief excursion up yet another set of stairs leading from the kitchen, then descended again and flanked the main stairwell in readiness to move up to the first floor landing. Using an extending mirror, Collins could see a female body sprawled in the door of the front-facing main bedroom: this was Jeremy’s adoptive mother June.
The team mounted the stairs and entered the bedroom. The door in which June was lying opened to the right and there was a window over the front of the farm house to the left. Lying on the other side of the room with her feet protruding beyond the foot of the bed, Collins found the body of Sheila Caffell. There was a rifle on her chest and two bullet wounds to her neck.
Her six year old twin sons were found last – shot dead in their separate beds in what had once been Sheila’s bedroom. An officer later told the boys’ father Colin that when he entered the room he had thought the children were sleeping, and decided not to wake them until the terrible scenes beyond their room had been partly covered up.
Colin was never able to bring himself to view the bodies of his children, which left him to imagine their condition and the terrible scene. When he later sought reassurance from the police that the boys hadn’t suffered for any length of time, the officer may have stretched the truth in order to make the bereaved father feel better. However, it seems true to say that the boys were unaware of their fate until it had overcome them. One died sucking his thumb after being shot repeatedly in the back of the head.
Throughout this time the wireless operator was recording updates, with an entry roughly every five minutes. At 08.10 another anomaly appears in the log. Hearing that everybody was now accounted for – and deceased – and not yet aware that one person, rather than two, was dead in the kitchen, the operator totted up “three further bodies found upstairs”. Bamber has taken this discrepancy at face value and woven it into his own narrative of what may have taken place once police entered the building.
Reports of Bamber’s conduct after being informed of the deaths of his family indicate a mixture of apparent grief and curious indifference. He was outwardly devastated and uncomprehending. Later he appeared to vomit in a field off Pages Lane. But he would switch into callous indifference, and within two hours cooked and ate a substantial breakfast at his flat in the presence of Detective Sergeant Stan Jones. Colin Caffell later observed that Jeremy seemed to ape his own behaviour, copying his refusal to re-enter the farm house, as if he needed to take his cue from others as to what was expected of a grieving relative.
But however hard it is to understand, it isn’t Bamber’s behaviour following the tragedy for which he is in jail. Nor can anyone mandate how a person should respond to grief and shock.
To begin with, police were not looking for anyone in connection with the deaths. Sheila, everyone concluded, had experienced a psychotic episode, murdered her family and taken her own life.
The case against Bamber
But within weeks Jeremy Bamber would appear at Chelmsford Crown Court charged with five murders.
The case against Bamber hinged on three things:
- Bamber’s girlfriend Julie Mugford remained Jeremy’s confident for a month after the event, but later became the key prosecution witness and testified that she had known all along that he was guilty.
- Bamber had backed himself into a corner by claiming to have received the call from his father. It wasn’t possible in the mid-1980s for BT to tell what calls had been placed when, so there was no evidence to support or disprove his claim. But if Nevill hadn’t telephoned, there was no way Jeremy could have known about the murders unless he’d been somehow involved. If the call had happened, Bamber had no reason to lie about its contents, and Nevill’s statement that Sheila had gone crazy with a gun. Therefore the only possible culprits were Sheila or himself – and forensic evidence suggested Sheila didn’t do it.
- A silencer designed for the Anschutz was recovered from a gun cupboard in the days following the massacre. Just visible inside was dried blood matching Sheila’s blood type. The silencer, which was also contaminated with red paint that matched scratches on the mantle shelf above the Aga, was discovered by Bamber’s relatives when they visited White House Farm with the specific intent of gathering evidence to substantiate their suspicions of Jeremy. As it was not on the gun found on top of Sheila, it was plainly not used by her to commit suicide, in which case, how did her blood get in there?
Bamber had spent years telling anyone who would listen exactly what he thought of his family. His father was ready to be put out to pasture. His mother was insane, having spent time in a psychiatric hospital herself for illnesses expressed as religious mania. Sheila, of course, was barking mad. And the children were bound to have been screwed up by their troubled upbringing.
Despite this, if Bamber’s antics after the deaths hadn’t been so impossible for those around him to understand, he might never have come under real suspicion for the murders.
The ease with which Bamber accepted his loss and began selling off the farm house’s contents alienated his cousins David Boutflour and Ann Eaton, and their parents. Detective Sergeant Stan Jones, who spent a great deal of time in Bamber’s company, suspected him of involvement in the massacre after just one day day, when he and Julie disappeared upstairs in his cottage at Goldhanger. Jones thought he could hear Jeremy laughing, and Julie later confirmed that Bamber had been in self-satisfied form that morning, telling her, “I should have been an actor”. By any account, Bamber lived it up after the deaths of his family, and spent a great deal of time partying with friends and preparing to disperse his parents’ property. Meanwhile, he attempted to sell the press topless photos of Sheila uncovered at her Maida Vale flat, and didn’t even attend the memorial service for his family held on the Sunday following the killings.
The funeral of the Bambers and Sheila (the boys were buried in London) was a different matter – here Jeremy got to play the bereaved son in full view of the world’s media. With his apparent inability to judge appropriate behaviour in the circumstances, he laid on an excessively theatrical display, complete with a well-timed collapse as the cortège left the church and came into view of press photographers.
Doubts emerge amongst the Bambers’ relatives
As facts about the events at White House Farm began to leak out, Bamber’s relatives arrived at the conclusion that Sheila couldn’t have been responsible for the massacre. The 28-year-old mother of two may have grown up on a farm but was not used to handling firearms. At a stretch, the Boutflours could imagine her loosing off .22 bullets from a single shot rifle, but the Anschutz used to kill everyone was semi automatic. Her ex-husband would add that the effects of anti-psychotic drug haloperidol had made her uncoordinated and clumsy. Loading and reloading the 10 bullet-magazine and still managing to hit the target 25 times out of 26 shots was not a feat they could realistically attribute to her, even in the grip of a presumed psychotic frenzy. Certainly, they reasoned, she would not have been found with her manicured fingernails intact and almost no traces of residue on her nightdress and hands.
Living in close proximity to weaponry doesn’t make a person into a firearms expert. June had lived at White House Farm for decades, but her brother recalls her referring to magazine cartridges as “the thingy” that slots in the gun. Interestingly, this was during a conversation in which June asked Robert Boutflour his opinion of an incident she witnessed in the weeks leading up to the murders, in which Jeremy had tried to get Sheila to load bullets into “the thingy”.
Robert recalls that his first thought, at a time when no-one could have imagined what would transpire, was “he’s obviously trying to get her fingerprints all over the magazine”. He hadn’t shared this thought with June at the time, instead merely asking her “She didn’t do it, did she?” (the answer was “No”).
This sort of hearsay evidence could scarcely form the basis of a successful prosecution. But past events of this kind helped bring Bamber’s relatives, and in turn the police, to a tipping point at which Jeremy’s involvement in the deaths began to cross over from ominous possibility to seeming likelihood.
Jeremy was known to his relatives as a ruthless operator obsessed with obtaining money. Since he’d returned from various overseas jaunts and settled into a job on the farm, he’d complained bitterly about being paid a labourer’s wage, comparing Nevill and June’s treatment of him unfavourably with Sheila’s subsidised existence in Maida Vale (Bamber enjoyed much in the way of subsidy himself – he lived rent free in the Goldhanger cottage and had access to a car and as much free petrol as he wanted). At a meeting to discuss dealing with trespassers at a family-owned caravan site in which he held an 8% share, Jeremy had shocked his Uncle Bobby with the observation “I’d have no trouble killing anyone. I could easily kill my own parents”. (Bamber later admitted robbing the premises in March 1985, stealing nearly £1,000 from a safe).
The picture acquired from detailed accounts of Bamber’s lifestyle and behaviour combines with a great deal of circumstantial evidence to create an inference of guilt greater than the sum of its parts. Of course, that is not a satisfactory standard of proof for the purposes of a criminal conviction.
The confession of Julie Mugford
But the most powerful evidence pointing to Bamber’s culpability is the confession of Julie Mugford. Contemporary commentators and the crown court judge made the point that Mugford’s sum testimony had “the ring of truth about it”. Her story of life in the month after the murders is a convincing tale of a person’s conscience unravelling due to the burden of carrying a great and terrible secret.
Why did Bamber confide in Julie? By every account, Jeremy was prone to verbal incontinence regarding the ins and outs of his personal life, and was particularly fond of hard luck stories about the raw deal meted out to him by his parents. He had no compunction sharing with all and sundry thoughts about the awfulness of his family, and the obstacle they presented to his overwhelming desire for money and status. He had been telling Julie Mugford for so long how he intended to put them all out of their misery (at one time he considered drugging the family and then setting fire to the farm house), that she had long since dismissed it as idle talk. She thought little of what he told her on the phone on the evening of 6 August: “it’s now or never”. She even dismissed Bamber’s 3AM phone call to tell her that everything was going well. It therefore came as a catastrophic shock to her when Bamber called again at around 8am, this time from a phone box in Tolleshunt, to tell her that everyone at White House Farm was dead. Later, wishing to put some distance in Julie’s mind between the man she knew and loved and the savage who had meted out such brutality in the farm house, Bamber invented a proxy in the form of a hit man, and told his girlfriend that this person had carried out the killings for £2,000 (the man he named was proven to be alibi). Throughout this period, Bamber remained confident that Mugford was sufficiently under his spell as to represent no threat to him, regardless of what she knew.
As the weeks passed, Julie moved from disbelief to fear, partly perhaps for herself and the responsibility she bore for failing to turn Bamber in on day one. But when Jeremy took her into the bedroom at Bourtree cottage and laughed that his façade was fooling the police so effectively, he little knew that at that very moment seeds of doubt were being sown in the mind of DS Stan Jones, waiting quietly downstairs.
Julie’s already fractious relationship with Bamber was torn apart by the insanity of August 1985. With his family cremated and Jeremy the beneficiary of almost the entire estate, grandiose plans were made and promises broken, played out to a soundtrack of drink and drug induced oblivion.
Just as Mugford broke, confessing to close friends and readying herself to approach the police, Sergeant Jones had nearly finished pulling together his own case against Bamber. Had Julie not visited the police station in September, the detective would in any case have pulled her in for questioning.
Bamber convicted … just
At Bamber’s trial, the jury were divided, and found the defendant guilty by a 10-2 majority. As sentence was passed, two female jurors wept.
Before reaching a verdict, the jury had asked for clarification concerning the blood in the silencer. They needed to be sure that it was Sheila’s – forensic evidence was plainly needed to put the matter of Bamber’s guilt beyond reasonable doubt in their minds.
In fact, the silencer is problematic as a piece of evidence. It was discovered not by the police, but by relatives with a financial interest in preventing him from securing his inheritance. Evidence provided by DNA testing would be used to catch a criminal in Britain for the first time only 12 months later. But at the time of the White House Farm murder, biological profiling techniques were little different from those employed during the war: distinguishing between blood groups was the summit of the forensic evidence that could be obtained. Procedures at Huntingdon lab were in any case starkly criticised in later years, and some authorities came to the view that no results produced around that time can be considered reliable.
In February 1996, Essex police took the bizarre decision, in contravention of their own guidelines, to destroy the outstanding forensic evidence relating to the case: therefore all we will ever know about the blood found in the silencer is that it could have been Sheila’s, and could not have been either Nevill’s or June’s alone, although there was a remote possibility it was a mixture from that of both. This was important as the latter possibility would not have excluded Sheila being responsible for the deaths and then returning the silencer to the cupboard before taking her own life, albeit that this would seem hard to fathom.
Bamber’s own views regarding the silencer stretch into the realms of conspiracy. He claims it was not necessarily used in any of the shootings. The scenario he prefers is one which weaves every anomaly in the police record into a (barely) coherent narrative in which Sheila, responsible for the deaths of the other four people in the house, doesn’t take her own life until the police are actually inside the farmhouse. Subsequent to this, Bamber’s cousins pounce upon the opportunity provided by his crass conduct to put him in the frame for murder, and go about fabricating evidence to support this assertion.
From the point of view of the defence, any inconsistency or error in the thousands of documents that make up the case file can potentially be exploited to undermine the prosecuting authorities and sow doubt in the minds of people unfamiliar with the facts.
A call from Nevill Bamber?
Approaching the evidence chronologically, Bamber first takes issue with police reports of his telephone call to Chelmsford station.
