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Book Review - Jeremy Bamber: Evil, Almost Beyond Belief? by Scott Lomax
http://www.insidetime.org/articleview.asp?article=19
By: Bob Woffinden
Leading investigative journalist Bob Woffinden highlights a startling
reassessment of one of the most notorious crimes in British history.
When Jeremy Bamber was convicted of the murders of five members of his family
in October 1986 the judge, Mr Justice Drake, ordered that he should serve
twenty-five years in prison. In 1995, the Home Secretary, Michael Howard, who
should not have been interfering in the judicial process, ordered that the
sentence should be for Bamber’s entire life – thereby effectively (since
Bamber was only 25 when he was convicted) more than doubling his punishment.
So did this have the makings of a constitutional row between the judges and
the government? Not really. In May this year, Mr Justice Tugendhat finally
threw in the towel on behalf of the judiciary and rubber-stamped Howard’s
decision. Bamber will spend the rest of his life in prison. Or will he?
Scott Lomax’s new book, Jeremy Bamber: Evil, Almost Beyond Belief? is, I
think, the first to try to put the case for Bamber’s innocence, and it is a
task that Lomax achieves extremely persuasively. Bamber asserted that his
father called him on the night of 7 August 1985, saying, ‘Please come over,
your sister has gone crazy and has got the gun’. Within a few hours, the
bodies of Bamber’s parents, Ralph and June, and his sister, Sheila Caffell
and her two sons were found inside White House Farm in Tolleshunt D’Arcy in Essex.
In the outset, it was clearly a case of tremendous significance. It
monopolised the front pages during the following weeks. But if it was one of
the most important cases of its era, the investigation turned out to be one
of the sloppiest, with vital evidence being mishandled, mislaid, not
collected in the first place or - whoops, sorry! - destroyed years later by Essex
police.
The case predated both DNA science and sophisticated telephone technology,
either of which would have enabled the mysteries of the case to be almost
instantly resolved. However, DNA had got going by the early 1990s so that
scientific exhibits which yielded little or no information at the time would
have been illuminating indeed in subsequent years – had they been preserved.
Why they were ‘routinely’ destroyed, when the case itself was clearly
ongoing, is one of the abiding mysteries. There are, as Lomax points out, many
others: why, for example, did neither the doctor who attended the scene nor
the
pathologist estimate times of death? In a case of this magnitude, that was a
staggering omission.
Other key points to which Lomax draws attention include the fact that there was
no genuine evidence of anyone having entered or exited the house that night;
and that Sheila’s bed was not slept in.
One of the fascinating aspects of the appeal process is that the judges at
Bamber’s second appeal declared, ‘The deeper we have delved into the
evidence, the more likely it has seemed to us that the jury were right’. This
is an uncanny echo of what the judges said at the second appeal of the
Birmingham Six: ‘The longer this hearing has gone on, the more convinced this
court has become that the verdict of the jury was correct’. And we know who
emerged triumphant in that battle for justice.
Lomax does have some controversial views. He feels that jurors should be
pre-selected on the basis of their mental capabilities, saying, ‘The system
would be less prone to error if an intelligent jury were selected’. I suspect
that few would agree; the idea that jurors might need to take IQ tests to
qualify is probably a recipe for even greater chaos than we have at present.
He is also mostly too deferential and needed sometimes to sail closer to the
wind. ‘It is rather dangerous’, he writes, ‘to accuse the police and
prosecution of deliberately withholding information’. Yes, Scott, but go on,
be a devil - you’ve got the information. The libel laws aren’t as
constraining now as they were a few years back.
However, this observation should not detract from his courage and
determination in writing the book at all. I doubt if those gentlemen
mentioned above - Drake, Howard and Tugendhat - will read it but, if they do,
they may perhaps feel twinges of conscience. They certainly should.
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