White House Farm - The Bamber Murders. Jan 8th ITV 9pm

[Dogleg]

Is anyone else planning to watch this six part series? I vaguely remembered the killings and on seeing this advertised have now lost hours to reading up about it online and have also downloaded a book about the case. I’m really looking forward to this one!

www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2019-12-25/itv-drama-white-house-farm/

I think part of JB's inability to accept his sentence does come from that Apple.

I think he knew JM didn't have the correct details eg the hitman, the number of shots - so he thought if she came forward it wouldn't convict him. It could even be that he deliberately dumped her so he could say 'she's doing this for revenge' (raising questions about her integrity and motivation) whilst feeling confident she didn't actually know the correct details anyway.

I do keep wondering why he called the police. Why not let the bodies be discovered in the morning? The only reason I can think of is if he would have been the first person at the farm in the morning and he didn't want to be first on the 'scene'.

@LordOfTheWhys I think that-the whole reason JB is in the frame is because of the call. If he hadn't fabricated that he may have got away with it.
I think he was concerned with providing himself with an alibi. I think he really planned it in his head. Had his mother's bike at his house for travelling back & fore, used the rifle for shooting rabbits evening before so his prints would legitimately be on the rifle, said he left the rifle out to fit in with Sheila just losing it & grabbing the rifle, saying there had been a conversation about foster care for the twins (which legally seems implausible given Colin having joint custody & their living with him).
I think the police really did make a mess of this case, hence their destroying evidence in recent years & refusing disclosure demands. But I really think JB did it & the police/CPS cannot chance him getting out given his offending is pretty much unheard of in Britain.

Also just to correct PP who said that if JB were to confess he may be released. That's not the case-he has a whole life tariff which means regardless of his behaviour:any confession he will never be released.
Whole life tariffs are rare. In a 'normal' murder case the convicted person will receive a life sentence with a tariff. Eg if someone gets a 15year tariff it means they will serve 15 years before the parole board will consider their release. The parole board doesn't have to direct release, so lots of lifers serve longer than their tariff. The 'life' part of the sentence refers to the fact if they are released at any point they will be on licence & therefore supervised by probation for the rest of their life.

Right verdict, wrong evidence.

This^. The police investigation and evidence handling was ramshackle at best, a debacle at worst. Seems to me that they accepted JB's account that his sister did it on a murder/suicide basis. That made things easier for them ?

The policeman querying JB's account had to try really hard to get his point across to the officer in charge. It was very nearly too little too late.

JB keeps on that his version of events is what really happened just for the attention.

I think that-the whole reason JB is in the frame is because of the call. If he hadn't fabricated that he may have got away with it.
I think he was concerned with providing himself with an alibi. I think he really planned it in his head.

Again, this^

If he planned it in his head, I'm wondering what his, 'damn, didn't think of that' moments were after the fact.

Why call JM at 3am on the night of the murders to say, initially, it's all gone well and finish the brief call with, 'there's a problem at the farm' or words to that effect.

If he was in a panic he would have said that first. Also, as the police said, if it was an emergency i.e. lots of blood and dead bodies he would have dialled 999 not looked through the telephone directory for the number of the local police station. His reasoning was that the police would have been dispatched from there anyway. (Not necessarily, a 999 response dispatcher would have asked the nearest available police car to attend.)

This is an indication of how much JB was orchestrating it. He's still orchestrating it now with his insistence (even he knows the game is up) that it happened how he said it happened.

That's criminals for you, apparently, they will keep lying and peddling their version in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Imagine the torment for a narcissist who knows he was found guilty on ‘evidence’ that he knows is fake but can’t say how he knows it is fake.

JB's Dad, Neville didn't phone JB to say, 'Sheila's gone berserk' on the night of the murders. Neville was shot in bed and got himself downstairs to the kitchen where the telephone was. He had bullet wounds to his lips and tongue so would not have been able to speak coherently to anyone ? Why would Neville have called JB not the police ?

JB insists there was someone moving around inside the house when him and the Police went to the farm.

Like a PP said, why not just leave the murder scene as it is. I know he didn't want to be first on the scene. He really planned it in his own head, didn't he. Meticulous detail.

Until the Police started picking it apart.

The cupboard where the silencer was found, was that where it was normally kept ? (I believe JB removed the silencer and returned it after the Police had searched the house.)

I thought JB's reaction to Sheila's room was showboating, because he had an audience.

JB made the call to the police, I believe, simply to plant the idea that sheila had “gone berserk”. Possibly thinking that if he didn’t make the call and just “discovered” the bodies, the police would initially dig around before making that conclusion. JB set out to frame and discredit sheila straight out of the gate. On meeting up with the police at the house he continued feeding them information about how sheila “was crazy, psychotic” and had been in a mental home etc. Also that she was “on drugs” (she was actually only taking an anti-psychotic drug that would’ve made her sleepy and disjointed). The post-mortem confirmed this but JB continued to spread the story that sheila was on “hard drugs”. He also told police she had been expelled from 2 schools which was a complete lie. All just JB’s plan to blacken sheila’s name and point the finger directly at her (he also claimed she beat the boys and punched them in the face - he was the only witness to this of course! - again this was discredited and decided to be false). His continual stories about sheila’s personality and lifestyle really went against him in the end as everybody else who knew her disputed it and said he was lying.
I believe he called JM to provide an alibi to his alibi - ie- that he wasn’t at WHF and his dad had just rang him. His exact words to her, who knows? Maybe he wanted to subtly implicate her with the “all’s going well” comment in case she decided to go to the police later on.
I don’t think he reckoned on the police knowing in what order Neville had been shot (ie he was shot in the head/throat first which severed his tongue - before going downstairs - making a phone call would’ve been impossible). I’m at a part in the CAL book where JB asks Stan Jones “can you tell in which order they were killed?” Jones says “I doubt it” and says “why do you ask?” and JB claims he needs to know as it will affect the will. I suspect it was more to do with trying to garner information about how much the police knew about the order - maybe he was starting to realise that if they knew the order it would become obvious that Neville couldn’t possibly have made a phone call.
A few days after the event he says (I think to Ann or his friends) that Neville “sounded like he had already been shot” when he made the call to JB. Maybe he was starting to realise there were holes in his story and he had to start filling them in!

