From In the Dark: “Blood Relatives”

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Speaker 4 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour and this is a special episode of our podcast devoted to new reporting by the New Yorkers Heidi Blake.

Speaker 4 Not so long ago, Heidi got a tip that led her to investigate one of the most notorious crimes in modern British history. Five members of a family had been brutally murdered at a rural estate.

Speaker 4 Heidi's reporting put the official account of that case into question, and it challenges the foundations of the UK legal system.

Speaker 4 That story is told in Blood Relatives, a new series from our investigative podcast, In the Dark, which won the Pulitzer Prize for audio this year. Here's how it begins.

Speaker 2 The shoreline in this part of England is marshy and riddled with inlets and creeks.

Speaker 5 It's a pretty desolate place.

Speaker 2 This is the coast of Essex, just northeast of London, but an entirely different landscape. The tides seep in and out with eerie drama, flooding the mudflats.

Speaker 2 On some mornings, mist rushes up suddenly over the marshes and forms a briny fog.

Speaker 2 I'm kind of driving in under smouldering grey cloud and just this expanse of

Speaker 2 bleak salt marshes of the Blackwater Estuary.

Speaker 2 And it feels so isolated.

Speaker 2 Heading inland from the Blackwater Estuary, away from the fog and the sea, I turned onto a rough dirt track with tall hedges on one side and open green fields on the other.

Speaker 2 I wound around the lane, turned down a gravel drive, and there it was.

Speaker 2 Yeah, here's the farmhouse.

Speaker 2 Big sign saying trespassers will be prosecuted.

Speaker 2 I had arrived at Whitehouse Farm,

Speaker 2 a place so infamous in Britain that I later learned reporters are specifically banned from visiting it.

Speaker 2 Despite its notoriety, it's a beautiful place.

Speaker 2 An elegant Georgian manor standing in open fields with a columned portico and commanding views over the salt marshes.

Speaker 2 And it's here that our story begins.

Speaker 2 The story I want to tell you is about a family whose lives once seemed nearly perfect.

Speaker 2 It centers around two siblings, a sister and brother, both blessed with charm and beauty, who grew up surrounded by the trappings of privilege in this gracious country manor.

Speaker 2 They appeared to have all the advantages in the world.

Speaker 2 Wealth, glamour, status.

Speaker 2 But in this family,

Speaker 2 things were not always as they seemed.

Speaker 2 By the end of the story, One of the siblings would end up dead,

Speaker 2 the other in prison for murder.

Speaker 2 And the tragedy that would tear this family apart would become one of Britain's most infamous crimes. One of the most notorious and shocking crimes in living memory.

Speaker 8 At that time, I'd never seen anything as horrific as that.

Speaker 2 It would become a story so often told and retold that it passed into public folklore.

Speaker 8 We have a scene of a crime which has been very cunningly arranged.

Speaker 10 It was one of the most sensational murder cases of the decade.

Speaker 2 The kind of thing that didn't need to be questioned, because it seemed like there was nothing more to know.

Speaker 8 I felt that I was in the presence of evil.

Speaker 1 But obviously we feel very sad about it all, knowing somebody that well and knowing that they're capable of committing this sort of act.

Speaker 2 From In the Dark and the New Yorker, I'm Heidi Blake,

Speaker 2 and this is Blood Relatives.

Speaker 2 Part One The Family

Speaker 2 In nineteen fifty one, a young couple moved into the manor at Whitehouse Farm. They were newly married and hoping to start a family.
Their names were Neville and June Bamber.

Speaker 2 Neville and June's marriage united two distinguished lineages. Neville came from an illustrious family.
One ancestor's portrait hung in the Tate Gallery in London.

Speaker 2 Another had apparently fought beside Richard the Lionheart and had even, according to family legend, killed a lion in Palestine.

Speaker 2 June's family were a a sort of local dynasty. They'd been in this part of Essex for generations, and they'd amassed an enviable fortune.

Speaker 2 A portfolio of country properties, farms, manor houses, even a lucrative vacation resort on the River Blackwater.

Speaker 2 Together, June and Neville became pillars of the rural community, like local gentry.

Speaker 5 They were like the squires of the village, really.

Speaker 5 They were quite important to us, all,

Speaker 5 and they helped us out a lot, the villagers in general.

