White House Farm Murders

The White House Farm murders took place near the English village of Tolleshunt D'Arcy, Essex, on 7 August 1985, when Nevill Bamber, a farmer and magistrate, his wife June, their adoptive daughter Sheila Caffell, and her six-year-old twin sons, were shot and killed during the night inside the Bambers' farmhouse.

The police at first believed that Sheila, diagnosed with schizophrenia, had fired the shots then turned the gun on herself. But weeks after the murders, the ex-girlfriend of Nevill and June's adoptive son Jeremy Bamber—the only surviving member of the immediate family—told police that Bamber had implicated himself. The prosecution argued that, motivated by a large inheritance, he had killed the family and placed the gun in his unstable sister's hands to make it look like a murder-suicide. A silencer the prosecution said was on the rifle would have made it too long, they argued, for her fingers to reach the trigger to shoot herself. He was convicted in October 1986 by a 10-2 majority, sentenced to a minimum of 25 years, and in 1994 was told he must spend the rest of his life in jail.

Bamber has protested his innocence throughout, though his extended family remain convinced of his guilt. The brutality of the murders and Bamber's efforts to secure his release have meant the case has rarely left the public eye. The Times wrote that it had all the ingredients of a classic whodunit: a massacre in the English countryside, overbearing parents, an unstable daughter, a scheming son, a jilted girlfriend, and bungling police.

Bamber's lawyers submitted several applications over the years to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the latest of which was rejected in April 2012. Their evidence included expert opinion that the silencer might not have been used during the killings, that the crime scene may have been damaged then reconstructed by police, that key crime-scene photographs were taken weeks after the murders, and that the timing of Sheila's death was miscalculated. One crucial issue was whether Bamber received a call from his father that night to say Sheila had gone "berserk" with a gun. Bamber said he did, that he alerted police, and that Sheila fired the final shot while he and the officers were standing outside the house. It became a central plank of the prosecution's case that the father had made no such call, and that the only reason Bamber would have lied about it—indeed, the only way he could have known about the shootings—was that he was the killer himself.