Among the litany of appalling murders in the annals of British criminal history, few have seared themselves into the public consciousness as deeply as the horrifying events which took place at White House Farm.
It was there, in that isolated farmhouse near Tolleshunt D’Arcy in Essex, that police discovered the bodies of five members of the same family early in the morning of August 7, 1985.
Amid scenes of unimaginable violence and bloodshed, all had died from gunshot wounds.
The White House Farm murders became one of the most notorious criminal sagas in modern times after the arrest, trial and imprisonment of Jeremy Bamber who, in 1986, was found guilty of shooting dead his wealthy landowner parents Nevill and June, their 28-year-old adopted daughter Sheila and her six-year-old twin sons, Daniel and Nicholas.
But 40 years on, in the wake of numerous books and TV series about the massacre which still poses a myriad of unanswered questions, the emergence of a mysterious 999 call has thrown fresh doubt over the killer’s true identity – and, therefore, Bamber’s guilt.
That haunting call is said to have come from inside the Georgian farmhouse at 6.09am on the morning of the murders – and wasn’t mentioned at Bamber’s trial. If verifiable, its timing would provide the now 64-year-old, who has always protested his innocence, with a cast-iron alibi and could see his conviction overturned.
By the time the call was made, according to evidence which convicted Bamber four decades ago, everyone inside White House Farm should already have been dead.
Prosecutors successfully argued that by around 3.30am, when Bamber first called police from his own home three miles away, he had already shot dead everyone inside the farmhouse before placing the murder weapon on Sheila’s body to make it look like the former model, a diagnosed schizophrenic, had taken her own life after slaughtering her family.
Jeremy Bamber was found guilty of shooting dead his wealthy landowner parents Nevill and June, their 28-year-old adopted daughter Sheila and her six-year-old twin sons, Daniel and Nicholas
Bamber has always argued that it was his mentally ill sister who wiped out the family in a case of murder-suicide. Right from the start, the events of that terrible bloodbath were horribly muddled in the way they were recorded, leaving questions about how many 999 calls police received and, crucially, who made them.
In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, Essex Police created two separate call logs noting phone reports that Sheila was wielding a rifle at the farm.
One, logged at 3.36am, referred to the call made by Bamber from his home, telling police that his 61-year-old father Nevill had just phoned him to say that his sister had ‘gone crazy and has the gun’.
The phone had gone dead, he reported, and when he tried to call his father back he had been unable to get a reply.
Another log created separately by a 999 dispatcher and given a time stamp ten minutes earlier at 3.26am, reported that Nevill himself had called police to say that his daughter had ‘got hold of one of my guns’.
Such a call would support the only alternative to Bamber’s guilt, which is that Sheila, who was found dead with the murder weapon, really was the killer.
Essex Police, however, have insisted that both logs refer to the same call by Bamber and that the difference in timing was an error.
Bamber, who is serving a whole life tariff at Category A Wakefield Prison, recently commissioned a document forensics expert to examine both pieces of paper.
Sheila Bamber was found dead with the murder weapon, which has prompted Bamber’s supporters to suggest he is innocent
They concluded that while an error was possible, the existence of two logs was ‘more simply explained if there had been two telephone calls’.
After Bamber reported his father’s distress call, he was told to meet police at the end of the drive leading to the house.
Officers at HQ in Chelmsford kept trying to phone the Bambers’ home number but were unable to get through. Several hours passed before officers entered the farmhouse and discovered the carnage inside.
During that time, several key pieces of evidence suggest that there were signs of life inside the house. The first officers to attend the scene even claimed to have seen someone moving around through the window downstairs.
Telephonist Jean Rowe, on duty at the switchboard in Chelmsford, received a call at around 4am from Essex Police HQ asking her to check the farmhouse line to see if anyone was speaking or if the phone was off the hook.
‘I could tell that the receiver was off the hook and the line was therefore open,’ she said in a statement given the following day.
‘There wasn’t any speech but I could hear a dog barking. The noise was loud so it appeared that the dog was near to the receiver. I couldn’t hear any other noise.’
Asked to check the line again by police at around 5.40am, Jean found that the phone in the White House kitchen was still off the hook. ‘The only thing I could hear was a very slight moving sound,’ she said in her statement.
Jeremy Bamber has not been successful in his appeal bids. He has been in prison for 40 years
At 5.50am, she was asked to connect the call to police HQ in Chelmsford where officers took over monitoring the line.
In 2002, however, a brief mention of yet another 999 call at 6.09am was discovered by Scotland Yard detectives during an investigation into the initial handling of the case. Essex Police produced a short typed but unsigned statement in the name of one of their officers, PC Nick Milbank. It made no mention of the 999 call and said that Milbank, who reported for duty at around 6am that day, had been asked to monitor the open line into the farmhouse.
He heard nothing, according to the 2002 statement handed to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), until police officers forced their way into the locked farmhouse at around 7.30am. Bamber’s attempt to appeal subsequently failed.
But last year, journalist Heidi Blake from the New Yorker magazine tracked down Milbank, who was still working as an Essex Police civilian. He recalled that a 999 call had come in at 6.09am to police HQ, suggesting that someone replaced the handset and dialled out again.
‘From what I can remember someone called 999,’ he said, from ‘inside the farmhouse’. While the caller did not speak to him, he recalled hearing what might have been muffled speech – perhaps a ‘voice or a radio’ and noises that could have been ‘a door opening or closing, or a chair being moved’.
When asked if this suggested that someone had been alive in the house, he answered: ‘Well, obviously.’ Asked about the 2002 statement in his name, he denied ever making it. ‘I certainly didn’t give anyone a statement. Any statement that I’ve made I’ve always signed,’ he said.
