page_title: White House Farm murders
section_title: New silencer evidence
hierarchical_section_title: White House Farm murders / Appeals / Court of Appeal, 2002 / New silencer evidence
caption_attribution_description: The neo-medieval pile of the Royal Courts of Justice on G.E. Street, The Strand, London.royal courts of justice
context_page_description: 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 adopted 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 adopted 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.
context_section_description: Although all the grounds (except 11) were reviewed by the court, the CCRC referred the case to the Court of Appeal on the basis of ground 15, the discovery of DNA on the silencer, the result of a test not available in 1986. The silencer evidence during the trial had come from John Hayward, a biologist in private practice, formerly of the Forensic Science Laboratory. He had found a "considerable amount of blood" inside the silencer; he had stated that it was human blood and that the blood group was consistent with it having come from Sheila. He said there was a "remote possibility" that it was a mixture of blood from Nevill and June. 
  Mark Webster, an expert instructed by Bamber's defence team, argued that Hayward's tests had been inadequate, and that there was a real possibility, not a remote one, that the blood had come from Nevill and June. This was a critical point, because the prosecution case rested on the silencer having been on the gun when Sheila was shot, something she could not have done herself because of the length of her arms. If she was shot with the silencer on the gun, it meant that someone else had shot her. If her blood was inside the silencer, it supported the prosecution's position that she had been shot by another party, but if the blood inside the silencer belonged to someone else, that part of the prosecution case collapsed.
  The defence argued that new tests comparing DNA in the silencer to a sample from Sheila's biological mother suggested that the "major component" of the DNA in the silencer had not come from Sheila. A DNA sample from June's sister suggested that the major component had come from June, the defence argued. The court concluded that June's DNA was in the silencer, that Sheila's DNA may have been in the silencer, and that there was evidence of DNA from at least one male. The judges' conclusion was that the results were complex, incomplete, and also meaningless because they did not establish how June's DNA came to be in the silencer years after the trial, did not establish that Sheila's was not in it, and did not lead to a conclusion that Bamber's conviction was unsafe.
caption: Bamber's appeal at the Royal Courts of Justice was dismissed in December 2002.
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