Jeremy Bamber and the Sound Moderator

Who fired the gun that killed his family?

David James Smith’s 2010 interview with Jeremy Bamber

Sixteen years have passed since I sat down opposite Jeremy Bamber in a private room off the main visitors’ suite at HMP Full Sutton, where he was then detained, and we talked for three hours about his murder convictions.

Because I had fought for and obtained Ministerial permission to conduct the interview, I was able to record it (ordinarily, of course, you do not attempt to waltz into any prison with a phone, a recording device, a laptop or a pen and paper, unless you are seeking to be locked up yourself) and our conversation became the basis of a longform cover story in The Sunday Times Magazine – (And By Dawn They Were All Dead, July 10, 2010) - in which I explored the case for his innocence.

I had secured Bamber’s cooperation by promising him a fair hearing of his arguments and that, I hope, was what I gave him. In correspondence afterwards he said fellow prisoners had teased him about some of my observations in the article. My line editor teased me about it too, mainly for the final pay-off in the piece, where I asked rhetorically if he was guilty, and answered my own question, “Reader, I have no idea”.

Bamber and I kept in touch for a while (I still have some of his letters and a Christmas card) and although it is now a few years since I heard from him, I often reflect on his case and have occasionally commented on it in articles and documentaries.

Back in 2010 I had not then become a Commissioner at the Criminal Cases Review Commission, and it seems strange now, looking back at the original article and its references to the CCRC, which I wrote knowing little then about an organisation that I would later come to know so intimately.

I don’t think there can have been many years over the, almost, three decades since the CCRC’s inception, when it did not have Bamber’s case under consideration (though never by me). Indeed, the Commission inherited his file from the Home Office when it opened for business in 1997, as the body of last resort for people claiming to be wrongly convicted (or wrongly sentenced).

As things stand, Bamber will die in prison, serving whole life orders for the murders of his father, Nevill; mother, June; sister, Sheila, and her twin six year old sons, Daniel and Nicholas. The two boys were both shot several times in the head, in their beds.

Bamber claims he didn’t do it. He was 24, in 1985 when the killings happened at White House Farm in Essex, and he turned 65 in January, 2026. He has already been in prison for 40 years.

Following his failed first appeal in 1989, Bamber had a second appeal in 2002, on referral by the CCRC. He was back with the CCRC at the time of my interview with him in 2010 and he is there again now, already some years into his latest review. I have no inside information, but reports suggest the Commission has already provisionally rejected the key four of his nine most recent submissions.

Bamber is now represented by a very able and experienced team of criminal appeal specialist lawyers - solicitor Mark Newby and counsel David Emanuel KC. It appears they may have already achieved a concession, in that in spite of the provisional rejection the key grounds will remain in play as the Commission continues to consider the wider additional points.

I believe too there is probably an additional potential submission to the CCRC by Bamber’s legal representatives, arising from some reporting of the case in The New Yorker by a former, very talented colleague of mine from The Sunday Times, Heidi Blake.

Her article about Jeremy Bamber and the killings, published in July 2024, was exceedingly long but contained one nugget of potentially sensational information - an interview with a police officer who had been on duty on the night of the murders and claimed to have received a 999 call from the farm house in the early hours of the morning, when Bamber was outside with the police who were waiting for the all clear to enter. The officer, by now old and retired, also denied signing an earlier statement apparently made by him, which gave a different version of events.

The 999 call, if it really happened, would split the case wide open. Such a call could only have come from Bamber’s sister Sheila, who Bamber had already identified as the shooter. That call would give Bamber an almost unshakeable alibi.

My understanding is that Essex Police spoke to the officer after Blake’s article was published, and he denied what was attributed to him and said he didn’t know he was talking to a reporter. I have no doubt that Blake has an accurate record of her conversation with the officer and behaved entirely properly.

The CCRC were told promptly of the alleged 999 call, but, it appears, did not immediately act to secure their own version of the officer’s testimony, and he then died. Concerns could be raised that , as it was an Essex Police case, they had a vested interest in the outcome when they interviewed the officer - at the very least there could be the appearance of bias. Ideally, the Commission should have used its powers to instruct an outside force to conduct the interview, or gone and carried out the interview itself.