After speaking to Bamber, PC West contacted his colleague Malcolm Bonnett in the Chelmsford HQ Information Room. There was also contact with an officer at Witham police station, which is halfway between Chelmsford and Tolleshunt. Bonnett wrote up a memo headed “daughter gone bezerk”, in which he paraphrases what Nevill is supposed to have told Jeremy about Sheila having “got hold of one of my guns”, and adds “Information passed to CD [control at Chelmsford] by Mr Bamber’s son”, confirming that Bonnett’s source was Jeremy Bamber via PC West.
West times Bamber’s own call from Goldhanger to Chelmsford Control at 03.36, whereas the other memo times West’s conversation with Bonnett in the Information Room at 03.26, so at least once timing is inaccurate. But Bamber concludes that the timing is bang on: his suggestion is that the other officer didn’t get his information from West, but from no less a person than Nevill Bamber. The officer, Jeremy maintains, must have taken an emergency call from the 61-year-old farmer and noted Nevill’s words as he’d spoken them.
Aware that a problem existed reconciling the order in which calls between the parties were placed and the time at which they were said to have happened, the Crown liaised with Bonnett. He confirmed that he’d spoken to West at 03.26, passing on the information received from Jeremy Bamber moments beforehand. Later he filled out an official Document Record to this effect.
At no time had he heard from Nevill Bamber or anyone else in connection with the incident at White House Farm. Presumably then, West had misread the clock when he filled out his call log, or just mistakenly wrote 03.36 instead of 03.26.
At 03.35, patrol car CA7 was dispatched to attend the scene from Witham, and Chelmsford directed CA5 to attend at 03.36. Overlooking the fact that the police were co-ordinating their response across relevant parts of the county, Bamber’s supporters also ask why the Essex constabulary should send a car from each station unless the police were responding separately to different reports?
There is something darkly comic about the image of Nevill Bamber, under a hale of bullets, leafing through the phone book to get hold of the number for Witham station instead of dialling 999.
Plainly, there is little for Bamber’s defence team to get their teeth into here, but that hasn’t stopped them promoting the risible scenario of a call from Nevill to Witham police station. Earlier this summer the mainstream press picked up on the story: the Mail and Mirror were among papers reporting it on 5 August as a dramatic new find that had the potential to clear the supposed killer.
These papers uncritically reported that all along, documented proof seems to have existed that police had heard about Sheila’s rampage not only via Jeremy but directly from Nevill. If this information was correct, Jeremy’s account was vindicated and he could not possibly be guilty of the murders.
It’s worth considering the implications of the defence’s claim. If it were true, several members of the Essex constabulary would have been aware of the existence of a call from Nevill on the morning of the murders. When officers began to suspect the son of involvement and started poking around for discrepancies in Jeremy’s story, they would quickly have turned up accounts of Nevill’s call, snuffing out any doubts they had about Sheila’s culpability.
In these circumstances, police would only have continued to pursue Bamber for the murders if they were intentionally attempting to frame him.
In fact, Bamber maintains that this is exactly what happened, although he casts the net much wider to take in his relatives as well as the Essex constabulary.
Bamber’s legal team must be aware that claims about Nevill telephoning police withstand no scrutiny. Perhaps their strategy is to keep throwing anything at all to the papers, the better to build a groundswell of feeling that their client is the victim of a miscarriage of justice.
The long retired Stan Jones recently told the Essex Chronicle that Bamber "consistently presents material which has already been discussed and adjudicated on in court and appeal hearings”, manipulating its supposed meaning to support his claim to be wrongly convicted.
Discrepancies in the wireless log
But other evidence adduced by Bamber is, at least, more substantive than the call report.
He has claimed that officers were in conversation at 05.25 with a person inside the farm, which is what a strict reading of the wireless log would appear to suggest. The implication from Bamber is that officers were trying to reason with a very much alive Sheila. If this was really the case, Jeremy was plainly alibi when Sheila met her death.
What’s curious is that although Jeremy was present at the time, he never suggested that officers were speaking to his sister until years later when he obtained the wireless log. It’s inconceivable that officers at the scene would not have updated him to this effect at any time that morning, particularly since they may have sought his involvement in any attempt to “talk Sheila down”. When Bamber was finally charged with the murders, why didn’t he tell the police incredulously that officers must know of his innocence, as some of them had spoken to Sheila while she was alive and when Jeremy’s whereabouts were well accounted for? The defence team never raised any such objection, then or in the years which followed, until one sentence in a log written up by an operator miles away seemed to throw up an inconsistency which could be exploited.
Bamber also maintains that at 07.30 PC Collins did see a female in the kitchen: a dazed Sheila, having self-inflicted the first of two wounds (and one which pathologists accept would not have killed her outright), who is roused by the sound of Woodcock smashing down the main door and flees upstairs to her parents’ bedroom.
By this account, she delivered the second, fatal wound as the police prepared to move upstairs. The officers heard no rapport from a rifle. But Bamber has no difficulty concluding that they covered up the truth or were leaned upon to do so.
In support of this theory, Bamber’s supporters adduce that photographs taken circa 09.00 show fresh blood running from Sheila’s wounds, and note that the gun on her body changes position between post-mortem photographs.
But there are prosaic explanations for this. The officers did interfere slightly with Sheila’s corpse: by their own account, the rifle was removed from her body and then returned when photographs were taken in order to represent the condition in which she was found. A bible belonging to June, which was discovered at Sheila’s waist, appears at the level of her shoulder in the photographs.
At the farm that morning, police had no difficulty accepting that Sheila had carried out the murders and taken her own life. This is what they had been primed to believe by Jeremy Bamber. They didn’t think there was any need to preserve the scene beyond what was necessary for the purposes of an open and shut coroner’s investigation. Nor were scene of crime procedures anything like as fastidious in 1985 as they are today.
There have been claims that rigor mortis is visible in photographs of Nevill, June and the twins, and that those of Sheila Caffell show no rigor or lividity. This claim does not seem ever to have been adduced by a medical professional rather than a layperson.
A consistent feature of objections to the Crown case is that they rest upon arguments from personal incredulity. Surely the blood on Sheila’s neck couldn’t look as “fresh” as it does in the photographs if she’d been dead for at least six hours?
Well, yes, it could. Officers observed that wet blood had pooled in the crook of Sheila’s right arm. Congealed blood had also formed in the aperture of the lower neck wound. One possibility is that when Sheila was moved by officers at the scene, this plug became detached, and allowed blood accumulated within Sheila’s neck, viscous but not yet congealed, to run thickly beyond the entrance of the wound.
Sheila could certainly not have shot herself once in the kitchen and once upstairs: the photographs show no blood down the front of her pale blue nightdress. The blood that has run from the two wounds flows at an angle down the mother of two’s neck and along her right arm, with a patch spreading onto her right bosom. If she was on her feet for anything more than a moment after receiving the initial shot, blood would have run vertically down her sternum.
Bamber passes a polygraph with flying colours
In 2007, Jeremy Bamber convincingly passed a lie detector test conducted by Terry Mullins, an expert in the field. Asked a series of twelve questions including “Did you shoot your family on 7 August 1985?”, “Did you hide a rifle silencer in a cupboard after shooting your family?” and “Did PC Berry radio in a report of seeing someone in an upstairs window around 4am on the morning of the shooting?”, Bamber gave answers that indicated his innocence and affirmed the sighting, and no indices of deception were apparent in the results recorded by the polygraph.
But despite its notoriety as a ruthless instrument of detection, the polygraph test has almost no credibility within the scientific community. The ability of such a device to accurately assess the truthfulness of answers is in reality little better than chance, relegating the science of polygraphy to the level of astrology and tarot cards. What’s more, the technique is particularly ineffective when applied to individuals with antisocial/psychopathic personality disorders, tendencies which are often displayed by people who kill deliberately. Gary Ridgway, the man convicted on the basis of DNA evidence (and later his own confession) as Utah’s Green River killer, passed a polygraph with flying colours at an early stage of the investigation. Conversely, Bill Wegerle, an innocent man, failed two separate tests after coming under suspicion of the murders.
Mystery of the missing scratches
Probably the most potent post-trial evidence the defence can summon is found in the conclusions of forensic image analyst Peter Sutherst, who was asked to examine photographs of surfaces above the Aga in the farm kitchen, where Nevill lost his life after what seems to have been a fierce struggle with the killer.
The silencer found by David Boutflour, which provided a key element of the case against Bamber, was not contaminated only with blood. The knurled end from which the bullets emerge was embedded with red paint made up of nine coats, exactly matching that on the surface above the Aga where scratches were found and photographed. The jury, or at least ten of them, believed the Crown’s contention that these marks were made when the gun, with sound moderator fitted, was flung about during a tussle between Nevill and his adopted son.
Arranging photographs of the scene chronologically in his cell, Bamber realised that he couldn’t make out the scratches in the first photographs which show most of the room: they were visible only in the close up pictures taken more than a month later, after police were alerted to their existence. The defence team also suggest that flakes of the bright red paint which were scratched out of the wall ought to be visible on the carpet in the first photograph.
It’s perfectly true that no such flakes are visible to the naked eye, and also that scratches to the paintwork cannot be made out in photographs showing greater portions of the kitchen.
To my mind, the marks ought not to be apparent in these photographs since they were made to the underside of the mantelshelf, which is simply not visible in the broader shots. However, I wouldn’t presume to argue with an expert on the topic.
This claim certainly has implications for the safety of Bamber’s conviction. Unlike disputes over what was scribbled in a wireless message log, the photographs have the potential to falsify evidence relied upon by the prosecution.
It is important to bear in mind, however, that if the marks were made at a later date, this does not exonerate Bamber. What it would suggest is that one or other party was determined to shore up the evidence against him.
However, since the jury were asked to rely upon the scratches as proof that the red paint on the silencer had got there on the night of the murders, the Court of Appeal would have no choice but to quash Bamber’s conviction if they now found reason to think that the evidence was planted. Whether they will have the opportunity to make that decision depends upon the outcome of the CCRC’s latest review of the evidence. The Commission is due to report its findings at any time. If Bamber gets a third appeal, he will be the first convicted murderer to do so.
Bamber waits for yet another day in court
The defence make various other claims concerning the reliability of police evidence, almost none of which bear any scrutiny. Sometimes, competing possibilities are floated that wildly contradict each other (Bamber himself has recently raised the possibility of an unidentified killer, a person who, if he is innocent, he must know cannot exist, since his father is supposed to have told him alone that the person going crazy with a gun was Sheila). On the evidence of the post-trial objections raised by Bamber’s various defence teams over the years, he and his representatives have tended to value quantity over quality when it comes to protesting Jeremy’s innocence.
The prosecution case, however, was supported by reams of additional evidence as to how Jeremy carried out his crime.
It remains true that there is no “smoking gun” in the Bamber case. But I for one was drawn to the story of White House Farm by fears a miscarriage of justice had taken place, and instead found myself resolutely convinced of the defendant’s guilt.
Some people have suggested it’s a coincidence too far that a sometimes deranged young woman who believed her relatives possessed by demons was visiting the farm when the murders were carried out. It isn’t a coincidence at all – it is the very reason Bamber choose that evening to carry out his plan, and why he thought he’d get away with it. Things went broadly in line with the young man’s expectations that night, but there was more than one hiccup. Nevill refused to give up without a fight, and Bamber must have blanched at realising a second shot was needed to finish off Sheila. Suicide victims don’t often shoot themselves twice through the head.
Bamber gave little of his feelings away when 10 of 12 jurors found the 25-year-old guilty following a potent summation by Judge Drake. At times, the cracks have shown. When in August 1992 the Police Complaints Authority dismissed his concerns over the way the original investigation was handled by Essex Constabulary, he joined five other inmates in Franklin, Durham in wrecking their cells and pasting the words “Free Bamber he is innocent” in excrement on the walls.
For the most part though, Bamber patiently waits. As his own correspondence illustrates, he exists in a state of limbo in which he continually believes freedom to be a matter of weeks away.
Elated after receiving the results of his 2007 polygraph test, Bamber told the Daily Mirror “I didn’t do it, I couldn’t have done it, I wouldn’t have done it.”
But he could have done it, seemingly would have done it and very probably did do it. Nevertheless, if the CCRC accepts that his latest submissions cast any doubt on the safety of his 1986 conviction, this fact may not be enough to keep him behind bars.
http://crimeheartsandcoronets.blogspot.com/2010/11/jeremy-bamber-guilty-as-charged.html
If the case later winds up in a higher court, it will generally be so that a point of law can be decided. Only in certain circumstances can a dispute over the facts form the basis for an appeal.
But the imagination of anyone with an interest in criminal law is easily captured by infamous past cases, particular those where someone has been convicted of serious offences against the person, but doubts have emerged as to their guilt.
