In The Dark - Blood Relatives, Episode 4

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

A bloody Bible, propped at an unlikely angle. A manor, locked from the inside. And a silencer, hidden under the stairs, and daubed with blood. Heidi digs into the evidence and uncovers shocking flaws. 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. Less than an hour from downtown Toronto, you'll feel a world away with Durham Tourism's new discovery guide. Explore day trip destinations, overnight getaways, and 129 must-tri-experiences in Durham region. From historic sites to starry nights and delicious days to downtown dates.

Want to keep your luggage light and your dollars in Canada? Discover Durham Region's open skies. To get your guide, visit durhamtourism.ca.combe. One afternoon, a few weeks after I first reached out to Jeremy Bamba, I opened my email, and saw that I'd been sent a link, an invitation to a cloud platform. When I opened it, I found myself staring at a vast digital repository. Jeremy Bambor's defence team had given me access to the sprawling case files on the murders at White House Farm. You should know that I am a giant nerd when it comes to documents.

I love burrowing through huge piles of paper, searching for anything hidden. But this was a truly bewildering morass. What I had been given was not only the evidence prosecutors presented at trial as proof of Jeremy's guilt. This repository contained a lot more than that. There were millions of pages. Police statements, typewritten memos, barely decipherable handwritten notes, witness interviews, radio and phone logs, letters and diaries,

penned by Jeremy's relatives, badly photocopied forensic records, autopsy reports, crime scene photos. On I scrolled and scrolled. So much of this evidence, Jeremy Bamba had to fight to obtain. It had been hidden for years. Now, he hoped,

it might finally reveal the truth. I'm Heidi Blake, from In the Dark and the New Yorker. This is Blood Relatives. The prosecution case against Jeremy Bambor centered on his supposed staging of the crime scene. We have a scene of a crime which has been very cunningly arranged. And the silencer that his relatives found under the stairs. I picked it up and looked at it and felt it.

I probably took probably 10 minutes before I suddenly realized the consequences of what I've got. The case was circumstantial, but it was enough to convince the jury back in 1986. It's the basis on which Jeremy Bamba has spent 40 years in prison. the basis on which he's consigned to die there. But I was hunting through all this fresh evidence that the jury never saw. And now, I'm going to tell you what I found. Part 1. Crime scene.

At Jeremy Bamba's trial, prosecutors showed the jury photographs of the scene to support their argument that Jeremy had staged it. In one, Sheila lies with the rifle on top of her body. A bloody Bible propped awkwardly against her upper arm. The Bible's unnatural position bolstered the prosecution's case that it had been placed there after her death by Jeremy to make it appear that she'd killed the family in a religious frenzy. But deep in the files, I found something that gave me pause

It was a sheaf of handwritten notes about those photos. The notes recorded concerns that had been raised by members of the Firearms Squad. They were the team that first went into the manor and found the family dead. Several of them had expressed misgivings about the photographs of the crime scene that were presented at trial. They said something was wrong with the images of Sheila's body. One officer noted that her body was, quote, not in same position as when I saw it, and that the Bible had not been propped against her shoulder as it was depicted, but lying at her waist. A second officer recalled that he and a colleague had raised similar concerns.

They were, quote, not happy with position of the Bible or of Sheila's body, but had been reassured that nothing was moved. I'm happy to accept this fact now, although in the back of my mind still a shadow of doubt, he'd noted. Were we clouded by what we saw because of the tenseness of the situation? Or could they have been moved? Question mark. Question mark. When I got hold of some of the firearms officers who'd read, raised those concerns. Along with dozens of other people who'd been involved in the case,

some of them were less than delighted to hear from me. Can I stop you there? I don't need to hear any more from you. I don't want to be involved in it, thank you. I know what? I really wouldn't waste any of your time on that case. I really would not. Oh Lord, not this again. We're not going to go anywhere with this. We're not going anywhere with it. I was hitting a lot of walls. Still, there was one police officer. I remained especially keen to talk to. Detective Inspector Ron Cook, the guy who'd overseen the inspection of all five bodies at White House Farm, including Sheila's. If anyone knew whether something had gone awry at the scene, it would be him. But when I tried to track him down,

I found he'd died several years ago. Then I saw in the files that Inspector Ron Cook had not been alone when he examined the bodies. He'd been a couple of accompanied by his deputy, Detective Sergeant Neil Davidson. When I found him, still living in Essex, he did agree to talk to me, even though he'd apparently already been warned off. Somebody said, they suddenly go hidey fishing for something that's about Camber. Oh, yeah. Don't touch you with a barge pool.