It is probably fair to say that set of events, if correct, does not reflect well on the Commission. I will consider below whether the claim the 999 call was made is plausible, but, plainly, the CCRC should have made a full inquiry and got to the bottom of the point.

The CCRC Commissioners and case review managers need to maintain an insatiable curiosity about the cases before them, none more so perhaps than this one which has been around for so long.

Although he has complained bitterly about the CCRC, it represents Bamber’s only hope of freedom. He continues to claim his sister, Sheila shot the family and then herself. In his version, he was not there at the scene and played no part in what happened. He only called the police, he said, (thought notably not himself using 999), because his father called him from the farm, to say his sister had “gone berserk with a gun”. The only evidence that call happened is the testimony of Bamber himself.

Just recently the case for his innocence was again being made in the public domain, in a lengthy article in The Guardian by another excellent feature writer Simon Hattenstone, focusing on the all-important role of the sound moderator, which had been found in the back of a cupboard by one of Bamber’s relatives, three days after the murder. Blood was found inside the moderator and in the sample analysed the blood group matched that of Sheila. If the moderator was on the gun, it made the barrel too long for Sheila to have shot herself. But Sheila was found lying with the gun across her body, and two shots to the throat.

By inference, Bamber had realised his problem at the last moment while staging the scene, and hurriedly removed and hid the moderator, while failing to cleanse it of the telltale signs that pointed to it being used by the killer, who was therefore not Sheila.

Unsurprisingly, Bamber’s years of effort to overturn his convictions have leaned heavily towards trying to discredit the evidence of the moderator, making various claims – his family fitted him up, the police fitted him up, the family and the police conspired together, there were two moderators, there was faked evidence etc etc.

I learned at the CCRC that it is not always a question of guilt or innocence in criminal cases. Proving factual innocence is often very difficult, sometimes impossible.

The DNA evidence - found at an evidentially significant location and belonging to someone else - that demonstrated Andrew Malkinson’s innocence beyond any doubt, after he had spent 17 years in prison for a 2003 rape was rare proof that he could not have committed the crime.

But it isn’t necessary to prove innocence to succeed at appeal. The test for the Court of Appeal is whether the conviction is safe. As the 1968 Criminal Appeal Act says, if the appeal judges determine it is unsafe they “shall” overturn the conviction.

The usual route for demonstrating that a conviction is unsafe is via fresh evidence. In a case involving significant corruption or serious failings by the police or the prosecution, a conviction can still be quashed, even if there is strong evidence that someone committed a crime.

I thought it might help to address some of the points raised in the recent articles I have mentioned, in the hope of improving public understanding of Bamber’s case.

The jury at Bamber’s trial had been deliberating for five hours – not ten – when they sent a note asking about the blood in the sound moderator. It was a rather nuanced note and so was the judge’s reply. They did not simply ask if the blood was a perfect match and he did not reply simply that it was.

The jury note said: “We need to hear blood expert’s evidence regarding the blood in the silencer (a) a perfect match of Sheila’s blood (b) what was the chance of the blood group being June and Ralph’s mixing together.”

The jury had already heard the expert’s evidence, and the judge’s precis of his evidence during his summing up of the case to the jury. Now the judge and counsel for the defence and the prosecution discussed the note and what to say to the jury. There was some ambiguity about the blood evidence, but not much.

The judge relayed the three-way discussion to the jury and told them that the blood group was most likely specific to Sheila, meaning the blood group did not match, and was probably not a mixture of, any of the other family victims.

The judge did not, so far as I know, tell the jury, either once or repeatedly, that the blood was an exact match for Sheila, and I do not believe it is now accepted he misled them on this point.

The jury did not come back with verdicts 21 minutes later. In fact after a further two and a half hours the judge told them they could bring majority verdicts and within 20 minutes they were back, two women jurors in tears, with 10-2 verdicts of guilty on all five counts of murder.

