In The Dark - Blood Relatives, Episode 3

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

One day, Heidi gets a call from Wakefield Prison, where Jeremy Bamber remains locked up, forty years after the murders. He’s one of the nation’s most reviled villains. But he insists he��s innocent. New Yorker subscribers get early, ad-free access to “Blood Relatives.” In Apple Podcasts, tap the link at the top of the feed to subscribe or link an existing subscription. Or visit newyorker.com/dark to subscribe and listen in the New Yorker app. In the Dark has merch! Buy specially designed hats, T-shirts, and totes for yourself or a loved one at store.newyorker.com.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Hi, it's Madeline. Before you tune in to this episode, I wanted to remind you that New Yorker subscribers get access to the full Blood Relative series early. All six episodes ad-free in the New Yorker app. It's just $1 a week to subscribe, which you can do by visiting new yorker.com slash dark. That's new yorker.com slash dark. Heidi, I'm only about 45 minutes. So we will have to schedule or schedule. or whatever it needs to be done.

But it's great because I'm now on the phone with you. And we can organise times, we can organise, you know, dates, meetings. But anyway, not to worry. We'll speak soon. Bye, Heidi. Happy birthday to me. Bye now. 40 years after the murders at White House Farm,

Jeremy Bamber remains in prison. He's locked up in a maximum security facility. known to the press as Monster Mansion. To this day, his name and photo are still splashed across stories nearly every month with headlines like Twisted Family Killers, or what the UK's most dangerous prisoners eat for Christmas dinner, full menu revealed. Despite all the fevered publicity surrounding the case, in the years since his trial, I and the rest of the public had

actually heard almost nothing directly from Jeremy Bamber. Prison authorities in the UK often make it hard for journalists to talk with inmates. So aside from a few quotes in the newspapers, mostly disseminated by his supporters, his own voice was lost in all the noise. So when I started looking into this story, I took a punt and sent a letter to Wakefield prison. And to my surprise, a couple of months later, I got the... that voicemail.

But it's great because now I'm on the phone with you. And we can organise times, we can organise, you know, days. I was eager to speak to Jeremy Bamber. Because for all these decades, while the tabloids have run their scare stories depicting him as a monster, he has steadfastly maintained that he's innocent. From in the dark and the New Yorker, I'm Heidi Blake. And this is blood relatives.

Cocky, narcissists, psychopath, cold-blooded. Jeremy was horrible. I mean, he did horrible things. Do not be fooled by Jeremy Bow. He's got away with so much. The first thing I thought when he started crying is you're forcing that. I think nearly every police officer came into contact with him thought he was lying.

I'd heard so many people talk about Jeremy Bambor. Now, I was going to hear directly from him. Part 1. Prison Calls. This call has been a person currently in a prison in England. If you do not wish to accept this call, please hang up now. Jeremy, hi. Oh, hi. The first time I spoke with Jeremy Bambor, he'd just celebrated a birthday.

63. Wow, 63. I've just put my camera up in jail and that's my 39th birthday. It was the 39th birthday that he'd spent behind bars. The image I'd had of Jeremy Bamba was from photographs and footage from the 80s when he was a brash, puckishly handsome young man of 24, flashing a rebellious. smile. But now, his hair had turned white and his voice was raspy. He was getting old. I look at it. I've been awake in jail a billion seconds. Jeremy has limited phone time every day,

only about 45 minutes to divide between his lawyer and friends and now me. And he was clear about how much of that he was willing to give me. So we're going to have 10 minutes. We've got to be straight, but we can have 10 minutes every day or if you're happy with that. because we've only got 45, so you can have 10. I'm very happy with that. That works great. I would end up talking to Jeremy almost every day for months. Morning, hi.

Jeremy, hi. Hello. So sorry to miss your call earlier. Jeremy would call me whenever he was free, which happened at all sorts of odd hours. And in fact, just locked myself out of my house. He'd call me in the morning when I was rushing to get ready. Hi, Heidi. Have you got two minutes? Absolutely, yeah.

