Jeremy Bamber told police his father had rung him at 3:30am to say his sister, Sheila Caffell, had gone berserk with his rifle, and when officers reached the family’s Georgian farmhouse in Essex that August morning in 1985, Sheila lay dead with the gun against her throat, having apparently shot her parents and her young twin sons before turning it on herself.
Detectives were sceptical that a woman recovering from schizophrenia could have fired the fatal shots twice into her own throat, and it was Bamber’s girlfriend who broke the case, telling police he had confessed the killings to her. A silencer later found hidden in a farmhouse cupboard proved decisive: it showed the rifle had been too long for Sheila’s reach when the shots were fired. Bamber was convicted on this day in 1986 and sentenced to life imprisonment, later made a whole life term with no possibility of parole.
He has always maintained his innocence, and decades on, still pursues appeals to have his conviction overturned.
