At 3.26 on that August morning Bamber rang the police and told them that his father had just telephoned him to say that his sister Sheila ‘has gone crazy and got the gun’. The police told him to meet them at White House Farm.
Quite independently, Bamber and the police made their way to the farm, but the police did not go inside the main building until 7.54 am, when they broke the back door down. They found Nevill, June, Sheila and her twin sons, shot twenty-five times, mainly at close range. Nevill was found in the kitchen where there had clearly been a struggle, June was in the master bedroom with her adopted daughter Sheila beside her on the floor, with a rifle up against her throat in what appeared to be a suicide following the murders.
There were certainly elements of insanity and rage in the brutality of the five killings. Nevill Bamber had been shot eight times in the head; his wife June had been shot seven times while sitting up in bed, the last shot between her eyes from less than a foot away; Sheila’s twin boys had been massacred in their beds as they slept, Daniel shot five times in the back of the head and Nicholas three times. Sheila herself had been shot twice under the chin.
The crime shocked the nation who, at first, accepted Bamber’s version of events and his sister’s guilt, describing it as a ‘family tragedy’. At the inquest a week later, on 14 August 1985, the police even supported his version of events and agreed that it was clearly a murder-suicide committed by Sheila.
Sheila Caffell, who had divorced her sculptor husband Colin in May 1982, had twice spent time in a psychiatric hospital being treated for schizophrenia in the months before the murders. Her sons had been placed in temporary foster care in both 1982 and 1983. Indeed, Bamber told the police she could have been upset on the night of the murders because her parents had asked her to consider placing Nicholas and Daniel back in temporary foster care as she was having difficulty coping.
At Bamber’s eventual trial for the five murders in October 1986, the prosecution argued that there was no evidence whatever that this discussion had actually taken place, and that Bamber’s suggestion was part of his plan to make it seem as though Sheila had indeed been the killer. If that was so, then Bamber’s plan worked for a month. Indeed, it was not until he fell out with his then girlfriend, art student Julie Mugford, that his scheme started to unravel. She told the police not only that Bamber hated his adopted parents but also that he had confessed to her that he had hired a friend to kill his family.
That was the beginning of the end for Bamber, who had been on holiday in Amsterdam as Mugford decided to tell her story. His behaviour there had already aroused some suspicions as he was alleged by a friend to have tried to sell drugs – and nude photographs of his late sister Sheila to the tabloid press.
Whatever the truth, Bamber was arrested shortly after his return from Holland, on 8 September, but was given bail five days later. At this point he promptly went on holiday again, this time to Saint Tropez in the South of France, once again demonstrating his taste for luxury and the good life. He was re-arrested on his return on 29 September and charged with all five murders.
The prosecution case against Bamber hinged on four crucial elements. First, that there was no evidence that his father Nevill had ever telephoned him that night, and if he was lying about the phone call, then Bamber must have been the killer. They also argued that the father was too badly injured to have spoken to anyone and that there was no blood on the kitchen phone. The prosecution also suggested that, even if he had made a phone call, he would surely have called the police rather than his adopted son.
The prosecution argued that a silencer was on the rifle when the shots were fired. This was based on the discovery of what they alleged was a spot of blood inside the silencer. If the silencer was on the gun, Sheila could not possibly have killed herself as she was too short to hold the gun to her throat and reach down to pull the trigger. Finally, the prosecution suggested that Sheila was not strong enough to have overcome her six-foot-one-inch-tall father in what seemed to have been a violent struggle.
With Julie Mugford as their star witness, the prosecution convinced the jury of seven men and five women, who convicted Bamber by a majority verdict of ten to two. Sentencing him to five life terms at Chelmsford Crown Court, Mr Justice Drake said, ‘I find it difficult to foresee whether it will ever be safe to release into the community someone who can plan and kill five members of their family and shoot two little boys asleep in their beds.’
The five life terms carried a minimum term of twenty-five years’ imprisonment. Eight years later, the Home Secretary Michael Howard confirmed that Bamber would be subject to a whole life sentence, and never be released.
In the years since, Bamber’s defence team has produced a string of expert testimony to challenge each of the prosecution’s arguments. They found a police log that showed that someone claiming to be Bamber’s father did call the police that night, though there is no indication as to who actually made the call. They argued that the silencer may not have been on the gun during the attacks, and produced crime-scene photographs that suggested Sheila’s body and the gun had been moved by Essex Police, who had restaged the crime scene because they had inadvertently damaged it. They also argued that the silencer was found by Bamber’s relatives weeks after the murders in a cupboard upstairs at White House Farm – and that they themselves stood to inherit the estate if he was convicted.
Bamber has undergone a series of psychological assessments during his thirty years in prison, but no evidence of his having any form of psychopathy has ever been found. His lawyers arranged for him to undergo a lie detector test in 2007, which he passed.
