page_title: White House Farm murders
section_title: Jeremy Bamber
hierarchical_section_title: White House Farm murders / Bamber family / Jeremy Bamber
caption_attribution_description: English: Head Street Head Street Goldhanger
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: Jeremy Nevill Bamber was born on 13 January 1961 to a student midwife who, after an affair with a married army sergeant, gave her baby to the Church of England Children's Society when he was six weeks old. His biological parents later married and had other children; his father became a senior staff member in Buckingham Palace. Nevill and June adopted Bamber when he was six months old. They sent him to St Nicholas Primary, then along with Sheila to Maldon Court prep school. This was followed when he was nine, in September 1970, by Gresham's School, a boarding school in Holt, Norfolk, where he joined the cadet force. He was apparently unhappy there, mainly because of bullying and a sexual assault. 
  After leaving Gresham's with no qualifications, Bamber attended sixth-form college, and in 1978 achieved seven O-levels. Nevill paid for him to visit Australia, where he took a scuba-diving course, before travelling to New Zealand. Former friends alleged that he had broken into a jeweller's shop while in New Zealand and had stolen an expensive watch. He had also boasted, they said, of being involved in smuggling heroin. He returned to England in 1982 to work on his adoptive parents' farm for £170 a week, and set up home, rent-free, in a cottage Nevill owned at 9 Head Street, Goldhanger, Essex. The cottage lay 3–3.5 miles (5.6 km) from the farmhouse, a five-minute drive by car and at least 15 minutes by bicycle. His father also gave him a car to use, and eight percent of a family company, Osea Road Camp Sites Ltd, which ran a caravan site.
  To Bamber's supporters, who over the years have included MPs and journalists, he is a victim of one of Britain's worst miscarriages of justice. The Guardian took up his case at one point. One or more Guardian journalists began corresponding with him in 2006, and two interviewed him in 2011. Describing him as "clever and strategic", they wrote that there was something about him that made the public unsympathetic toward him. He was "handsome in a rather cruel, caddish way—he seemed to exude arrogance and indifference. ... Like Meursault in the Camus novel L'Etranger, he did not seem to display the appropriate emotions." He is reported to have passed a lie detector test in 2007.
  His detractors include his extended family and his father's former secretary, Barbara Wilson. She told reporters that Bamber used to provoke his parents, riding in circles around his mother on a bicycle, wearing make-up to upset his father, and once hiding a bag of live rats in the secretary's car. Whenever Bamber visited the farm, there were arguments, she said. Tension had apparently increased in the weeks before the murders; she said Nevill had remarked to her about foreseeing a "shooting accident". Bamber's girlfriend, Julie Mugford, alleged that he had talked about killing his family. A farm worker testified that Bamber had once said of Sheila: "I'm not going to share my money with my sister." The court heard that, in March that year, while discussing security at the family's caravan site, he had told his uncle: "I could kill anybody. I could even [or "easily"] kill my parents." Bamber denied having said this.
caption: Bamber lived in Head Street, Goldhanger, Essex
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