Jeremy Bamber is one of 39 prisoners in British jails serving sentences that will keep them behind bars for the whole of their natural lives. He is the only one who protests his innocence.
Might Bamber really have served half his life in jail for a crime he did not commit?
_______________
Tuesday 6 August 1985, and the south Essex coast was cool for the time of year. Temperatures overnight dipped to 11 degrees and there were brief rain showers.
At approximately 03:30 the next morning, an officer at Chelmsford police station answered the phone to a young man identifying himself as Jeremy Bamber of Head Street, Goldhanger. The caller had dialled the station directly, instead of being patched through after ringing 999.
Bamber told PC Michael West that a few minutes earlier he’d been woken by the sound of his phone ringing. It was his father, calling from the family farm in Tolleshunt D’Arcy. “Please come over, Jeremy” Nevill Bamber had urged his adopted son, “you sister’s gone crazy and she’s got the gun”.
Sheila was Jeremy’s 28-year-old sister and the divorced mother of twin boys, custody of whom was principally in the hands of their father. She had been adopted by the Bambers a few a years before Jeremy (himself adopted) was born, and the two were not related by blood. A former model, she had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and spent time at St Andrew’s Hospital, Northampton.
Bamber wanted police to collect him on their way to White House Farm, but West urged him to make his own way there and rendezvous with officers who would be in attendance outside.
The constable then contacted Witham station, which was seven miles closer to Tolleshunt. At 03.35, patrol car CA7 was despatched from Witham. Although he lived just a few minutes drive from his parents’ property, Bamber was overtaken by the white Ford Sierra as it sped towards the village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy.
At 03.48 the three occupants – Sergeant Bews and PCs Myall and Saxby – reached Pages Lane, the private road leading to White House Farm. A few minutes later, Bamber arrived at the scene. The three officers were parked a short distance into the lane; Bamber pulled up behind them and left his silver Astra to speak with them. After identifying himself, he was asked to clarify what his father had managed to tell him before being abruptly cut off. The young man reiterated that Nevill, sounding very distressed, had asked him to come over at once because his sister Sheila had gone crazy and got hold of a gun. Sheila (whose married name of Caffell he couldn’t recall), was “a nutter” and recent psychiatric in-patient. As was to be expected, there were a number of guns on the farm, and Sheila was capable of handling them. Bamber told the officers that his mother June also lived at the house, and Sheila’s children, six year old Daniel and Nicholas, were staying on the farm.
Two adults and two children were therefore at the mercy of a mental patient wielding a firearm which she may or may not have discharged. The officers’ first step would be to approach with caution and make a visual assessment. Ideally, Nevill would now have control of the situation and would emerge from the farm house to greet them. The police could then decide whether Sheila needed medical assistance or should be taken into custody.
With Saxby remaining in the vehicle to monitor the radio, Bamber and the remaining officers walked down the lane together in the direction of the property. They stealthily approached the front door, at one point crouching behind a hedge in an effort to remain inconspicuous. It was nearing 04:00, but dawn would not break for another 90 minutes. At the right side of the house on the first floor was Jeremy’s parents’ bedroom. Lights were blazing here and in several other rooms.
Suddenly, there seemed to be movement upstairs. The trio retreated and a decision was made to summon the Tactical Firearms Group. As the group waited next to the patrol car, armed support was an hour away and several decisions had yet to be weighed up.
Accounts of what happened in the hours that followed have been revisited many times in the intervening quarter century. At his trial Bamber didn’t challenge the police timeline or account of events, but when he later gained access to additional material recounting the officers’ experiences that morning, he identified several statements and pieces of information that he claims help exonerate him from responsibility for the murders.
It is common ground that the firearms team entered the farm house shortly after half past seven and reported that everybody was dead.
More than three hours prior to this, Jeremy Bamber and the officers were at an impasse, and faced seeing out what was left of the night in a frustrating wait.
An additional patrol car arrived from Chelmsford, and British Telecom were asked to perform a check against phone number 0621 860209 (there were multiple handsets at the farm but only one line). The operator reported that the phone was off the hook. Sending a signal to clear the engaged tone, she was able to listen in to sounds inside the property, and told the police that the only thing audible was the sound of a barking dog (the Bambers’ Shih Tzu Crispy was later found cowering under their bed). The line could be monitored continuously from this point.
A radio operator was recording details of transmissions made by the officers using their CBs, and this later served to provide a running accounts of events.
The Tactical Firearms Group arrived close to 05:00, and, giving the farm house itself a wide berth, everyone repositioned themselves inside a barn at the rear, which allowed them to scan the back of the property and prepare their next move. With the sun due to rise in barely half an hour, the logical thing for the armed response team to do was to bide their time.
Shortly before 05.25, a challenge was issued using a loudhailer to anyone inside the property.
The wireless operator pre-empted events and recorded “Firearms team are in conversation with a person inside the farm”. However, the call to persons inside met only with silence. The wireless operator updated the log at 05.29 – “From CA7 – Challenge to persons inside house met with no response”
Additional firearms officers arrived at 06.45 and were greeted by Sergeant Bews. Fresh on the scene, PC Woodcock from the Firearms Training Department was told by his colleagues that a siege was underway and a young woman with mental health issues was presumed either to have killed everyone or to be holding them hostage. Whatever had taken place, there had been no response from anyone in the farm at any time, and because of this the group were preparing to force entry into the property.
Inspector Montgomery and Police Sergeant Adams put together the raid team, consisting of PCs Collins, Delgado, Woodcock, Hall, Alexander-Smart and acting Sergeant Manners. The team, working from a plan of the building sketched by Jeremy, divided the property into “White”, “Green” and “Black” zones. Woodcock was nominated to break down the rear door using a sledgehammer. Collins and Delgado lined up on one side of the door. To their right was the kitchen window. Collins peered inside and reported seeing the body of a woman.
The door gave way when Woodcock pounded it several times with the sledgehammer. As the armed officer led the others into the property, he turned into the kitchen and saw the same person witnessed by Collins, obviously dead. In fact it was not a woman but 61-year old Nevill Bamber. A chair was on its side to the left of an Aga oven, and Nevill’s corpse was sat awkwardly on one edge of the backrest. He was slumped forward with arms at his side and his head fully inside a silver-topped bucket – in fact a coal scuttle. Blood had run thickly down the sides of this hod. The body was facing the window Collins had looked through, and all that was visible of Nevill’s head was a dishevelled shock of grey hair. This was why Collins had mistaken farmer Bamber for an old woman.
With Collins having stated over his police radio that he’d seen a woman in the kitchen, and Woodcock now reporting the body of a man, the wireless operator made the following entry at 07.37:
“one dead male and one dead female in kitchen”.
The error was insignificant in itself, but when Bamber obtained a copy of the log in 2005, he quickly sought out anything that could be represented as an inconsistency and manipulated to support his claim that he’d been framed for the crime.
At this stage Hall was covering a set of steps that led upstairs from the kitchen, Manners covered the hallway and Alexander-Smart was also occupied in a monitoring capacity. An additional officer entered the premises, and Woodcock, Collins and Delgado made a brief excursion up yet another set of stairs leading from the kitchen, then descended again and flanked the main stairwell in readiness to move up to the first floor landing. Using an extending mirror, Collins could see a female body sprawled in the door of the front-facing main bedroom: this was Jeremy’s adoptive mother June.
The team mounted the stairs and entered the bedroom. The door in which June was lying opened to the right and there was a window over the front of the farm house to the left. Lying on the other side of the room with her feet protruding beyond the foot of the bed, Collins found the body of Sheila Caffell. There was a rifle on her chest and two bullet wounds to her neck.
Her six year old twin sons were found last – shot dead in their separate beds in what had once been Sheila’s bedroom. An officer later told the boys’ father Colin that when he entered the room he had thought the children were sleeping, and decided not to wake them until the terrible scenes beyond their room had been partly covered up.
Colin was never able to bring himself to view the bodies of his children, which left him to imagine their condition and the terrible scene. When he later sought reassurance from the police that the boys hadn’t suffered for any length of time, the officer may have stretched the truth in order to make the bereaved father feel better. However, it seems true to say that the boys were unaware of their fate until it had overcome them. One died sucking his thumb after being shot repeatedly in the back of the head.
Throughout this time the wireless operator was recording updates, with an entry roughly every five minutes. At 08.10 another anomaly appears in the log. Hearing that everybody was now accounted for – and deceased – and not yet aware that one person, rather than two, was dead in the kitchen, the operator totted up “three further bodies found upstairs”. Bamber has taken this discrepancy at face value and woven it into his own narrative of what may have taken place once police entered the building.
Reports of Bamber’s conduct after being informed of the deaths of his family indicate a mixture of apparent grief and curious indifference. He was outwardly devastated and uncomprehending. Later he appeared to vomit in a field off Pages Lane. But he would switch into callous indifference, and within two hours cooked and ate a substantial breakfast at his flat in the presence of Detective Sergeant Stan Jones. Colin Caffell later observed that Jeremy seemed to ape his own behaviour, copying his refusal to re-enter the farm house, as if he needed to take his cue from others as to what was expected of a grieving relative.
But however hard it is to understand, it isn’t Bamber’s behaviour following the tragedy for which he is in jail. Nor can anyone mandate how a person should respond to grief and shock.
To begin with, police were not looking for anyone in connection with the deaths. Sheila, everyone concluded, had experienced a psychotic episode, murdered her family and taken her own life.
The case against Bamber
But within weeks Jeremy Bamber would appear at Chelmsford Crown Court charged with five murders.
The case against Bamber hinged on three things:
- Bamber’s girlfriend Julie Mugford remained Jeremy’s confident for a month after the event, but later became the key prosecution witness and testified that she had known all along that he was guilty.
- Bamber had backed himself into a corner by claiming to have received the call from his father. It wasn’t possible in the mid-1980s for BT to tell what calls had been placed when, so there was no evidence to support or disprove his claim. But if Nevill hadn’t telephoned, there was no way Jeremy could have known about the murders unless he’d been somehow involved. If the call had happened, Bamber had no reason to lie about its contents, and Nevill’s statement that Sheila had gone crazy with a gun. Therefore the only possible culprits were Sheila or himself – and forensic evidence suggested Sheila didn’t do it.
- A silencer designed for the Anschutz was recovered from a gun cupboard in the days following the massacre. Just visible inside was dried blood matching Sheila’s blood type. The silencer, which was also contaminated with red paint that matched scratches on the mantle shelf above the Aga, was discovered by Bamber’s relatives when they visited White House Farm with the specific intent of gathering evidence to substantiate their suspicions of Jeremy. As it was not on the gun found on top of Sheila, it was plainly not used by her to commit suicide, in which case, how did her blood get in there?
Bamber had spent years telling anyone who would listen exactly what he thought of his family. His father was ready to be put out to pasture. His mother was insane, having spent time in a psychiatric hospital herself for illnesses expressed as religious mania. Sheila, of course, was barking mad. And the children were bound to have been screwed up by their troubled upbringing.
Despite this, if Bamber’s antics after the deaths hadn’t been so impossible for those around him to understand, he might never have come under real suspicion for the murders.
The ease with which Bamber accepted his loss and began selling off the farm house’s contents alienated his cousins David Boutflour and Ann Eaton, and their parents. Detective Sergeant Stan Jones, who spent a great deal of time in Bamber’s company, suspected him of involvement in the massacre after just one day day, when he and Julie disappeared upstairs in his cottage at Goldhanger. Jones thought he could hear Jeremy laughing, and Julie later confirmed that Bamber had been in self-satisfied form that morning, telling her, “I should have been an actor”. By any account, Bamber lived it up after the deaths of his family, and spent a great deal of time partying with friends and preparing to disperse his parents’ property. Meanwhile, he attempted to sell the press topless photos of Sheila uncovered at her Maida Vale flat, and didn’t even attend the memorial service for his family held on the Sunday following the killings.
The funeral of the Bambers and Sheila (the boys were buried in London) was a different matter – here Jeremy got to play the bereaved son in full view of the world’s media. With his apparent inability to judge appropriate behaviour in the circumstances, he laid on an excessively theatrical display, complete with a well-timed collapse as the cortège left the church and came into view of press photographers.
Doubts emerge amongst the Bambers’ relatives
As facts about the events at White House Farm began to leak out, Bamber’s relatives arrived at the conclusion that Sheila couldn’t have been responsible for the massacre. The 28-year-old mother of two may have grown up on a farm but was not used to handling firearms. At a stretch, the Boutflours could imagine her loosing off .22 bullets from a single shot rifle, but the Anschutz used to kill everyone was semi automatic. Her ex-husband would add that the effects of anti-psychotic drug haloperidol had made her uncoordinated and clumsy. Loading and reloading the 10 bullet-magazine and still managing to hit the target 25 times out of 26 shots was not a feat they could realistically attribute to her, even in the grip of a presumed psychotic frenzy. Certainly, they reasoned, she would not have been found with her manicured fingernails intact and almost no traces of residue on her nightdress and hands.