Speaker 2 Barbara Wilson lived for years in the village of Toleshunt Darcy, about a mile from Whitehouse Farm.

Speaker 5 They were two or three levels above us, us menials, you know, and everybody looked up to them, really.

Speaker 2 Neville Bamber was tall and dashing, a former RAF fighter pilot. He managed the family's sprawling farming business and served as a local magistrate.

Speaker 2 Everyone I spoke to told me that Neville was scrupulously kind and fair in all his dealings.

Speaker 2 June Bamber was less gregarious than Neville, a bit more enigmatic.

Speaker 5 Mrs. Bamber, she used to come to most of the functions in the village like teas and things like that, and she helped in the church a lot.
And I found that she was very quiet, but very pleasant.

Speaker 5 She always had a smiley face. and her eyes used to smile as well, so you knew it was genuine, really.

Speaker 2 For a long time, Barbara Wilson saw the Bambas the way everyone in the village did.

Speaker 2 Kind in a patrician way, but remote and untouchable.

Speaker 2 But one day, she had a chance encounter that would offer her an inside seat right at the heart of the Bambas family home.

Speaker 5 I was coming back from taking my daughter to primary school, and Mr. Bamber came along and stopped his van and said, Barbara, would you be kind kind enough to give me a hand with some office work?

Speaker 5 And I said, Yes, sure.

Speaker 5 And that's how I started.

Speaker 2 Neville asked Barbara to come to work for him several days a week, managing his farm accounts in his study at the family manor.

Speaker 2 The office was a jumble of old papers and golf clubs and back issues of Farmers Weekly, but the rest of the house was neat and cosy.

Speaker 2 It was a real working farmhouse where the agar stove was always burning, surrounded by gardens that blossomed with budlier and honeysuckle.

Speaker 5 It was nice to go in the summertime, because June always seemed to be happy and smiling, and Mr. Bamber would always be jolly.
He'd come in from the farm and

Speaker 5 he'd make some sort of joke or something, so it was a happy sort of atmosphere then.

Speaker 2 But Barbara came to learn that life was not as simple as she'd imagined for the Bambers.

Speaker 2 Despite their serene exterior, June and Neville had long been plagued by a private sorrow. They couldn't have a baby.
June, in particular, was haunted by this.

Speaker 2 After years of trying, the things she wanted most in the world remained out of reach.

Speaker 2 So one day, the couple turned to the Church of England. They told officials at the Church's Children's Society that they wanted to adopt a child.

Speaker 2 And a few months later, in 1957, the church presented them with a baby, a girl, with a pale face and wisps of dark hair, and then after a few more years, another baby. This time, a boy.

Speaker 2 The children were named Sheila and Jeremy.

Speaker 2 At first, the siblings seemed to grow up in perfect harmony, running around the farm with the family's yellow labrador, Jasper.

Speaker 2 There's a photograph of the two kids, sitting on the lawn in front of the manor.

Speaker 2 Jeremy in a knitted jumper with checked trousers, Sheila in a pleated skirt with a page boy haircut, Jasper sitting between them, almost as if guarding them.

Speaker 2 It seemed from the outside like the family was finally complete.

Speaker 5 They wanted to give the impression, I think, that everything's fine, but underneath, you know, there's turmoil.

Speaker 2 Privately, June had never recovered from her grief at being unable to conceive her own biological child.

Speaker 2 She struggled to accept Sheila, in particular, as her own daughter, and often treated her coldly, rarely hugging her or kissing her.

Speaker 2 June became severely depressed, and she started disappearing for long stretches of time.

Speaker 2 Barbara Wilson remembered the moment when she first learned what was going on.

Speaker 5 Mr. Bamber had a word with me and said that she had to go away and

Speaker 5 then we set up the money to send to pay for her keep.

Speaker 5 That was basically, you know, that she wasn't very well and

Speaker 5 we've put her somewhere where

Speaker 5 hopefully she'll be looked after and get better.

Speaker 5 I assume that, you know, they do whatever they do, you know,

Speaker 5 use electric shock and things like that, don't they?

Speaker 2 June had been committed to a psychiatric hospital, and she did undergo multiple courses of electroshock therapy there. But it didn't seem to help.
She kept being sent back again and again.

Speaker 2 In the end, she was diagnosed not only with depression, but also with psychosis and paranoia.

Speaker 2 As her mental health kept deteriorating, June became more and more fixated on religious ideals.

