On 7 August 1985, five people were found dead at White House Farm in Essex, England: 28-year-old Sheila Caffell (familiarly known as Bambi); her six-year-old twin sons Daniel and Nicholas; and her adoptive parents, June and Nevill Bamber. All five had been shot with a rifle. Caffell’s 24-year-old brother Jeremy Bamber, who was also adopted, had alerted Essex police to a disturbance inside the farmhouse – he said his father had called to tell him – and had been outside with the police for four hours before the bodies were discovered. Caffell, who had recently been hospitalised with schizophrenia and is said to have feared her children were going to be taken into foster care, was found with the rifle lying on her chest, pointing towards her neck. There were two gunshot wounds to her neck and chin, and a bloodied Bible by her side.
The case was initially thought to be open and shut, a tragic murder-suicide committed by Caffell. But a month later, Jeremy Bamber was arrested. He has now been in prison for 41 years, and questions have always swirled regarding the safety of his conviction. These have grown recently. The proper body to examine this is the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), but it is in disarray; it has already taken the CCRC four years to consider less than half the evidence that Bamber has submitted to them. In a short series we are considering discrete pieces of evidence, with analysis from forensic experts.
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Essential to the case against Jeremy Bamber is the question of whether or not a silencer was used in the killings, then removed from the rifle and hidden. If so, it was argued in court, Sheila Caffell was clearly not the killer.
It was three days after the murders that a silencer was found in a downstairs cupboard by Bamber’s relatives. This is, in itself, a mystery. Why wasn’t this silencer discovered when Essex police searched the cupboard on the day of the killings? Also, if Bamber was a criminal genius who murdered five members of his family, escaped the house, called the police and thereby successfully framed his sister, why would he have carefully put the silencer back in the cupboard to be discovered, rather than get rid of it?
The silencer became crucial in court. In 1986, Justice Maurice Drake told the jury at Essex Crown Court that if they believed it had been attached to the Anschütz 525 rifle used to kill Sheila Caffell, then Jeremy Bamber had killed all five members of the family.
The jury had been out for about 10 hours when it sent a note asking for clarification. Was the blood found in the silencer a perfect match for Caffell, they asked. Yes, replied Justice Drake, it contained only Caffell’s blood and did not match anybody else in the family. Twenty-one minutes later, the jury returned with their verdict. They ruled, on a 10-2 majority, that Bamber was guilty of the murders.
Now a distinguished British forensic physician has said he does not believe a silencer, also known as a moderator, was used when Caffell was shot dead. The Guardian commissioned Professor Jason Payne-James, a specialist in forensic and legal medicine, to examine the crime-scene photographs taken by Essex police. He has concluded that the bullet injuries are not consistent with a contact or close range injury caused by an Anschütz 525 rifle with a silencer attached. Payne-James, president of the European Council of Legal & Forensic Medicine, specialises in the medical recording and interpretation of injuries.
He told the Guardian: “The pattern imprint on the skin is not large enough to suggest that a silencer was used, either at very close range or in contact with her body. These are close-range bullet holes, and the nature of the moderator or silencer is such that you’d expect some form of pattern imprint equivalent to the diameter of the silencer if it was used in contact or at very close range.”
Bamber and his legal team believe this is a gamechanger. Why is it so significant? Because at trial the closest thing to forensic evidence was contained in the silencer. The prosecution case was that Caffell’s blood had been found in there. The blood was “backsplatter”, a forensic term referring to biological material ejected backward from a gunshot entrance wound, travelling in the opposite direction to the bullet’s flight path. It is a “blow back” effect created by the intense energy transfer and escaping muzzle gases during a close-range or contact shot.
The blood found in the silencer did not, in itself, suggest Bamber was the killer. The prosecution’s argument depended on accepting two separate elements. First, Caffell’s blood in the silencer showed it had been used in her shooting. Second, the prosecution argued, her arms were not long enough to reach the trigger and shoot herself in the neck with the silencer on.
Then the obvious clincher. There is no way Caffell could have shot herself twice in the neck, removed the silencer, walked downstairs, placed the silencer in the cupboard, then returned upstairs to her parents’ bedroom to die. The only other explanation was that Bamber was the killer.
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Attention shifted away from the murder-suicide theory a month after the killings. That was when Bamber’s former girlfriend Julie Mugford changed her original statement, and told the police he had talked about murdering his family to inherit their considerable wealth. She said he had hired a hitman. When the alleged hitman proved to have a cast-iron alibi, Mugford again changed her story, saying Bamber, who had split up with her shortly after the murders, had told her he was going to kill his family himself.
It later emerged that Mugford had agreed to sell the story of their relationship to the News of the World for £25,000 if Bamber was convicted. Essex police and Crown prosecutors had also agreed to drop charges against her for burglary, chequebook fraud, selling cannabis and robbery, because “prosecuting her could jeopardise her availability or credibility as a key witness” against Bamber. The Guardian has contacted Mugford for comment.