Living in close proximity to weaponry doesn’t make a person into a firearms expert. June had lived at White House Farm for decades, but her brother recalls her referring to magazine cartridges as “the thingy” that slots in the gun. Interestingly, this was during a conversation in which June asked Robert Boutflour his opinion of an incident she witnessed in the weeks leading up to the murders, in which Jeremy had tried to get Sheila to load bullets into “the thingy”.
Robert recalls that his first thought, at a time when no-one could have imagined what would transpire, was “he’s obviously trying to get her fingerprints all over the magazine”. He hadn’t shared this thought with June at the time, instead merely asking her “She didn’t do it, did she?” (the answer was “No”).
This sort of hearsay evidence could scarcely form the basis of a successful prosecution. But past events of this kind helped bring Bamber’s relatives, and in turn the police, to a tipping point at which Jeremy’s involvement in the deaths began to cross over from ominous possibility to seeming likelihood.
Jeremy was known to his relatives as a ruthless operator obsessed with obtaining money. Since he’d returned from various overseas jaunts and settled into a job on the farm, he’d complained bitterly about being paid a labourer’s wage, comparing Nevill and June’s treatment of him unfavourably with Sheila’s subsidised existence in Maida Vale (Bamber enjoyed much in the way of subsidy himself – he lived rent free in the Goldhanger cottage and had access to a car and as much free petrol as he wanted). At a meeting to discuss dealing with trespassers at a family-owned caravan site in which he held an 8% share, Jeremy had shocked his Uncle Bobby with the observation “I’d have no trouble killing anyone. I could easily kill my own parents”. (Bamber later admitted robbing the premises in March 1985, stealing nearly £1,000 from a safe).
The picture acquired from detailed accounts of Bamber’s lifestyle and behaviour combines with a great deal of circumstantial evidence to create an inference of guilt greater than the sum of its parts. Of course, that is not a satisfactory standard of proof for the purposes of a criminal conviction.
The confession of Julie Mugford
But the most powerful evidence pointing to Bamber’s culpability is the confession of Julie Mugford. Contemporary commentators and the crown court judge made the point that Mugford’s sum testimony had “the ring of truth about it”. Her story of life in the month after the murders is a convincing tale of a person’s conscience unravelling due to the burden of carrying a great and terrible secret.
Why did Bamber confide in Julie? By every account, Jeremy was prone to verbal incontinence regarding the ins and outs of his personal life, and was particularly fond of hard luck stories about the raw deal meted out to him by his parents. He had no compunction sharing with all and sundry thoughts about the awfulness of his family, and the obstacle they presented to his overwhelming desire for money and status. He had been telling Julie Mugford for so long how he intended to put them all out of their misery (at one time he considered drugging the family and then setting fire to the farm house), that she had long since dismissed it as idle talk. She thought little of what he told her on the phone on the evening of 6 August: “it’s now or never”. She even dismissed Bamber’s 3AM phone call to tell her that everything was going well. It therefore came as a catastrophic shock to her when Bamber called again at around 8am, this time from a phone box in Tolleshunt, to tell her that everyone at White House Farm was dead. Later, wishing to put some distance in Julie’s mind between the man she knew and loved and the savage who had meted out such brutality in the farm house, Bamber invented a proxy in the form of a hit man, and told his girlfriend that this person had carried out the killings for £2,000 (the man he named was proven to be alibi). Throughout this period, Bamber remained confident that Mugford was sufficiently under his spell as to represent no threat to him, regardless of what she knew.
As the weeks passed, Julie moved from disbelief to fear, partly perhaps for herself and the responsibility she bore for failing to turn Bamber in on day one. But when Jeremy took her into the bedroom at Bourtree cottage and laughed that his façade was fooling the police so effectively, he little knew that at that very moment seeds of doubt were being sown in the mind of DS Stan Jones, waiting quietly downstairs.
Julie’s already fractious relationship with Bamber was torn apart by the insanity of August 1985. With his family cremated and Jeremy the beneficiary of almost the entire estate, grandiose plans were made and promises broken, played out to a soundtrack of drink and drug induced oblivion.
Just as Mugford broke, confessing to close friends and readying herself to approach the police, Sergeant Jones had nearly finished pulling together his own case against Bamber. Had Julie not visited the police station in September, the detective would in any case have pulled her in for questioning.
Bamber convicted … just
At Bamber’s trial, the jury were divided, and found the defendant guilty by a 10-2 majority. As sentence was passed, two female jurors wept.
Before reaching a verdict, the jury had asked for clarification concerning the blood in the silencer. They needed to be sure that it was Sheila’s – forensic evidence was plainly needed to put the matter of Bamber’s guilt beyond reasonable doubt in their minds.
In fact, the silencer is problematic as a piece of evidence. It was discovered not by the police, but by relatives with a financial interest in preventing him from securing his inheritance. Evidence provided by DNA testing would be used to catch a criminal in Britain for the first time only 12 months later. But at the time of the White House Farm murder, biological profiling techniques were little different from those employed during the war: distinguishing between blood groups was the summit of the forensic evidence that could be obtained. Procedures at Huntingdon lab were in any case starkly criticised in later years, and some authorities came to the view that no results produced around that time can be considered reliable.
In February 1996, Essex police took the bizarre decision, in contravention of their own guidelines, to destroy the outstanding forensic evidence relating to the case: therefore all we will ever know about the blood found in the silencer is that it could have been Sheila’s, and could not have been either Nevill’s or June’s alone, although there was a remote possibility it was a mixture from that of both. This was important as the latter possibility would not have excluded Sheila being responsible for the deaths and then returning the silencer to the cupboard before taking her own life, albeit that this would seem hard to fathom.
Bamber’s own views regarding the silencer stretch into the realms of conspiracy. He claims it was not necessarily used in any of the shootings. The scenario he prefers is one which weaves every anomaly in the police record into a (barely) coherent narrative in which Sheila, responsible for the deaths of the other four people in the house, doesn’t take her own life until the police are actually inside the farmhouse. Subsequent to this, Bamber’s cousins pounce upon the opportunity provided by his crass conduct to put him in the frame for murder, and go about fabricating evidence to support this assertion.
From the point of view of the defence, any inconsistency or error in the thousands of documents that make up the case file can potentially be exploited to undermine the prosecuting authorities and sow doubt in the minds of people unfamiliar with the facts.
A call from Nevill Bamber?
Approaching the evidence chronologically, Bamber first takes issue with police reports of his telephone call to Chelmsford station.
After speaking to Bamber, PC West contacted his colleague Malcolm Bonnett in the Chelmsford HQ Information Room. There was also contact with an officer at Witham police station, which is halfway between Chelmsford and Tolleshunt. Bonnett wrote up a memo headed “daughter gone bezerk”, in which he paraphrases what Nevill is supposed to have told Jeremy about Sheila having “got hold of one of my guns”, and adds “Information passed to CD [control at Chelmsford] by Mr Bamber’s son”, confirming that Bonnett’s source was Jeremy Bamber via PC West.
West times Bamber’s own call from Goldhanger to Chelmsford Control at 03.36, whereas the other memo times West’s conversation with Bonnett in the Information Room at 03.26, so at least once timing is inaccurate. But Bamber concludes that the timing is bang on: his suggestion is that the other officer didn’t get his information from West, but from no less a person than Nevill Bamber. The officer, Jeremy maintains, must have taken an emergency call from the 61-year-old farmer and noted Nevill’s words as he’d spoken them.
Aware that a problem existed reconciling the order in which calls between the parties were placed and the time at which they were said to have happened, the Crown liaised with Bonnett. He confirmed that he’d spoken to West at 03.26, passing on the information received from Jeremy Bamber moments beforehand. Later he filled out an official Document Record to this effect.
At no time had he heard from Nevill Bamber or anyone else in connection with the incident at White House Farm. Presumably then, West had misread the clock when he filled out his call log, or just mistakenly wrote 03.36 instead of 03.26.
At 03.35, patrol car CA7 was dispatched to attend the scene from Witham, and Chelmsford directed CA5 to attend at 03.36. Overlooking the fact that the police were co-ordinating their response across relevant parts of the county, Bamber’s supporters also ask why the Essex constabulary should send a car from each station unless the police were responding separately to different reports?
There is something darkly comic about the image of Nevill Bamber, under a hale of bullets, leafing through the phone book to get hold of the number for Witham station instead of dialling 999.
Plainly, there is little for Bamber’s defence team to get their teeth into here, but that hasn’t stopped them promoting the risible scenario of a call from Nevill to Witham police station. Earlier this summer the mainstream press picked up on the story: the Mail and Mirror were among papers reporting it on 5 August as a dramatic new find that had the potential to clear the supposed killer.
These papers uncritically reported that all along, documented proof seems to have existed that police had heard about Sheila’s rampage not only via Jeremy but directly from Nevill. If this information was correct, Jeremy’s account was vindicated and he could not possibly be guilty of the murders.
It’s worth considering the implications of the defence’s claim. If it were true, several members of the Essex constabulary would have been aware of the existence of a call from Nevill on the morning of the murders. When officers began to suspect the son of involvement and started poking around for discrepancies in Jeremy’s story, they would quickly have turned up accounts of Nevill’s call, snuffing out any doubts they had about Sheila’s culpability.
In these circumstances, police would only have continued to pursue Bamber for the murders if they were intentionally attempting to frame him.
In fact, Bamber maintains that this is exactly what happened, although he casts the net much wider to take in his relatives as well as the Essex constabulary.
Bamber’s legal team must be aware that claims about Nevill telephoning police withstand no scrutiny. Perhaps their strategy is to keep throwing anything at all to the papers, the better to build a groundswell of feeling that their client is the victim of a miscarriage of justice.
The long retired Stan Jones recently told the Essex Chronicle that Bamber "consistently presents material which has already been discussed and adjudicated on in court and appeal hearings”, manipulating its supposed meaning to support his claim to be wrongly convicted.
Discrepancies in the wireless log
But other evidence adduced by Bamber is, at least, more substantive than the call report.
He has claimed that officers were in conversation at 05.25 with a person inside the farm, which is what a strict reading of the wireless log would appear to suggest. The implication from Bamber is that officers were trying to reason with a very much alive Sheila. If this was really the case, Jeremy was plainly alibi when Sheila met her death.
What’s curious is that although Jeremy was present at the time, he never suggested that officers were speaking to his sister until years later when he obtained the wireless log. It’s inconceivable that officers at the scene would not have updated him to this effect at any time that morning, particularly since they may have sought his involvement in any attempt to “talk Sheila down”. When Bamber was finally charged with the murders, why didn’t he tell the police incredulously that officers must know of his innocence, as some of them had spoken to Sheila while she was alive and when Jeremy’s whereabouts were well accounted for? The defence team never raised any such objection, then or in the years which followed, until one sentence in a log written up by an operator miles away seemed to throw up an inconsistency which could be exploited.
Bamber also maintains that at 07.30 PC Collins did see a female in the kitchen: a dazed Sheila, having self-inflicted the first of two wounds (and one which pathologists accept would not have killed her outright), who is roused by the sound of Woodcock smashing down the main door and flees upstairs to her parents’ bedroom.
By this account, she delivered the second, fatal wound as the police prepared to move upstairs. The officers heard no rapport from a rifle. But Bamber has no difficulty concluding that they covered up the truth or were leaned upon to do so.
In support of this theory, Bamber’s supporters adduce that photographs taken circa 09.00 show fresh blood running from Sheila’s wounds, and note that the gun on her body changes position between post-mortem photographs.
But there are prosaic explanations for this. The officers did interfere slightly with Sheila’s corpse: by their own account, the rifle was removed from her body and then returned when photographs were taken in order to represent the condition in which she was found. A bible belonging to June, which was discovered at Sheila’s waist, appears at the level of her shoulder in the photographs.
At the farm that morning, police had no difficulty accepting that Sheila had carried out the murders and taken her own life. This is what they had been primed to believe by Jeremy Bamber. They didn’t think there was any need to preserve the scene beyond what was necessary for the purposes of an open and shut coroner’s investigation. Nor were scene of crime procedures anything like as fastidious in 1985 as they are today.