But I just blown out the chance to see what you want to know and what are you about. Sergeant Davidson told me he was called out to White House Farm early in the morning, right after the bodies were discovered. And from the start, he said, he was told what to expect. I was called at 7.30 that first morning. Uh-huh. And already, I was being told, can you come out to four murders of suicide? Four murders and a suicide, he was told.

He met Inspector Ron Cook outside the manor. Cook was a veteran, the lead crime scene investigator on the case. In his long career, Davidson told me that Cook had acquired a nickname and not the kind that an eagle-eyed investigator might hope for. His colleagues called him Bumbling Ron. Chaos rained, wherever he trod. He used to call him Bumbling Ron for a reason. He was a clumsy sod.

Oh, God, it was a nightmare. The officers entered the house, accompanied by the official crime scene photographer. Their job was to document the scene meticulously and then retrieve any items that might need to go to the lab, bullet casings, carpet samples, pieces of clothing. They examined Neville Bamber's body and Dunes and the twins. Davidson told me he'd just had twins of his own at the time, and the scene hit him especially hard. It was a bit of shock to me. It was a very overwhelming scene. It was an overwhelming, you know, to take it all. When they got to the master bedroom they saw Sheila's body on the floor

beside the bed with the rifle pointed at her chin beneath a fatal gunshot wound The Bible was lying open by her body Davidson said he stood looking down at Sheila before the photographer captured the official images Then Inspector Ron Cook did something deserving of his nickname Remember bumbling Ron?

Yeah As I recall it He lifted the Bible up, I had a look at it, and then he said, oh, we'd better put it back how it was. He picked up the Bible and looked at it before any photos had been taken. This was a huge revelation. I did my best not to make Sergeant Davidson think twice about going on by sounding too astounded. Huh. Do you remember if he rifled the pages or closed it or just glanced at the page?

open on? I think he was fumbling with it in his hands. You know, he took it up. I think he had to look at it. And the more I think about it, the more I think he said something like, can you remember what page he was on, something like that. That's interesting. And that was definitely before the pictures were taken.

Yes. That was, as I recall it, that was in order to take the pictures to sort of recreate what we just screwed up, so to speak. The whole thing was just shambolic. The idea that Bumbling Ron might have briefly closed the Bible while fumbling with it was especially significant because the photographs of the Bible show a mirrored pattern of blood on its open pages. A prosecution expert later said this showed that Jeremy must have closed it after firing the fatal shot and then reopened it to prop it by Sheila's body.

Davidson told me Bumbling Ron seemed to realize his mistake and, hurriedly put the Bible back next to Sheila's body, making his best guess as to where it should go. I know it was somewhere where it went back, but as to exactly where I don't know. It was, you know, there or thereabouts, but I couldn't say exactly. You know, he put it back, best as he could remember. The Bible, repositioned best as Bumbling Ron could remember. apparently that was what the crime scene photographer captured that morning and those were the images that would later be shown to the jury in the courtroom

as part of the evidence that Jeremy Bamber had rearranged the scene I asked Sergeant Davidson if Ron Cook had disturbed anything else that day how about the gun that had been on top of Sheila's body there's just a slight possibility that Ron may have picked it up and put it back The gun? Yeah. Hmm. But I just had a ceiling that that may have happened.

It was like this oh shit moments, you know, we've got to put it back. One of those oh shit moments, he said. Later, a second officer told me he'd heard at the time that Ron Cook had indeed moved the gun. I asked Sergeant Davidson about the other concern that had been raised by firearms officers that Sheila's body itself looked like it might have been moved before it was photographed. No, no.

If anything, the arms may have been... He may have moved the arms, but, you know, we never drugged it anyway. What Sergeant Davidson was telling me was effectively that the crime scene had been restaged after the family was shot, just not by Jeremy Bamba. The person who'd moved...

Moved the Bible and the gun and potentially the body in the first hours of the investigation was none other than the police's own lead crime scene investigator. Ron Cook had actually been cross-examined at trial on this very point. He acknowledged moving the gun and Sheila's arm as he examined her body, but insisted that everything was properly photographed, quote, before anything was moved or touched so as to to preserve the integrity of the scene. In the light of what Davidson had just told me, it seemed the jury had been flagrantly misled.