There had been other evidence supporting the use of the moderator during the killings. A “pull through” of the rifle had found no blood in the barrel itself. The only blood from the crime scene was in the moderator.

A fleck of red paint found on the moderator matched the underside of a shelf in the kitchen, where scratch marks could be seen. It was clear that a life and death struggle had occurred in that room between the killer and Jeremy Bamber’s father.

A fuller account of the trial is contained in The Murders at White House Farm by Carol Ann Lee, which I have relied on. The book reports the trial judge in summing up, telling the jury the moderator could “on its own” lead to conviction, but also the jury could set it aside and still find evidence on which to convict Bamber. No doubt, he had in mind, primarily, the evidence of Bamber’s then girlfriend Julie Mugford, which suggested some premeditation and planning by Bamber.

It is worth noting that the issue of alleged flaws or misrepresentations in the blood group analysis was revisited, and rejected by the judges, at Bamber’s 2002 appeal, following lengthy inquiries by the CCRC and the discovery of newly available DNA, which also provided no assistance to Bamber.

The alleged 999 call is anothe difficult issue. There is paperwork available - Bamber has it, the CCRC must have it - that documents the position with the landline phone on the night of the murders. The receiver was off the hook in the house and the line was therefore open, meaning you could hear into the house. A BT telephonist, Jean Rowe checked the line at 0356 at the request of the police and checked it again at 0555. There were dog noises, but Rowe heard nothing significant.

The police then asked for Rowe’s assistance in patching the line through to their own open 999 call line, where it was monitored by PC Nicholas Milbank - the same officer who recently told The New Yorker that he had received a 999 call at 0609.

So, the documentary evidence is that the open line was patched into the 999 line, which obviously is not the same as a 999 call being made. An open line created by the receiver being off the hook cannot be broken unless the receiver is replaced. That means a 999 call could not have been made without the receiver being returned to its rest on the phone - and according to the documentary evidence, including, apparently, of PC Milbank himself, no call was made - no call could have been made - while first Jean Rowe, sporadically, and then PC Milbank constantly, monitored the open line.

I can’t help feeling if there had been a 999 call from the house while armed police were poised outside, waiting to burst in (as they did some 90 minutes later) that call would have been a major development in the incident, and not something that could have been buried for 40 years. However, I still think the CCRC needed to find out the exact position and ought to have gone and talked to Milbank themselves and compared his new account with the documented history of the phone evidence.

I hope the CCRC will continue to give careful consideration to all Jeremy Bamber’s key submissions, which I believe includes new pathology evidence that suggests the bullet wounds were made by a weapon without a sound moderator fitted. If the Commission assesses that new evidence has significantly altered the evidence heard by the jury 40 years ago, perhaps a referral back to the Court of Appeal could be on the cards.

It can be a painstaking and difficult process, reviewing cases - the CCRC receives 100s of applications every year and all deserve and require attention. It is free to apply to the CCRC and there is no limit on the number of times you can reapply, as long as you have something new to say.

Each case takes time, sometimes too much time, but resources are not infinite, and each application for review by the CCRC must be opened in the expectation that it could be a miscarriage of justice - even though the vast majority of applications will, quite rightly, end up being rejected.

There is always the risk of rejecting a deserving case. It happens. It happened with Malkinson.

Bamber must be on his third CCRC application. Whether he can persuade my former colleagues of the virtue of his latest claims, only time will tell. He certainly has the best legal representation he could wish for.

If charm was a factor (heads up - it isn’t) then Bamber would have a racing start. During our interview there was a break for lunch and we all - an MoJ press officer, perhaps three prison officers, Jeremy Bamber and myself - gathered around some platters of rolls, sandwiches and pastries laid on by the prison. We made small talk for a few minutes and Bamber seemed quite content, chatting away. I am not sure I have ever eaten a meal in a more surreal setting. Just don’t ask me if I was lunching with a mass killer or a victim of a miscarriage of justice. Reader, I have no idea.

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