White House Farm: Former cop aims to help free Jeremy Bamber

Jeremy Bamber, 60, is serving life for murdering five members of his family at White House Farm, Tolleshunt D’Arcy, in 1985.

Bamber was found guilty of murdering his adoptive parents Nevill and June, both 61, his sister Sheila Caffell, 26, and her six-year-old twins Daniel and Nicholas.

He has always protested his innocence and claims Ms Caffell, who suffered from schizophrenia, shot her family before turning the gun on herself.

A six-part ITV dramatisation of the case called White House Farm is currently one of the most watched shows on UK Netflix.

Read more: Ex-detective says he believes convicted killer Jeremy Bamber is innocent

Former policeman Stuart Bower, from Hove, has been writing to the convicted killer since 2007 and believes Bamber has evidence which may exonerate him.

This includes a bombshell 999 call log, made from Jeremy’s father on the night, in which he revealed his daughter had “gone berserk” after getting “hold of one of my guns”.

White House Farm is one of the top-watched shows on Netflix

“In 1985, I was put in prison for a crime I didn’t commit,” said former West Yorkshire policeman Mr Bower.

“It took me nine years to clear my name in an uncontested appeal in 1994.”

Mr Bower was convicted of arson on a boat he owned jointly with his father-in-law.

He spent six months in custody and was awarded £475,000 in damages as a result.

“What happened to me is why I have put myself forward on more than one occasion to assist other people who have been victims of miscarriages of justice,” he said.

During the night of August 6, 1985, Jeremy Bamber’s parents Nevill and June Bamber were shot and killed inside their farmhouse, White House Farm in the village of Tolleshunt D'Arcy.

Their adoptive daughter Sheila Caffell and her six-year-old twins Daniel and Nicholas were also killed.

Sheila Caffell with her sons

Bamber, who was 24 at the time, phoned the police to say Nevill had called him saying Sheila had “gone crazy and has the gun”.

The police initially believed Sheila, diagnosed with schizophrenia, had shot her family before turning the gun on herself.

However, their attention soon turned to Bamber after Sheila’s blood was found on a silencer.

Jeremy Bamber

They said this meant she could not have committed the murders and then taken her own life.

Bamber’s lawyers now claim prosecutors did not disclose evidence of a second silencer.

Mr Bower said: “In 2007, following articles in the national paper, I wrote to Jeremy Bamber and offered my services, telling him my history.

Stuart Bower has been writing letters to Bamber since 2007

“I sent him the press cuttings of Paul Foot in Private Eye, the Halifax Courier and The Argus to show him what had happened and that I was genuine – we started corresponding.

“I asked him very early on two questions that convince me he was 100 per cent innocent.

“The first question I asked him is ‘why did your father phone you instead of dialling 999 and phoning the police and why did you phone the local police instead of dialling 999?’.

“What had been concealed from Jeremy, and he did not know until several years later when a fellow prisoner was helping him go through a mass of documents that had been released to him, was that prior to phoning him, his father had dialled 999 and said Sheila was threatening her family.

“Would the jury have convicted Jeremy had they ofknown that?”

The 999 call log

A photocopy of a 999 call log shown to the Gazette's sister paper The Argus reveals the call made from Jeremy’s father, Nevill, on the night of the murders.

It appears to show that Nevill told the operator that his “daughter gone berserk [sic]" and she has “got hold of one of my guns”.

Mr Bower added: “Jeremy said to me that in his letter, as Sheila was ‘barking mad’ and the local police knew of her history of mental illness, he assumed it would have been quicker to phone the local police.

“That makes perfect sense to me.”

Mr Bower raised questions about shrapnel found in Sheila’s neck.

“The second question that I asked Jeremy was ‘did anybody check that the bullets taken from your dead family were fired by your father’s gun?’.

Stuart Bower has been writing letters to Bamber since 2007

“That is when he revealed to me that, at trial, they produced a .22 rifle bullet saying it was taken from the neck of Sheila Caffell.

“Yet the pathologist report goes in great detail how he weighed the bullet, which hit the neck and broke into three large and several small pieces.

“He weighed the bullet and it was not a .22 rifle bullet.”

Mr Bower said he enlisted the help of his late brother, a retired professor of medicine, who offered support to Bamber’s lawyers based on the current evidence.

Jeremy Bamber now

Bamber had an appeal against his convictions dismissed by the Court of Appeal in 2002, and also had a High Court challenge to the Criminal Cases Review Commission's (CCRC) refusal to refer his case for another appeal rejected in 2012.

Mr Bower said: “There was a documentary and one of the sergeants who attended the scene and was joined there by Jeremy Bamber said they saw somebody moving in the upstairs windows – they withdrew back and hid behind a hedge waiting for the firearms unit to arrive.

“This sergeant said that it was an optical illusion caused by moonshine on the window – which is what caused me to write to the science museum, directed to the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, who confirmed the moon wasn’t shining that night.

“To be exact, it was in its last quarter which means it was nothing more than a silver sickle in the sky.”

Mr Bower continues to write to and receive letters from Bamber.

Stuart Bower has been writing letters to Bamber since 2007

He has also written to Hove and Portslade MP Peter Kyle, urging him to get involved in the case.

He wrote: “If Jeremy Bamber was to write to you himself, would you be willing to take up the cudgels on his behalf, and refer this to the Home Secretary and demand that a copy of the audio message of the three nines call is handed over to his defence team?”