Bamber in new bid to overturn farmhouse murders conviction
LAWYERS acting for White House Farm killer Jeremy Bamber have submitted what they claim is dramatic new evidence in a bid to overturn his conviction at the Court of Appeal, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
The former public schoolboy was convicted of murdering five family members at their farmhouse on the night of August 6, 1985. In one of the most notorious cases in British criminal history, he was found guilty of shooting his adoptive parents, his sister and her six-year-old twins in Tolleshunt D’Arcy, Essex.
The defence dossier sent to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) contains ten new pieces of evidence, according to Bamber’s lawyers, and raises questions over a gruesome key detail highlighted by the judge at Bamber’s trial.
According to the claims, burns to the father’s back were caused not by the hot end of a rifle, as the jury was told in 1986, but by a hot kitchen AGA. This image – of a man not just capable of shooting dead his family but torturing them too – helped secure Bamber’s conviction, say his legal team.
They also claim Essex Police tampered with the crime scene before taking photographs. Bamber was given a life sentence with a minimum term of 25 years, later changed to full life without parole.
Now 61 – the same age as his parents Nevill and June when they were killed – he is the only wholelife prisoner in the British prison system who maintains his innocence, and has previously launched four unsuccessful appeal bids.
Bamber has always said his sister Sheila Caffell, 28, killed his family before shooting herself.
Speaking exclusively to The Mail on Sunday from HMP Wakefield, Bamber said: ‘After 36 years it can now be proven with absolute certainty that I did not burn my dad with the rifle barrel or the rifle’s sound moderator, as my trial jury were misled into believing.’
In a statement last night, Essex Police said numerous appeals ‘have never found anything other than Bamber is the person responsible’ for his family’s killings.
The CCRC said: ‘We have received Mr Bamber’s application, and a review is ongoing.’
‘Burns were caused by an AGA, not torture’