Jeremy Bamber

Jeremy Bamber was born Jeremy Paul Marsham at St Mary Abbots Hospital, Kensington, London, to Juliet Dorothy Wheeler (born 1938 in Leicester), a vicar's daughter who had had an affair with British Army Sergeant Major Leslie Brian Marsham (born 1931 in Tendring, Essex), a controller at Buckingham Palace.

In 1957, four years before adopting Jeremy, the couple had adopted a baby girl, Sheila.

Bamber attended St Nicholas Primary, followed by Maldon Court, a private prep school.

Jeremy Nevill Bamber (born Jeremy Paul Marsham; 13 January 1961) is a British convicted mass murderer.

Wheeler gave the baby up for adoption in 1961, the year of his birth, through the Church of England Children's Society.

Nevill and June Bamber adopted Bamber when he was six months old.

It was only after his conviction that his biological parents were told by reporters that Bamber was their son.

They were by then married to each other and working at Buckingham Palace.

The Bambers were wealthy farmers who lived in a large Georgian house at White House Farm, near Tolleshunt D'Arcy in Essex.

Nevill was a local magistrate and former RAF pilot.

In September 1970 he was sent to Gresham's School, a boarding school in Holt, Norfolk.

Bamber left Gresham's with no qualifications, much to Nevill's anger, but managed to pass seven O-levels at The Sixth Form College in Colchester, which he left in 1978.

Brett Collins claims Bamber had sexual relationships with men and women, finding that his good looks and charm made him popular with both.

After leaving school Nevill financed a trip for Bamber to Australia, where he took a scuba diving course, and to New Zealand.

In New Zealand, according to Collins, Bamber was "ripped off" by a would-be heroin dealer in Auckland.

Bamber reportedly boasted of smuggling heroin overseas and broke into a jewellery shop to steal two expensive watches, one of which he gave to a girlfriend in the UK.

One of Bamber's cousins claimed that he left New Zealand in a hurry after friends of his had been involved in an armed robbery.

Bamber returned to the UK and worked in restaurants and bars, including a period as a waiter in a Little Chef on the A12; but he later agreed to return home and work on his father's farm.

Although Bamber reportedly resented the low wages, he was given a car and lived rent-free in a cottage his father owned at 9 Head Street, Goldhanger, 3.5 mi from his family's farmhouse at White House Farm.

He also owned eight per cent of his family's caravan site, Osea Road Camp Sites Ltd., in Maldon.

A few weeks before the murders, Bamber broke into and stole from the caravan park; this was only revealed following the murders, when he admitted to the burglary after his girlfriend Julie Mugford came forward as a witness against him.

He was convicted of the 1985 White House Farm murders in Tolleshunt D'Arcy, Essex, in which the victims included Bamber's adoptive parents, Nevill and June Bamber; his adoptive sister, Sheila Caffell; and his sister's six-year-old twin sons.

Returning a majority guilty verdict, the jury found that, after committing the murders to secure a large inheritance, Bamber had placed the rifle in the hands of his 28-year-old sister, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, to make the scene appear to be a murder–suicide.

Bamber is serving life imprisonment with a whole life tariff, meaning that he has no possibility of parole.

He has repeatedly applied unsuccessfully to have his conviction overturned or his whole life tariff removed; his extended family remains convinced of his guilt.

Bamber claims he alerted police to the shootings at around 3:30 am on 7 August 1985.

He contends that he told them Nevill had telephoned him to say that Bamber's sister, Sheila Caffell, had gone "berserk" with Nevill's rifle.

When police entered the farmhouse at White House Farm, Caffell was found dead on the floor of her parents' bedroom with the rifle up against her throat.

June was found in the same room.

Caffell's six-year-old twin sons, Nicholas and Daniel, were found in their beds in another upstairs room, while Nevill was found in the kitchen downstairs.

The family had been shot a total of twenty-five times, mostly at close range.

Sheila had spent time in a psychiatric hospital undergoing treatment for schizophrenia months before the murders.

The police believed that she was responsible until Mugford told them Jeremy had implicated himself.

The prosecution argued that there was no evidence that Bamber's father had telephoned him, stating that Nevill was too badly injured to have spoken to anyone; that there was no blood on the kitchen phone; and that he would have called the police, not Bamber.

They also argued that the silencer was on the rifle when the shots were fired and that Caffell's reach was not long enough to hold the gun and silencer at her throat and press the trigger.

In addition, Sheila was not strong enough, they said, to have overcome Nevill in what appeared to have been a violent struggle in the kitchen.

The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) referred the case to the Court of Appeal in 2001, which upheld the conviction in 2002.

The appeal was rejected and the CCRC rejected further applications from Bamber in 2004 and 2012, with the commission stating in 2012 that it had not identified any new evidence or legal argument capable of raising a real possibility that his conviction would be quashed.

On 10 March 2021, a new application was lodged with the Criminal CCRC for a referral to the Court of Appeal.

As of 2023, he has spent 37 years in prison, making him one of the longest-serving prisoners in the UK.