Sheila Caffell

Ralph Nevill Bamber (known as 'Nevill', born 8 June 1924, 61 when he died) was a farmer, former Royal Air Force (RAF) pilot, and magistrate at the local Witham magistrates' court.

He and his wife, June (née Speakman, born 3 June 1924, also 61 when she died), had married in 1949 and moved into the Georgian White House Farm on Pages Lane, Tolleshunt D'Arcy, Essex, set among 300 acres of tenant farmland that had belonged to June's father.

The Court of Appeal described Nevill as "a well-built man, 6 ft tall and in good physical health".

This became significant because Jeremy's defence suggested that Sheila, a slim woman of 28, had been able to beat and subdue her father, something the prosecution contested.

Unable to have biological children, the couple adopted Sheila and Jeremy as babies; the children were not related to each other.

June suffered from depression and had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital in the 1950s, including in 1958 after Sheila's adoption, where she was given Electroshock therapy at least six times.

Sheila Jean "Bambi" Caffell (born 18 July 1957, 28 when she died) was born to the 18-year-old daughter of Eric Jay, a senior chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

At his insistence, the baby was placed for adoption.

Her mother gave her up to the Church of England Children's Society two weeks after the birth, and Sheila was adopted by the Bambers in October 1957.

The chaplain had known Nevill in the RAF and selected the Bambers from a list of prospective adopters.

Daniel and Nicholas Caffell (born 22 June 1979, six when they died) were born to Sheila and Colin Caffell, who married in 1977 and divorced in 1982.

Colin was an art student when he met Sheila.

In 1982 she was treated by Hugh Ferguson, a psychiatrist who later saw Sheila.

The Bambers were financially secure, owning property that included the farmhouse, a flat in London, 300 acres of land and a caravan site.

The couple gave the children a good home and private education, but June was intensely religious and tried to force her children and grandchildren to adopt the same ideas.

She had a poor relationship with Sheila, who felt June disapproved of her, and June's relationship with Jeremy was so troubled that he had apparently stopped speaking to her.

Sheila's ex-husband was concerned about the effect June was having on his sons; she made them kneel and pray with her, which upset him and the boys.

Both parents were involved in the children's upbringing after the divorce, although the boys were briefly placed in foster care in 1982–83 because of Sheila's health problems.

For several months before the murders they had been living with Colin in his home in Kilburn, North London, not far from Sheila's residence in Maida Vale.

The White House Farm murders took place near the village of Tolleshunt D'Arcy, Essex, England, United Kingdom, during the night of 6–7 August 1985.

Nevill and June Bamber were shot and killed inside their farmhouse at White House Farm along with their adopted daughter, Sheila Caffell, and Sheila's six-year-old twin sons, Daniel and Nicholas Caffell.

The only surviving member of the immediate family was their adopted son, Jeremy Bamber, then 24 years old, who said he had been at home a few miles away when the shooting took place.

Police initially believed that Sheila, diagnosed with schizophrenia, had fired the shots then turned the gun on herself.

But weeks after the murders, Jeremy's ex-girlfriend told police that he had implicated himself.

The prosecution argued that, motivated by a large inheritance, Bamber had shot the family with his father's semi-automatic rifle, then placed the gun in his unstable sister's hands to make it look like a murder–suicide.

A silencer, the prosecution said, was on the rifle and would have made it too long, they argued, for Sheila's fingers to reach the trigger to shoot herself.

A week-long visit to White House Farm had been arranged for August 1985 at the Bambers' request; the plan was that the boys would visit their grandparents with Sheila before going on holiday to Norway with their father.

Daniel and Nicholas were reluctant to stay at the farm.

They disliked that June made them pray, and in the car on the way asked their father to speak to her about it.

In addition Daniel had become a vegetarian and was worried about being forced to eat meat.

When their father dropped them off at the house on 4 August, it was the last time he saw them.

The boys are buried together in Highgate Cemetery.

Sheila was cremated, and the urn with her ashes was placed in their coffin.

Bamber was convicted of five counts of murder in October 1986 by a 10–2 majority verdict, sentenced to a minimum of twenty-five years, and informed in 1994 that he would never be released.

The Court of Appeal upheld the verdict in 2002.

Jeremy protested his innocence throughout, although his extended family remained convinced of his guilt.

Between 2004 and 2012, his lawyers submitted several unsuccessful applications to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, arguing that the silencer might not have been used during the killings, that the crime scene may have been damaged then reconstructed, that crime-scene photographs were taken weeks after the murders, and that the time of Sheila's death had been miscalculated.

A key issue was whether Jeremy had received a call from his father that night to say Sheila had "gone berserk" with a gun.

Jeremy said that he did, that he alerted police, and that Sheila fired the final shot while he and the officers were standing outside the house.

It became a central plank of the prosecution's case that the father had made no such call, and that the only reason Jeremy would have lied about it—indeed, the only way he could have known about the shootings when he alerted the police—was that he was the killer himself.