At 3:26am on 7 August 1985, Jeremy Bamber called Essex Police claiming his adoptive sister Sheila had gone berserk with a rifle at the family farm in Tolleshunt D’Arcy. Officers arrived to find a scene staged to look like a murder-suicide: Bamber’s adoptive father Neville shot multiple times in the kitchen, mother June dead in her bedroom, and Sheila’s six-year-old twins shot in their beds. Sheila herself lay dead, clutching a rifle and a bible, shot through the throat.
The scene appeared so convincing that police initially accepted the murder-suicide theory and even helped Bamber burn bloodstained carpets and bedding. It was Bamber’s former girlfriend who broke the case, telling police he had confessed the killings to her. Forensic evidence, including a silencer found at the farm bearing traces of Sheila’s blood inside the barrel, proved she could not have shot herself with it attached. Bamber was convicted in 1986 and sentenced to five concurrent life terms, later made whole life, meaning he will never be released.