Aside from the silencer, the evidence against Bamber was circumstantial. But this six- to seven-inch black cylindrical steel tube has had a controversial history. Bamber has argued that the fact the silencer was found by his late uncle Robert Boutflour and cousins David Boutflour and Ann Eaton is highly suspicious. In all his submissions to the CCRC, he has said they never liked him and hoped to inherit the Bambers’ wealth, which they did as a result of his conviction. Eaton, who now lives at White House Farm, and David Boutflour have repeatedly declined to talk to the Guardian, though they have always denied the suggestion that they set up Bamber.
After the silencer was discovered, Robert Boutflour went to Essex police with an speculative theory about how Bamber had killed the family. Robert suggested that Bamber had ridden over fields from his cottage on his mother’s bike in a wetsuit, crept into the house, shot the family, escaped through the kitchen window, and washed away his “blood splashings” in the nearby North Sea. In his diary, Robert Boutflour wrote that Bamber sprayed his parents with bullets to “make it look like the work of a maniac”. He postulated that Bamber then woke Sheila, led her into the master bedroom, past her dead mother, told her to lie down with the Bible and shot her. Although his hypothesis appeared far-fetched, much of it became the basis for the prosecution case. Most important of all was the silencer. It was Robert who told Essex police that there was blood inside the silencer and that this could be significant.
When Justice Drake, who died in 2014, said the silencer only contained blood belonging to Caffell he misled the jury. The blood found between two of its baffle plates matched Caffell’s blood group. But the Forensic Science Service had already informed all interested parties this blood grouping is shared by 8% of the population, including Robert Boutflour, who regularly used the family guns for pest control and sport. It was claimed at trial that a “considerable amount” of Caffell’s blood was in the silencer, although only one small flake had been found that belonged to her blood group.
There was also a second blood group found in the baffles that didn’t match any of the deceased’s blood groups, or Bamber’s, although it was a potential match for David Boutflour. The jury were told none of these facts. On multiple occasions during his summing up, Justice Drake said that the blood in the silencer was a match “for Sheila alone”.
Subsequently, DNA testing before Bamber’s 2002 appeal revealed that the moderator contained three mixed DNA profiles. This led to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the body responsible for investigating alleged miscarriages of justice, referring the case back to the court of appeal.
But the three appeal court judges ruled that while the original blood grouping evidence was now less certain, the fact that the DNA profiles could contain part of Caffell’s DNA, and the “vast” amount of other evidence – including the testimony of Mugford – meant the conviction remained safe. They noted that the silencer had been handled by many people since 1985, making the presence of other DNA explicable. They claimed that all of Caffell’s blood in the moderator could have been swabbed away in previous forensic tests.
“The more we examined the detail of the case, the more likely we thought it to be that the jury were right,” the judges concluded in December 2002.
But nothing quite made sense. In the 17 years that had passed since the killings, nobody had ever attempted to explain why Bamber would have replaced the key evidence in the downstairs cupboard where it was bound to be found. Barbara Wilson, the White House Farm secretary, had been summoned to the farm by the relatives shortly before they found the silencer. She told the New Yorker magazine that she believed the discovery had been staged for her benefit. “I would say that they’d already found it, but they wanted someone to prove that they’d found it,” she said. David Boutflour denied there had been a re-staging.
Even with the silencer evidence, there was still no DNA linking Bamber to the crime. While the prosecution argued that there had been a fierce struggle between Bamber and his father, Nevill, it conceded that Bamber was unmarked.
Over the decades, the mystery of the silencer has deepened. The Parker Hale sound moderator has become one of the leading characters in the crime, almost as infamous as Bamber himself. Is it a firearm accessory used to try to hush up a grotesque familicide, or does it hold the secret to one of Britain’s greatest miscarriages of justice?
In 2011, more than 350,000 documents were disclosed to Bamber. Among them was evidence suggesting the police had examined at least two different silencers, although the jury had been told there was only one, and that it contained Caffell’s blood. Now it appeared that there were silencers with different exhibit numbers (SBJ1, DB/1 and DRB/1), different sizes (six and a half inches, and seven inches) and differing groove patterns (one knurled, one straight cut).
Bamber’s team argued that the police had conflated forensic results from a moderator they had found on the day and the moderator the Boutflours had found. Essex police announced that they had found a “heavily bloodstained silencer hours after the gruesome massacre” at a press conference on 16 September 1985. This was reported in at least a dozen newspapers, including on the front page of the Daily Mirror. The police now claim they never said this.
At the trial, David Boutflour said the police had not seized his silencer before the trial. But in the New Yorker’s epic 2024 investigation into the Bamber case, he told journalist Heidi Blake that they had taken it away for “months and months” before the trial, supporting the claim that Essex police were in possession of more than one moderator before the 1986 trial, despite their 40 years of denials.
