Jeremy Bamber - Can the magnificent Simon Hattenstone of The Guardian shame the CCRC into doing a proper investigation?
Simon Hattenstone
An excellent series of articles by Simon Hattenstone have appeared in The Guardian newspaper illustrating the current situation regarding Jeremy Bamber. Hattenstone’s research and the resultant articles (see here, here and here) have placed the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) in a shameful light and exposed their indifference and woeful investigative competence. The tragedy is that in researching his articles, Hattenstone has not done anything that the CCRC could not have done themselves in the past nearly 30 years and had they done so Jeremy Bamber could have enjoyed freedom for all of the 21st Century.
Jeremy Bamber has now been in prison for over forty years and, very unusually for a person in his situation, still insists that he is innocent.[1] In relation to Hattenstone’s revelations, how should the CCRC now approach his case? Surely, they should recognise that despite Bamber having experienced frequent dismissive setbacks with his CCRC submissions, he continues to insist that various aspects of the case made against him are simply wrong. But the CCRC approach is not to redouble efforts to probe what he say but. instead. to obfuscate further. Could this attitude emanate from the attitude of the Court of Appeal (CoA) in 2002 which seemingly continues to impose a biased influence on the CCRC?
In 2002, Defence counsel, Michael Turner QC, told the judges during the hearing that there had been "many compelling points" in Bamber’s favour at trial supporting his case that he did not "assassinate" his entire adoptive family, but that they were killed by his sister before she committed suicide.
It was also argued that evidence was "deliberately withheld so as to unfairly bolster the prosecution's case and secure a conviction".
Victor Temple QC, opposing the appeal, told the judges that the Crown's principal submission was "that there has been no evidence placed before your lordships to enable this court to doubt the safety of these convictions".
Mr Temple told the judges: "At the end of the day nought plus nought equals nought and if that is right ... these convictions for murder remain safe and we would invite you to uphold these convictions."
Lord Justice Kay, reading a summary of the ruling said: "We have concluded that there was no conduct on the part of the police or the prosecution which would have adversely affected the jury's verdict."
He pointed out that it was not the function of the court to decide whether or not the appellant committed the murders. The judge said: "We do not doubt the safety of the verdicts, and we have recorded in our judgment the fact that the more we examined the detail of the case, the more likely we thought it to be that the jury were right."
Which only goes to show how utterly wrong the Court of Appeal can be.
However, the damning words of Lord Justice Kay continue to be used to emphasise the viewpoint that Bamber has no credible evidence to put before the CoA and this appears to continue to influence the CCRC in a significant way. It is abundantly evident in their statements when rejecting his submissions that they are weary of going over the same grounds time after time. But this is grossly unfair on Bamber, as Bamber, and his Campaign Team, are the only people who have been investigating the case for the past forty years, uncovering new evidence through painstaking research. The CCRC has conducted no investigations whatsoever despite being established for the express purpose in 1997.
There are individual witnesses, as detailed below, who hold vital information that potentially exonerates Bamber but have never been interviewed by the CCRC. There is documentation held under PII regulations that the CCRC cannot be bothered to access. There is also documentation related to the subject matter below that has clearly been forged by the police, but the CCRC shows no interest in probing the reasons for the forgery, who did it, and on what orders was it carried out. The CCRC has seemingly not considered the material in the ‘Dickinson’ enquiry that exonerates Bamber or questioned why Det. Superintendent James Dickinson chose not to reveal in 1986 that he had uncovered information that indicated that police officers had conspired to pervert the course of justice and that indisputably Bamber was innocent – Dickinson was therefore the first, but not the last, who had an opportunity to correct the wrong verdict that condemned Jeremy Bamber to forty years of wrongful imprisonment.
Undoubtably, the attitude of the CCRC since their creation in 1997, has been that Bamber is guilty and they are going to make no efforts whatsoever to assist him in his fight for freedom. How inhumane that outlook is and how despicable are those CCRC employees who continue to refuse to do their jobs.
I am going to outline below just one of many possible examples to exemplify what I mean by describing the CCRC staff as utterly incompetent and devoid of moral probity. That is, the issue of both Nevill and Jeremy Bamber telephoning the police on the fateful morning of 7 August 1985, Nevill at 03:26 and Jeremy at 03:36. As Simon Hattenstone declares in his article, if this happened then Jeremy is innocent.
What has become clear is that during the lamentable Essex Police ‘investigation’ led by Det. Chief Supt. Michael Ainsley it was decided to frame Jeremy Bamber by falsely claiming that he telephoned the police at 03:26 because some documentation held at Police HQ indicated that a phone call had been received at that time regarding the incident at White House Farm (WHF). However, that was not the full explanation or truth.