And the problems didn't end there. In the days after the killings, before Aniton returned to the manor, she'd requested that the police clean up the worst of the gore. So Ron Cook asked Sergeant Davidson to go back to the scene with him and deal with things. Let's just tidy up the house and that's what we do. Inside the house, Cook and Davidson found walls, carpets and bedding, drenched with blood. They started mopping up the bloody floors and ripping out the blood-stained carpets.

Ron said, right, we've got to get rid of the rest of the blood on the carpet. So we just cut a big piece of carpet out where the blood was. And that's what we burnt in the garden. They hurled the carpets and bedding out of the upstairs windows and had them burned. A literal bonfire of evidence right there on the farm. Burning the bedroom carpets and... Oh, my goodness.

We just said, whoosh, and not it went. Right. So you burned that? Crazy. I know, it's crazy. It's all wrong, but I heard myself saying it, but that's the way it was then. It was all wrong, Sergeant Davidson told me. But that's the way it was. then. He said, you have to understand. It didn't seem like there was really much to investigate. By that point, the chief investigator had already declared that this was an open and shut case

of murder suicide. The idea that Jeremy Bamber would become a suspect in these murders hadn't even entered their minds. So Davidson said, preserving the crime scene didn't seem all that important. You know, it was never taken seriously as a crime scene as such. You know, It was never taken into who done it. For those that were at the time at the sea, it was, who else but a mad woman could do this? And, you know, it was such a believable story. It was crazy to think anything else other than what we were presented with.

But then, that believable story suddenly flipped on its head. Julie Mugford came forward. The detective in charge of the case was replaced, and Jeremy became the prime suspect. Sergeant Davidson told me, the shit hit the fan big time. The crime scene investigators were under new orders to find any piece of forensic evidence that connected Jeremy to the killings.

He said Inspector Ron Cook spent weeks, quote, chasing around red in the face, trying to put right what he'd botched. He was trying to dig himself out of the whole big time. He was panicked 24-7 panic. What can we salvage? What can we resubmit? The problem, Sergeant Davidson said,

was that hardly anything from the scene had been preserved. Because everything had been either burnt or destroyed or, you know, gone along with the first wave of attack, as it were. The Bamber's bodies had been cremated and the carpets and bedding had been burned. The house had been cleaned. They hadn't even dusted it for fingerprints. The only article of forensic evidence that the police had to go on

was something that hadn't been found by crime scene investigators at all. Something that had instead been discovered, days later, by Jeremy Bamber's cousins. Bambers' fate was sealed when his cousins handed over to the police a silencer with blood on it. Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on Revisionous History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control. There was this joke that said that it was easier to get forgiveness in the Church of Christ for murdering somebody than it was to be divorced.

From Revisionous History, this is The Alabama Murders. Listen to Revisionous History, The Alabama Murders, wherever you get your podcast. Yes. Part 2. The Silencer The Silencer was the single most important piece of forensic evidence against Jeremy Bamber. At his trial, in 1986, the jury was told that scientists found blood inside the silencer's barrel. Blood are the type that matched Sheila's and nobody else's, and which must therefore have come from that fatal moment when she was shot through the throat. So the prosecution logic was this.

If the silencer was on the gun when Sheila was shot, that meant she couldn't be the killer. She clearly couldn't have shot herself and then unscrewed the silencer and placed it in a box under the stairs. It must have been Jeremy who'd murdered the family and hidden the silencer because he was the one who'd called the police

to report that Sheila was on the loose with a gun. Even on the face of it, all this struck me as a bit of a logical stretch. For one thing, if Jeremy Bamba was a killer cunning enough to meticulously stage the scene and then call the cops, why would he go ahead and stash the bloodied proof of his guilt under the stairs? And knowing what I'd just learned about bumbling Ron and the mess that had been made of the crime scene,

now I had even more questions about the silencer. Now I want to prepare you for what I found when I dug into the door. documents. Because the story I'm about to tell you about the silencer is a long and winding ride, but it's crucial because this is the only tangible piece of evidence that can be said to tie Jeremy Bamber to this crime. And a piece of forensic evidence so pivotal ought to be painstakingly preserved. But spoiler alert, that is not what happened in this case. So buckle up. Here it is, the story of the silencer, from the top.