There have been claims that rigor mortis is visible in photographs of Nevill, June and the twins, and that those of Sheila Caffell show no rigor or lividity. This claim does not seem ever to have been adduced by a medical professional rather than a layperson.
A consistent feature of objections to the Crown case is that they rest upon arguments from personal incredulity. Surely the blood on Sheila’s neck couldn’t look as “fresh” as it does in the photographs if she’d been dead for at least six hours?
Well, yes, it could. Officers observed that wet blood had pooled in the crook of Sheila’s right arm. Congealed blood had also formed in the aperture of the lower neck wound. One possibility is that when Sheila was moved by officers at the scene, this plug became detached, and allowed blood accumulated within Sheila’s neck, viscous but not yet congealed, to run thickly beyond the entrance of the wound.
Sheila could certainly not have shot herself once in the kitchen and once upstairs: the photographs show no blood down the front of her pale blue nightdress. The blood that has run from the two wounds flows at an angle down the mother of two’s neck and along her right arm, with a patch spreading onto her right bosom. If she was on her feet for anything more than a moment after receiving the initial shot, blood would have run vertically down her sternum.
Bamber passes a polygraph with flying colours
In 2007, Jeremy Bamber convincingly passed a lie detector test conducted by Terry Mullins, an expert in the field. Asked a series of twelve questions including “Did you shoot your family on 7 August 1985?”, “Did you hide a rifle silencer in a cupboard after shooting your family?” and “Did PC Berry radio in a report of seeing someone in an upstairs window around 4am on the morning of the shooting?”, Bamber gave answers that indicated his innocence and affirmed the sighting, and no indices of deception were apparent in the results recorded by the polygraph.
But despite its notoriety as a ruthless instrument of detection, the polygraph test has almost no credibility within the scientific community. The ability of such a device to accurately assess the truthfulness of answers is in reality little better than chance, relegating the science of polygraphy to the level of astrology and tarot cards. What’s more, the technique is particularly ineffective when applied to individuals with antisocial/psychopathic personality disorders, tendencies which are often displayed by people who kill deliberately. Gary Ridgway, the man convicted on the basis of DNA evidence (and later his own confession) as Utah’s Green River killer, passed a polygraph with flying colours at an early stage of the investigation. Conversely, Bill Wegerle, an innocent man, failed two separate tests after coming under suspicion of the murders.
Mystery of the missing scratches
Probably the most potent post-trial evidence the defence can summon is found in the conclusions of forensic image analyst Peter Sutherst, who was asked to examine photographs of surfaces above the Aga in the farm kitchen, where Nevill lost his life after what seems to have been a fierce struggle with the killer.
The silencer found by David Boutflour, which provided a key element of the case against Bamber, was not contaminated only with blood. The knurled end from which the bullets emerge was embedded with red paint made up of nine coats, exactly matching that on the surface above the Aga where scratches were found and photographed. The jury, or at least ten of them, believed the Crown’s contention that these marks were made when the gun, with sound moderator fitted, was flung about during a tussle between Nevill and his adopted son.
Arranging photographs of the scene chronologically in his cell, Bamber realised that he couldn’t make out the scratches in the first photographs which show most of the room: they were visible only in the close up pictures taken more than a month later, after police were alerted to their existence. The defence team also suggest that flakes of the bright red paint which were scratched out of the wall ought to be visible on the carpet in the first photograph.
It’s perfectly true that no such flakes are visible to the naked eye, and also that scratches to the paintwork cannot be made out in photographs showing greater portions of the kitchen.
To my mind, the marks ought not to be apparent in these photographs since they were made to the underside of the mantelshelf, which is simply not visible in the broader shots. However, I wouldn’t presume to argue with an expert on the topic.
This claim certainly has implications for the safety of Bamber’s conviction. Unlike disputes over what was scribbled in a wireless message log, the photographs have the potential to falsify evidence relied upon by the prosecution.
It is important to bear in mind, however, that if the marks were made at a later date, this does not exonerate Bamber. What it would suggest is that one or other party was determined to shore up the evidence against him.
However, since the jury were asked to rely upon the scratches as proof that the red paint on the silencer had got there on the night of the murders, the Court of Appeal would have no choice but to quash Bamber’s conviction if they now found reason to think that the evidence was planted. Whether they will have the opportunity to make that decision depends upon the outcome of the CCRC’s latest review of the evidence. The Commission is due to report its findings at any time. If Bamber gets a third appeal, he will be the first convicted murderer to do so.
Bamber waits for yet another day in court
The defence make various other claims concerning the reliability of police evidence, almost none of which bear any scrutiny. Sometimes, competing possibilities are floated that wildly contradict each other (Bamber himself has recently raised the possibility of an unidentified killer, a person who, if he is innocent, he must know cannot exist, since his father is supposed to have told him alone that the person going crazy with a gun was Sheila). On the evidence of the post-trial objections raised by Bamber’s various defence teams over the years, he and his representatives have tended to value quantity over quality when it comes to protesting Jeremy’s innocence.
The prosecution case, however, was supported by reams of additional evidence as to how Jeremy carried out his crime.
It remains true that there is no “smoking gun” in the Bamber case. But I for one was drawn to the story of White House Farm by fears a miscarriage of justice had taken place, and instead found myself resolutely convinced of the defendant’s guilt.
Some people have suggested it’s a coincidence too far that a sometimes deranged young woman who believed her relatives possessed by demons was visiting the farm when the murders were carried out. It isn’t a coincidence at all – it is the very reason Bamber choose that evening to carry out his plan, and why he thought he’d get away with it. Things went broadly in line with the young man’s expectations that night, but there was more than one hiccup. Nevill refused to give up without a fight, and Bamber must have blanched at realising a second shot was needed to finish off Sheila. Suicide victims don’t often shoot themselves twice through the head.
Bamber gave little of his feelings away when 10 of 12 jurors found the 25-year-old guilty following a potent summation by Judge Drake. At times, the cracks have shown. When in August 1992 the Police Complaints Authority dismissed his concerns over the way the original investigation was handled by Essex Constabulary, he joined five other inmates in Franklin, Durham in wrecking their cells and pasting the words “Free Bamber he is innocent” in excrement on the walls.
For the most part though, Bamber patiently waits. As his own correspondence illustrates, he exists in a state of limbo in which he continually believes freedom to be a matter of weeks away.
Elated after receiving the results of his 2007 polygraph test, Bamber told the Daily Mirror “I didn’t do it, I couldn’t have done it, I wouldn’t have done it.”
But he could have done it, seemingly would have done it and very probably did do it. Nevertheless, if the CCRC accepts that his latest submissions cast any doubt on the safety of his 1986 conviction, this fact may not be enough to keep him behind bars.
http://crimeheartsandcoronets.blogspot.com/2010/11/jeremy-bamber-guilty-as-charged.html
Julie Mugford by Mike Tesco
Julie MUGFORDS claim that she went to the police station voluntarily is not true..
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She did not simply decide on the morning of 7th September 1985, that she was going to go to the police station, and yet this is what she and the police and supporters of Bambers guilt, are expecting us to believe and accept..
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Lets look at the true explanation of what took place and why [u][b]Julie MUGFORD [/b][/u]and her friend [u][b]Liz Rimmington[/b][/u], ended up being taken to the police station by non other than [u][b]Detective Sergeant Stanley Brian JONES[/b][/u]..
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JONES was the one who says he took the silencer to the police station on 12th August 1985 and he was also involved in helping to persuade Julie MUGFORD to give the evidence she gave, which was ultimately used to support the prosecution of Jeremy Bamber for the murders..
-------------------------------
Lets look at how the police were notified in order for DS JONES to abandon his planned night out on the town with his wife and drive all the way to Colchester to meet Liz Rimmington and Julie MUGFORD at Rimmingtons home address?
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First of all, why was MUGFORD at Rimmingtons home address?
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Well, the fact of the matter is that MUGFORD had gone there to confront her friend Liz about a relationship she had recently had with Jeremy, and whilst there, she confided in her, that Jeremy had ditched her, and MUGFORD needed a shoulder to cry on..
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MUGFORD and Rimmington discussed their personal problems and talk started to get around to the subject of the shootings which had taken place at WHF.
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In recent weeks MUGFORD and BAMBER had had many fall outs and on one occasion Bamber almost lost his temper and according to MUGFORD he restrained himself from hitting her. She says that the reason he stopped short of attacking her on that occasion was because she threatened to tell the police about what they had done (not the murders as claimed by MUGFORD, but the burglary at Osea Road Camp Sight and the cheque book frauds that she and her friend Susan Battersby had committed)..
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MUGFORD had already been to see her partner in crime, Susan BATTERSBY and obviously discussed the possibility that she may have to tell the police about what they had been doing..
-------------------------
MUGFORD was later to tell the police that she had purchased some Jeans for Jeremy at the time of the checkbook offences and this is what MUGFORD was refferring to when she spoke to Liz Rimmington)..
-------------------------------------
At this point, Rimmington must have realised that at some point the fact that Julie and her friend had been committing criminal offences was bound to come out sooner rather than later and that Bamber himself had got some sort of hold over both of them..
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Conversation them must have got around to whether or not Jeremy could have had some involvement in the shootings of his family, and information contained in newspapares was spoken about, between the pair..
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Liz Rimmington must have been left with the impression that BAMBER may have had something to do with the murders and she contacted the police station to relay her beliefs..
--------------
Liz Rimmingtons contact with the police by telephone has not been recorded properly, and to date, we do not yet know to whom she spoke, or what exactly she said to the police officer, on that occasion..
--------------------------------
We do not yet know whenh this officer contacted Detective Sergeant JONES, and what he told him, but we can be sure that whatever he told him it was enough to get JONES to abandon any plans he had made, to take his wife out on the town for a drink, and a meal, and whatever was said, it caused JONES to drive all the way up the A12 to Colchester, to the home address of Liz Rimmington, to see her and Julie, who was staying with her at the time..
------------------------------
Such was the desire of JONES to speak to Rimmington and MUGFORD that on his own admission the first thing he asked when he arrived at Rimmingtons home address was "DID JEREMY BAMBER KILL HIS FAMILY"?
----------------------------------------------------------
This is odd, because we have no information as to why JONES should abandon his plans to go out for the night with his wife and travel all the way to Colchester to meet up with Rimmington and MUGFORD and no sooner did he arrive there than he was asking if Jeremy BAMBER had killed his family?
-----------------------------------------------
Then we learn that JONES is escorting Rimmington and MUGFORD to the police station and this is the occasion she is supposed to have gone voluntarily there..
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MUGFORD was infact escorted to the police station by DS JONES in the company of Liz Rimmington..
-----------------
DS JONES is an interesting character in the grand scheme of things connected with this case. For example, he was the only police officer who beilieved that Sheila Caffell had not been responsible for killing herself and he also suspected Jeremy Bamber of being the killer (he is supposed to have suspected these things before MUGFORD apparently came forward and gave her evidence, voluntarily)..
---------------------------------------------------------------
And so we now know that it was he (DS JONES) who had transported MUGFORD to the police station, on the occasion she was supposed to have attended, voluntarily..
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This is of material interest because there exists a police action report, in which other police officers, raise the point about the nature of MUGFORDS confession statement, which they say was recorded in the third person (as though she was using another persons words to describe what Bamber had told her)..
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Liz Rimmington or DS JONES?
-----------------------------------
Suddenly a pictrure is beginning to emerge..
----------------------------------------------------
If the original words that MUGFORD is supposed to have reported BAMBERS confession to her were recorded in the third person, we have to ask ourselves, hang on a minute, who did Julie make this statement to? And more importantly, what is it that she actually said at that time and how was it said?
------------------------------------------------
That would be a good starting piont..
----------------------------------------------
Step forward DS JONES, who better than someone who was involved in the investigation into these deaths than him. It was JIONES who did not accept that Sheila Caffell could have killed herself and it was DS JONES who shared the same views as the relatives and it was DS JONES who brought Julie MUGFORD to the policve station and it was probably DS JONES who interviewed MUGDFORD and recorded her first statement (recorded in the third person)..
--------------------------------------------------
Who was present when MUGFORD made that first witness statement?
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This needs to be established so that we can begin to understand who may have been influential in wording the so called confession evidence of BAMBER to MUGFORD..
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I think that words were put into Julie MUGFORDS mouth by DS JONES and this is why other police officers later commented upon the confession evidence, having been written in the third person..
-----------------------------------
We must try and identify the third person involved in this process..
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Once this is done we will be left in no doubt at all that Julie MUGFORDS evidence is nothing more than an elaborate lie.
http://www.studiolegaleinternazionale.co.uk/viewtopic.php?p=712&sid=a3854a7cb9d91eca7ab05a70f9b35923
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
She did not simply decide on the morning of 7th September 1985, that she was going to go to the police station, and yet this is what she and the police and supporters of Bambers guilt, are expecting us to believe and accept..