In the wake of this amassed evidence, Bamber has repeatedly attempted to get his case re-opened, by petitioning the Criminal Cases Review Commission to look at the new evidence and then mounting two appeals to the Court of Appeal. The CCRC began an initial review in May 1997 and referred his case to the Court of Appeal on the basis of fresh DNA evidence about the blood on the silencer, but the Court rejected the appeal. In December 2002, in a 522-point judgement, the judges said that the more they examined the details of the case, the more they thought the jury had been right.
Undeterred, Bamber tried again, asking the CCRC to review new evidence, and even offering a reward to anyone who could help his cause. But in April 2012 they again refused to intervene. There seems little doubt that Bamber will continue his campaign to prove his innocence in the years to come, which is why the outcome of the European Court was so important to him.
Relentless in his determination to re-open his case and prove his innocence, Bamber has a large number of friends and supporters outside prison, and has formed several close relationships with women while in jail. Bamber has rarely been involved in trouble during his nearly thirty years in prison, but on one occasion defended himself from a knife attack by using a broken bottle, and he received twenty-eight stitches on his neck when he was attacked from behind by another inmate while making a telephone call.
Bamber has also launched two civil law suits while serving his sentence, both claiming that he had been denied his rightful share of the family’s estate: one involving the home of his adoptive grandmother; the other focusing on the family ownership of a caravan site in Essex. He lost both cases, which, his supporters have suggested, only increased his sense of injustice.
Nevill and June Bamber’s relatives have persistently dismissed his claims as ridiculous and argued that his guilt is plain for all to see. The law suits he brought against them for a share of the inheritance that they received has only served to sharpen the ant
agonism. In particular, June’s nephew told the BBC after Bamber’s appeal in 2002, ‘I am obviously biased, you know I have lost five members of my family, and I would be very concerned if he should be let out, as I think he would be a threat to the public, not just to myself but to everyone else as well.’
Another family member commented, ‘We are particularly saddened that Sheila’s memory is constantly tarnished by Bamber. We never doubted for a second that this was the only possible decision the Court could reach and that justice was indeed done in 1986.’
Meanwhile, Essex Police’s Assistant Chief Constable at the time of Bamber’s arrest, John Broughton, said in 2002, ‘We have never been in any doubt that the original verdict was the right and only verdict. Even with the modern technology now available, today’s decision has demonstrated that the original evidence continues to stand the test of time.’
Nevertheless Jeremy Bamber steadfastly continues to protest his innocence, and his sister’s guilt, on his website, which contains testimonials, details of new evidence, articles he has written and his blog, which chronicles the many twists and turns in his campaign.
The other appellant alongside Vinter and Bamber in the European Court victory was former cinema owner Peter Moore, a homosexual who was always known as the ‘Man in Black’, and who was convicted of killing and mutilating four men, three of whom were gay, ‘for fun’ in his native North Wales between September and December 1995. His case is every bit as chilling as Bamber’s.
An unmarried loner, Moore was born in Rhyl in North Wales in 1940 and ran local cinemas in the 1970s and 1980s, living with his mother in Kinmel Bay, Clwyd until her death in May 1994. She doted on Moore, calling him her ‘miracle son’ because he had been born when she was in her forties. The loss of his mother may have triggered ‘an extremely ugly change in his character’ according to the prosecution at his trial for the four murders in November 1996.
It was alleged that Moore may have attacked as many as fifty men in the twenty years before his killing spree in 1995 in what the trial judge later described as ‘twenty years of terror’, but he had apparently never killed any of them. What is certain is that Moore was fixated on gay men.
With a fascination for the wartime German Nazi party, he would haunt gay meeting places across North Wales, dressed in Nazi-style caps and leather boots, while carrying a large knife or truncheon to terrorise his victims. ‘The Man in Black’, as Alex Carlile, the QC for the prosecution, put it at his trial. ‘Black thoughts and the blackest of deeds.’ The QC also told the Court, ‘He thought it gave him the dominating and overbearing appearance he sought to frighten his victims and for his own sexual gratification.’
A tall man with mousy hair and a greying moustache, Moore hardly looks a threatening killer, yet his total lack of empathy for any other human being sets him apart. One of the police officers who interviewed him after his arrest explained, ‘I could not believe how dispassionately he was talking. He was talking the way you and I would talk about going down to town to buy a newspaper or a pint of milk.’
Moore concealed his true self in the persona of a friendly businessman who would help the local residents by running a Saturday morning ‘cinema club’ for their children. Moore would entertain the children with film and then treat them to snacks and popcorn in the cinema’s little snack bar. Many local parents would drop their kids off into the care of Moore and then go off to do their shopping, picking them up again afterwards. It was an ideal arrangement. To them, Moore appeared to be nothing more than an affable and trustworthy local businessman – ‘an upstanding member of the community’, as one put it.
In fact it was just part of the subtle disguise that Moore had assumed in public for more than twenty years, hiding himself in plain sight, and disguising his true personality – that of a man who was both deeply manipulative and intensely calculating.