The saga began when Jeremy's cousins, David and Anne, found the silencer, stashed in the cupboard under the stairs. And that's when I found it. I see. It was in a box. It was in just an ordinary sort of box like that. Yet, interestingly, as I poured through the police records, I saw that a few days earlier,

Inspector Ron Cook and several other officers had looked inside that very same cupboard, the one under the stairs at the manor, and they hadn't seen it. It was three days later that the cousins went back to the manor to look for clues and said they made their discovery. That was on August 10th.

But curiously, buried in Anne's notes, I found a list she'd apparently written before that, ahead of the cousin's unsuccessful meeting with police on the 9th of August. The first item on her list read, Look at silencer, blood, question mark. So, before the family claimed to have found the silencer, Anne was apparently already aware of its existence and planning to examine it for blood. I talked about this with Barberts.

Barbara Wilson, the Bamba's farm secretary. She's the one who told me how unwell she there seemed right before the murders. Barbara was actually there when the cousins found the silencer. I think it was Anne. I can't remember who actually phoned me and said, would I go in? They'd summoned her to the manner ostensibly to help them find some of Neville's papers. But soon after she arrived, they started rummaging under the stairs. And they fished out this shoebox, about that long it was, and there was a silencer.

They pulled out and said, I think it was David Blofel. I said, it's a silencer, and I think there's some blood on the end here. Barbara testified about witnessing the discovery at trial. But when I talked to her about this, she confided something she didn't tell the jury, that she'd had the feeling all along that the discovery had been staged for her benefit. It just seemed to be orchestrated. Augustrated?

And why do you think they would have done that? My theory is that they must have found it, but they wanted proof that they'd found it and not put it there themselves. I wrote to Anne Eton, asking detailed questions about the circle, in which the silencer was found, but she declined to comment. David insisted that, quote, never was there a restaging.

After finding the silencer, the relatives told police they'd loaded it into the trunk of Anne's car, with a trove of guns and jewelry they'd gathered up from the manor, and then took it home to her farmhouse, where they sat around the kitchen table, having a closer look. David even tried to unscrew it to look inside. He told me he'd abruptly realised this wasn't such a great idea. And all of a sudden, all of a sudden things clicked together and we suddenly thought, oh my God, we shouldn't be touching this. And then, of course, I had more my prints on it, didn't it?

But anyway. Even then, they didn't call the cops right away. Instead, they stashed the silencer at the bottom of a wardrobe and two more days passed before police learned of its existence. It wasn't until August 12th, five days after the murders, that a detective drove out to Anne's farmhouse to collect the silencer. He didn't have an evidence bag handy, so he stuck it inside a paper towel tube

before stopping to share a bottle of whiskey with Anne's husband, Peter Eaton. Then he tossed the silencer into the back of his car and drove away. They rolled up and down in the back of a police officer's car before it finally ended up in, you know, at the right place. Back at the station, the detective failed to enter the silencer into the police property log. Instead, he locked it in his desk drawer.

The next morning, he handed it over to the lead crime scene investigator, none other than bumbling wrong. Inspector Ron Cook had a look at the silencer for himself. The record show he and the detective who'd collected it from the family both noticed a single grey hair caught in its muzzle. But then, the hair vanished. The scenes of crime officer Inspector Ronald Cook admitted that when he received the silencer, it had a grey hair on it.

And when he delivered it to the forensic science laboratory, the hair had been dislodged and couldn't be found. That didn't stop prosecutors sighting. the hair at trial the following year, they suggested it could have been Neville's hair, an indication that the silencer had been used to strike him on the head. So there was no hair for scientists to test at the forensic lab, but they did find two other things.