Speaker 2 She'd always been involved in the church, but now she was obsessed with notions of good and evil, holy and unholy.

Speaker 2 By now, June's daughter, Sheila, had grown into an arrestingly beautiful teenager. She was so striking that people would come up to her in the street and ask to take a photo with her.

Speaker 2 June was troubled by the attention men paid to her daughter. She saw Sheila's flirtations as a mark of wickedness.

Speaker 2 Once, she found Sheila sunbathing naked in a field with a boyfriend and flew into a fury, screaming at Sheila that she was the devil's child.

Speaker 2 Sheila was anxious to get away from her mother. When she was 17, she moved to London to start a modelling career.
And at first, it was a success.

Speaker 2 Sheila got a big job in Tokyo and appeared in a Bacardi ad.

Speaker 2 More jobs followed. She became known in the press as Bambi.

Speaker 2 In one black and white photo from the mid-70s, she's dressed for the seashore, wearing a bando bikini top and skirt, gentle waves of dark hair framing her face, big wide eyes smiling at the camera.

Speaker 2 In London, Sheila soon fell in love with an artist, and they moved in together.

Speaker 2 But it was a turbulent relationship.

Speaker 2 They had explosive rows, and he slept around.

Speaker 2 Eventually, Sheila got pregnant, and her mother, June, insisted that the couple get married. But then, soon after the ceremony, the baby was stillborn.

Speaker 2 After that, Sheila became increasingly preoccupied with trying to have a baby.

Speaker 2 But then she had another miscarriage, and some of her mother's dark thought patterns seemed to surface within her.

Speaker 2 She seemed to see these losses as a sort of divine punishment,

Speaker 2 and she told people that she thought she exuded an evil aura.

Speaker 2 She wrote in a letter, I've never felt so confused and unable to control my brain.

Speaker 2 It's almost as if I'm schizophrenic or something.

Speaker 2 I feel so sick of people and stale.

Speaker 2 Finally, in the summer of 1979, Sheila carried a pregnancy to term.

Speaker 2 She gave birth to healthy twin boys, Nicholas and Daniel.

Speaker 2 They were beautiful babies, bonny with snowy blonde hair and their mother's big wide eyes. It was everything Sheila had hoped for.

Speaker 2 But June, who'd struggled for so many years with her own infertility, found it hard to welcome her grandson's arrival.

Speaker 2 When she visited Sheila in hospital, instead of congratulating her or giving her a hug, June stood in the doorway and said frostily, Who's a clever girl then?

Speaker 2 Sheila was crushed.

Speaker 2 Then, a few months after her twins were born, Sheila's husband abandoned her for another woman, leaving her alone in her London flat with the babies.

Speaker 2 Barbara Wilson remembers that when Sheila would come up from London to visit White House Farm around this time, she seemed quiet and withdrawn.

Speaker 5 And we'd sit around the table and chat and have coffee. When I first started to see her, she was

Speaker 5 quite

Speaker 2 normal

Speaker 5 and she'd chat and smile. Not a great deal, but she would be normal.

Speaker 5 But latterly, she did say some odd things.

Speaker 2 Sheila was quietly unravelling. She started hallucinating and resorting to self-harm.
Then she started telling people that she was scared she might even hurt the twins.

Speaker 2 Eventually, her father, Neville, intervened. He arranged for Sheila to be sent away to the same psychiatric hospital where June had undergone electroshock therapy.

Speaker 2 Once again, Barbara Wilson was deputised to pay the bills.

Speaker 5 I used to write the checks out for her

Speaker 5 hospitals that she used to have to go to,

Speaker 5 because she just kept on having breakdowns and.

Speaker 2 Did you get a sense of sort of what was wrong with Sheila?

Speaker 5 Oh yes, I knew that it was

Speaker 5 probably due to drugs.

Speaker 2 Sheila had been doing a lot of drugs while she was in London, but her troubles went much deeper. As she'd feared, Sheila went on to be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

Speaker 2 At the hospital, she was prescribed an antipsychotic. But when she got out, she quickly began skipping her meds, instead, smoking marijuana and doing cocaine.

Speaker 2 She'd call the manor from her London flat late at night, rambling about being the Virgin Mary or Joan of Arc.

Speaker 2 Barbara said that by now, the strain of it all was hard for the Bambas to hide.