Or while I was sleeping with some urgent detail from his case. case that he just struck on. Sorry to do this, but it's quite important. And the important thing with the radio and telephone marks is they've produced a huge amount of supposing manuscript copies. It was strange to find myself on the phone with a man considered to be one of Britain's most vicious killers. For years, I'd talk about him the same way most people do

as a cold, glib, psychopath, who'd done something unimaginable. imaginably evil. But here I was, chatting to him, about ordinary things. I went down to the hairdressing salon here. What kind of style have you gone for? Well, just a normal way, you know, short back in size, really. The old standard prison haircut. When it came to the details of his case, Jeremy was more than ready to dive in.

I guess you've got one of two learning things you'd love to ask. Well, I mean, I certainly have. And I kind of thought maybe the thing to do. do, since we're going to be going to be going at this in 10-minute chunks, is just to kind of go through things in this somewhat chronological order, if that makes sense. I'm leaving this to you, Heidi.

Yeah, okay. You can have me fried, poached, scrambled, you know, flambayed, however you want me. I had so many questions for Jeremy about what had happened on the night of the killings, but also about how he'd behaved in the days and weeks afterwards. In that time, Jeremy had acted in ways that his relatives and later police and prosecutors had found odd, and by extension, suspicious.

So much so that his behaviour became a big part of the case against him. It was what led prosecutors to present him so effectively as a cold-blooded villain. The way they told it, in court, all the strange things Jeremy did and said added up to such a damning portrait, one that has lingered in the public imagination for decades. And so I wanted to hear how Jeremy would explain those things. Come on then, let's go. We'll have to rack some brain cells to go back 40-odd years

to get some meat on the bone here. I know. It's a long time ago. Let's see how we get on. Just tell me what comes to you naturally. Okay. I'm wondering if you can take me back to the day before the crime on the 6th, when you were out on, you were harvesting all day

out on the tractor? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It had been harvest season, the busiest time of year on the farm, and Jeremy said he'd spent the day helping his father, Neville, bring in the crops. That evening, he'd spotted some rabbits by the potato shed.

On the farm, they were considered pesky vernon. So Jeremy said he hurried back to the manor to grab his father's rifle, a 22 an shirt. So nipping back for the rifle and thinking, oh yeah, I'll get these. And by the time I'd gone back, they'd gone. No rabbits that day. As dusk settled over the fields, Jeremy said he headed back to the manor to return his father's rifle and say goodnight to his parents and his sister, Sheila, who was up from London with the twins. He said he paused. when he walked in the house and propped the rifle

at the end of a bench in the scullery. And I think there was some flowers there and some bits and bobs and I just rested against that. And I remember taking the magazine out and putting it on the... I think it was a cushion or something there. Everyone was in the kitchen.

His parents were sitting at the table with Sheila and Jeremy said the atmosphere was tense. He said June and Neville were telling Sheila that she was too ill to take care of her boys since her most recent schizophrenic breakdown, and they were suggesting that she should place them in foster care.

This scenario, losing her children, was Sheila's worst nightmare. Tell me, how did Sheila strike you that day? She was looking just lost, if the words be right. And just that, she used to smoke these little shrewd cigars. And I remember she was puffing a lot of those. when she came down this time, as if she'd, you know, got that kind of need to just get that nicotine fix, which I think she didn't like being told what to do. Jeremy's account of this conversation about fostering the twins was familiar.

He'd told police about it on the night of the murders, and it had come up at trial. Prosecutors claimed he'd invented it to make it appear that Sheila had flown into a rage at the suggestion that the boys should be taken away and that was why she'd murdered the family. But to me, Jeremy's memory of the last time he saw his family didn't make Sheila sound scary, just kind of small and quiet and sad.

That's the last few I had of them. You know, mum in her normal seat sitting there eating her tea, Dad, in his normal seat, sitting there eating his tea, and Sheila, the other end of the table. And I remember her being quite hunched over and small, looking back into the room as I left, and just said, goodnight, everybody, and off I went. And that was it, until Dad phoned me. Jeremy said he drove home to his cottage, a couple of miles from the manor. He watched a bit of TV and went to bed. And that night, around 3.30 a.m., Jeremy said he was woken up by the phone call from his father, Neville.

He sounded distressed and rushed and distracted. Jeremy recalled Neville saying, your sister has gone berserk, and she's got a gun. Sheila's got one of my guns. Police come over. I must have said something, but I don't remember. saying anything. Dad, what's up? Or, Dad, you know, how can I help or what do you want? Or I must have said something, but I don't remember responding, Dad, what is it? Or dad, and then the phone just went dead or cut off. He said he tried calling back, but he couldn't get through. The line was busy.