A small red stain that appeared under a microscope to be paint, and something highly significant. They analysed the blood that the relatives had spotted, and the tests confirmed, that it was human. With a discovery like that in a murder investigation, you'd think such a crucial piece of evidence would be locked down for further testing

under tightly controlled conditions so it couldn't be further contaminated. Instead, the scientist gave the silencer back to Bumbling Ron. Inspector Ron Cook took it with him back to the station and no one can say what happened to it next because for the next 17 days Cook failed to keep records of its whereabouts

in the police property log. And this big gap in the chain of custody records is where the silencer's journey gets even weirder. Because when Ron Cook eventually returned it to the forensics lab, on August 30th, more than three weeks after the crime, scientists found something new. They now recovered flakes of blue, green, white and grey paint from its tip,

as well as the red they'd already seen. Nine layers in total, which turned out to match a sample taken from the mantle above the hearth in the manor. The colours corresponded with the many hues the wall had been painted over the years. And police said they'd also made another discovery, silencer shaped scratches on the mantle that matched the grooved pattern on its end where the flakes of paint had been found. This seemed to be the clearest evidence yet

that the silencer had been on the gun on the night of the murders and had scratched the hearth during a struggle with Neville. But these paint flakes struck me as a perplexing finding because I could see in the files that when the lab had first examined the silencer before Ron Cook took it away for 17 days, that paint didn't seem to have been there. The records of that examination, under a microscope,

don't mention multiple flakes of different coloured paint, just that one small red mark. Where had these other paint flakes come from? One thing I could see in the records was that Ron Cook had gone back to the manor during that mysterious 17-day gap. It was Cook, who took the paper, paint sample from the hearth, and reported finding scratches under the mantle while he had sole

charge of the silencer. And it was only after that, when he returned the silencer to the lab, that scientists found the paint flakes that perfectly matched the hearth. Ron Cook was later asked in a review of the case years after the trial, whether he'd used the silencer to scratch the mantle that day. This simply did not. occur, he said. The only time I saw the silencer was while it was on police premises, he went on, never anywhere near the house. But the gap in the chain of custody records makes that statement impossible to verify. We will never know what exactly Ron Cook did with the silencer in those 17 days. I asked Sergeant Davidson about Cook's failure to keep

record of the silencer's whereabouts. I didn't even know it'd done that. It's common practice to, for evidential purpose, is to sign stuff in and out. So it remains its integrity. Yeah, that's it. Retains its integrity. That's the whole point of it.

Yeah. So, but again, you know, that who runs M.O., he was, you know, not that strict on himself, really, or on the system. So on the silencer, so far, Paint that mysteriously appeared. A hair that mysteriously disappeared. And then there was the blood. There's the blood.

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.new Yorker.com. Back in the 1980s, DNA testing was not yet widely used, but investigators could analyze blood samples to determine their type. And when they tested the blood inside the silencer, they found that it matched Sheila's. This, prosecutors would tell the jury was dispositive. It proved, that Sheila could not have shot herself, and therefore she had been murdered by her brother.

But I now learned that police actually harboured some private concerns about the integrity of the blood evidence. The prosecution's ballistics expert had concluded that the blood in the device was backspatter from Sheila's neck wound. The only other way it could have got in there was by someone, quote, dripping it very carefully inside. Before the trial, the chief investigator, Mike Ainsley, learned that Anne Eton had access to a source of Sheila's blood. Remember, she'd found Sheila's bloody underpants soaking in a bucket in the White House kitchen

and had apparently thrown them into a trash bag that she'd taken home with her for closer inspection. She'd noted, Sheila had a period, blood, knickers, I threw out and brought here. When Ainsley learned Anne had done this, he warned her that she could be accused of contaminating the silencer. She later wrote, He told me that when it comes to the trial, they, the defence, will allege that I put the blood inside the silencer and that Sheila's underwear could be a source of that blood. I must point out that I had never thought of that possibility, and I certainly did not plant blood of any description inside the silencer. And to my knowledge, neither did any other member

of my family. At trial, Anne was never cross-examined about the possibility that she or anyone else could have contaminated the silencer. The blood evidence proved decisive. When the jury was deliberating, they wrote a note to the judge asking him to clarify whether the blood was a, quote, perfect match for Sheila. The judge assured them that it did not match anyone else. They returned their guilty verdict 21 minutes later. But as I scoured the records, I came across a piece of paper that starkly contradicted the judge's words. The piece of paper that caught my eye was a letter from the Government Forensic Science Lab dated September 1986. It showed that scientists had belatedly tested blood samples from Jeremy Bamber's relatives just a week before his trial. The letter contained a

statement from the scientist who'd done the testing. He said, quote, judged by these grouping results alone, the blood from the sound moderator could have come from either Sheila Kofel or R.W. Bowflower. There had been another match. R.W. was Robert Beauflower, David and Anne's father. The man who'd written that elaborate diary entry imagining how Jeremy might have committed the murders. It turned out that Robert had the same blood type as Sheila, which meant that blood found in the silencer's internal baffles.

