Jeremy Bamber summary farm evidence files Composite: Composite: Guardian Design; Peter Case/Mirrorpix/Getty; Ted Blackbrow/ANL/Shutterstock View image in fullscreen Jeremy Bamber summary farm evidence files Composite: Composite: Guardian Design; Peter Case/Mirrorpix/Getty; Ted Blackbrow/ANL/Shutterstock The Bamber files Jeremy Bamber The Jeremy Bamber files: three crucial questions about the White House Farm massacre In 1986, Bamber was convicted of the murders of five members of his family. He has always protested his innocence. This year, with the help of leading experts, we have re-examined some of the most compelling evidence
Warning: this piece contains crime-scene photographs
The White House Farm massacre is one of Britain’s most notorious and horrifying crimes. On 7 August 1985, five members of the Bamber family were shot dead at their farmhouse in Essex, England. This Wednesday marked exactly 40 years since Jeremy Bamber was convicted of the murders of his adoptive parents, his sister and her six-year-old twin boys. He was initially jailed for a minimum of 25 years, later upgraded to a whole-life sentence.
If Bamber did kill his family, it is right that he remains in prison. But there have always been questions about the safety of his convictions, and these have grown recently. My late reporting partner, Eric Allison, formerly the prisons correspondent for the Guardian, spent years investigating the case and we began reporting on these questions together. If Bamber isn’t guilty, the idea of an innocent man spending 41 years and counting in prison, wrongfully convicted of killing his loved ones, is horrifying.
View image in fullscreen The funeral of Sheila Caffell, her twin sons and her parents in August 1985. Photograph: Chris Barham/ANL/Shutterstock Bamber’s case has been submitted three times to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the body responsible for investigating alleged miscarriages of justice. If the CCRC believes there is a “real possibility” that the verdict will be quashed or the sentence changed, it then refers cases back to the court of appeal. Bamber’s case was referred once by the CCRC to the court of appeal in 2001, and the panel of judges concluded: “The more we examined the detail of the case, the more likely we thought it to be that the jury were right.” In 2012, the CCRC refused to refer Bamber’s case back to the court of appeal. In 2021, he made a new submission; the CCRC has rejected the four of 10 points it has so far analysed.
In recent years, the CCRC has been widely criticised, not only for the time it takes to investigate alleged wrongful convictions, but for failing to investigate them, full stop. The Bamber case is a prime example. The CCRC has taken five years to examine those four points, and there has seemingly been no attempt to investigate the issues that Bamber insists make his conviction unsafe or prove his innocence.
In fact, at times, the CCRC seems to have gone out of its way to do the opposite – to challenge convincing evidence by returning to trial evidence that has subsequently been refuted or proved unreliable.
View image in fullscreen A crime-scene photograph taken at White House Farm after the massacre. In 2024, the investigative journalist Heidi Blake wrote a brilliant piece for the New Yorker, challenging the safety of Bamber’s conviction. This was subsequently turned into the podcast Blood Relatives . She interviewed a former police officer, Nicholas Milbank, who…