Speaker 5 They were always fairly jolly and such like, but gradually you could tell that

Speaker 5 their mood was changing.

Speaker 2 It wasn't only Sheila weighing on her parents' minds. The couple were also having trouble with their younger child, their son.

Speaker 2 Jeremy had been sent away at the age of nine to board at Gresham's, one of the country's most prestigious schools. He'd been a rebellious student.

Speaker 2 He brewed beer in his dorm and sneaked out at night to watch punk bands. And when he left school and came back to the farm at 17, he rubbed everyone the wrong way.

Speaker 5 And with Jeremy coming home and not being very nice, Mrs. Bamba in particular was very nervy.
And Mr. Bamber was

Speaker 5 more cross about things.

Speaker 2 Jeremy was handsome and debonaire, with dark hair and fine features. Kind of an incongruous figure on the back of a tractor.

Speaker 2 When he came home, he quickly caused a scandal by striking up an affair with a married mother of three.

Speaker 2 Then he started growing marijuana behind the cattle shed, and though he did pitch in on the farm, as the years went by, he continually infuriated his father by taking off to go traveling and flirting with more enticing careers as a cocktail waiter or scuba diver.

Speaker 2 Barbara said Jeremy could be charming.

Speaker 5 He was absolutely lovely at times. You could really, really like Jeremy when he was, you know, to start with when you first got to see him, and he'd laugh and joke and be very friendly.

Speaker 2 But she also saw a side to him that she found unsettling. She felt like he was always trying to antagonize his parents.

Speaker 5 I mean, he did horrible things. He rode on Mrs.
Bamber's bicycle. She got a bicycle.
He rode round and round in tighter circles round her and she'd flinch.

Speaker 5 Oh Jeremy, don't do that, but he would do it and laugh and odd things like that. And he used to make up because it used to annoy Mr.
Bamber.

Speaker 2 He used to wear makeup? Yeah.

Speaker 5 He used to wear lipstick and I don't know whether it was I make up and he'd come up in the office. It was just to embarrass me, really, and to embarrass Mr.
Bamber.

Speaker 2 To Barbara and others in the village, a man wearing makeup seemed strange. It was just not the done thing.

Speaker 2 Toleshunt Darcy was a pretty reactionary place.

Speaker 2 But that wasn't the only thing Barbara objected to. She said Jeremy could be cruel.
Once she claimed he'd even put a bag of rats in her car. She said he hid them inside a sack of potatoes.

Speaker 5 It was a big sack, a paper sack, and I went to get in my car and it rustled. And so so I jumped, and I was petrified.
I'm petrified of mice and rats.

Speaker 2 It seemed to Barbara that Jeremy was turning into an embarrassment, maybe even a menace. And as for Sheila, she was declining rapidly.

Speaker 2 Her modelling career had crumbled and she was working as a cleaner, turning up to jobs dishevelled, staring blankly into space.

Speaker 2 In the spring of 1985, when Sheila was 27, she seemed to hit a breaking point.

Speaker 2 She was home with the twins in London when she flew into a frenzy, battering the walls with her fists and accusing anyone who came near of trying to kill her.

Speaker 2 Neville came down to London and had Sheila readmitted to the psychiatric hospital, where she stayed for a few weeks before being discharged again, this time with new antipsychotic medication.

Speaker 2 Her doctor gave instructions for it to be administered monthly, by injection, so she wouldn't skip a dose.

Speaker 2 That August, Sheila came to stay at the manor with Nicholas and Daniel. The twins were six years old by now, sweet, tousle-haired boys, all knees and elbows.

Speaker 2 Nicholas was chatty and fascinated by nature.

Speaker 2 Daniel was shyer and more sensitive. He carried a baby doll everywhere and told people he wanted to be a mummy.

Speaker 5 The boys always used to come up into the office and Mr. Bamber always gave them a peppermint.

Speaker 5 And they used to chat and say what they'd been doing and things like that. And we'd probably have about 10 or 15 minutes talking to them and they'd go down quite happily.

Speaker 2 Around that time, Barbara remembered being called down to join the family for coffee in the kitchen, as usual. She could see that Sheila was in a bad way.

Speaker 5 She was dressed all in black and she didn't look well. I must admit,

Speaker 5 she just looked vacant that last

Speaker 5 time.