The prosecution alleged that there was a single phone call at 03:26 even though police records and testimony given under oath indicated a phone call at 03:36 and one of many blunders and misdirection’s given by the presiding judge, Sir Maurice Drake, was to tell the jury to accept a timing of 3.26am[2].
Following the trial, there was testimony and documentation available that gave conflicting accounts of when the alleged telephone call(s) made by Jeremy Bamber was made. However, CCRC staff have never shown the slightest interest in using their investigative powers to solve the confusion surrounding the timing of the telephone calls. The CCRC could have unravelled the mystery quite easily by interviewing a handful of police officers:
PC Michael James West 03:26 and 03:36 call
PC1902 Paul Stanley Cracknell 03:26 call witness
PC1930 Robin Raymond Norcup 03:26 call witness
DC Stephen Myall 03:36 call witness
PS Christopher Bews 03:36 call witness
PC Robin Saxby and 03:36 call witness
Civilian radio operator Malcolm Bonnett 03:26 call witness
A functioning CCRC wpuld have seen staff making it a priority to access the original documentation relating to the phone calls; official documentation and pocket notebooks. Had they done so, they would surely have identified the need to interview the police officers involved. The CCRC have never interviewed any of the above named personnel.
PC’s Cracknell and Norcup made witness statements indicating that they were in the Control Room at Chelmsford Police Station (CD) when PC West received a phone call at 03:26 from Nevill Bamber. It had to be that phone call as they left CD at 03:33. If interviewed by the CCRC, they could confirm what they discussed with PC West following the 03:26 phone call and why they then made their way to WHF. PC West surely told both officers what the telephone call was about and there must have been a conversation as to what to do next, resulting in Cracknell and Norcup immediately leaving CD and making their way to White House Farm. They have never been interviewed by the CCRC. Supposing Cracknell and Norcup were to disclose that the 03:26 phone call was from Nevill Bamber?
The CCRC could have interviewed Cracknell and Norcup in 1997. After all, it is an obvious strategy to interview everyone who was in the CD Control Room that morning at 03:26, otherwise nothing said by PC West could be corroborated. Too much trouble for the CCRC?
PC Michael West
At Chelmsford Crown Court, in October 1986, PC Michael West, took the stand to give evidence for the prosecution. PC West said he filled out an event record, called a C1, as the conversation took place with Bamber. West told Anthony Arlidge, the QC for the prosecution, that he recorded the time of 3.36am using the digital clock on the wall in the control room. Challenged on the time of the phone call, he said several times that it was at 03:36, not 03:26. Despite this, all subsequent versions of his trial testimony have claimed that it was "agreed" that West had made a mistake reading a digital clock and the actual time of the call was 03:26.
West’s witness statements were brief and unhelpful, as if they had been created to divulge as little as possible. In his first witness statement, made two days after the murder, West said he received the call from “Mr. Bamber” at 3.26am. Frustratingly, he didn’t clarify which Mr. Bamber he was referring to. In a slightly more detailed statement a month later, the time had been changed to 3.36am. The CCRC have never asked West why the times change from one statement to the next, or indeed why he referred only to a “Mr. Bamber” when it was Jeremy Bamber who was supposedly the caller.
Rivlin suggested in court that West had got the time wrong when he changed it in his statement and that the call from Jeremy Bamber was made at 3.26am. West refused to admit to a mistake and the issue was left unclear, apart from Drake’s misleading direction to the jury.
The 3.26am timing of a telephone call is supported by a ‘rolling’ incident log made by a civilian phone operator, Malcolm Bonnett. He was situated at Essex police HQ, a building roughly a mile away from CD.
The Bonnett log was presented to the court as his record of a call West made to him about the phone call he had received from a ‘Mr Bamber’ (Nevill). However, the jury was told that the Mr Bamber in question was Jeremy. Bonnett’s rolling log starts with an entry at 3.26am. The subject line for this call is “Daughter gone berserk”. This is the only document the jury were shown in regard to the time of the call. It was never explained why West’s C1 log of the phone call was not included in the bundle given to the jury. They had no idea why West had logged the time as 3.36am or why the confusion in court when it was suggested he had got it wrong.
Something obviously didn’t add up. It remains unclear whether West or Bonnett actually sent out the police cars to WHF. Both claim to have done so. West said he radioed the officers asking them to attend the scene, but Bonnett also said that after receiving the call from West about the incident he sent the first police car, CA7, to White House Farm at 03.35am, followed by another car, CA5, at 03.36am. These timings only made sense if West had taken a telephone call from someone (Nevill) at 3.26am.and then another call, from Jeremy Bamber at 03:36.
Surely, given the recording of conflicting times and confusion as to who did what, the CCRC should have been suspicious and sought clarification from West and Bonnett? After all, the issue of who phoned and when is central to Bamber’s claims of innocence. The CCRC did nothing and have done nothing to clarify this issue since 1997.