In yet another twist in this extraordinary saga, PC Milbank died of cancer in June this year.
Just months before his death, after Bamber’s legal team raised the issue of the call with the CCRC, Milbank gave a final statement to Essex Police in which he said that he had ‘never to my knowledge’ spoken to a journalist from the New Yorker.
White House Farm at Tolleshunt D’Arcy, near Maldon, in Essex
In fact, their entire conversation can now be heard in full on the US publication’s newly-released Blood Relatives crime podcast.
Nor, said Milbank in that final statement before he died, did he recall making a statement to the Bamber Court of Appeal inquiry in 2002, but ‘given the role I had it is likely I did provide one for continuity. It would have been a handwritten statement signed by me.’
Since his death, Essex Police has produced a handwritten, signed version of Milbank’s 2002 statement which Bamber’s legal team want forensically tested.
His widow told the Daily Mail this week that she ‘had no dealings and never had with the case’.
Bamber’s supporters insist the 6.09am call proves once and for all that Sheila – and not her brother – carried out the killings at the house which was locked from the inside. Several hours passed between those killings, they argue, before – realising the house was surrounded by police – Sheila shot herself.
She had recently been hospitalised for paranoid schizophrenia, had a fraught relationship with her deeply religious mother and was said to be afraid that her parents, who thought she wasn’t well enough to care for her children, were planning to foster them.
Her mother’s blood-stained Bible was found next to her body, open at Psalms 51-55. The line, ‘save me from blood guiltiness’ was underlined.
In the aftermath of the murders, senior Essex Police detectives pursued this theory and the crime was treated as murder-suicide. But relatives raised concerns that Bamber, who like Sheila was adopted, appeared emotionally detached and was behaving strangely.
Colin Cafell lost his ex-wife Sheila and their twin sons in the murders
Further suspicions were aroused when he went on holiday to the south of France after the funeral. Sheila, they also argued, wouldn’t have been physically capable of carrying out the crimes. Most damning of all, however, was testimony given by Bamber’s recently dumped girlfriend Julie Mugford, who told police he had been planning the murders for a year and had contacted a hitman.
She later changed her story and said Jeremy was the murderer.
News of a potentially crucial new piece of evidence in the case has been dismissed by those close to the Bamber family who remain convinced of Jeremy’s guilt.
A spokesman for June Bamber’s niece, Ann Eaton, who moved into White House Farm with her husband and children after the murders, said that ‘as far as she’s concerned justice has been done’.
Colin Caffell, Sheila’s ex-husband – and father of the twin boys – described claims of the call as ‘spurious’ and told me this week: ‘I know beyond a shadow of doubt that Sheila could never have carried out the killings.’
One of Sheila’s closest friends, Tora Tomkinson, also insisted to the Daily Mail that Sheila could not have been the killer.
‘She was the most kind, gentle person and a wonderful mother,’ she said. ‘She loved her children to bits. They were her world. She wouldn’t have had it in her to murder those two boys.’
In a statement, Essex Police said: ‘This case has been the subject of several appeals and reviews by the court of appeal and the Criminal Cases Review Commission. All of these processes have never found anything other than Bamber is the person responsible for killing his adoptive parents Nevill and June, sister Sheila Caffell and her twin sons Nicholas and Daniel.’
Philip Walker, of the Jeremy Bamber Innocence Campaign, said this week that the CCRC should never have allowed Essex Police to interview Milbank last year, given that he was still serving with the force.
‘It had an obligation to protect Nick Milbank after he disclosed a potential cover-up by his employer. The CCRC put him at risk and compromised his evidence by allowing the force to deal with him directly.’
The miscarriage of justice watchdog, which has come under heavy fire for long delays in investigations and its apparent reluctance to challenge the courts, is currently deciding whether or not to refer Bamber’s case back to the Court of Appeal for a second time. Since Bamber filed his application in 2021, it has reviewed only four of the ten grounds which his lawyers argue undermine the safety of his conviction.
While the remaining six grounds are still under review, in June the CCRC concluded that none of the first four reached the threshold for a referral to the Court of Appeal – including, astonishingly, the alleged 999 call said to have been taken by PC Milbank.
According to criminologist Dr Dennis Eady of the Cardiff University Innocence Project, wrongful convictions often arise because of something he calls the ‘Agatha Christie syndrome’ involving the ‘evil perpetrator of the perfect murder’. He said this week: ‘There’s something about this case which seems to blind people from looking at the evidence … it’s easier for people to think that Jeremy Bamber is a psychopath than to actually accept that the system has made an absolute mess of it.’
Bamber’s legal team are planning to respond to the CCRC next week. Earlier this year, Bamber’s 40-year bid to prove his innocence received another boost after bombshell claims by a police whistleblower that officers tampered with the crime scene.
The Essex Police ex-CID officer said that items were ‘moved’ and ‘replaced’ before crime scene photographs were taken and that video footage of the murder scene was withheld from Bamber’s defence team and later destroyed.
While the whistleblower claims he viewed the footage, Essex Police denies it even existed.
The officer, who served for 20 years and left the force with an exemplary record, told the Mail on Sunday this year: ‘If the crime scene has no integrity, then neither does the investigation and it follows that neither does the case against Mr Bamber.’
Campaigner Philip Walker says that Bamber was hopeful about the ongoing bid to overturn his conviction when he spoke to him on the phone this week.
For the time being, he remains one of Britain’s most notorious murderers – a man described at his original trial by the judge as ‘warped’ and ‘evil, almost beyond belief’.
The only alternative is one which many refuse to countenance – that Jeremy Bamber is the victim of one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British legal history.