And then that left me just wondering what to do. Jeremy told me that this call was worrying, for sure, but not totally out of the ordinary. His family was used to dealing with Sheila's schizophrenic episodes. She'd lashed out before and thrown things. And when this kind of thing happened, it usually blew over. By all accounts, Neville was an intensely private man, who hated the idea of involving strangers in his family's business. But Jeremy said, as far as he knew, Sheila had never grabbed a gun before.

So after this call from his father, he said he wasn't sure what to do next. Should he call the police? Or would that seem like a big overreaction? I didn't have any idea that it would spiral like this because it's never done before. Right. So, you know, thinking out while I'm heading towards, you know, gunfire and mayhem, I didn't think that at all. I thought I was going to get there.

Dad was going to come and say, for fuck's how you brought the police. What I wanted was you to come over because I'm panicking a bit because she'd It's just a little bit more out of control than normal. He told me he wondered if part of him was even feeling a bit annoyed with Sheila for making a scene. It's the inevitability of mental illness that it goes up and down. And it's quite emotionally tiring for those around. And you would... It's quite difficult.

I mean, and to keep that level of... concern and love, and sometimes you can just think, for fuck's sake, you know, put yourself together. Sometimes it can just wear you down. That night, despite his hesitation, Jeremy did decide to call the police. But rather than dialing the emergency number, 999, he found a telephone directory and looked up the number for the local station. Prosecutors would later point to this decision as evidence that Jeremy was making up the whole story. Sergeant Chris Buse, the first officer on the scene that night,

told me it had immediately struck him as odd. Kids are brought up with the number 999 drilled into their heads. If something's wrong, call 999. You don't look up the local police station's number at 2 o'clock in the morning or whenever it is. I asked Jeremy about that. And the decision sort of not to dial 999, I guess I'm curious, Like, do you remember considering doing that and then thinking, no, that's silly, I'll just look up? It never occurred to me to phone 999.

It wasn't an emergency. You know, she's dealt with these things before. So, no, I didn't. I didn't think of 999. Jeremy said that as he drove over to the manor to meet the police, he was a bit apprehensive. But it wasn't until he got there and found the house eerily silent that he said he started to become really concerned. The only sound from inside was the whining of the family's dog, a Shih Tzu named Crispy. Everything else was still.

That was when he'd started urging the police to go into the house. Sergeant Buse had told me he thought this too was suspicious. He wanted us to see as soon as possible that the house was sort of dead people, so we could play out a scene with dead bodies and him reacting to him. Like Jeremy just couldn't wait for the police to go inside and find his family's bodies. But when I put Sergeant Buse's theory to Jeremy, he felt that that was a sign that you already knew what was in there and you just wanted them to go in and find it quickly,

so the whole thing was sort of over. Jeremy said that was ridiculous. I did try and push him to go in the house. Of course I did. And he wouldn't. But that's him. That's him being frightened. I mean, obviously we want to.

go in the house. I wanted to go in the house to save my family or to help them. Jeremy sat and waited in a patrol car for hours for armed police to arrive, then for hours more as they surrounded the property and called for Sheila to surrender. He said he kept waiting anxiously while the raid team entered the house. It's probably as frightening a situation as anyone could be in, and yet I had no one there holding my hand or giving me any reassurance. After a while, Sergeant Buse came over to him to break the terrible news. He just came up. I think he tapped on the window and wound it down and said, you know, they're all dead. Everybody's dead.

Jeremy broke down in tears when he heard the news, a reaction that struck Sergeant Buse as a big act. But Jeremy told me he was in shock, so much so that he thought at first that the police had killed his family. And I went, what, you've shot them all, you've killed them all. Why have you shot them all? I remember being really distressed at the police for having done it because I genuinely believed that because there were so many armed police

that I genuinely believed they'd killed everybody. And I remember saying that over and over to them. And I remember that one of the senior officers coming over and saying, no, no, no, we haven't shot them, we haven't shot them. No. When Jeremy told me this, I was skeptical. I wondered if he'd come up with this story in order to undermine the prosecution's narrative