Speaker 5 I sat one end of the table and Mrs. Bamber was at the top,

Speaker 5 and so was Sheila. And

Speaker 5 we were just sort of chatting in general. and that's when Sheila said

Speaker 5 the devil

Speaker 8 and

Speaker 5 everything is black

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 all men are

Speaker 5 evil.

Speaker 2 All men are evil, Sheila said.

Speaker 2 Everything is black.

Speaker 5 But we didn't

Speaker 5 you don't say, well, why?

Speaker 5 Because

Speaker 5 you just knew that she wasn't herself.

Speaker 5 Yeah, she was a poor thing, really, towards the end.

Speaker 2 That was the last time Barbara Wilson would ever see Sheila.

Speaker 2 Forty years later, as I sat with her in her comfortable living room, watching crows wheeling over the fields beyond the window, She told me she's haunted to this day by that scene and everything that followed.

Speaker 5 It took me a long time, a long, long time to get over it.

Speaker 5 Before this happened, I was just a normal person, but

Speaker 5 I'm different.

Speaker 5 I know I'm different.

Speaker 4 You're listening to a special episode from our investigative podcast, In the Dark. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and we'll continue in a moment.

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Speaker 3 Since 1981, Justin Vineyards and Winery has been producing world-class Bordeaux-style wines from Paso Robles and are what put the Paso Robles region on the winemaking map.

Speaker 3 Wines like their flagship Red Blend Isosceles are perfect to enjoy with friends and family this holiday season.

Speaker 3 Shop all of their exceptional wines at justinwine.com and be sure to use the promo code RADIO20 to receive 20% off your order today.

Speaker 2 Part 2.

Speaker 2 August 7th, 1985

Speaker 2 Police Sergeant Chris Bugs had been stationed in rural Essex for about a year. It was mostly an uneventful job.

Speaker 2 In this intensely traditional community, local people like to keep the cops out of their private business.

Speaker 8 It's the way British country life is. Got lots of little villages,

Speaker 8 lots of outlying farms, a lot of, you know, we'll sort our own problems out. It's the way country people deal with things, I suppose.

Speaker 2 Sergeant Bewes spent much of his time going out on street patrols, responding to the occasional petty theft.

Speaker 8 Not a lot of crime at all.

Speaker 8 Police force is probably 90% bored and 10% adrenaline.

Speaker 2 But on August 7th, 1985, that was about to change.

Speaker 2 Sergeant Buse was on duty in the early hours of that morning. He and two colleagues were patrolling an industrial park where there'd been a space of break-ins, hoping to catch the thief in the act.

Speaker 8 We're sitting in bushes and creeping around the industrial estate when I get a call on my personal radio to go back to the station. Urgent.
So literally drop what you do and get back there right away.

Speaker 8 There's a guy called Jeremy Bamber's phoned who said there's something going on at his parents' house, White House Farm.

Speaker 2 Jeremy Bamber had phoned the station from the cottage where he lived nearby at around 3.30am

Speaker 2 to report that he'd just received an alarming call from his father, Neville, at the manor.

Speaker 8 Phone call from his father, who sounds very panicky,

Speaker 8 who

Speaker 8 tells him it's Sheila, she's gone mad.

Speaker 2 His sister, Sheila, had gone berserk, Jeremy said Neville had told him.

Speaker 2 The twins were asleep upstairs, and Sheila had a gun.

Speaker 8 And he said, then the phone just cut off.

Speaker 2 Jeremy told police he'd tried calling back, but the phone at the manor seemed to be off the hook.

Speaker 2 Sergeant Bugs and two colleagues jumped into a patrol car and sped through the countryside towards Whitehouse Farm.

Speaker 8 And it's all very dark country lanes, no road lighting, anything like that.

Speaker 8 Hedgerows either side, and

Speaker 8 I wonder what the hell I'm going to find at the other end.

Speaker 2 When they reached the farm, they stopped at the end of its winding driveway and climbed out of the patrol car. The manor lay around a bend, hidden by tall trees, and the scene was strangely quiet.

Speaker 2 The only sound was the faint whining of a dog.

Speaker 8 Firearm incident where someone's got a gun, you're gonna get noise.

Speaker 8 There's no noise in the house at the moment.

Speaker 8 Well, it's ominous, isn't it?