It is established that Bamber telephoned his girlfriend, Julie Mugford, at 03:30. She told him to go back to bed. He ignored her and at 3.36am he called the police.
After a month-long trial, the jury came back with a 10-2 ‘Guilty’ majority verdict on 28 October 1986. The two female jurors who held out have been proven correct.
Essex Police then hid a vast amount of documentation under public interest immunity (PII) powers which were employed to ‘bury’ inconvenient materials. All of this documentation has theoretically been available to the CCRC for the past 30 years or so, but it appears that none has been accessed.
Amid the countless documents hidden is the C1 form[3] that West filled in as he was speaking to ‘Mr. Bamber’ on 7 August 1985[4]. The time recorded on it is 3.36am, as he stated at trial. At the top, it clearly states who has made the call and from what address – Mr Bamber, 9 Head Street, Goldhanger. The subject is “Distress call”.
As has been pointed out by Jeremy’s Campaign Team for at least 30 years, when West’s C1 log is compared with Bonnett’s log, important differences, apart from the times of the call, become obvious. In West’s C1 log of Bamber’s call, it says: “Father phoned (aged 62). Please come over your sister has gone crazy and has the gun. Phone went dead. Sister Sheila Bamber age 27 has history of mental illness.” This is clearly Jeremy Bamber relating the call from his father – hence the reference to father and sister.
By contrast, the opening of Bonnett’s rolling log, which begins at 3.26am, is told from a wholly different perspective. For a start, it refers to Caffell as “daughter” rather than “sister”. The subject of the log is “Daughter gone berserk” and it says, “Daughter Sheila Bamber aged 26 yrs has got hold of one of my guns”. The guns at White House Farm belonged to Nevill. In West’s C1 log it refers to the gun. Both logs get Caffell’s age wrong. Bonnett’s says she is 26, West’s 27. In fact, she had celebrated her 28th birthday a couple of weeks earlier. In West’s log, Bamber has mistakenly added an extra year to his father’s age. In Bonnett’s log, no age is given.
Then there is the different way in which the caller’s name and address is logged. The convention in police logs is to start with the informant’s name and address, because it immediately establishes who is providing the information, and it means they are traceable if contact is lost. Bonnett’s log of West’s call refers to “Mr Bamber, White House Farm, Tollshunt D’Arcy”. West’s log refers to “Mr Bamber, 9 Head Street, Goldhanger”. Next to the address for White House Farm is the phone number. Bonnett’s rolling log doesn’t have a number for the farm till 03.56am, when the police confirm that the phone is off the hook.
In addition, Bonnett’s 3.26am log makes no mention of Caffell’s history of mental health problems, a crucial fact that any officers dispatched to the scene should have been informed of.
Thus, the CCRC ‘investigators’ had very good reason to probe the numerous differences between the recorded documents by interviewing PC West and Malcolm Bonnett. They have never done so, and Bonnett is now dead.
In 2016, a documents expert, Dr Chris Davies, studied the new evidence and concluded that the most likely reason for the inconsistencies was that there were two phone calls. “I consider that this would be my preferred explanation for them,” he said. If Nevill called the police at 3.26am to say his daughter had “gone berserk” and had the gun, it puts Jeremy Bamber in the clear. Needless to say, the CCRC have ignored the opinion of Dr. Davies.
In 2020, the Jeremy Bamber Innocence Campaign came across “pocketbook no.49”, belonging to DC Stephen Myall, one of the three officers originally radioed, alongside PS Bews and PC Saxby, asking them to attend the incident at 3.30am, six minutes before West stated on his C1 log that he received the call from Bamber. At the time, they were on an undercover foot patrol of an industrial estate after a spate of burglaries.
In his pocketbook, Myall wrote that he, Bews and Saxby immediately returned to Witham police station when, at “03.37am approx”, they received a phone call from West about the incident at White House Farm. “The Officer (PC West) at CD Control was on the phone and told us that he was relating information to us and still had the informant (Jeremy Bamber) on the other telephone.” Myall wrote that Bamber had told West that his father had said “words to the effect of ‘Come quick, your sister’s gone berserk. She’s got a gun’. The telephone had then gone dead.”
Myall’s pocketbook and those of the two other Witham officers have been available to the CCRC for nearly thirty years. Had those pocketbooks been accessed when Jeremy first started to plead his innocence, the CCRC must surely have realised that there were two phone calls, one at 03:26 by Nevill Bamber to PC West and another call at 03:36 by Jeremy Bamber to PC West. Why has the CCRC, with all their powers to investigate, never uncovered DC Myall’s pocketbook information? To use a common parlance, “they can’t be arsed”.
All of which points to a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, involving PC West and whoever in the chain of command ordered him to commit perjury. Perhaps, that is why the CCRC would prefer not to seek answers even when they are right under their noses.