that he set out from the start to frame his sister. But later, I found an officer's handwritten notes confirming that Jeremy had voiced this suspicion at the scene. The officer wrote, I put that comment down to him being distraught. Jeremy told me that however scared he'd been for his family's safety up to that point, it had still never really occurred to him

that Sheila had actually killed them. There was no sense of, of what an earth could have unfolded in the house. You know, because it's not like I would have imagined that Sheila would have, you know, shot everyone. You know, I had no concept whatsoever that it was going to end like this. That would have never, ever entered my mind that we were going to enter the house to find everybody dead. Not even one percent of my thought thought that. From the officer's notes at the scene, it seemed at first like Jeremy was unable to accept that his family was gone.

He kept begging to speak to his father, and when the cops reminded him that Neville was dead, he broke down afresh. Then, finally, he muttered, Sheila ought to be in a nut house for what she's done. Shortly afterwards, he was seen retching in a field. Can you tell me a bit of what was going through, going through you, going through your mind as you were processing this news that your sister had done it? Do you know, selfishly, absolutely selfishly, I remember selfishly thinking, how on earth am I going to fucking cope? How am I going to manage this on my own? and that genuinely I remember it and I can feel the feel now and I'm crying now just that instant how the fuck am I going to cope and I

it was really frightening If you're a reader, or even an aspirational reader, I hope you'll join us on critics at large from the New Yorker. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now. and how we got here. And because we're culture critics, we just love to go back to the text. Yes, so if books are for you, critics at large just might be for you as well. Join us on Critics at Large from the New Yorker every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. Part 2. Scrutiny.

In the days after the crime, police records show that a doctor prescribed Jeremy some valium to calm his nerves. and he started washing the pills down with alcohol. It was after that that he did and said many of the things that seemed to his relatives so unbefitting of a grieving son, like cracking jokes after the funeral. How do you feel looking back on those moments? Do you look back at that and think, oh God, I wish I hadn't said that.

That just didn't look great. It's just my stupid personality. Honestly, just being a dick. Actually, like a dick and say things I shouldn't have said, but, you know, I need to take, I need to own it. I need to, you know, I have to own it. I had noticed that Jeremy could be a bit of a screwball. Like that moment in our very first call, when we were about to start talking about the murder of his family, and he said, You can have me fried, poached, scrambled, you know, flambayed, however you want me.

That seemed so flippant. Or another time, when we talked about the family Shih Tzu, Crispy, the one who could be heard whining inside the manor. The dog had been jumpy after the shootings and had taken to biting people. So Jeremy sent him to the vet to be put down and presumably cremated. I know I made a joke the other day about Crispy. And I said, he was, in the end, Crispy. Is that too soon? Is it too soon, 40 years later?

Right. And it probably is too soon. You can hear me laughing along awkwardly, as I did other times too, when he'd make sexist jokes or be a bit boredy, and I'd think, really, read the room, Jeremy. I'd imagine him sitting around the Sunday dinner table with his relatives, David and Anne and their father, Robert, back in the 80s. And it wasn't hard to see how he'd rubbed them the wrong way.

His uncle, Robert, wrote, I loathed that boy and couldn't bear being anywhere near him. Even Jeremy's own barrister seemed to take against him. In private notes before the trial, he described his client as, quote, spoiled brat, or brat who would have liked to have been spoiled more. It was strange, this goshness, coming from a man who'd been so widely depicted as an arch manipulator, a charming and highly persuasive sociopath. Do not think fall by Jeremy Boundler.

Who'd deceived so many people. We have a scene of a crime which has been very cunningly arranged. Then, as I waded through the evidence files, I found a document that seemed to offer an explanation. A psychiatric report that outlined multiple assessments Jeremy has undergone over the years at the request of prison authorities or his lawyers. None of those evaluations had detected any evidence of psychopathic traits

or any sign that Jeremy had a personality disorder. He was a little vain, a little flamboyant, a little compulsive, but all within the normal range. The report also placed him within the low to normal range for impression management, meaning that he was not an artful manipulator. He was below, average in his ability to assess or influence the way others perceived him. The psychiatrist concluded,

it is hard to sustain the view that Jeremy Bamber is so expert in deceptive self-presentation as to maintain this front over a variety of different assessors, different assessment instruments and different times. In the weeks after the murder, Jeremy was under relentless scrutiny. His cousins were watching him closely, taking copious notes about what he said and did. Many of their observations would feature prominently at trial

when prosecutors pointed to his behaviour as evidence that he was a cold, remorseless killer. But Jeremy told me he was pretty much oblivious to all of this. He had no idea his behaviour was being picked apart, like the moment at his parents' funeral, for instance, when he broke down crying, which his cousin, David Bowflower, had told me, seemed so suspicious.