Speaker 2 Soon a silver car pulled up behind them and out climbed a tall, slender figure. It was Jeremy Bamber.

Speaker 8 Youngish guy, tussled hair, and he spoke quite a refined accent, not a localistic accent.

Speaker 8 He said, have you been in there yet? I said, no.

Speaker 8 And he said, well, can't you go in and look? I said, no.

Speaker 8 I said, the last thing we're going to go is go in there and confront someone with a gun.

Speaker 2 Regular police in Britain don't carry guns, and Sergeant Bugs was not prepared to go in without armed backup.

Speaker 2 But he asked Jeremy to follow him up the driveway to take a look at the house from the outside.

Speaker 2 They tiptoed through the darkness until it came into view.

Speaker 2 Lights were shining in three windows, the kitchen, the bathroom, and the bedroom where Sheila's twins were sleeping.

Speaker 2 But the house was totally still.

Speaker 2 Sergeant Buse said the scene unnerved him, and he wondered if bringing Jeremy this close had been a miscalculation.

Speaker 8 I was thinking, isn't that good an idea bringing him with me? Because if there is someone in there that sees us and takes a pot shot at us, I'm actually putting a civilian at risk by doing this.

Speaker 2 Still, he gestured for Jeremy to follow him through a field to the front, where light was filtering through the curtains of the master bedroom. And suddenly, a shadow seemed to loom in the window.

Speaker 8 I thought out of the corner of my eye I caught a movement.

Speaker 2 The men ducked behind a hedge and braced for shots, but none came. Then they raced back to the patrol car, and Sergeant Bugs radioed for backup.

Speaker 2 From their notes that night, it seems like the awful significance of what might be happening with Sheila was starting to dawn on Jeremy.

Speaker 2 Oh God, he said, I hope hope she hasn't done anything silly.

Speaker 2 He told the officers that his sister was mentally ill and that she'd been distressed earlier that evening by a fraught conversation with their parents.

Speaker 2 Neville and June had told Sheila that she was no longer fit to look after her sons, he said.

Speaker 2 And they'd urged her to have the boys placed in foster care.

Speaker 2 He worried that this might have tipped her over the edge and he begged the officers again to go into the house. But again, they refused.
Jeremy kept pleading.

Speaker 2 They're all the family I've got, they noted him saying. But Sergeant Bewes was adamant.

Speaker 8 Now, Jeremy, I've explained to you several times now, we're not going in because of the dangers.

Speaker 8 If unfortunately, there's something serious going off in there,

Speaker 8 We don't want to make it worse by having two or three dead policemen added to it as well.

Speaker 2 I asked Sergeant Bewes about that, how he weighed his fears for his own safety and that of his fellow officers against the fact that there were two little kids inside that house.

Speaker 8 Obviously, concerned for everybody in there, and I'm a father.

Speaker 8 If I'd heard a kid calling for help, I'd have definitely gone in. But it's easy for me to say, I would have done this, I would have done that.
That's not what happened.

Speaker 2 It was almost five in the morning before a van thundered up the farm track, carrying a squadron of armed officers. But even then, they didn't enter the house straight away.

Speaker 2 Instead, they mustered inside a cattle barn facing the back of the property. Then, they spent two and a half hours calling through a bullhorn for Sheila to surrender.

Speaker 2 Still, there was no response.

Speaker 2 Finally, at 7.30, the raid team was authorized to go in.

Speaker 2 The back door was locked, and it took several blows with a sledgehammer to open it. When the officers finally burst inside, they found a harrowing scene.

Speaker 8 Neville Bamber was found in his dressing gown, lying amidst a load of ransacked furniture, effectively.

Speaker 2 Neville lay slumped over an upturned chair by the kitchen hearth, with his face resting inside a coal scuttle. He'd been shot repeatedly in the head, and blood had pooled on the floor.

Speaker 2 He'd also been shot in the shoulder and the arm, and he seemed to have been battered in a struggle. There was shattered crockery and shards of a broken light fixture scattered on the floor.

Speaker 2 The raid team continued through the house.

Speaker 8 They went up the stairs,

Speaker 8 found

Speaker 8 June in the doorway of her bedroom,

Speaker 8 obviously shot.

Speaker 8 Went into that room and found Sheila lying on the floor with a rifle going lengthways up the body.

Speaker 2 Sheila was on her back in a turquoise nightgown and jewellery with a fatal bullet hole through her chin.