The CCRC has examined Bamber’s convictions three times. In 2002, it sent the case back to the court of appeal, but the appeal was rather caustically dismissed.
In 2011, the CCRC refused to refer the case, stating that the evidence did not raise a real possibility that the court would find Bamber’s convictions unsafe. In 2021, his lawyers made a new submission, consisting of 10 points. By July 2025, the CCRC had examined four of the 10 points in Bamber’s submission and declared that, on the basis of these four points, it would not be referring the case back, although it would continue to explore the remaining six points.
One of the four points that was dismissed was the discrepancy between 3.26am and 3.36am being recorded as the time of Bamber’s call to the police. The CCRC remains adamant that the different timings are a result of police error and that there was only one call, from Jeremy Bamber, at 3.26am. This is despite the C1 log from West stating it was at 3.36am and despite Myall’s record stating that West had Bamber on the phone at 3.37am.
The CCRC also claims disingenuously that the issue of the call timings “had been dealt with at trial”. This is completely incorrect. At trial, and at his 2002 appeal, Bamber’s team had no idea that there were two logs suggesting two calls to police about the same incident.
After the trial, Drake ordered the Dickinson review, an internal inquiry by Essex police into what The Times newspaper called the “blunders, omissions and ineptitude” of the force’s early investigation into the murders.
The findings of the Dickinson inquiry have never been made fully public. However, some documents from the review were released to Bamber’s lawyers in 2011 after a legal challenge. His defence team only recently discovered that the Dickinson review supports the 3.36am timing of Bamber’s call in its timeline of events on the day. It states that Bamber called West at 3.36am and, at 3.37am, “PS Bews, PC Myall & Saxby [were] at Witham. Receive telephone message from PC West. Despatched to White House Farm.” All these references are consistent with the first call to the police having been made by Nevill at 3.26am, officers being asked to attend White House Farm, then West taking a second call from Bamber at 3.36am.
In conclusion, the CCRC is belatedly in possession of documentation that shows beyond any doubt, PC West received a telephone call from Nevill Bamber at 03:26 and West relayed information to Malcolm Bonnett at HQ. West then received a telephone call from Jeremy Bamber at 03:36. DC Myall’s pocketbook reveals that PC West spoke to the Witham officers at 03:37, as confirmed by the Dickinson inquiry and that Jeremy Bamber called PC West at 03:36. Thus proving beyond any doubt that Jeremy Bamber is innocent – something the CCRC should have discovered nearly 30 years ago.
Additionally, lurking in the background and primed to explode upon the CCRC, a fifty page document outlining circa 70 wounds to the three adult victims never disclosed by the pathologist. Leaving the reader in no doubt that Sheila Caffell killed her family, not Jeremy Bamber. The CCRC refuse to examine this document which they have had in their possession for over a year.
How much longer does Jeremy Bamber have to wait for the CCRC to do something positive and constructive and refer his case to the Court of Appeal?
By Bill Robertson
Bill Robertson has researched alleged miscarriages of justice for around 20 years and advised on several cases, including the most recent application to the CCRC by Jeremy Bamber.
Please let us know if you think that there is a mistake in this article, explaining what you think is wrong and why. We will correct any errors as soon as possible.
References
[1] The vast majority of murders admit their guilt at some point; it is very rare for someone to continue to insist that they are not guilty for such as period of time.
[2] A series of police logs and statements that were not disclosed at trial suggest Bamber made the call at 3.36am.
[3] Two versions of the C1 form said to have been completed by PC1990 Michael West are in existence. One is clearly a forgery and has spelling errors and different wording to the original form. However, someone has clearly gone to a considerable degree of trouble to try to make the forged document appear identical to the original, complete with spelling errors. What could be the possible motive for the police forging a document? The forged form was created when the City of London Police were asked to investigate aspects of the case against Jeremy Bamber in 1991.
The forgery of the C1 form was seemingly done in order to cheat the ESDA (electro-static document analysis) testing process. An Electrostatic Detection Device, or EDD, is a specialised piece of equipment commonly used in questioned document examination to reveal indentations or impressions in paper which may otherwise go unnoticed. It is a non-destructive technique (will not damage the evidence in question) thus allowing further tests to be carried out. It is a sensitive technique capable of detecting indentations on pages several layers below the top sheet, and many years after the indentations were created.
It is assumed that PC West was requested to write the forged document; the handwriting appears identical. Yet, despite creating a ‘sophisticated’ forgery, the time of Jeremy Bamber’s call is timed at 03:36 in both documents, suggesting that the purpose of the forgery was not to obfuscate the timing of the call. The was seemingly to thwart ESDA testing.
[4] Astonishingly, this log wasn’t even included in the exhibit list, which includes every document that can potentially be shown to the jury.
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