It matched him, too. There was never any allegation that Robert was actually involved in the murders, or any of the other relatives, for that matter. Everyone agreed that the crime could only have been committed by Jeremy or Sheila. but Robert was with David and Anne when they found the silencer and the family had kept it for at least two days

before it was turned over to the cops at trial Robert insisted that he hadn't touched the silencer and amazingly he was never cross-examined about whether the blood in the device could belong to him And even that wasn't the end of the problems with the blood evidence. There was another record in the most recently disclosed material that muddied things still further.

It was another lab record, and this one indicated that a second blood sample had been found inside the silencer. This second sample was a different blood type entirely. It didn't match either Sheila or Robert, but it did match David Beauflower, the person who found the silencer to begin with. When I spoke to David, that day in his garden, I asked him about this, whether it was possible his blood could somehow have got into the silencer.

So apparently they also found a little bit, one little sample in there that seemed to match the blood sample they took from you. And what I was wondering was, is it possible, do you think, could you have, you know, when you were unscrewing it? Could you cut yourself? I could have had a bit of DNA on it? Of course I could. David's wife, Karen, was hovering nearby. No, that never ever came up. It was never queried with us. There was never, they never, they never, they never, they never came. It never came part of the story. But I think everybody, you know, it's such probably a small sample in that, in that thing.

David threw up his hands, as if in surrender. Well, I'm ready to go. I'm ready to go. I'm ready to own up to it all. No, I mean, definitely, no one suggesting that. I think a little bit of humour sometimes. No, absolutely. No, all I was wondering was whether just could it, could that be explained by, you know, when you were on screwing it? Yeah, well, I did screw it. I put my hand on it, and it came quite hard. I doubt it was glad. I tried to turn it quite hard before I realise the...

I don't think you cut yourself. No. Do you think you could have nicked yourself, like just a little bit? Well, I'm fairly thick skin. I wouldn't have thought so. No. No. But the skin tissue could have been there, couldn't it? So to sum up, forensic tests back in the 1980s found blood in the silencer that could have belonged to at least three people, not just Sheila, but also David and his father, Robert. But at the trial, the jury was told that the blood matched only Sheila. In 2015 years after the killings, investigators retested.

the silencer at the request of Jeremy Bamber's lawyers. By then, forensic testing methods had grown more sophisticated, and the silencer was finally tested for DNA. When the results came back, they were shocking. The tests had found none of Sheila's DNA on or inside the silencer at all. That was so revelatory that it got Jeremy Bamber a fresh hearing at the course of

of Appeal back in 2002. Bamba has always maintained his innocent, but it was only last year that the Criminal Cases Review Commission agreed to refer it back to the Court of Appeal based on the new DNA claims. But the judges quickly dismissed it. They said that all Sheila's blood could have been swabbed away during forensic tests or degraded over time. The tests had revealed DNA from two or.

unidentified people, but the court concluded that probably just came from scientists and others who touched it over the years. David and Robert Beauflower's DNA, meanwhile, had apparently not been tested. The court's reasoning immediately struck me as very strained. From what I know about DNA, it shows up after even minimal contact. If there had really been a considerable amount of Sheila's blood inside the silencer, as the jury was told in 1986, how could all trace of it completely disappear? I called a DNA expert to ask about it,

a forensic scientist named James Clary, who's appeared as an expert witness in scores of criminal cases all around the world. Well, what they concluded was that it was possible that a science would be dismantled by these forensic scientists who did various swabbing tests and that their DNA may have ended up inside the silencer as a result of the touching of it. Yeah.

But it just seemed odd to me that you would say that DNA left behind by touching would have survived, but that DNA from a large amount of blood wouldn't have survived? Yeah, agreed. If there was a lot of blood there, because blood is a rich source of DNA, unless they swapped every single bit, then you would expect some. to remain, but it's possible, but it's then just a bit of an oxymoron, I suppose, where they did get a DNA from, you know, at least two other people and not the victim, is a bit suspect, you know, is a bit, it wouldn't make sense, you know, that wouldn't be

a reasonable proposition. The absence of Sheila's DNA just didn't make sense. What could explain it? The answer might lie in one of the strangest and most baffling things about this case. And that is, that it's actually very unclear how many silences the police had in their possession as they investigated this case, what they did with them, which ones were tested and what they really found. In other words, the silencer I've just been telling you about, it might not be the only one.