His mother’s death in 1994 may have tipped Moore over the edge, but whatever the reason, he killed for the first time in late September 1995 with a £25 hunting knife that he had bought for himself as a birthday present. His victim was Henry Roberts, a fifty-six-year-old retired railwayman who lived alone in a crumbling cottage on the island of Anglesey off the Welsh coast. Though he chose to live in squalor, Roberts was comparatively well off as the result of a large redundancy payment and family inheritances.
Like Moore, Roberts was interested in Nazi memorabilia and sported a Nazi flag on the wall of his cottage, which lay just off Moore’s route home from one of his cinemas.
When the retired railwayman failed to turn up at his local pub for three days a friend went to look for him at his cottage and found him lying face down near an outhouse outside. His trousers were round his ankles and he had been stabbed in each buttock. But those were certainly not his only injuries. Roberts’ body was covered in stab wounds – fourteen to the front and thirteen to the back in an attack ‘of frenzied and sadistic viciousness’ as the prosecution put it at Moore’s trial. But he had died as a result of just one of the stab wounds – to the heart. Roberts’ swastika flag was missing.
Less than a month later Moore went trawling for another victim in a Liverpool gay bar. He came across a drunken young drug addict named Edward Carthy, who was twenty-eight and ‘a disaster waiting to happen’ according to the prosecution at Moore’s trial. The young man wanted the cinema owner to drive him to his home in Birkenhead for sex, but instead Moore drove him into a forest in North Wales. When Carthy realised he tried to jump out of the van Moore was driving, but failed. ‘I think he got a bit frightened, actually,’ his killer said laconically afterwards. Moore stabbed him four times, killing him, and left Carthy’s body in the forest.
After his arrest in December 1995 Moore led police to the spot where he had dumped the young man’s body in the forest. What they found were Carthy’s remains, badly decomposed and mutilated by animals which had severed an arm and bitten off his head. Moore showed not a trace of concern or remorse, however, looking on stony-faced, his eyes flat and disengaged as the police gathered the remains.
By now Moore had developed a taste for killing, and his desire to kill was escalating rapidly. Before the end of November he had killed a third time, but this time the victim was clearly not gay. Keith Randles was a forty-nine-year-old divorced father of two daughters who had recently lost his job in middle management, but who had found work as a traffic safety officer looking after some roadworks on the A5 road to Anglesey.
On 30 November Randles went to buy some fish and chips for supper, and then returned to the caravan he was living in beside the roadworks to spend the rest of the evening quietly. It did not turn out to be as quiet as he had hoped, because later that night, once again using the A5 as his route home, Moore knocked on the caravan’s door and dragged Randles outside while stabbing him repeatedly until he died. Unlike Roberts or Carthy, his two previous victims, there was no sign that Moore knew Randles; it was the spontaneous attack of a man bent on murder, no matter the cost.
After his arrest Moore told the police that Randles had pleaded for his life, asking him what he was doing, and why. ‘For fun,’ Moore told him as he continued the killing, with his victim looking ‘nonplussed’ as he put it.
‘Would you say at that point he accepted the inevitable?’ a detective asked.
‘No, he carried on screaming,’ Moore replied.
Then, when asked if he enjoyed it, Moore added chillingly, and once more with an absolutely stony face, ‘There was a certain enjoyment from it, but the enjoyment wasn’t sexual. Like everything it was a job well done.’
/> As trophies Moore took Randles’ video recorder and his mobile phone.
Just over two weeks later, Moore killed for the fourth time, but this time returning to his preference for a gay victim. On the evening of Sunday 17 December, thirty-five-year-old crematorium worker and father of two Anthony Davies, who lived near Colwyn Bay with his wife Sheila, told her that he was going to visit his aunt who had just been discharged from hospital with a broken leg. It was about 11 pm, and the story was a subterfuge to get out of the house and meet other gay or bisexual men.
When Davies had not returned by 4.30 the following morning Sheila Davies phoned her husband’s aunt, who told her that Tony had left her more than three hours before. In fact he had driven to Pensarn Beach, a local gay meeting place for men looking for casual sex. There he encountered Peter Moore who had been ‘cruising around’, as he told the police later, almost certainly intent on finding another gay man to kill.
Later Moore told the police that he had watched Davies get out of his car, light a cigarette and then walk to the water’s edge. When he got to him he found him with his trousers round his ankles. Nothing could have been more provocative to the conflicted Moore.
‘I just took the knife out and stabbed him,’ he told the police. ‘I think he screamed or shouted a bit.’
When the police finally searched Moore’s house, they found Davies’ duffel bag, while his keys were in the fish pond. Moore never neglected to keep some trophies which he always craved from his victims to help him to relive the details of the killings.
Peter Moore’s spree of four murders in barely three months might have gone undetected had the police not been persuaded to open a confidential ‘tip line’ for information on the murders aimed at the gay community. Within four days of the killing of Anthony Davies the line had received a series of anonymous calls suggesting that Moore had been, and still was, violent towards homosexuals. One man even told the police that he had been taken to Moore’s home six months earlier and been tortured, but had never admitted his ordeal to anyone because of his shame.
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