Did you feel under a microscope at the time? Did you feel like people were watching? You didn't? No, no, not at all. Not at all. I didn't see the cameras. I didn't see, I didn't see people, I didn't see any of it. I was just, I was wrapped up in the few people that were around me

and my own self-injoled and sadness, I suppose. I asked about that famous footage, of him, breaking down outside the church, and how some people thought he was acting. Yeah, but that's just, I mean, come on. You know, it just, it hurts when people, you know, I was crying yesterday, you know, come on. I'm an emotional person who,

I'm sorry, I know everyone thinks I'm a psychopath and can't cry and don't have any emotion, but it's just not true. Then there was that moment afterwards that Jeremy's cousins found so sickening when he turned and gave them what David called a Cheshire Cap smile. Jeremy remembers that too, but he says he was just trying to reassure them that he was all right. Smiling and, you know, trying to put forward a, you know, a kind of united front that I'm okay and, you know, don't worry and we've got the, we got through the funeral and it was, it was tough. But having got through it, you know, I felt, well, great, we're through it.

What about all that partying and vacationing? The way he'd been knocking back champagne and cocktails at a Caribbean restaurant after the funeral, and then holding court at his girlfriend's birthday dinner, visiting strip clubs and sailing off to Amsterdam and Santa Fe. I asked Jeremy what that was all about. Trying to feel things maybe, trying to feel, trying to get people to like me more or, you know, like when we were going down to the Caribbean cottage and, you know, I was trying to be the life and the soul at Julie's birthday or whatever. You know, you kind of, you force it. And what do you think you were seeking, how you were comforting yourself in those actions of all of those things you did?

love and kindness and support and friendship and an end to my sadness and trying to figure out that life was worth living I suppose These criticisms of Jeremy for failing to perform his sorrow convincingly were later presented as evidence at trial that he was lying about everything as though no innocent person who'd just lost his whole family

would conceivably behave the way he did. But this aspect of the case troubled me because grief can manifest itself in all sorts of strange and unbecoming ways. All these are retrospectively trying to figure out ways to, I don't know, just portraying me slightly strangely. And it disturbs me a little bit, but it's, you know, these are all kind of nothingnesses. But accumulatively, people think that this is the narrative. Yeah.

And it's really not. As Jeremy tells it, in his grief, he didn't even notice that his relatives were growing suspicious of him. He said he felt grateful for their presence. He thought they were being supportive. At one point, he even sent his cousin, Anne Eaton, a bunch of flowers. I did, yeah, I said to some flowers. Thank you for all your loving. Thank you for everything you're doing.

You know, I was happy to have some supports from people come around and, you know, care for me. Anne recorded this moment, receiving Jeremy's flowers in her notes. She wrote, The card which came with them said, Thank you for all your loving. Ugh. It wasn't until later that Jeremy started to realise that something was amiss between him and his relatives. It was when he finally went back to the manor for the first time after the murders,

that Jeremy suddenly noticed various things were missing. He said he was shocked to find that David, Anne and their parents, parents had started making off with some of the valuables from the manor. They wanted mum and dad's possessions, jewellery, paintings, things. They just wanted stuff. When I went round the house and they'd loaded everything into their cars and taking it back to their houses, I just couldn't believe it. And I thought, what on earth's going on here?

They were just going in the house and taking what they wanted. In mum's house, mom and dad's house. They were just taking things and taking them home. But what happened to, in whose world, do you go into someone's house of the deceased and start taking possessions? Hmm. I mean, come on. This was true. That day, the cousins went into the manor and found the blood-spattered silencer that soon became a crucial piece of the case against Jeremy.