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Lets look at the true explanation of what took place and why [u][b]Julie MUGFORD [/b][/u]and her friend [u][b]Liz Rimmington[/b][/u], ended up being taken to the police station by non other than [u][b]Detective Sergeant Stanley Brian JONES[/b][/u]..
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
JONES was the one who says he took the silencer to the police station on 12th August 1985 and he was also involved in helping to persuade Julie MUGFORD to give the evidence she gave, which was ultimately used to support the prosecution of Jeremy Bamber for the murders..
-------------------------------
Lets look at how the police were notified in order for DS JONES to abandon his planned night out on the town with his wife and drive all the way to Colchester to meet Liz Rimmington and Julie MUGFORD at Rimmingtons home address?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
First of all, why was MUGFORD at Rimmingtons home address?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, the fact of the matter is that MUGFORD had gone there to confront her friend Liz about a relationship she had recently had with Jeremy, and whilst there, she confided in her, that Jeremy had ditched her, and MUGFORD needed a shoulder to cry on..
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MUGFORD and Rimmington discussed their personal problems and talk started to get around to the subject of the shootings which had taken place at WHF.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In recent weeks MUGFORD and BAMBER had had many fall outs and on one occasion Bamber almost lost his temper and according to MUGFORD he restrained himself from hitting her. She says that the reason he stopped short of attacking her on that occasion was because she threatened to tell the police about what they had done (not the murders as claimed by MUGFORD, but the burglary at Osea Road Camp Sight and the cheque book frauds that she and her friend Susan Battersby had committed)..
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MUGFORD had already been to see her partner in crime, Susan BATTERSBY and obviously discussed the possibility that she may have to tell the police about what they had been doing..
-------------------------
MUGFORD was later to tell the police that she had purchased some Jeans for Jeremy at the time of the checkbook offences and this is what MUGFORD was refferring to when she spoke to Liz Rimmington)..
-------------------------------------
At this point, Rimmington must have realised that at some point the fact that Julie and her friend had been committing criminal offences was bound to come out sooner rather than later and that Bamber himself had got some sort of hold over both of them..
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Conversation them must have got around to whether or not Jeremy could have had some involvement in the shootings of his family, and information contained in newspapares was spoken about, between the pair..
-------------------------------------------------------------
Liz Rimmington must have been left with the impression that BAMBER may have had something to do with the murders and she contacted the police station to relay her beliefs..
--------------
Liz Rimmingtons contact with the police by telephone has not been recorded properly, and to date, we do not yet know to whom she spoke, or what exactly she said to the police officer, on that occasion..
--------------------------------
We do not yet know whenh this officer contacted Detective Sergeant JONES, and what he told him, but we can be sure that whatever he told him it was enough to get JONES to abandon any plans he had made, to take his wife out on the town for a drink, and a meal, and whatever was said, it caused JONES to drive all the way up the A12 to Colchester, to the home address of Liz Rimmington, to see her and Julie, who was staying with her at the time..
------------------------------
Such was the desire of JONES to speak to Rimmington and MUGFORD that on his own admission the first thing he asked when he arrived at Rimmingtons home address was "DID JEREMY BAMBER KILL HIS FAMILY"?
----------------------------------------------------------
This is odd, because we have no information as to why JONES should abandon his plans to go out for the night with his wife and travel all the way to Colchester to meet up with Rimmington and MUGFORD and no sooner did he arrive there than he was asking if Jeremy BAMBER had killed his family?
-----------------------------------------------
Then we learn that JONES is escorting Rimmington and MUGFORD to the police station and this is the occasion she is supposed to have gone voluntarily there..
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MUGFORD was infact escorted to the police station by DS JONES in the company of Liz Rimmington..
-----------------
DS JONES is an interesting character in the grand scheme of things connected with this case. For example, he was the only police officer who beilieved that Sheila Caffell had not been responsible for killing herself and he also suspected Jeremy Bamber of being the killer (he is supposed to have suspected these things before MUGFORD apparently came forward and gave her evidence, voluntarily)..
---------------------------------------------------------------
And so we now know that it was he (DS JONES) who had transported MUGFORD to the police station, on the occasion she was supposed to have attended, voluntarily..
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is of material interest because there exists a police action report, in which other police officers, raise the point about the nature of MUGFORDS confession statement, which they say was recorded in the third person (as though she was using another persons words to describe what Bamber had told her)..
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Liz Rimmington or DS JONES?
-----------------------------------
Suddenly a pictrure is beginning to emerge..
----------------------------------------------------
If the original words that MUGFORD is supposed to have reported BAMBERS confession to her were recorded in the third person, we have to ask ourselves, hang on a minute, who did Julie make this statement to? And more importantly, what is it that she actually said at that time and how was it said?
------------------------------------------------
That would be a good starting piont..
----------------------------------------------
Step forward DS JONES, who better than someone who was involved in the investigation into these deaths than him. It was JIONES who did not accept that Sheila Caffell could have killed herself and it was DS JONES who shared the same views as the relatives and it was DS JONES who brought Julie MUGFORD to the policve station and it was probably DS JONES who interviewed MUGDFORD and recorded her first statement (recorded in the third person)..
--------------------------------------------------
Who was present when MUGFORD made that first witness statement?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This needs to be established so that we can begin to understand who may have been influential in wording the so called confession evidence of BAMBER to MUGFORD..
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I think that words were put into Julie MUGFORDS mouth by DS JONES and this is why other police officers later commented upon the confession evidence, having been written in the third person..
-----------------------------------
We must try and identify the third person involved in this process..
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Once this is done we will be left in no doubt at all that Julie MUGFORDS evidence is nothing more than an elaborate lie.
http://www.studiolegaleinternazionale.co.uk/viewtopic.php?p=712&sid=a3854a7cb9d91eca7ab05a70f9b35923
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Jeremy Bamber : AUDIO DS Stan Jones discusses the case Starts around 2.05
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p00dfcft/Ian_Wyatt_12_02_2011
DS Stan Jones discusses how and why he first suspected Jeremy Bamber.
Transcript:
DS.Jones: He went over, across the field and appeared to be sick. Only in my opinion, he was'nt sick he was just acting. Little things later on ' Do we want a fry up ?'...in his house ?...having just lost all his family he is now inviting us for a 'fry up' in his house. I just find that, I just find that so strange. His actions, did'nt appear to be that of a person who has lost all of his family.
Full transcript to follow...
DS Stan Jones discusses how and why he first suspected Jeremy Bamber.
Transcript:
DS.Jones: He went over, across the field and appeared to be sick. Only in my opinion, he was'nt sick he was just acting. Little things later on ' Do we want a fry up ?'...in his house ?...having just lost all his family he is now inviting us for a 'fry up' in his house. I just find that, I just find that so strange. His actions, did'nt appear to be that of a person who has lost all of his family.
Full transcript to follow...
MUGFORD and Maxine Carr..both as guilty, Julie even more so, she knew of the murders before they happened, but Julies word alone did not convict Bamber, the silencer and proof of Sheils blood on it....also proving Sheila could not possibly have killed herself with the silencer attached. Therefore, did the police ever know it was Julie who handed the silencer to Ann Eaton, if in fact that is what she did do...was this knowledge kept among the family? the police in the dark, had the police known Julie would have spent many years in jail...so there was a deal among the family..proof that Bamber was the killer in exchange for Julies freedom ? Without the silencer police could not prove it was BAMBER.
Quote from Bamber forum
I know you've brought up the issue of Maxine Carr before, and I have to say I agree with you. Maxine said she was at the house when she wasn't, which was a lie, but she didn't cover up for Huntley knowingly - she was found not guilty of that. She didn't provide a false alibi as such, she just said she was there. She has been reviled by many people for that to the extent that she has to hide her identity now.
Julie Mugford did a similar thing in some ways - worse really as she claimed that she knew Jeremy had done it, and yet I've seen nothing about her getting a hard Stime in the press or from the police or general public. She was not prosecuted for any of it. One could say that the prosecution needed her as a witness, but then Maxine Carr also testified against Huntley and was not given immunity.
I am still struggling to believe the stories of Julie mugfordSecond quote:
Let's just say she was telling the truth (and to confirm once again I do not believe her) Julie mugford apparently knew the murders were happening weeks before the event she knew about the murders the morning of the event and she believed Jeremy was responsible for the murders after they happened (it would be a billion to one Jeremy didn't carry out the murders if he had told her before on that morning). She showed no guilt in that month after. No body could pull that off. She faced no charges although her actions would almost definately stopped the police having the forensic evidence to prove conclusively how the family died. She was given immunity and became a teacher with children in Canada. My believe is the police knew she was lieing all along or she would never have been allowed to teach. She perverted the course of justice in 5 murders compared to another famous face Maxine Carr who perverted the course of justice in two murders. Can someone explain why she was not charged please
Maxine Ann Carr
Born 16 February 1977 (age 33)
Grimsby, Lincolnshire, England
Conviction(s) Perverting the course of justice, Benefit fraud & Deception
Penalty 42 months imprisonment & 36 month rehabilitation order
Status Released
Occupation Teaching assistant
[edit]Maxine Carr
Maxine Carr had initially provided a false alibi to police for Huntley, claiming to be with him at the time of the murders when she was actually in Grimsby. She was charged with perverting the course of justice and assisting an offender. She pleaded guilty to the first charge and not guilty to the second.
Her failure to expose Huntley's lies in the early stages of the investigation (before either of them was arrested) meant that police initially eliminated Huntley as a suspect. The police who investigated the disappearance and murder of the two girls later said they would have quickly established that Ian Huntley was the abductor (and ultimately the murderer) of the two girls had Maxine Carr told the truth about their whereabouts at the time the girls went missing. But, due to her lies, the police were left waiting nearly two weeks before finally being able to arrest and charge him[14]
The court accepted that Carr had only lied to the police to protect Huntley because she believed his claims of innocence and so found her not guilty of assisting an offender. She was sentenced to three and a half years in prison and was released on probation on 14 May 2004 after serving 21 months (including 16 months on remand). She was given a new secret identity to protect her from threats of attack from members of the public that had been made during her remand, as well as during and after the trial.
I know you've brought up the issue of Maxine Carr before, and I have to say I agree with you. Maxine said she was at the house when she wasn't, which was a lie, but she didn't cover up for Huntley knowingly - she was found not guilty of that. She didn't provide a false alibi as such, she just said she was there. She has been reviled by many people for that to the extent that she has to hide her identity now.
Julie Mugford did a similar thing in some ways - worse really as she claimed that she knew Jeremy had done it, and yet I've seen nothing about her getting a hard Stime in the press or from the police or general public. She was not prosecuted for any of it. One could say that the prosecution needed her as a witness, but then Maxine Carr also testified against Huntley and was not given immunity.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
MUGFORD and BOUTFLOUR....so no proof the silencer was ever found in the gun cupboard...just handed over to Ann Eaton by Julie ?..and Boutflour does the rest.
David Boutfour finds silencer in gun cupboard on 11th September 1985, and he contacts the police by telephone on that same date, informing the police that he had taken the silencer to his sisters house. The police collect the silencer from Ann Eatons house, later that (11th September 1985) date...
Friday, February 18, 2011
Julie MUGFORD : More convinced than ever that it was she who handed over the silencer..Poster knows too much not to be believed. Poster comments on the Bamber forum ..and yes Bamber is a nasty piece of work..I understand perfectly the fear of Julie Mugford. Poster , also well aware that SHEILA did not commit these muders ...'unscrews the silencer' no one in a manic state would be unscrewing silencers and no screwdriver with bloodstains found...BAMBER would have taken the silencer and screwdriver with him...
Comments from HorseyDave:
Get a life you lot - You are all guilty of discrediting this site. NO 8mm/9mm bullets found. NO den found, and if you really do think that they all got together and planned the whole thing, read his fathers will.
I imagine that if i asked you all to describe JB you'd all have the idea that he was a "simple farmers son, he worked on the farm, toiled all day, joined in the village fete, attended church, oh what a charming boy" !!!!!!!!
WRONG WRONG WRONG
And IF he hadnt been locked up and he was out today, he wouldnt of given you the time of day - He was "above his station", he thought himself far too important to talk to the likes of us, he was a playboy, he drove around like a nutter, he took drugs, showed no respect for the farm as a working farm, and if, as did happen on more than one occasion when i was there, if it was his turn to check on the heifers, or drive the combine, one of us would always get a late night phonecall saying he was stuck in London (ie too busy partying to give a toss about the farm)
1. Shelia DID not shoot herself. Either JB shot them all, or another unknown person, there are NO other possibilities, and it makes me cross that intelligent sensible people are concocting just rubbish so as to support there crazy ideas.