Yy I think he probably kicks himself about the call.
Also, now he's had years to think about it, I wonder if he wishes he'd planted June as the main suspect. She had a history of MH issues. She knew how to fire a gun. It would have been more plausible that she killed the boys than Sheila did.

'I do keep wondering why he called the police. Why not let the bodies be discovered in the morning? The only reason I can think of is if he would have been the first person at the farm in the morning and he didn't want to be first on the 'scene'.'

He could arrived at the farm at his usual time but not gone in, called the police and said 'something's wrong, they haven't unlocked the door and they're not answering when I knock, I don't know what to do, I can see through the kitchen window something awful has happened. By the way there are loads of guns in the house
...' [to hint at why he hasn't just broken in himself] and also fed them the information that now he comes to think of it Sheila was in a bit of a state when he left them the night before. Best of both worlds.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing though.

True. Maybe he worried the dog would move items about too. In theory the dog could have knocked the gun off Sheila and then the police might not have been so quick to jump to murder/suicide.

Dog could easily be shut in another room though?

If JB meticulously planned the murders and JB said there was a phone call from WHF to his home that morning then a phone call was made (he wouldn’t have planned everything so detailed without ensuring that)

I cannot find any reference to BT saying that there was no record of a phone call – just that they monitored the line at the request of the police, they checked the phones were in good working order etc. But not an actual confirmation or denial that a phone call was made that morning.

I understand they didn’t have itemised bills but BT had to charge their customers. If someone disputed the cost of their bill how did BT prove it was correct?

So if a call wasn’t answered (ie JB called his house from WHF and hung up without it being answered) then why would he expect BT to have a record of that? If he had swapped the old fashioned telephone from upstairs and put it in the kitchen then they couldn’t have checked the last number dialled if it didn’t have that function. JB would know that surely?

Iirc in the 80’s you could ring someone and the phone would ring forever until you gave up waiting for it to be answered. Is it feasible that JB could have called from WHF to his home and answered the phone 15 minutes later after returning on the bike? You could mute the ringing on our phone back then so it doesn’t mean the neighbours would have necessarily heard a phone ringing for ages.

Then you have the problem of an ‘open’ line not being able to be used (to ring the police). But didn’t that also time out after so many minutes? We had an elderly relative that was always hanging up incorrectly but I don’t remember the line being out of operation for hours.

It is another piece of ‘evidence’ that JB would be seething over if he can’t simply say ‘I know the phone call was real because it was me that made it’ and he believes BT / the police are withholding the records.

TheCountess but he didn't shut the dog in a room because it was found under Nevill and June's bed and their bedroom door wasn't closed.

I was talking about whether it would have been practical for him to avoid making the phone call that put him in the frame, in response to your pondering that point. You seemed to be saying one reason might be that he would have worried the dog might have messed up the staging if left for a long time so I was saying that would have been easy to avoid. Sorry if I have misunderstood / not been clear what the point of my post was.

It’ll be interesting how they deal with the court case tomorrow night.

Why would he have bothered locking the dog up anyway? I doubt he thought about the possibility of Crispy moving the gun. I don’t think he was that meticulous!
And if sheila had gone berserk with a gun (in JB’s mind) would she have stopped to lock him away?
JB hated that dog so I wonder if it hid under the bed as soon as the shooting started and JB couldn’t find it - if it had been barking at him he probably would have shot it too.

@AppleJane IIRC BT didn't hold information for local calls. So no confirmation of whether call was made or not. And yes I'd thought about the line being left open meaning JB couldn't call out for a while-not sure how that was dealt with?

TheCountess ah right, I see what you mean.
The call story seems to have been pre-planned ... because he left the phone off the hook before he left the farm.
Unless that wasn't why the phone was off the hook. One theory somewhere said the phone was off the hook to stop anyone calling out from any of the other phones. Maybe JB forgot to put it back on, didn't realise till he got home so then made up the call story to explain why the farm phone was off the hook. 🤷‍♀️

He could have left the phone off the hook initially to stop anyone calling out and then used it to call his home just before he left (no blood on the phone?)

Imagine him riding like the clappers to answer the call at the other end and then finding out that BT had no record of it! He even asked the police to ask BT to check their records didn't he?!

"But why? Loving and living with a criminal isn't a criminal offence, otherwise we'd have as many women's prisons as men's"

Really?! It's perverting the course of justice that is the criminal offence. Not "loving and living with a criminal"

Oh, and for any doubters. Bamber is guilty as sin, he's an absolute narcissist, manipulative arse and he's welcome to his whole life tariff

Bamber is guilty as sin, he's an absolute narcissist, manipulative arse and he's welcome to his whole life tariff

Do you have inside info, whitesoxx?

Venus I don't have any information that I can give other than what I've already said but yes, plenty of day to day dealings with him. It's clear to anyone that knows him

Interesting!

Really?! It's perverting the course of justice that is the criminal offence. Not "loving and living with a criminal"

That was precisely my point, @whitesoxx. Somebody suggested JM should have been imprisoned for loving and living with Bamber. Given that perverting the course of justice requires a positive act, not an omission, I've asked what offence people think JM should have been charged with but no-one has come up with an answer so far.