They'd also scoured the property for cash and other valuables, the family treasures, as Robert Beauflower called them in his diary, filling the trunk of Anne's car with guns and jewellery that they wanted to take away, quote, for safekeeping. It was actually only after this when he realised his relatives were taking things that he started to move the family's valuables out of the house himself, an act that led his cousins to allege

that he was emptying the house of treasure, or as David Beauflower put it, flogging it off ten to the penny. Jeremy told me he sold only a handful of items, a few bits and bobs, but this allegation played into the prosecution case that he'd murdered the family out of greed. There was one possession, in particular, that Jeremy was especially concerned with.

It was his mother's engagement ring, a beautiful band studded with gemstones. It was three sapphars and two diamonds. Sapphire at the end, diamond, sapphire diamonds. in a row. Lovely. Beautiful. Yeah, that sounds beautiful. Huh. Yes, it was. And mum loved it.

And she treasured it, not for its value, but because it was dead. His mother, June, wore it always, ever since he could remember. She never took it off. Even, even, even, even when she trapped her hand in the door and her ring finger was damaged and she still wouldn't take the ring off. She'd never taken her engagement ring off, and she never would. The engagement ring was a valuable. item, and right after the murders, the relatives had told Jeremy they wanted to keep it.

Anne even wrote about this. I asked Jeremy before I left about Aunt June Bamba's engagement ring because my mother wished to have something of her late sisters, she noted. But Jeremy had told her no. He wanted his mother's ring to be cremated with her. Jeremy told me his mother had always said that she would take the ring to her grave, and he insisted that the family follow his mother's he didn't care about the ring's value. But in the end, that's not what happened. Unbeknownst to Jeremy, the ring was removed from June's body during the post-mortem

and handed over to the relatives. Mum would have been absolutely, absolutely devastated by that. Hmm. Breaks my heart. They did that to my mum. breaks my fucking heart. She used to say that to me so often. You really wanted to honour that wish that she wanted...

It was what she said. She must have said it a thousand times to me in her life that she was so honoured to wear Dad's ring. I just feel really distressed. Poor mum, God. Yeah, it's really hard. I just, if you could pinpoint one thing that they did that broke my heart was in.

The ring was given to Anne's mother, and she kept it. Hi, it's Madeline. I'm excited to tell you that In the Dark has merch. There's a hat, a shirt, and a tote bag, all with the new In the Dark logo. They're modern and high quality, and you can get them by going to store.newarker.com. Part 3. Conviction As the weeks and months passed after the murders and the cloud of suspicion continue to

form around Jeremy, he still refused to believe he was really a suspect. Even after he broke up with his girlfriend, Julie Mugford, and she came forward with damning accusations against him. He said to me with quite a lot of fearments that he'd get rid of all of the family, including Sheila and the boys. Jeremy told me, he assumed she was just angry and wouldn't stick with her story. I thought, typical. That's just typical. You just, I don't want to go out with you anymore. And then you go to the police and say, Jeremy's paid a him and two grand to kill the family because you're really angry.

They should play out with you. And I just thought, the police aren't going to believe that in nonsense. You know, and she's just angry. When he learned about the blood-spattered silencer under the stairs, he dismissed it, saying someone must have planted it. It was as if the gravity of his situation just hadn't sunk in. Even when he was charged with murder and driven away to jail, he says he caught sight of a group of friends across the street and grinned at them through the window.

Like when I was smiling at my friends at the court case, I just try to reassure people, look, I'm okay, mate, don't worry. So I smile and wave and I'm fine. But you have to put on a brave face. This was how the press captured that photo of the accused killer grinning in the back of a police fan that became such an infamous image. When he went to trial, in October of 1986,

this tendency of his, to fail to read the room, it proved a gift to the prosecution. There was this one famous moment during cross-examination when the prosecutor pushed him on one point in particular about his story of going out to shoot rabbits on the night of the murders. If Jeremy's story was true, the prosecutor said, that meant he'd left a rifle, lying around the house, a dangerous thing to do with children present.

Jeremy kept taking gulps of water. I wish I hadn't done it, he said. He added in a whisper, I was being lackadaisical. Then the prosecutor changed tack, accusing him of making the whole story up, and Jeremy snapped back. That's what you've got to try and establish. Everyone I spoke to who attended the trial remembered that as a deviant. This is David Woods, the reporter who covered the case for the Colchester Gazette.