2. For Kaldin and others lets set out the house and pantry/cubboard/scullery for once and for all - WHF was originally built on a 'T' classic design. Front rooms, Front bedrooms across the front, and on the end of the "T" piece stands the kitchen, with a chimney stack on its gable end. At some point a extension was added on to that gable end, it had its own door into the yard, its own chimney stack, and its own staircase. It was originally the cowmans cottage. At some later date a door between the main house kitchen (right of the Aga) was knocked through. If you go through that door today you will enter the farm office, to the right of that room is a slim wooden staircase leading to a bathroom and 2 bedrooms.
Upstairs on the landing, a gap has been knocked through to provide access to all rooms, ie the twins room, and shelias. JB's parents room was at the front of the house, top right. Top left was a guest room, JB's room (?), opposite his was the bathroom.
The gun cabinet was in a small room (pantry) that is attached to the kitchen,
3. The theroy of Shelia shooting herself after murdering everyone else does not stand up. In any situation she would of had to disable her father first, so.......... if she did it, she would of had to go downstairs get the gun, affix silencer (screwdriver needed to turn grub screws), return upstairs shoot Mr Bamber, and then having not killed him, find herself in the kitchen where she fights him before finally killing him, then she goes upstairs, shoots her mum, her boys dead in there sleep, and now shelia gets clever - she returns downstairs, unscrews the silencer, buts it into the cabinet, goes back upstairs, props herself up, sticks her toe in around the trigger and shoots herself, then lays down, gets the bible,opens it at page Psalms 51 - ?, lays down and pops herself ??
It did not happen, and if anyone ever asked a jury or a judge to believe that should be found guilty just for there disrespect..
Believe me people, either JB did it, or someone else, there are no other possibilities to any sane minded human being.
I actually liked the guy, and if he stopped writing to me in block capitols and using court references to every point, id write more, he knows my views, but he insists its either him or shelia, and thats why i have my doubts, as the shelia idea does not stand up
Its as if everyone wants to solve the crime, when in actual fact it is not that difficult to do.
The courts have dealt with the polices handling of the case on several occasions, so they (sic) are not now going to say that as well as the police, the courts were wrong too.
If one accepts that there really are only two options ie Jeremy or a person unknown, then JB's denial of a 3rd person is extremely dangerous for him, as if it is proven (resonable doubt etc) that his sister didnt do it, there is only one option left.I personally feel the whole life sentence was a 'vote winner'/"conservatives tough on crime" etc, but you must understand that before such a judgement is made, the courts, the judges,the police and the family are all listened too - The home secretary would of consulted the DPP and asked if there was any chance he was innocent, however small - and that very point troubles me more than anything.JB's whole defence and appeals have been based on "you find a reason Im guilty, and like a rabbit out of the hat, I'll find a scenerio that disproves that".
There was alot more going on than JB has ever mentioned, meet me, come to our village, talk to the people who lived there,worked there,drank in the pubs,bought his coke - These are not teenagers with a grudge, but now, 50,60 & 70 year old decent people, On there own, there is NOT one person within 20 miles of WHF who has a decent word to say for him, or bar one, the cowman & his wife, but thats not about JB, but about the light aroplane,the landing lights and there dis-like towards the Boutfours & Eatons.
For what its worth I believe he is GUILTY of being involved in the murder of his family, I DID NOT say guilty of the murder.
Its easy being clever after the event, but had JB admitted his guilt early on, he would of been released after 16 years, it was when that point passed the HS made it a whole life tariff.
Get a life you lot - You are all guilty of discrediting this site. NO 8mm/9mm bullets found. NO den found, and if you really do think that they all got together and planned the whole thing, read his fathers will.
I imagine that if i asked you all to describe JB you'd all have the idea that he was a "simple farmers son, he worked on the farm, toiled all day, joined in the village fete, attended church, oh what a charming boy" !!!!!!!!
WRONG WRONG WRONG
And IF he hadnt been locked up and he was out today, he wouldnt of given you the time of day - He was "above his station", he thought himself far too important to talk to the likes of us, he was a playboy, he drove around like a nutter, he took drugs, showed no respect for the farm as a working farm, and if, as did happen on more than one occasion when i was there, if it was his turn to check on the heifers, or drive the combine, one of us would always get a late night phonecall saying he was stuck in London (ie too busy partying to give a toss about the farm)
1. Shelia DID not shoot herself. Either JB shot them all, or another unknown person, there are NO other possibilities, and it makes me cross that intelligent sensible people are concocting just rubbish so as to support there crazy ideas.
2. For Kaldin and others lets set out the house and pantry/cubboard/scullery for once and for all - WHF was originally built on a 'T' classic design. Front rooms, Front bedrooms across the front, and on the end of the "T" piece stands the kitchen, with a chimney stack on its gable end. At some point a extension was added on to that gable end, it had its own door into the yard, its own chimney stack, and its own staircase. It was originally the cowmans cottage. At some later date a door between the main house kitchen (right of the Aga) was knocked through. If you go through that door today you will enter the farm office, to the right of that room is a slim wooden staircase leading to a bathroom and 2 bedrooms.
Upstairs on the landing, a gap has been knocked through to provide access to all rooms, ie the twins room, and shelias. JB's parents room was at the front of the house, top right. Top left was a guest room, JB's room (?), opposite his was the bathroom.
The gun cabinet was in a small room (pantry) that is attached to the kitchen,
3. The theroy of Shelia shooting herself after murdering everyone else does not stand up. In any situation she would of had to disable her father first, so.......... if she did it, she would of had to go downstairs get the gun, affix silencer (screwdriver needed to turn grub screws), return upstairs shoot Mr Bamber, and then having not killed him, find herself in the kitchen where she fights him before finally killing him, then she goes upstairs, shoots her mum, her boys dead in there sleep, and now shelia gets clever - she returns downstairs, unscrews the silencer, buts it into the cabinet, goes back upstairs, props herself up, sticks her toe in around the trigger and shoots herself, then lays down, gets the bible,opens it at page Psalms 51 - ?, lays down and pops herself ??
It did not happen, and if anyone ever asked a jury or a judge to believe that should be found guilty just for there disrespect..
Believe me people, either JB did it, or someone else, there are no other possibilities to any sane minded human being.
I actually liked the guy, and if he stopped writing to me in block capitols and using court references to every point, id write more, he knows my views, but he insists its either him or shelia, and thats why i have my doubts, as the shelia idea does not stand up
Its as if everyone wants to solve the crime, when in actual fact it is not that difficult to do.
The courts have dealt with the polices handling of the case on several occasions, so they (sic) are not now going to say that as well as the police, the courts were wrong too.
If one accepts that there really are only two options ie Jeremy or a person unknown, then JB's denial of a 3rd person is extremely dangerous for him, as if it is proven (resonable doubt etc) that his sister didnt do it, there is only one option left.I personally feel the whole life sentence was a 'vote winner'/"conservatives tough on crime" etc, but you must understand that before such a judgement is made, the courts, the judges,the police and the family are all listened too - The home secretary would of consulted the DPP and asked if there was any chance he was innocent, however small - and that very point troubles me more than anything.JB's whole defence and appeals have been based on "you find a reason Im guilty, and like a rabbit out of the hat, I'll find a scenerio that disproves that".
There was alot more going on than JB has ever mentioned, meet me, come to our village, talk to the people who lived there,worked there,drank in the pubs,bought his coke - These are not teenagers with a grudge, but now, 50,60 & 70 year old decent people, On there own, there is NOT one person within 20 miles of WHF who has a decent word to say for him, or bar one, the cowman & his wife, but thats not about JB, but about the light aroplane,the landing lights and there dis-like towards the Boutfours & Eatons.
For what its worth I believe he is GUILTY of being involved in the murder of his family, I DID NOT say guilty of the murder.
Its easy being clever after the event, but had JB admitted his guilt early on, he would of been released after 16 years, it was when that point passed the HS made it a whole life tariff.
Did Shelia go down stairs, get the gun, load it, meet her father in the kitchen, over come him, shoot him dead before going back upstairs and shooting her own children and her mother, before popping downstairs, avoiding all sugar and blood, getting the silencer and going back upstairs, laying down, placing her big toe around the trigger before shooting herself several times, then arranging the gun on her torso, opening the Bible at the correct Psalm, placing it beside herself, before dying ?
Did JB take his mothers bike home to polish hr spokes ?
but
Did the police remove the landing lights and why ?
Did the Boutifours resent a drug taking lazy playboy taking the farm ?
Was Junkie Jules given police help in settling in canada ?
Did the police really not find the silencer, but 'point' the balfours in the general direction ?
Why are the family now selling up and emigrating ? Do they know "someones coming home and will want his farm ??
How did mothers bike get mud on its wheels unless it had been ridden down a muddy track ?
and
If the courts refuse his leave to appeal, do we finally accept his guilt, and hope JB is man enough to accept it, or has he appealed for so long, he doesnt know anything else.
If you are not a liar, prove it. If you have misled people, have the balls to admit it.
You say look at myself - I am and all i see is YOU, a jealous silly little man who is jealous of mine,jules and richards contacts
I live within just 4 or 5 miles of the farm, my mother attends the same WI meetings as Mrs Eaton, I have worked there several times, i rent land off them - I KNOW without doubt JB was involved with the murder of 2 innocent children, shot as they slept. I KNOW without doubt he was involved in the murder of two lovely people who took him from a childrens home, gave him love, a lovely lifestyle, a fantastic education, and he was involved in murdering them. I KNOW without doubt he was involved in the wicked murder of his sister,
and IF you knew the people i know,live alongside, work with and socialise with, you would know alot more than you do now.
JB will never be released unless he tells the TRUTH, and if he is so wicked he can not do this, then he deserves to be where he is - had he done iit before 1967 and he would of been hung.
I am one of a very few villagers who hope one day he is released, and should he put the record straight, I have heard a family member say that should he come clean, his release would follow - as it is now, he will never be released
Said POSTER became abusive and removed from forum...
You say look at myself - I am and all i see is YOU, a jealous silly little man who is jealous of mine,jules and richards contacts
I live within just 4 or 5 miles of the farm, my mother attends the same WI meetings as Mrs Eaton, I have worked there several times, i rent land off them - I KNOW without doubt JB was involved with the murder of 2 innocent children, shot as they slept. I KNOW without doubt he was involved in the murder of two lovely people who took him from a childrens home, gave him love, a lovely lifestyle, a fantastic education, and he was involved in murdering them. I KNOW without doubt he was involved in the wicked murder of his sister,
and IF you knew the people i know,live alongside, work with and socialise with, you would know alot more than you do now.
JB will never be released unless he tells the TRUTH, and if he is so wicked he can not do this, then he deserves to be where he is - had he done iit before 1967 and he would of been hung.
I am one of a very few villagers who hope one day he is released, and should he put the record straight, I have heard a family member say that should he come clean, his release would follow - as it is now, he will never be released
Said POSTER became abusive and removed from forum...
Julie Mugford would not be prosecuted for her petty crimes...
Officers Report,
Dated, 13th June 1991
(COLP)
-----------------------
With regard to the decision to prosecute Julie David Adams to a principle Assistant director, whose name he could not decipher. The note was dated 5th december 1985.
He stated that following the receipt of advice from counsel he had reached the decision not to prosecute Julie Mugford:-
(a)
In relation to the drug offences, as the evidence against her was her own admission, there being no other direct evidence, and ther fact that as a first offender, Essex police policy would be to caution her for the offence
(b)
In relation to the burglary at Osea Park Caravan site, her only involvement had been an unsuccessful attempt to get the key thereafter she could only be considered a bystander. He concluded that the burgalry charge should be withdrawn.
(c)
In relation to the cheque offences, the money had been repaid, the bank did not wish to prosecute. There was no chance of a successful prosecution.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mr Swan stated that he could not give us a copy of the note as it was covered by Public interest Immunity. However, he offered to write us a letter outlining the decisions made and the reasons for those decisions.
It was agreed that this letter would suffice for our purposes.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
S. C. Hutchins
Dated, 13th June 1991
(COLP)
-----------------------
With regard to the decision to prosecute Julie David Adams to a principle Assistant director, whose name he could not decipher. The note was dated 5th december 1985.
