Lack of appeal

Here we go again. Like a macabre version of Groundhog Day, mass murderer Jeremy Bamber is making yet another bid for freedom. This nasty legal saga has been dragging on for almost 26 years, ever since Bamber was first found guilty of the savage massacre at his family’s farmhouse in rural Essex. By a majority verdict, the jury at Chelmsford Crown Court decided that in the early hours of 7 August 1985, Bamber had shot dead his adoptive parents, Nevill and June, his sister Sheila Caffel, and her young twin sons, Daniel and Nicholas. No fewer than 25 rounds from an Anschutz .22 semi-automatic rifle had been fired at the victims, almost all from point-black range.

After hearing the jury’s verdict, the judge described Bamber as ‘warped and evil beyond belief’ as he sentenced him to life imprisonment, and despite all his protestations of innocence, Bamber has consistently failed to sway the justice system. On two occasions, in 1989 and 2002, the Court of Appeal considered his case in the light of supposed new evidence and both times it upheld the original verdict. Indeed, after the second appeal, the judges wrote, ‘The deeper we have looked into this case, the more likely it seems to us that the jury was right.’ Those words have not deterred ­Bamber. He’s kept up his campaign through the media, through his website and now on Twitter, aided by a group of diehard supporters who revel in lurid conspiracy theories about the actions of Essex police, the courts, and the wider Bamber family.

Most popular

Mark Galeotti

Why Putin is keeping Trump waiting for a Ukraine deal

Cheered on by these creepy fans and a new legal team, Bamber is now seeking to go to the Court of Appeal a third time. His claims of new evidence revolve around the weapon used and some of the witness testimony, and they’re currently being examined by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which will announce shortly if he will be granted leave to appeal yet again.