The court went absolutely quiet. Everyone knew he'd slipped up there, because that's the first time you thought, you cocky, so and so, you know, he couldn't resist that little taunt. I said it, you know, it's just that frustration. Look, I did. I went out and I saw the rabbits and I got the gun and put it back, and that's the truth. And, you know, it's for you to prove I'm lying, you know. And when that kind of came out, tell me about what you sensed in the courtroom. I felt it. You know, I felt, I thought, you know, that just sounds so cocky and arrogant and stupid.

I just wonder what you were feeling at that point, because having left the rifle there, potentially played a very significant part in all of this. And I just wonder whether if you were... Of course, because I was being made to feel a guilt that I felt was unwarranted. But did you... And that I couldn't say, well, look, my dad was just so laxidaisical with guns, really. You know, he has to take some blame. And I couldn't say that.

You know, what on earth was he doing, allowing Sheila and the boys to come to the house where there are, you know, half a dozen, a dozen guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition and all the single thing's locked up. That felt like something you couldn't say because that wouldn't go over well. Yeah, I couldn't say it, could I?

I bristle sometimes when I get made to feel blame and guilt for things that, you know, I'm not allowed to defend myself on. Because I can never say anything bad about mum and dad, can I? Because I'm not allowed to. Yeah, that must, I mean, that must be difficult. You know, because people say, ah, yeah, there you go, you see. That's why you wanted to kill him. Jeremy's trial lasted 17 days before the jury retired to deliberate.

So did you sit there with a kind of sinking feeling, realizing this isn't going my way? Or did you not realize until the verdict? I still thought right at the end that the jury would come back with not guilty. You did? Huh. And so tell me about that moment when they came back in and read the verdict. Um, it was surreal because it was like it was an out of body experience. How can they say that? Just shock, just that. What? As if I'm not hearing it right. Did I hear that right? What? Guilty? You mean not guilty? And it was just devastating. I thought telling the truth would be enough. And I genuinely believed if I was truthful and honest and open that this would be a not guilty and would all go away

and everyone would understand what really happened. And I've been waiting 40 years for that. You know, Morning, Heidi. Hi, Jeremy. How are you doing today? I'm doing okay. Sounds like you're outside. I can hear see you. Oh, you know, I've just got, I've got my window open. I will close it.

No, that's fine. There we go. It's lovely to hear. Are you like it? It's the, you know, one of the things that I, I mean, I often just think, God, I've just, you know, I've not been on a train for 40 years, not been on playing for 40 years. I've not walked in a straight line for 40 years. I've not done, you know, so many things.

And it's just, you know, hearing seagulls. I never hear seagulls. Well, yeah, I mean, they are noisy. But, no, I can't, I mean, I can't imagine what it must be like to be deprived of all those ordinary things. Well, you just don't miss them in the end because you don't even remember what they were, strangely. Over those 40 years, a lot has changed.

In his early years in prison, Jeremy got into trouble a lot. Though he always maintained his innocence, he was angry. and he acted out. He brewed moonshine, smoked heroin, and got into fights. You got to remember I came in very early at 24, and, you know, this exposed to an awful lot of things in jail that I never saw outside. I mean, you know, everybody inevitably ends up dabbling in a few drugs in jail

and a bit of drink, and, you know, you kind of, it's the same as life outside when you're a young boy experimenting with things. But after a while, he told him. me, he reached a turning point when he met a prison officer who seemed to believe in him. I met an officer called Mr. Robinson and he said, so what you need to do is that you do have to decide whether you want to stay in here for the rest of your life and, you know, get involved in the prison or whether you want to fight your case and prove your innocence. And he said, you need to make the decision. And I said, right. And then I just dug in and gone on the case papers

and, you know, filed them all and look through them all and here I am now. Since then, Jeremy has applied himself with single-minded zeal to clearing his name. He's filled his cell with case documents, piles and piles of three-ring binders. And are you sitting there now kind of surrounded by... When I look against my wall, I have a stack of one, two, three, four, five. They're about five feet high each stack. And he spends hours each day, rifling through them, scouring them for some new thing, some overlooked fact that might turn the whole case on its head.