He stated that following the receipt of advice from counsel he had reached the decision not to prosecute Julie Mugford:-
(a)
In relation to the drug offences, as the evidence against her was her own admission, there being no other direct evidence, and ther fact that as a first offender, Essex police policy would be to caution her for the offence
(b)
In relation to the burglary at Osea Park Caravan site, her only involvement had been an unsuccessful attempt to get the key thereafter she could only be considered a bystander. He concluded that the burgalry charge should be withdrawn.
(c)
In relation to the cheque offences, the money had been repaid, the bank did not wish to prosecute. There was no chance of a successful prosecution.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mr Swan stated that he could not give us a copy of the note as it was covered by Public interest Immunity. However, he offered to write us a letter outlining the decisions made and the reasons for those decisions.
It was agreed that this letter would suffice for our purposes.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
S. C. Hutchins
Thursday, February 17, 2011
JULIE MUGFORD: Why was she allowed to just walk away ? because she handed in the silencer through a third party and that third party claimed to have found it in the gun cupboard ?
If we are to believe the evidence given by Julie MUGFORD to Essex police about knowing of plans to kill the family by Jeremy Bamber for up to a year before they were shot dead, and we are to take into condsideration her additional claims that Jeremy was supposed to have told her after the family had been shot that he had paid a local hitman by the name of Mathwew MacDonald the sum of ?2000 to kill everyone, and or, that Bamber himself had been responsible for the deaths, be it by planning to burn the house down after he had drugged everyone or by shooting them all, one is left to wonder why she kept quiet and did not try to warn the family that Jeremy intended to kill them all, she did not inform any of the relatives about Jeremys plans or any of her friends.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Furthermore, when she went to identify the bodies of the victims at the Morgue she held a belief that she could communiticate with the spirit of the deceased, and in particular, Sheila Caffell, to find out what had happened and for her to be advised on what to do for the best? Julie Mugford kept all this information back from the family, the relatives and the police on occasions before the shootings and afterwrads..
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It was not until a month after the shootings that she may have been coerced by someone to speak to the police (7th September 1985) which as I have previously commented upon was the exact same date that another relative started to type up his diary entries where he describes his thoughts about Jeremy being the killer and more imporatnatly, how Jeremy had done it.
-------------------
According to the contents of a police action report she reported the so called confessions of Jeremy to the police in the third person on that date (7th September 1985) a clear indiaction that she had been told what to say be somebody else..
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lets put things into perspective, what I would like to know is why wasn't Julie MUGFORD charged with aiding and abbetting Jeremy Bamber in the killings and trying to cover it up and with attempting to pervert the course of justice, or with being an accomplice?
-----------------
Myra HINDLEY, Rose WEST and Maxine CARR were implicated and stood trial for the parts they played in the crimes their partners committed, and so what was so very different about the suggested role that Julie MUGFORD played in the case of the White house farm murders?
--------------------
Julie MUGFORDS evidence was tainted as far as I am concerned, "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned", she lied about the monies she had been promised by the News of the World for her exclusive story in the event that Bamber was convicted and she kept information from the family about plans to kill them and then after the family had been shot she kept information back from the police and the relatives for a whole month - and sandwiched in between all of this she had been seeking to try and communiticate with the spirit of Sheila Caffell to find out what had happened?
She also apparently went to the police (7th September 1985) to tell them all of these stories on the same date that another relative started to draft up his diary entries which contained his thoughts about how he believed that Jeremy had been the killer and not Sheila, and most importantly of all, when she went to the police on that occasion she reported Bambers so called confessions to the police in the third person (a clear sign that she had been put up to say what she apparently said on that occasion)..
------------------------------------------------------------
HINDLEY, WEST, CARR and MUGFORD, all have something in common, if the roles they played in their respestive cases is true, they should have been charged with criminal offences and been sentenced to terms of imprisonment, but in the case of MUGFORD, she was not even apparently arrested and interviewed under caution let alone charged, and she was never at risk of being convicted of any criminal offence. Could this be because the evidence and information she had to give was not the truth and that Essex police knew that it was not the truth and this is why they did not arrest her, interview her under caution and charge her, and why she was never at risk of being convicted of anything?
--------------
The evidence of Julie MUGFORD was totally unreliable and misleading.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The question that everyobody should be asking is "WHY WASN't Julie MUGFORD CHARGED with criminal offences connected with this case"?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Was she really an accomplice (if her accounts were true)?
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Should her evidence have been treated differently and should the trial judge have warned the jury or cautioned them about the content of MUGFORDS testimony and the danger of relying upon it to convict Jeremy BAMBER of the five murders, and asked them to take into account the reason why she was not charged and standing in the dock with BAMBER, if what she had to say was true?
--------------------------------------------------------
YES (at least that is my opinion)...
http://www.studiolegaleinternazionale.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=311&sid=9c3883d95deb9500465df8fa160b61d7
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Furthermore, when she went to identify the bodies of the victims at the Morgue she held a belief that she could communiticate with the spirit of the deceased, and in particular, Sheila Caffell, to find out what had happened and for her to be advised on what to do for the best? Julie Mugford kept all this information back from the family, the relatives and the police on occasions before the shootings and afterwrads..
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It was not until a month after the shootings that she may have been coerced by someone to speak to the police (7th September 1985) which as I have previously commented upon was the exact same date that another relative started to type up his diary entries where he describes his thoughts about Jeremy being the killer and more imporatnatly, how Jeremy had done it.
-------------------
According to the contents of a police action report she reported the so called confessions of Jeremy to the police in the third person on that date (7th September 1985) a clear indiaction that she had been told what to say be somebody else..
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lets put things into perspective, what I would like to know is why wasn't Julie MUGFORD charged with aiding and abbetting Jeremy Bamber in the killings and trying to cover it up and with attempting to pervert the course of justice, or with being an accomplice?
-----------------
Myra HINDLEY, Rose WEST and Maxine CARR were implicated and stood trial for the parts they played in the crimes their partners committed, and so what was so very different about the suggested role that Julie MUGFORD played in the case of the White house farm murders?
--------------------
Julie MUGFORDS evidence was tainted as far as I am concerned, "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned", she lied about the monies she had been promised by the News of the World for her exclusive story in the event that Bamber was convicted and she kept information from the family about plans to kill them and then after the family had been shot she kept information back from the police and the relatives for a whole month - and sandwiched in between all of this she had been seeking to try and communiticate with the spirit of Sheila Caffell to find out what had happened?
She also apparently went to the police (7th September 1985) to tell them all of these stories on the same date that another relative started to draft up his diary entries which contained his thoughts about how he believed that Jeremy had been the killer and not Sheila, and most importantly of all, when she went to the police on that occasion she reported Bambers so called confessions to the police in the third person (a clear sign that she had been put up to say what she apparently said on that occasion)..
------------------------------------------------------------
HINDLEY, WEST, CARR and MUGFORD, all have something in common, if the roles they played in their respestive cases is true, they should have been charged with criminal offences and been sentenced to terms of imprisonment, but in the case of MUGFORD, she was not even apparently arrested and interviewed under caution let alone charged, and she was never at risk of being convicted of any criminal offence. Could this be because the evidence and information she had to give was not the truth and that Essex police knew that it was not the truth and this is why they did not arrest her, interview her under caution and charge her, and why she was never at risk of being convicted of anything?
--------------
The evidence of Julie MUGFORD was totally unreliable and misleading.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The question that everyobody should be asking is "WHY WASN't Julie MUGFORD CHARGED with criminal offences connected with this case"?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Was she really an accomplice (if her accounts were true)?
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Should her evidence have been treated differently and should the trial judge have warned the jury or cautioned them about the content of MUGFORDS testimony and the danger of relying upon it to convict Jeremy BAMBER of the five murders, and asked them to take into account the reason why she was not charged and standing in the dock with BAMBER, if what she had to say was true?
--------------------------------------------------------
YES (at least that is my opinion)...
http://www.studiolegaleinternazionale.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=311&sid=9c3883d95deb9500465df8fa160b61d7
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Bamber and Mugford accomplices in the murder of five people...
Bamber and Mugford were made for each other and I have come to the conclusion they thought of themselves as some sort of modern day Bonny and Clyde . Julie a thief and a liar, Bamber, cut from the same cloth.
It would also not surprise me to learn that Bamber had taken the silencer with him back to his home and told Julie, if Julie knew where it was hidden who is to say at some point she did not pass it on to a family member...who decided to 'plant' and find it in the gun cupboard , accusing the police of 'sloppy work' along the way....after all the silencer was found in an empty box of ammunition with a slight trace of blood on it .....AND they all knew Sheila was incapable of such a crime, they just knew it. No wonder they are terrified of Bamber being freed on a technicality. The idea was always crazy to think of someone removing the silencer and placing it in the gun cupboard , even crazier to suggest Sheila shot herself, returned the silencer to the gun cupboard, taking time to place it in the empty ammunition box, run upstairs and shoot herself again....BUT not so crazy to think Julie , filled with hatred and fear after her betrayal, to betray her ex-lover one more time and make sure he was charged with the crime he committed by handing over the silencer.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-144370/Ex-girlfriend-face-Bamber-dock.html
Mugford to face Bamber in the dock..
TWIST IN BAMBER APPEAL..MUGFORD NOT CALLED
KILLER Bamber's appeal took a surprise twist yesterday when his ex-girlfriend Julie Mugford was not called to give evidence.
Ms Mugford - who has always said Bamber is guilty - flew from her home in Canada expecting to take the stand at the Appeal Court.
But after legal submissions the 37-year-old mum of two, who now lives in Winnipeg, was released as a witness. She left the London hearing without commenting.
Bamber, 41, is serving life for murdering five members of his family at their home in Tolleshunt D'Arcy, Essex, in 1985.
Miss Mugford said at the time he boasted to her he was going to kill his parents to claim a pounds 500,000 inheritance,
She stood beside Bamber at the family funeral when he cried "
I have racked my brains as to the reason Bamber would ring Julie at 3am in the morning, convenient also that not a flatmate but Julie herself should answer the telephone. The call , an alibi for them both , flatmates woken by the call, Julie waiting for the call, and nothing on record that the girls she shared with heard the conversation. The call was only needed to confirm Jeremy had phoned to relay the message that Ralph had phoned to say something was happening at the farm. Julie a willing accomplice. The call from Ralph, ficticious and the only 'proof' which was no proof at all of Nevills call. Julie and Bamber needed the flatmates as witnessess....
Julie Mugford, knows so much more but she was covering her own back from spite because Bamber had dumped her and not wanting to be implicated in any way she spilled her guts to the police. Bamber was in between a rock and a hard place, he must have hated her for her betrayal and I can understand her fear of him ever being released, she and she alone knows what he is capable of , she saw the bodies, offered to identify them...saw the twin boys...and yes afraid for her own children and what he might do to them if he ever finds her. . Bamber ,unable to say she knew of his plans because this would be an admission of guilt. BAMBER caught in his own web of deceit....Julie Mugford is as guilty, as if she herself pulled the trigger....
It would also not surprise me to learn that Bamber had taken the silencer with him back to his home and told Julie, if Julie knew where it was hidden who is to say at some point she did not pass it on to a family member...who decided to 'plant' and find it in the gun cupboard , accusing the police of 'sloppy work' along the way....after all the silencer was found in an empty box of ammunition with a slight trace of blood on it .....AND they all knew Sheila was incapable of such a crime, they just knew it. No wonder they are terrified of Bamber being freed on a technicality. The idea was always crazy to think of someone removing the silencer and placing it in the gun cupboard , even crazier to suggest Sheila shot herself, returned the silencer to the gun cupboard, taking time to place it in the empty ammunition box, run upstairs and shoot herself again....BUT not so crazy to think Julie , filled with hatred and fear after her betrayal, to betray her ex-lover one more time and make sure he was charged with the crime he committed by handing over the silencer.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-144370/Ex-girlfriend-face-Bamber-dock.html
Mugford to face Bamber in the dock..
TWIST IN BAMBER APPEAL..MUGFORD NOT CALLED
KILLER Bamber's appeal took a surprise twist yesterday when his ex-girlfriend Julie Mugford was not called to give evidence.
Ms Mugford - who has always said Bamber is guilty - flew from her home in Canada expecting to take the stand at the Appeal Court.
But after legal submissions the 37-year-old mum of two, who now lives in Winnipeg, was released as a witness. She left the London hearing without commenting.
Bamber, 41, is serving life for murdering five members of his family at their home in Tolleshunt D'Arcy, Essex, in 1985.
Miss Mugford said at the time he boasted to her he was going to kill his parents to claim a pounds 500,000 inheritance,
She stood beside Bamber at the family funeral when he cried "
This is a work in progress...to be continued
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