When invited to comment about the silencers, Essex police said: “In August 1985, the lives of five people, including two children, were needlessly, tragically and callously cut short when they were murdered in their own home by Jeremy Bamber. In the years that followed, this case has been the subject of several appeals and reviews by the court of appeal and the Criminal Cases Review Commission – all of these processes have never found anything other than Bamber is the person responsible for killing his adoptive parents Nevill and June, sister Sheila Caffell and her two sons Nicholas and Daniel.”
In 2012, Bamber told the Guardian’s former prisons correspondent Eric Allison that he had always believed the silencer was a red herring, and in January that year he had received scientific evidence that backed him up. An eminent American pathologist, Dr David Fowler, the chief medical examiner for the state of Maryland, wrote a report concluding he believed the rifle was fired without a silencer. The report was peer-reviewed by two equally eminent American pathologists who agreed with him.
Also in 2012, ballistics expert Philip Boyce conducted an experiment on the difference between a contact wound on pig skin shot with the Anschütz 525 and a contact wound with the silencer attached to the gun. It showed that the bullet wounds left by the rifle were clean, resembling the wounds found on Caffell. The wounds with a silencer were larger, with a “halo” effect. At the time, Boyce said: “Based on my examination of the wounds, and the photographs, and the tests that I’ve just done, I am of the opinion that the contact wound to Sheila’s chin was actually contact without the silencer fitted.”
Bamber believed the silencer that had seen him jailed would now see him cleared. But it was another nine years before the significance of Dr Fowler’s report could be assessed. In 2021, his team entered new submissions to the CCRC, consisting of 10 points. It took the commission four years to review the first four points, including the silencer evidence, and last June it said it would not be referring back to the court of appeal based on these, though it would continue to examine the remaining six points.
The commission gave Dr Fowler’s report short shrift. Bamber told me he was astonished that the CCRC had rejected it partly on “facts” that were known to be untrue at the trial 40 years ago, and partly on what appear to be semantics. The CCRC cited “the fact that blood matching that of Sheila Caffell was found in the moderator”, even though its own findings in 2002 contradicted this, and it is now accepted that Justice Drake’s statement to the jury saying the blood was an exact match for Caffell’s – rather than simply the same blood type – was plain wrong.
In its provisional statement of reasons, the CCRC said that it was also rejecting Dr Fowler’s report suggesting no silencer had been used, because it did not align with the trial testimony. They claimed that Dr Fowler characterised the wounds to Caffell as resulting from “firm contact” with the skin, whereas the prosecution’s firearms witness Malcolm Fletcher had said the lower wound may have been the result of a shot between one and three inches away. (However, at trial, pathologist Dr Peter Vanezis, who was called by the prosecution, described both wounds to Caffell as having been caused by a weapon “lightly touching” the skin, a description that is consistent with Dr Fowler’s conclusions.)
In conclusion, the CCRC state that there is “no real possibility that evidence from Dr Fowler might lead the court of appeal to quash any of Mr Bamber’s convictions”.
Last year, the CCRC’s chair Helen Pitcher and CEO Karen Kneller resigned after an independent review highlighted poor management, weak decision-making processes, and a culture resistant to challenging the court of appeal under their management. When Dame Vera Baird took over as interim chair in June 2025, she told Radio’s 4 Today programme that the CCRC “look for reasons not to refer rather than to refer”.
Bamber believes the CCRC’s rejection of Dr Fowler’s evidence is yet another example of this. If the commission didn’t trust his expertise, he asks, why didn’t it hire its own expert to examine the wounds?
A CCRC spokesperson says: “It would be inappropriate for us to discuss the case or make any further comment while the application is being reviewed.”
But Professor Payne-James’s new report for the Guardian negates the CCRC’s objection, because he states that, irrespective of whether it was a contact or close-range injury, he does not believe a silencer was used. “I’m in agreement with Dr Fowler,” he concluded in his report, after reviewing digitised crime scene photographs for the Guardian. In total, five forensics experts have now said they do not believe that a silencer was attached to the gun that killed Caffell.
Philip Walker, a spokesperson for the Jeremy Bamber Innocence Campaign, says: “The CCRC has spent well over a decade dismissing the report of the three senior US pathologists on totally spurious grounds. It has done this without further investigation, and without consulting any other experts. Thankfully the Guardian has done the work the CCRC should have been doing all this time, and asked a top forensic physician to examine the wounds, and this has confirmed Dr Fowler et al’s conclusions.”
Bamber believes that the CCRC has no choice but to refer his case back to the court of appeal now. Writing from Wakefield Prison, he says: “I am very pleased that one of the UK’s leading experts in forensic medicine has confirmed what we have known for years; namely that Sheila was shot without a moderator on the rifle. It completely removes the central plank of the prosecution’s case, the ‘blood evidence’, which was manipulated to convince 10 of the 12 jurors of my guilt.” Bamber believes that he would never have been convicted without the silencer. The narrative constructed around it led to his downfall, he insists. Now he hopes it will lead to his salvation.
“Without the silencer,” he says, “the whole case collapses.”