I can't help it. You know, I'm trying to cling onto, I suppose, small pieces of floating debris in the sea to try and stay afloat. And these little things help to keep me afloat. Over the years, Jeremy Bamber has fought to overturn his conviction on dozens of grounds, including that his relatives had a financial motive to frame him, that key witnesses like Julie Mugford lied and that police botched the forensics at the crime scene

but the justice system has blocked him at every turn the appeal courts have upheld his conviction not once but twice his case has also been reinvestigated twice first by City of London Police and then by Scotland Yard but so far every attempt to clear his name has failed every authority that has ever examined the murders at White House Farm has reached the same conclusion.

Jeremy Bamba is guilty. But he has not given up. The way the justice system in the UK works, Jeremy has one more potential path to proving his innocence, through a watchdog that investigates potential miscarriages of justice. It's called the criminal cases, Review Commission, the CCRC, and it has the power to order the Court of Appeal to re-hear a case if fresh evidence comes to light.

When Jeremy was preparing for his last appeal, his defence lawyer discovered a mountain of new material. Police had gathered millions of pages of evidence, only a tenth of which had been available to the defence at trial. Back in 1986, police and prosecutors had wide discretion about what they were obliged to disclose, so a lot of evidence got held back. And a lot more had been gathered since Jeremy's conviction during the various police reviews and re-investigations of the case. Now, Jeremy had got hold of hundreds of thousands of those files, a vast trove of evidence, a lot of which the jury had never heard about.

Jeremy's defense team began combing through those records, and in 2021 they filed an application to the CCRC, outlining several grounds on which they said his conviction should be overturned. But when I began talking with Jeremy in January last year, it seemed like the case had stalled. So now, Jeremy gave all that fresh evidence to me. I hope you find something, you know. He said maybe there was something he'd missed, something that finally revealed the truth.

Truth, truth is always, truth is, truth is, it is what it is, and you can't undermine it. I didn't murder my... I mean, I promise you, you know, no matter how many times we slice up this case, I'm always in a sense. I spent months talking to Jeremy, weighing his version of events against the claims of his relatives and those of the prosecution, trying to understand the complex characters and the tangled family dynamics at the heart of this case. For what it's worth, my sense of Jeremy, after all those hours of conversation, was very different from the way he's been portrayed. He gave imperfect answers to my questions, made oddball jokes, and he could be reflective and self-deprecating.

Sometimes he talked about his family's deaths with an uncanny detachment. Other times, he seemed overwhelmed by his grief. But all of this is character evidence. None of it is proof of anything. As an investigative reporter, what I'm really interested in, above all else, are plain hard facts. It was time to put all of these questions of character aside

and look at the tangible evidence. A bloody Bible propped at an unlikely angle. A manor locked from the inside. And the linchpin of the case, a silencer, hidden under the stairs, and daubed with blood. Coming up on blood relatives. It was such a believable story. It was crazy to think anything else other than what we were presented with. It just seemed to be orchestrated.

Augustrated. And why do you think they would have done that? It was panic, 24-7 panic. What can we salvage? What can we resubmit? Yeah, I could have a bit of DNA on it, of course I could. We never, no, that never ever came up. If you're a New Yorker subscriber, you can listen to the rest of blood relatives now.

Visit New Yorker.com slash dark to subscribe for just a dollar a week and listen to all six episodes in the New Yorker app, ad-free. For non-subscribers, new episodes will be released every Tuesday. Blood Relatives is written and produced by me, Heidi Blake, and lead producer Natalie Jablonsky. It's edited by Alison McCadham. Samara Fremark is the managing producer for the series.

Additional editing by Madeleine Barrett, Willing Davidson and Julia Rothschild. Additional production by Raymond Tunga Kar. Theme and original music by Alex Weston. Additional music by Chris Junim, Alison Leighton Brown and Gary Meister. This episode was mixed by Corey Shreppel. Our art is by Owen Gent.

Art direction by Nicholas Conrad and Aviva Michaelov. Fact-checking by Naomi Schreplett. Sharp. Legal review by Fabio Bertoni and Ben Murray. Our managing editor is Julia Rothschild. The head of Global Audio for Condé Nast is Chris Bannon. The editor of The New Yorker is David Remnick. If you have comments or story tips, please send them to the team at in the dark at new yorker.com. And make sure to follow in the dark wherever you get your podcasts. From From PRX.