Jeremy Bamber has been ‘Knellered’ – the challenge ahead for Dame Vera Baird

Dame Vera Baird KC, Interim Chair, CCRC

After over four years of supposed careful deliberation the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has issued a Provisional Statement of Reasons (PSOR) rejecting four of the ten grounds that Jeremy Bamber hoped would result in his case being referred to the Court of Appeal. The four grounds were effectively the strongest arguments submitted and had been prioritised by the Jeremy Bamber Innocence Campaign (JBIC).

Material considered and work undertaken by the CCRC in assessing the submissions of 2021 consisted of[1]:

• Transcript of the trial judge’s Summing-up;

• The Court of Appeal judgments and other papers relating to the appeals;

• Files from the Forensic Archive;

• Files from the CPS relating to Jeremy Bamber’s 2020 application for judicial review of the decision not to provide additional disclosure;

• Various official reviews that have taken place over the years of Mr Bamber’s conviction and the Essex Police investigation of matters occurring at White House Farm; and,

• The application to the CCRC and submissions and documents submitted subsequently

Mr Bamber’s previous applications to the CCRC.

Do you notice what is missing from the list of actions? - Any attempt to INVESTIGATE anything anew!

This amounts to a ‘Knellering[2]’, that is, a process of supposed enquiry into the grounds submitted without any attempt to INVESTIGATE a single aspect of the materials submitted.

‘Knellering’ has been the favoured approach of the CCRC for many years under the leadership of the former CEO Karen Kneller, who resigned recently. In compiling a rejection of Mr Bamber’s submissions, presumably it is asking too much for Case Review Managers (CRM’s) to understand that a different approach is being heralded by the new Chair of the CCRC, Dame Vera Baird KC, so the three Commissioners involved have produced a PSOR of which Kneller would have been proud: dismissive, arrogant and sarcastic in tone, daring anyone to challenge it and in many respects suggestive that the JBIC are wasting everyone’s time.

One aspect of the submission and rejection is perfectly illustrative of the challenge ahead for Dame Vera. That is, the reported 999 call made from inside White House Farm at 06:09 on the morning that the bodies were discovered. If the 999 call was made, it had to be from one of the supposed victims, still alive while Jeremy Bamber stood outside with the police. For a detailed analysis of the discovery of the 999 documentation see here.

The CCRC were made aware of an article in the New Yorker magazine by CCRC Watch on 6^th August 2024. We told Helen Pitcher, who was Chairman at the time:

“In an article published in The New Yorker magazine on 29 July 2024 information is revealed that confirms what many of us have said for years; Jeremy Bamber is innocent…

We know this because an Essex Police officer, PC Nicholas Milbank received a 999 call from inside White House Farm at 06:09. The only person who could have made that call was Sheila Caffell, sister of Jeremy Bamber. Jeremy Bamber was outside in company with police officers; therefore he could not have killed Sheila Caffell and by implication she must have killed her family (as two police investigations determined). During the 2002 Metropolitan Police investigation known as ‘Stokenchurch’, police officers discovered Action Record Print 343. This shows that the 999 call was received by Essex Police.[3]

In The New Yorker article, former PC Nicholas Milbank confirmed that the call was received, and he could hear noises indicating that someone was moving around. It is in this context that I urge you to ensure that your staff urgently explore the Metropolitan Police Stokenchurch investigation files for confirmation that the 999 call took place.

Additionally, please ensure that the Essex Police investigation into the White House Farm murders conducted by Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Jones (SC/688/85) is accessed to examine for all references to the 999 call.

May we please also suggest that your staff check the witness statement made by Inspector D. Burrell, created on the same day (13/9/1985) as the falsified statement of PC Nicholas Milbank as it seems highly probable that the Burrell statement is also a fake. With confirmation that Jeremy Bamber is innocent coming from former PC Nicholas Milbank it is imperative that the CCRC acts swiftly to refer his conviction to the Court of Appeal and that it, too, acts promptly to overturn his wrongful conviction so that Jeremy Bamber is released from prison as quickly as is possible”.

Helen Pitcher eventually sent us a dismissive response. It is now known that the CCRC did not undertake any of the investigations suggested and, instead of making an urgent appointment to meet with Nicholas Milbank, they ignored him completely.

Nicholas Milbank subsequently died in June 2025 without ever having been contacted by the CCRC. 

