Mystery of the White House Farm: will we ever know the truth?

Those who died were June and Ralph Bamber, six year old twins Nicholas and Daniel Cafell, and their mother, Sheila Cafell. It was Sheila Cafell who died holding the rifle. Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Jones took charge of the inquiry, and seems to have quickly reached the conclusion that he was dealing with four murders and a suicide.

DCI Jones was not simply relying on the explanation offered by the crime scene itself. Sheila Cafell, the adopted daughter of June and Ralph Bamber, was a paranoid schizophrenic who had been failing to take the medication which controlled her condition. In her worst moments, she had come to believe that her sons had been sent by the devil to attack her. She was known to dislike her mother, and to have seriously contemplated suicide. She believed that both her mother and herself had evil minds which needed to be ‘cleansed’. By her body lay a Bible open at a page including such sentences as ‘My heart is sore pained within me: and the terrors of death are fallen upon me.’

The police had been alerted to what was happening at the White House Farm by Jeremy Bamber, Sheila Cafell’s brother, also adopted by the Bambers. He lived three miles from the farm. He called the police at 3.20 am on 7 August 1985, and said he had just been phoned by Ralph who said ‘Please come over. Your sister has gone crazy and has got the gun.’ Police officers drove to the farm, but did not enter it until 7.30. Soon after their arrival they saw someone moving within the farmhouse. By then, Jeremy Bamber had joined them. Since no one had been seen to leave the farmhouse, it was reasonable to assume that the killer must have remained inside.

The known facts fitted the four murders and a suicide theory. But relatives of the Bambers, aware that as a result of the deaths Jeremy stood to inherit £400,000 worth of assets, examined the property three days later. They found windows which were insecure, and, at the back of the gun cupboard, a sound moderator (popularly known as a silencer) which fitted the rifle. On the moderator was a flake of blood. Analysis of the blood by prosecution expert John Hayward showed that it could have come from Sheila Cafell, and not from anyone else. Blood could enter the moderator when it was very close to the to the person shot, and Sheila Cafell is not likely to have shot herself once, replaced the moderator in the cupboard, walked upstairs to where her body was found, and shot herself again.

The second investigation

Then on 7 September 1985, Jeremy Bamber’s girlfriend approached the police and told them he had admitted responsibility for the crimes.

Bamber was arrested but released without charge. Under pressure from the relatives, DCI Jones was taken off the case, and replaced by Detective Superintendent Michael Ainsley. Bamber was rearrested and charged with murdering all five victims. On 28 October 1986 he was convicted at Chelmsford Crown Court and, following two unsuccessful appeals, he remains in prison.

As S. C. Lomax observes, this case has ‘many of the ingredients of a classic detective novel.’ The hero might be Detective Sergeant Stan Jones (no relation to DCI Jones, I assume), who arrested Bamber on the second occasion and questioned him. More sceptical than his superior officer, Stan Jones had always suspected Bamber. The junior detective did not trust superficial appearances, but instead encouraged the amateur sleuths from the family, who found indicators of possible evidence neglected in the original examination of the scene of the crimes. Perhaps the investigation had not been too thorough initially, due to the four murders and a suicide assumption.

The new narrative was compelling, based as it now was on more subtle evidence. The blood groups identified in the flake of blood on the moderator were found to be consistent with Sheila Cafell’s blood. Bamber’s claim to have received the phone call from his father, saying his sister had gone crazy, now became evidence against him, since the police said the phone used by Ralph Bamber was off the hook when they entered the farmhouse, suggesting that if the call to Bamber had been made, his line would have remained connected and he would not have been able to make the call to the police shortly afterwards (there are of course a number of explanations why the line at Bamber’s house would have been cleared in time for him to make the call).

New police methods

As Lomax’s book painstakingly demonstrates, all the evidence against Bamber is dubious and under challenge. But this case occurred at a time of major changes in policing in the UK. The Police & Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE), although not all of its provisions had come into force when Bamber was arrested, had effectively deprived the police of their long discredited practice of ‘verballing’ – claiming to have heard suspects confess to crimes. In future, if verbal confessions disputed by suspects were to be introduced as evidence, they had to be reported by lay witnesses – as, in this case, Bamber’s girlfriend.

This change to new methods and the development of new forensic techniques gave the flake adhering to the moderator, and the proposition that Bamber was lying about receiving a phone call from his father, an evidential strength derived from the notion that such indicators could provide an insight into the mind of the suspect, enabling the construction of a new narrative which could be substituted for the straightforward, old fashioned story that DCI Jones had accepted. This now became, according to the prosecution, Bamber’s carefully constructed cover story, hiding the truth about his evil nature, which was now revealed by the new model detectives. Ironically, that method of identification which was to become central to the new police methods, DNA matching, was not yet available in 1985: it might have determined once and for all whose blood was on the moderator and settled the case. But the police have destroyed all the real evidence in this case, so further tests cannot be carried out.

Competing narratives

To say that there are two narratives produced according to two differing methods is not to imply a choice of one as right and the other wrong. But the new policing methods recruit any behaviour by suspects as evidence of guilt: the fact that the police car overtook Bamber’s car on the way to the crime scene was taken to indicate that he wasn’t in a hurry because he knew that his family were already dead; taking a holiday was taken to indicate that he was indifferent to his family’s fate, rather than traumatised and needing to distance himself from the horror at White House Farm; and so on. Presentation of such ambiguous information in court as part of a compelling narrative of a police investigation revealing the hidden truth may guarantee a conviction. But analysed later, item by item, the case presented in court no longer seems so convincing, and the first, only too obvious explanation of the deaths reasserts itself.

However reacceptance of the original explanation is not easy to achieve. The forensic examination of the scene of crime and the exhibits removed from it, which neglected completely the sound moderator which was to become a key item of evidence, was perhaps not too thorough, since then the case appeared to be already solved. The re-examination of the scene, following the relatives’ initial findings, which appeared to show that Bamber could have left the farmhouse by a window after committing the crimes, was carefully recorded, and since the real evidence was subsequently destroyed, is not easy to challenge. The effect of police recording methods is to make the investigations which produce prosecution evidence transparent, while obscuring any other possible evidence.

Non-disclosure

As in virtually all cases featured on the INNOCENT website, some evidence has undoubtedly not been disclosed by the police and prosecution. The investigation into the White House Farm murders took place under an earlier disclosure regime, where rules were less clear than they are now, but which seemed to permit the police to withhold evidence that the defence did not ask for. Since then appeal court decisions in the cases of Ward and Saunders led to disclosure of everything found and all records generated by the police in the course of their investigation (theoretically – in practice, how could anyone tell whether everything had been disclosed or not?).

The new regime did not last . The Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1998 (reinforced by subsequent Acts) gave the police responsibility for selecting the records that might help the defence. But defendants and their lawyers have to declare what their defences are going to be so that the police can select the records to be disclosed. Not only does this mean that defences sensitive to police interference have to be disclosed in advance of trials, but that defendants have to forecast what the police might have found that might be helpful to them. The police might hold evidence which would help a defendant’s case, but only the defendant would recognise it as being helpful, since the police might have given it no consideration at all. Tough. The poor innocent defendant will never know that evidence exists that might prove his innocence. Lomax deduces that such evidence must exist (or must have existed) in Bamber’s case. Will we ever know?

Using this book

The account I’ve given here, of narrative and counter narrative, of case construction and presentation, can be extracted from this very thorough book, but with difficulty. The author pursues an assumption that Jeremy Bamber is innocent right from the beginning, even when he purports to be presenting the prosecution case (chapter 5). As a result, every detail of prosecution evidence is subjected to close analysis in order to prove it is invalid, each time it is mentioned. The detail and the repetition make the book hard to read. It is tempting to react by looking for reasons for Bamber’s guilt. Why, after all, did police officers, a jury, and two sets of appeal judges believe Bamber to be guilty? We weren’t at the scene, nor did we hear witnesses testify in court. Why should we question the officers’, jury members’ and judges’ conclusions?

But this would be unfair to Bamber. We have to take the information provided by Lomax and reconstruct the course and effects of the police investigation so that we can understand why the jury is likely to have made a mistake, and how the appeal court was able to leave the mistake uncorrected.

So will we ever know the truth? As ever, the workings of police investigations and the criminal justice system serve to obscure whatever truth might have once existed, and we are left with doubt. That should be, according to the system we have in place, not enough to convict a defendant.

by Andrew Green

The author, S. C. Lomax, writes on miscarriage of justice cases, including that of Barry George, convicted but subsequently cleared of responsibility for the murder of TV presenter Jill Dando.

click here for INNOCENT page on Jeremy Bamber