In the reams of documents I had in front of me, there were records from tests on what appear to be at least two different silencers. Documents show different reference numbers as the silencer passes through the forensics lab. Diagrams seem to depict devices with different grooved patterns, and there are examination notes that appear to show two nearly identical devices being inspected, at the same time, by different scientists in separate departments as part of this case.

Jeremy Bamba's lawyers have alleged that the cops had more than one silencer in their possession and were running tests on each of them and potentially conflating their results to fit their theory of the crime. It's a bold allegation, and Essex police have always flat out denied this. They said they never had more than one silencer in evidence as part of this case. And to be honest, at first, this argument of Jeremy seemed a bit far-fetched to me too. But when I talked to David Bowflower, he mentioned to me that both he and his father owned silencers like the one they'd found under the stairs at the manor. You had also the identical silencer, exactly the same. Ah, okay.

Exactly the same. I've got a couple of silences. I'm a shooting man, and my dad was as well, and my dad had a silencer on his gun, and I had one. And then David told me that after the murders, the police had come by his house and taken them. They'd taken both his silencer and his dads. They took them all. They took all the silences away and just to inspect them

and make sure there wasn't any foul dougarry or I hadn't actually put the silencer and made it. What's the right word? In other words, it hadn't been a... In other words, it hadn't been a, I hadn't been dishonest. Like contaminated in some way? Well, the question was, I mean, you could argue that I placed the silence there, couldn't I? The fact that police had removed David's silencer from his possession

seemed like an important admission, not least because at trial, David had been asked if police had taken his silencer away, and at that point, he'd denied it. Now, he told me not only had police taken the silencers, but they'd kept them for so long he'd thought they might never get them back. And did you remember how long did they keep them for? Oh, months. Months, really? Oh, months and months, yeah.

Ha. When did you get back? When did you get them back? Really? Yeah. Yeah. So David was saying something new, that police did have more than one silencer in their possession

for a considerable amount of time. during the investigation. And the gap in the chain of custody records makes it difficult to say for sure which was which and what was done to them and where the blood and paint evidence that was presented at trial really came from.

What was left then of the theory of the crime that had been presented to the jury at trial? There were the allegations Julie Mugford had made shortly after Jeremy had broken up with her. But even the trial judge, who told the jury the silencer alone was enough evidence to find Jeremy guilty.

Even he cautioned them against relying on Julie's testimony because of the motive she might have to lie. There was the theory laid out in Robert Beauflower's diary. That vivid tale about how Jeremy had committed the murders wearing a wetsuit, escaped through the kitchen window and used his mother's bicycle as a getaway vehicle, which had heavily influenced the story prosecutors told the jury at trial.

but which really amounted to little more than wild conjecture. There was all that character evidence about how Jeremy had behaved in the weeks after the crime, his partying and drinking. But none of that could be said to prove that he was a murderer. Now I had all this new information. My reporting had found that these two central pieces of evidence, the bloody Bible, the storied silencer,

were in fact hopelessly compromised. And when those fell away, it seemed to me that the case against Jeremy Bamber lay in tatters. Then there was one more thing I saw, digging through all those hundreds of thousands of documents. A single line of text that led me to a new, witness, someone who had brand new information about what had happened on the night of the

murders, as police surrounded the manor and Jeremy Bamba sat waiting in a patrol car. This person had vital testimony to offer about what was going on inside the manor at the height of the standoff. And his story had been buried for full. 40 years. Well, I certainly didn't give anyone a statement, but no one's spoken to me about it since the 1980s other than you. That's next time on blood relatives. 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 McCadden. Samara Freemark is the managing producer for the series. Additional editing by Madeline Barron, Willing Davidson and Julia Rothschild.

Additional production by Raymond Tunga Kar. Theme and original music by Alex Weston. Additional music by Chris Julin and Alison Lacey. Brown. This episode was mixed by Corey Schreppel. Our art is by Owen Gent. Art direction by Nicholas Conrad and Aviva Michaelov. Fact-checking by J.L. Goldfine. Legal review by Fabio Botoni 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 PRX.