The CCRC’s response on this vital issue was negligent and astounding. Instead of speaking with Mr Milbank in August 2024 and investigating the undisclosed evidence surrounding the issue (e.g. the recordings, and records, of the 999 call), they simply handed the whole issue to Essex Police, a classic Knellering tactic, employed frequently in other cases. Essex Police were thus invited by the CCRC to concoct any evidence that they could to nullify Milbank’s verbal recollections. Evidence outlined below suggests that Essex Police have forged another statement from Milbank!

Nicholas Milbank, who was still a civilian employee of Essex Police at the time, allegedly gave a further statement to Essex Police, in which he did not directly deny making the statements that he did to Heidi Blake, but claimed, they say, that she had misrepresented herself to him, and that, by implication, his quotes in the article were unreliable.

The CCRC, as they have done on numerous previous occasions, merely accepted the account from Essex Police and endorsed the view that Ms Blake, and the New Yorker, had obtained their material under false pretences, and it was, accordingly, lacking credibility. This is, undoubtedly, what the Court of Appeal will also say should the issue be put to them.

Fortunately, an audio recording of the conversation with Milbank exists and will be released in an attempt to establish that Milbank was not deceived.

There are a number of problems with the CCRC approach to investigating the 999 call, to put it mildly. Firstly, nobody at the CCRC saw fit to examine the Metropolitan Police Stokenchurch files. The original information discovered makes reference to an Action Record 343 instructing an officer to investigate “the 999 call”. The outcome of that investigation has never been seen, but it must surely exist in the Stokenchurch records. The CCRC is the only body empowered to insist on being shown the relevant paperwork, but they seem not to have requested to view it. Presumably, if the outcome of the investigation by Stokenchurch officers discovered that there was no 999 call, that discovery and the paperwork would have generated instant disclosure. The fact that nothing has been disclosed suggests that the investigation confirmed that there was indeed a 999 call.

Secondly, Essex Police have obtained a hand-written statement purportedly from Nicholas Milbank in which he says (among other things) that he didn’t know that Heidi Blake was a journalist and she has misrepresented his words. However, the handwritten statement, consisting of two pages, misspells his surname twice. Nicholas Milbank must have spent his entire adult life correcting people who spelt his surname with two ‘L’s as in ‘Millbank’. What is the likelihood that he wrote his own surname twice as Millbank and then crossed out one of the L’s on both sheets of paper? Or, is it possible that Essex Police wrote the statements themselves and shoved them in front of Nicholas Milbank for his signature when he subsequently crossed out the extra L in his name? Or did Milbank even see the statements? Is it really his signature on them?

Thirdly, there is no evidence that the CCRC have ever read any of the investigation compiled by Detective Chief Inspector Thomas ‘Taff’ Jones, starting on the day that the tragedy was discovered, which must surely contain further evidence regarding the 999 call(s) from White House Farm.

Therefore, in order to halt the process of ‘Knellering’, Dame Vera must somehow instil in the CCRC staff a sense of curiosity and a willingness to investigate, not just trawl through historical records of previous submissions. How on earth did it not strike someone at the CCRC that Nicholas Milbank should be interviewed urgently rather than leaving almost a year before he died? The answer is quite simply the Knellering process that has become organisational culture at the CCRC, combined with the appalling practice of employing former police officers to oversee cases. It is not unreasonable to think that the police and the CCRC knew that Nicholas Milbank was terminally ill when the New Yorker article appeared and that if they delayed speaking to him he would be dead in the near future.[4]

As Jeremy Bamber said, “My current Senior Manager at the CCRC is an ex-policeman (Essex), who lied to my solicitor, and to me, about what my Case Review Manager had stated to me in various phone conversations.  Months later, he admitted that my calls to the Commission were all recorded and conceded that my Case Review Manager had said what I alleged he’d said all along. (see here and here).

There is a great deal for Dame Vera Baird KC to correct at the CCRC, starting with an organisational culture that is not interested in finding out the truth if it aids an applicant. She should insist that her staff request to examine the Stokenchurch documentation immediately and pursue all avenues to establish the truth about the 999 call, anything else will amount to dereliction of duty.

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] As listed by the CCRC

[2] A process perfected by Karen ‘Invisible’ Kneller while Chief Executive of the CCRC. It involves deliberate obstruction and obfuscation regarding any information tending to suggest that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred.

[3] A police officer was given the task of investigating it. 

[4] Milbank’s police obituary asks for donations to Myeloma UK. Essex Police website states: “The Chief Constable regrets to inform you of the sad death of our former colleague Nick Milbank who served for over 50 years as a cadet, Police Officer in FIR, then as a support staff member in Contact Management Command. He passed away on 6 June 2025 aged 67 years