On August 7th 1985, the bodies of June and Nevill Bamber, their daughter Sheila, and her twin six year-old sons Daniel and Nicholas, were found in an English farmhouse. They had all been shot to death.
At first, police thought Sheila guilty of the murder-suicide. The gun was found in her hands, and her schizophrenic episodes had been becoming more severe; her culpability was the tragic, but obvious conclusion. Soon, however, new evidence was found that pointed to her brother Jeremy, the only member of the immediate family left alive. After a highly publicised trial, he was convicted and sent to prison. He remains there to this day.
In the sixth season of the Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast In The Dark: Blood Relatives, New Yorker journalist Heidi Blake explores those forty-year-old murders, discovering new evidence that casts doubt as to whether he should be. The show expands on her article from last year, exploring various angles that seem to have been overlooked, despite “The Whitehouse Farm Murders” being one of the most tabloid-covered mass murders in recent British history.
Regardless of whether or not the right person is currently sitting in jail, what Blake makes clear throughout these six episodes is the extent to which the investigation allegedly reverse-engineered its villain.
Nobody liked Jeremy. Some of these reasons were legitimate, others weren’t. Either way, he was not a popular man. It’s almost as if everyone wanted him to have done such a heinous thing because it fit their narrative.
Even perfectly reasonable actions were twisted to underline his supposed guilt. Jeremy was the one who phoned the police after getting a call from his father about Sheila becoming erratic with a gun. The police took hours to get in the house, waiting for an armed unit to show up (not unusual, as British police don’t carry guns unless specially trained). Somehow, Jeremy’s anxiousness for them to enter the house wasn’t taken as simple fear for his family, but as a sign he was eager to begin his “performance” of grief. That attitude would carry over to the aftermath of the murders, when everything he did – whether appearing too upset, or not upset enough – was taken as proof of his guilt by both the police and the rabid media.
Then there was the more overt mishandling of the police investigation, led by a detective whose colleagues actually nicknamed him “Bumbling Ron.” Blake discovers that Bumbling Ron both moved and lost vital crime scene evidence. He did his best to restage the scene as he’d found it. But that staging was also ultimately blamed on Jeremy.
Although the case is four decades old, a surprising number of the people involved in the investigation are still around, and Blake manages to get most of them on the record. Some are more reluctant than others, like the cousins whose personal investigation played a large part in putting Jeremy in jail, one of whom now lives in the farmhouse where the murders took place. While Blake never foregrounds herself at the expense of the story, from a procedural standpoint, it’s fascinating to hear her try to extract information from those particularly reticent sources, deftly finding just the right combination of non-threatening manner and innocuous words to squeeze just a little more from them. It doesn’t always work, but even her unsuccessful attempts make for engrossing listening.
Nevertheless, there perhaps isn’t quite enough acknowledgement here that forty years is a long time, and sometimes what reads as reluctance or dishonesty can be attributed to the plain fallibility of memory. If there’s one flaw with the otherwise compelling and exhaustively reported series, it’s the lack of discussion around the effect that fallibility could have on a case that has been playing out for almost half a century.
At the very least though, it would be reasonable to assume that the revelatory new evidence Blake uncovered warrants a new trial. But, as she underlines in a crushing final episode, it just isn’t that simple. The sole governmental organisation dedicated to aiding the wrongfully accused, the Criminal Cases Review Commission, is woefully overstretched and underfunded, and seemingly far more concerned with helping the system whose missteps it is their whole mission to uncover than the ones they actually exist to help.
While it’s hard to believe it after listening to all six episodes, there is still a chance that Jeremy was the killer. What makes In The Dark: Blood Relatives so effective is that, for the podcast’s purposes, his guilt doesn’t matter. Blake’s riveting, rigorous reporting brings to light a whole raft of systemic flaws that should be downright frightening to fellow Brits.
If Jeremy is in fact innocent, you can only hope the podcast will grant him the freedom he’s been denied for forty years.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd.