White House Farm murders
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White House Farm, 2007
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| Date | 6–7 August 1985 |
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| Location | White House Farm, near Tolleshunt D'Arcy, Essex, England |
| Coordinates | 51°45′33″N 0°48′12″E / 51.7591°N 0.8032°ECoordinates: 51°45′33″N 0°48′12″E / 51.7591°N 0.8032°E |
| Deaths |
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| Convicted | Jeremy Bamber (then 24), convicted on 28 October 1986 of five counts of murder |
| Sentence | Whole-life order |
The White House Farm murders took place near the village of Tolleshunt D'Arcy, Essex, England, during the night of 6–7 August 1985. Nevill and June Bamber were shot and killed inside their farmhouse, along with their adoptive daughter, Sheila Caffell, and Sheila's six-year-old twin sons, Daniel and Nicholas Caffell. The only surviving member of June and Nevill's immediate family was their adoptive son, Jeremy Bamber, then 24 years old, who said he had been at home a few miles away when the shooting took place.
The police at first believed that Sheila, diagnosed with schizophrenia, had fired the shots then turned the gun on herself. But weeks after the murders Jeremy Bamber's ex-girlfriend told police that he had implicated himself. The prosecution argued that, motivated by a large inheritance, Bamber had shot the family with his father's semi-automatic rifle, then placed the gun in his unstable sister's hands to make it look like a murder–suicide. A silencer the prosecution said was on the rifle would have made it too long, they argued, for Sheila's fingers to reach the trigger to shoot herself. Bamber was convicted of five counts of murder in October 1986 by a 10–2 majority, sentenced to a minimum of 25 years, and informed in 1994 that he would never be released. The Court of Appeal upheld the verdict in 2002.
Bamber protested his innocence throughout, although his extended family remained convinced of his guilt. Between 2004 and 2012, his lawyers submitted several unsuccessful applications to the Criminal Cases Review Commission. They argued that the silencer might not have been used during the killings, that the crime scene may have been damaged then reconstructed, that crime-scene photographs were taken weeks after the murders, and that the time of Sheila's death had been miscalculated.
A key issue was whether Bamber received a call from his father that night to say Sheila had "gone berserk" with a gun. Bamber said that he did, that he alerted police, and that Sheila fired the final shot while he and the officers were standing outside the house. It became a central plank of the prosecution's case that the father had made no such call, and that the only reason Bamber would have lied about it—indeed, the only way he could have known about the shootings when he alerted the police—was that he was the killer himself.
Ralph Nevill Bamber (known as Nevill, born 8 June 1924, 61 when he died) was a farmer, former RAF pilot, and local magistrate at Witham Magistrates' Court. He and his wife, June (née Speakman, born 3 June 1924, also 61 when she died), had married in 1949 and moved into the Georgian White House Farm on Pages Lane, Tolleshunt D'Arcy, set among 300 acres of tenant farmland that had belonged to June's father. The Court of Appeal described Nevill as "a well-built man, 6' 4" tall and in good physical health". This became significant because Bamber's defence suggested that Sheila, a slim woman of 28, had been able to beat and subdue her father, something the prosecution contested.
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