Murder at White House Farm

Essex, England, August 1985. A police car was parked outside a farm called 'White House'. The police had come to check the place because of a phone call saying there was trouble at the farm, the home of the Bamber family. When they arrived, the police found the place deathly quiet. Seeing this, they waited until daybreak before knocking at the door. There was no answer and so they broke into the house.

Inside, they found the bodies of five people, all killed with the same rifle. Nevill and June Bamber, the owners of White House Farm, their daughter, Sheila, and her twin six-year-old boys, Nicholas and Daniel. The rifle was Mr. Bamber's. They found Sheila dead but still holding it to her throat. There was a bible in her other hand. She'd suffered from schizophrenia. She must have lost her mind, killed her parents and sons and then herself. It all seemed clear and Jeremy, Sheila's brother who lived a few miles away, said that his father had called him in the middle of the night to say that Sheila had gone beserk.

In fact, it was Jeremy, who had called the police. Four murders and a suicide in one night had suddenly left him with no family but he now owned and controlled the family's many properties and businesses and would get £500,000 in cash. He had started his life in an orphanage but was now a very rich man.

In 1960, in London, an army sergeant working at Buckingham Palace, started a love affair. He was married but his new girlfriend was soon pregnant. The baby, Jeremy, was born in 1961 but he was given to an orphanage. The little boy was healthy and good-looking and was soon adopted by a couple from Essex, the Bambers. Nevill and June Bamber were upper middle class. He had been an Air Force pilot and they now owned the family farm, some properties and a number of businesses.

However, they could not have children and so they had decided to adopt some. First, a little girl, Sheila, and, four years later, Jeremy. The two adopted children grew up in comfort but, when Jeremy reached the age of eleven, his father decided to send him to boarding school. His sister had already gone. And, besides, his father felt strongly that he should not mix with the village boys at the local secondary school. It wasn't good for the family's status and, anyway, Jeremy would probably be these boys' boss in the future.

Social class really mattered to Nevill Bamber. Jeremy only asked himself why someone would adopt a child from an orphanage just to send him away to school. He hated it and so did his sister. He hated it even more after he was raped in his first year at the school. Whether because of the rape or for other reasons, Jeremy soon became very sexually active with both men and women. He was especially good looking and so boyfriends and girlfriends came and went in great numbers.

He was, however, less successful in his school work and, despite the expensive education, he left with no qualifications. His father was not happy and seemed ashamed for the boy to live at home and so he paid for Jeremy to travel. He journeyed to New Zealand where he is said to have broken into a jeweller's and stolen some expensive watches. He also told everyone that he had smuggled heroin during his trip. When he got home, his father gave him a small house to live in rent free, a car and a job on the farm, but not a well-paid one.

A few months before the murders, Jeremy had started going out with a young woman called Julie Mugford. She was pretty and lively; they soon became girlfriend and boyfriend. They had plans to get married but, how could they when Jeremy had such a badly paid job and no house of his own? The murders, when they came, answered this question. Now, Julie's new boyfriend was a rich man. There could and would be a big wedding and an easy life spending the Bamber money. She couldn't hide it: on the night of the murders, she came to the farm to be with Jeremy. She smiled a lot, she whispered in Jeremy's ear and they laughed together. This seemed strange to the police but they were very busy that night and, anyway, people react to death in different ways.

In the weeks after the shooting at the farm, Julie prepared for her wedding, full of plans. But then came the shock. Little by little, she became sure that Jeremy had another woman. There were rumours that he wanted to leave Julie. Now she was angry. First, she went to the press to sell them the story of how Jeremy, and not his sister, had killed the family. They told her to go to the police because, otherwise, they could not put the story in their newspapers. She did and told them that Jeremy had paid a man to do the killing. There was no point, she said, giving the killer's name because he had a false but unbreakable alibi. The police said that a judge would never believe that story and so asked her to think again, to think very hard. Then she remembered that Jeremy had done it himself. The police arrested him and a newspaper paid Julie Mugford 25,000 pounds for her story.

Still, the case against Jeremy was weak. There was what Julie said. There was all the money that became his the night the others in his family were killed. On the other hand, he had no record of violence at any time in his life, psychiatric tests found no evidence of a psychopathic personality, and he passed a lie detector test about the murders. His chances in court looked good. Then came new evidence.

Relatives of Nevill and Julie Bamber had stayed in the farmhouse since the murders. Now, months afterwards, and after Jeremy's arrest, they brought the police a silencer for the rifle used in the murders. They said they had just found it in a cupboard in the house. The house that had been searched expertly by the police. The silencer, a metal tube about 30cm long, was attached to the rifle. It is difficult to kill yourself with a long gun like a rifle because it is hard to reach the trigger when the gun is pointing at you. With the silencer attached, Sheila, who was not an especially tall woman, couldn't have held it to her throat and fired it herself. If, somehow, she had done that, this left the question: who had taken the silencer off the rifle and put it in the cupboard? Maybe Sheila did that before killing herself.

But the evidence about the silencer was just enough to turn the jury against Jeremy Bamber and they found him guilty by a majority of ten votes to two. He was sentenced to at least twenty-five years in prison. The same relatives who found the silencer now inherited the Bamber family money and property. That was in 1986, Jeremy Bamber is still in prison.

The police in the case often did strange or stupid things. They said that Nevill Bamber had not called them that night but a telephone record shows he did. They sat outside the Bamber house for hours. There is evidence that they moved bodies and objects before the detectives arrived and then quickly put them back in the wrong places to hide their mistake. Then, they believed a witness they knew to be angry with Jeremy. She had also taken her time in contacting them.

Jeremy continues to fight to clear his name from prison. Julie Mugford moved to Canada to start a new life. And the Bamber relatives still live at the farm and control the family businesses.