Sarah Hanover

Why I know that Bob Woffinden is wrong and that Jeremy is an innocent man by Sarah Hanover, Business Consultant

Myself and my colleagues work for Jeremy pro bono and we inherited the duty from an associate of ours some time back now. I personally have seen every single document we hold electronically which is well over 6 thousand pages. I have to say I have not seen a shred of evidence which causes me any concern over Jeremy’s innocence.

Bob Woffinden has written an article on Jeremy’s case and he now believes Jeremy murdered his family. I also understand that he said after reviewing “all of the evidence” that he is now “surprised and disturbed” by what he found. No one is more surprised and disturbed than me and the whole Defence team that he wrote this article without contacting us and asking to see the new evidence in Jeremy’s case! I personally have offered Bob access to thousands of documents which have never been seen by anyone other than a handful of people. On each occasion Bob has not responded to the opportunity offered to him. Neither have we ever had any contact with his co-investigator Richard Webster.

How Bob has managed to ‘reconstruct events’ in the case without the documental evidence is a complete mystery. The issue of the telephones in the house has never been a secret and the jury and police were well aware of where the telephones were found and that a witnesses found the one he refers to under the magazines on 23rd of August which was some three weeks after the tragedies,to find out more about this click here. There had been a storm which had caused problems with the phones at the farm this was well documented by the engineers who called at the house and removed one of the phones. Naturally if your phone downstairs was broken you would not keep running upstairs to answer calls and you would take the one from the bedroom and put it downstairs. It is not known who moved the telephone, but that of course suited the prosecution to suggest that it was Jeremy. .

Contrary to what Bob says about Barbara Wilson's account of Nevill believing that Jeremy was going to kill him she didn't mention this in ANY of her 14 witness statements or her trial testimony, it only seems to have emerged as a result of her media interviews, well how odd. And even if this rubbish were true why on earth would Nevill Bamber, a magistrate, confide in one of his employees and not puruse the matter in a different way? None of Nevill Bamber's close friends said anything of the sort, in fact many said very positive things about his releationship with Jeremy but none of these were called as witnesses at the trial. I put it that Barbara Wilson's account is nothing but a pack of lies.

According to the 1980’s rudimentary technology a call was definitely made from White House Farm to Jeremy’s cottage at Goldhanger, just as Jeremy has always maintained. But at court the prosecution argued that if this were so then Jeremy could not have rang out to the police from his phone while it was still connected to the farm. But they didn’t consider the possibility that Nevill could have tapped the cradle, clearing the line to make another call to the police which we now know he did. This freed the line enabling Jeremy to call the police and also ties in with Jeremy saying he was getting the engaged tone from the farm. We don’t know why the phone was off the hook at the farm, if after calling the police Nevill tried to make another call or how the phone came to be how it was found. It is even more difficult to consider the scene as we know that Inspector Harris used the phone to call ACC Simpson despite his denying this further documents have surfaced.

The mystery is where the information Bob has obtained comes from. He states in the article “The first thing he did on entering the house was to take the kitchen phone off the hook. By doing this he disabled every phone in the house.” This is just supposition, how does Bob KNOW that is what happened - was he there? And the other idea of the wet suit is not a realistic one, but interestingly Robert Boutflour, who inherited most of the family estate on Jeremy’s conviction, did mention this in his diary – is this the new evidence that Bob says he has found? And would this be the same diary that Robert Boutflour used to write the date when he and his family found the sound moderator on the 10th August, which was crucial to the conviction? Because it is in this diary he says that the house was already fingerprinted – but that is not true because the house was not fingerprinted until after Jeremy’s arrest on the 8th of September.

Bob goes on to detail a convoluted account of telephone swapping and detail which he has no evidence for as far as we can see and his research is based on fleshing out the 2002 appeal ruling and the Dickinson report. He seems to be under the illusion that the cleaner said that Jeremy told her the phone was broken but she testified in court that he simply told her that he thought it was a spare when she asked him what he wanted her to do with it. Jeremy cannot be expected to know the position and working order of each phone in a house which he did not live in, even more so when Jean Bouttell described the phone situation at White House Farm as 'mustical phones' because of the frequency with which they were moved around. Bob also seems to think that it was Jeremy who took the phone from upstairs to downstairs, there is no evidence to suggest this. And if Bob's assertions about this were right, why then would Jeremy Bamber have disabled all of the phones in the house at one main point. It's just plain badly researched journalism. I will not go over each issue in the case here as there is much detail about Sheila’s mental health on the web site along with detail about Julie Mugford and her own motivations and her story that there was a hitman which developed into nothing. Bob also seems to have overlooked the fact that Nevill would have easily been overpowered by Sheila as he had been shot a number of times.

As Bob knows the police destroyed all DNA evidence and bullets and many photographs back in 1996. Jeremy would welcome a retrial as there is a mountain of evidence showing his innocence along with the call logs showing that Sheila was alive inside the house while Jeremy was on pages lane with police. If hearsay evidence is now admissible then let it be because nowadays it is unlikely that the police would close off a crime scene, finish their work and then allow family members to go through the house and submit evidence to the police days and weeks after they had finished their work. In today's world it has already been proven that Sheila's DNA was not in the moderator at the 2002 appeal, but sadly it could not be proven that her DNA never was in the moderator back in 1985.

The pathologist states very clearly on his lab notes and in his statements on Sheila that the first bullet did not kill her it lodged in the tissue of her neck and she would have been able to get up and walk around after sustaining this injury. Sheila was a very ill woman her mental health was frightening even her own boyfriend who said in his statement that he feared for his own safety.

But even in today’s world the police still withhold original statements which show that Sheila was not dead, they withhold a whole hour from the call logs at the scene. Why is this? The CCRC refuse to use section 17 of the Criminal Appeals Act to obtain orginal documents - why is this? Perhaps these call logs show police conversation with Sheila. But Bob should know that Jeremy’s 26 years struggle, hard work and long hours spent on his case is not out of some misplaced vanity, and he should also know of his struggle to obtain vital documents from the police. There is only one reason Jeremy keep’s fighting and it is because he is innocent, like Jeremy or not he is an innocent man and that is the truth. Bob’s conjecture over a telephone is not enough to keep him prison. He will be free and the evidence will ensure that he is . . . if Bob had only taken the time to look.

EVERY CLAIM MADE HERE IS SUPPORTED BY DOCUMENTAL EVIDENCE