The call came at about half past three on the morning of August 7, 1985. By his own account Jeremy Bamber, twenty-four, told police that his father had just telephoned him from White House Farm, near Tolleshunt D'Arcy in Essex, to say that his sister Sheila had gone "berserk" with the rifle. When officers went into the Georgian farmhouse they found five people dead. Nevill Bamber, sixty-one, lay in the kitchen. His wife June, also sixty-one, was in their bedroom, and on the floor of the same room lay Sheila Caffell, twenty-eight, with the rifle up against her throat. Her six-year-old twin sons, Nicholas and Daniel, were dead in their beds. The family had been shot twenty-five times, most of the wounds inflicted at close range.
For the first weeks the police saw what they had been told to see. Sheila had been treated for schizophrenia in a psychiatric hospital months earlier, and the scene read as a murder-suicide. The case turned on two things that surfaced afterward. Three days after the shootings one of Bamber's cousins found the rifle's silencer in a cupboard at the farmhouse. Then Julie Mugford, Bamber's girlfriend, came forward and told detectives that he had implicated himself. Her evidence also brought out a burglary he had committed at the family's caravan park a few weeks before the killings, which he admitted. He was arrested on September 29, 1985.
He was born Jeremy Paul Marsham on January 13, 1961, at St Mary Abbots Hospital in Kensington, the son of Juliet Wheeler, a vicar's daughter, and Leslie Marsham, an army sergeant major, who had had an affair; he was given up through the Church of England Children's Society and adopted by Nevill and June Bamber at six months old. The couple had adopted a baby girl, Sheila, four years earlier. Nevill was a wealthy farmer, a local magistrate and a former RAF pilot. Jeremy boarded at Gresham's School in Norfolk and left without qualifications, passed seven O-levels at a sixth-form college in Colchester in 1978, and traveled in Australia and New Zealand before coming home to wait tables and, eventually, to work on his father's farm. He lived rent-free in a cottage his father owned at 9 Head Street, Goldhanger, three and a half miles from the farmhouse, and held eight percent of the family's caravan business at Maldon. His birth parents, who had since married each other and were working at Buckingham Palace, learned from reporters after the trial that the convicted man was their son.
The prosecution said he had killed the family for a large inheritance and then staged the scene around his sister. It argued there was no evidence Nevill had telephoned anyone: he had been too badly injured to speak, there was no blood on the kitchen phone, and a man in his position would have called the police rather than his son. It said the silencer had been fitted when the shots were fired, and that with it attached Sheila's arms were too short to hold the muzzle at her throat and reach the trigger. It said she was not strong enough to have overcome Nevill in what had plainly been a violent struggle in the kitchen, and that she had been shot twice, which it called inconsistent with suicide. Blood found in the silencer had been grouped as compatible with Sheila and none of the others; if her blood was in the silencer when she was shot, the Crown argued, she could not have fired the gun. The defense said that Sheila had shot the other four and then herself. On October 28, 1986, the jury returned a majority verdict of guilty on all five counts. He was sentenced to life, later fixed as a whole-life tariff.
He has contested the verdict ever since. The Criminal Cases Review Commission inherited his application from the Home Office in March 1997 and, during its review, obtained DNA evidence indicating that the blood in the silencer could not have come from Sheila Caffell but could have come from one of the other victims. It referred the case, and on December 12, 2002, the Court of Appeal upheld the convictions. The Commission rejected further applications in 2004 and in 2012, when it said it had found no new evidence or legal argument capable of raising a real possibility that the convictions would be quashed. The defense has long argued that a police log suggests Nevill did call the police that night and that the silencer, found by a relative days later, cannot be relied on.
His case also reached Strasbourg. With Douglas Vinter and Peter Moore he took the whole-life order to the European Court of Human Rights, lost in January 2012, won the right to a further appeal, and in July 2013 the Grand Chamber held that a whole-life sentence must carry some review offering a prospect of release. He fought his family in the civil courts too, suing unsuccessfully for a share of his grandmother's estate, from which she had cut him when he was arrested, and in 2004 for profits from the caravan site. Most of the inheritance went to June's sister. In prison, at Long Lartin and then Wakefield, he has transcribed books in the braille workshop, survived a knife attack and, on another occasion, a wound to the neck that took twenty-eight stitches.
A new application went to the Commission on March 10, 2021, built on some 350,000 documents released to his lawyers in 2011 when a public interest immunity order expired, and eventually running to ten grounds (nine in one account). In May 2023 the Independent Office for Police Conduct found that Essex Police had breached its statutory duty by failing to refer twenty-nine serious complaints about senior officers' handling of the case. Reporting by Heidi Blake for The New Yorker in 2024 included recorded interviews with a former officer, Nicholas Milbank, which Bamber's supporters say describe a 999 call from inside the farmhouse while Bamber was outside with police. Essex Police then gave the Commission a statement dated September 10, 2024, in Milbank's name, denying he had spoken to the magazine, and the Commission rejected that ground; campaigners criticized it for letting the force deal directly with a key witness.
In July 2025 the Commission announced that it had refused to refer four of the ten grounds and was still considering the other six. His campaign raised money in January 2026 to challenge the refusals. In May 2026 the prison service barred him from direct contact with journalists, citing the need to protect victims from serious distress. He has now served forty years. His extended family remains convinced of his guilt, and he still says that Sheila shot the family and then herself.
January 13, 1961: born Jeremy Paul Marsham at St Mary Abbots Hospital in Kensington.
August 7, 1985: Nevill and June Bamber, Sheila Caffell and her twin sons Nicholas and Daniel are found shot dead at White House Farm in Essex.
September 29, 1985: arrested.
October 28, 1986: convicted on all five counts by a majority verdict and sentenced to life.
March 1997: the Criminal Cases Review Commission inherits his application.
December 12, 2002: the Court of Appeal upholds the convictions.
2004: the Commission rejects a further application; it rejects another in 2012.
January 2012: he loses his challenge to the whole-life order at the European Court of Human Rights.
July 2013: the Grand Chamber holds that a whole-life sentence must carry some review offering a prospect of release.
March 10, 2021: a new application goes to the Commission.
May 2023: the Independent Office for Police Conduct finds Essex Police breached its statutory duty over complaints about the case.
July 2025: the Commission refuses to refer four of his ten grounds and continues considering the other six.
May 2026: the prison service bars him from direct contact with journalists.