Speaker 2 Beside her lay a bloodstained Bible open to a passage from Psalms. There was a streak of red in the middle of the page under a line that said, Save me from blood guiltiness.

Speaker 2 Down the hall, in the twins' room, officers found the boys in bed. Daniel was curled on his side with his thumb in his mouth.
Nicholas lay on his back, the covers pulled up to his chin.

Speaker 2 Five bullets had been fired through the back of Daniel's head. Nicholas had been shot three times in the face.

Speaker 2 The firearms officers paused in the doorway, briefly stricken.

Speaker 2 Then they radioed through the news.

Speaker 2 Outside, a senior officer walked over to Sergeant Bughes and told him what had happened.

Speaker 8 One of my bosses comes up and said they've gone in and it's not good. It looks like all the family have been killed by the daughter.

Speaker 8 And you don't like telling people, giving people bad news. But unfortunately, it's part of the police officer's job.

Speaker 8 And so I went to Jeremy, I said, unfortunately, I've now made

Speaker 8 entry and unfortunately everybody is dead. I said, I don't know the circumstances, but everybody's dead.

Speaker 8 And he looked at me and

Speaker 8 he started to cry.

Speaker 2 News of the killings tore through the sleepy rural community of Toleshunt, Darcy.

Speaker 2 The next day, the massacre filled the front pages of the national newspapers with headlines like Farmhouse of Death and Top Model Massacres Family.

Speaker 8 Police in Essex are investigating a bizarre shooting in which.

Speaker 14 Late on Tuesday evening, something happened which triggered the deaths of all five of the Bamber family.

Speaker 14 No one knows why the family had to die. The only remaining member of the family was Mr.
Bamber's adopted son, Jeremy.

Speaker 2 As police conducted their investigation, what happened at Whitehouse Farm seemed beyond doubt.

Speaker 2 All the details added up.

Speaker 2 People close to Sheila told police that she'd talked about hearing voices and being chased by the devil.

Speaker 2 One who'd witnessed her most recent breakdown said he was extremely scared for everyone's safety. Sheila behaved like a person possessed, he said, and she'd claimed she could hear the voice of God.

Speaker 2 Sheila's psychiatrist told officers that she'd had bizarre delusions.

Speaker 2 She thought her sons would seduce her and saw evil in both of them, he said.

Speaker 2 Her worst fear was that she might be capable of killing the boys.

Speaker 2 Though the psychiatrist had prescribed her a monthly injection of her antipsychotic so that she couldn't skip it, when she'd received her last shot, a month before the murders, she'd cajoled a different doctor into giving her a half dose.

Speaker 2 It seemed clear that Sheila had suffered a psychotic breakdown, a horrifically violent episode, in which she'd killed everyone, her parents and her two sons, and then turned the gun on herself.

Speaker 2 There was the story about the panicked call Jeremy had received from his father saying Sheila had gone berserk with a gun.

Speaker 2 There was Sheila lying dead, holding the rifle, a bloody Bible beside her body. And there was the house, which had been securely locked from the inside.

Speaker 2 It all cohered into a dark, logical narrative. As one police officer who was there that night said to me, it was all so believable.

Speaker 2 What other explanation could there be?

Speaker 2 He told me, the story had ended. It started and finished on that day.

Speaker 2 Part 3.

Speaker 2 Master Criminal

Speaker 2 The shooting at Whitehouse Farm happened a year before I was born, so I grew up hearing hearing about it.

Speaker 2 My mum would sometimes read out snippets of murder stories from her newspaper, and this story was all over the papers.

Speaker 15 Huge, huge, huge story.

Speaker 11 It was like being in a movie almost sometimes, you know, that you were the centre of something that everyone else was reading about.

Speaker 2 David Woods covered the story of the murders from the beginning. for the Colchester Gazette, a local paper in Essex.

Speaker 8 Digging and digging and digging.

Speaker 11 There was like a feeding frenzy on trying to find out what you could.

Speaker 2 Not only were mass shootings exceedingly rare in Britain, but the story had all these tantalising elements.

Speaker 4 You got everything.

Speaker 11 Big family, money.

Speaker 11 It was seen as, you know, living the ideal life of being pillars of the society they live in.

Speaker 2 And Sheila, the doe-eyed model, turned killer.

Speaker 8 Bambi, great nickname.

Speaker 11 Beautiful.

Speaker 11 Tragic. She fitted a lovely narrative, didn't she, for the press? So there was a feeding frenzy on her as well.

Speaker 2 But then, the narrative, which had seemed so clear, began to change.

Speaker 2 Exactly one month after the murders at Whitehouse Farm, came a sudden, astonishing turn in the case. Essex police now say that the model Sheila Cafforne could have been murdered.

Speaker 9 But all the evidence at the time say police pointed to suicide. In the past week, they've been working on new information.

Speaker 2 Police now suspected that the crime had been carried out by an assassin who shot the whole family and then arranged the scene to make it appear that Sheila had fired the gun.

Speaker 16 And Sheila would be the scapegoat because of her mental illness. He would make it look as though she had killed the family and then committed suicide.

Speaker 2 And now, the prime suspect in the case was none other than Sheila's own brother, Jeremy Bamber.

Speaker 2 New witnesses had come forward and new evidence had been found and now police were convinced Jeremy had been plotting for months to murder his family.

Speaker 2 They said he was a killer so cunning that he'd staged a crime scene that fooled dozens of detectives, so manipulative that he had bamboozled them all with his performance at the scene.

Speaker 2 And so shameless that he'd used used his sister's mental illness to make her a scapegoat.

Speaker 2 And he'd done it all for his family's fortune, to which he became the sole heir.

Speaker 2 But his crime had finally caught up with him.

Speaker 2 Jeremy was arrested and arraigned on five counts of murder.

Speaker 2 As he was driven away from the courthouse in handcuffs, Jeremy was photographed smiling broadly out of the window.

Speaker 2 The resulting picture of the accused killer grinning in the back of a police van became one of the most iconic images of the crime.

Speaker 2 For David Woods and the rest of the press pack, Jeremy turned out to be the ideal tabloid villain.

Speaker 11 A womanized

Speaker 8 bit of a cad, really.

Speaker 11 I mean, you have to say he was a good-looking guy and he appears to have had a lot of charm.

Speaker 11 Someone who thought a lot of himself, I think.

Speaker 11 Cocky, narcissist, psychopath, and also cold-blooded. He didn't exactly get a good press, did he?

Speaker 2 In 1986, the year after the killings, Jeremy Bamber was convicted and sent to prison for life.

Speaker 2 The murders at Whitehouse Farm became Britain's most notorious family massacre. And Jeremy Bamber became one of the country's most despised villains.
Tonight is this man evil beyond belief.

Speaker 2 This was the version of the story I grew up hearing about. When I got my first job in journalism decades later, the case was still a tabloid favorite.

Speaker 9 The infamous case of the White House farm murder.

Speaker 2 It was rehashed over and over again in books, documentaries, and hit TV dramas. Neville Bamber called Jeremy, told him Sheila was going crazy with a gun.

Speaker 15 If you believe Jeremy, the phone call he said his dad made to him, it doesn't make sense.

Speaker 11 So you're accusing him now, are you?

Speaker 2 Eh?

Speaker 15 The son, someone's shooting me.

Speaker 2 But I personally never had a reason to think too deeply about it. Until one day, a couple of years ago, when I heard something about the murders at Whitehouse Farm that did intrigue me,

Speaker 2 I got a tip that this most famous of crimes might still be unresolved.

Speaker 2 That the narrative that had been presented to the jury and then been repeated in countless retellings might be completely wrong.

Speaker 2 So I dug in.

Speaker 2 I began looking into the murders, and as I learned more, I became preoccupied with trying to figure out how the whole case had turned so decisively upside down.

Speaker 2 What had happened to transform Jeremy Bamber in the eyes of the police and the public from a grieving son, weeping outside a locked manor where his whole family lay dead,

Speaker 2 into a cunning mass murderer.

Speaker 2 The more I found out, the clearer it became that nothing about this story was as it seemed.

Speaker 2 And what I began to uncover would challenge what I thought I knew:

Speaker 2 not only about the murders at Whitehouse Farm,

Speaker 2 but also about the police, the judiciary,

Speaker 2 the whole British legal establishment.

Speaker 4 That's episode one of Blood Relatives, a new series reported by Heidi Blake of The New Yorker. The story continues on In the Dark, wherever you listen to podcasts.
Thanks for joining us.

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