Shelia, known as 'Bambi', died along with her parents and sons. Her brother was charged with the murders but he claimed Bambi was the killer

 

Unable to have children of their own, they had adopted Sheila, who was 28 at this time, and Jeremy, then 24.

Jeremy lived in a cottage of his own in Goldhanger, a neighbouring village.

Sheila, a model known as Bambi, lived in London. In 1977, she married Colin Caffell and gave birth to twin sons in June 1979.

However, she had a history of serious psychiatric problems. She and Caffell divorced in 1982 and the children were generally cared for by their father.

In 1983, she was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and in Easter 1985 had treatment in a psychiatric hospital.

However, on August 4, Colin Caffell drove the children and their mother to Tolleshunt d'Arcy and dropped them off to spend a week at the farm.

Sometime on August 7, Sheila, her sons and her parents were all shot dead.

In the days after the shootings, the police believed, and the media reported, that Sheila had killed her parents and her sons and then shot herself.

However, this initial view soon changed. Sheila had been shot upwards through the neck twice.

How could anyone shoot themselves twice? Then, the senior investigating officer, DCI Thomas 'Taff' Jones, was removed from the case for what were described as "operational reasons". (Tragically, he died in a fall from a ladder at his home before the case went to trial.)

The new police team had a different view: they believed Jeremy Bamber killed everyone in order to claim a £435,000 inheritance (£1million in today's money) and had tried to frame his sister for the murders.

Convicted: Jeremy Bamber was found guilty of killing his sister Bambi and the rest of his family

Their case was strengthened when Julie Mugford, Bamber's former girlfriend, made a highly damaging statement suggesting he wanted to be rid of his family.

Bamber was charged with five murders. The prosecution case was that he had left the farmhouse at about 10pm the previous evening and gone home but then returned and shot them all dead - the twin boys in their own bedroom, and Sheila and June in the main bedroom.

Nevill, it was said, was shot four times in the bedroom, before Jeremy finished him off in the kitchen with another four shots.

He then went back to his cottage and pretended to have received the call from his father.

By the time of the trial in October 1986, that was the accepted view of the case. He was convicted on a 10-2 majority verdict and jailed for life.

Since then, he has made two appeals, which were rejected in 1989 and 2002. Bamber, however, passed a liedetector test last year.

Now, his legal team and the Daily Mail have obtained astonishing new evidence that was not available to the judges who heard the last appeal.

Much has come to light from police records that have been released slowly down the years.

Some have been obtained recently under the Freedom Of Information Act. Only now can the full significance of these documents be appreciated.

For the first time, a clear picture of what occurred has begun to emerge.

The case can now be seen in a completely fresh perspective and - most amazingly - the new evidence appears to confirm that the man who has spent 22 years in prison for mass murder is as innocent as he has always claimed.

After Bamber's telephone call to the police station that night in 1985, he met three officers outside the farmhouse.

By then, it was about 3.50am. From that point on, Bamber was with the police continuously.

As they all waited, they thought they saw someone moving about inside the house. However, at the trial, the officers interpreted this sighting as "a shadow" or "a trick of the light".

Bamber, however, has always maintained that they saw someone. Now, the newly available transcript of a police radio log supports his claim.

At 5am, several members of Essex police's tactical firearms group (TFG) arrived at the scene. The radio log records the following exchange:

5.25am: Firearms team are in conversation with a person from inside the farm.

5.29am: Challenge to persons inside the house met with no response.

At 5.38am, the TFG requested that "an inspector and six extra firearms personnel" be sent.

If there had been no sign of life or activity within the house, why call for more firearms officers?

The reason back-up was requested must be because the police - as already shown in the radio transcript - knew there was someone alive inside the house.

The officers in this new team attended a briefing at the New Times pub in nearby Tiptree.

There, according to police statements, they were informed that "a woman [is] going berserk with a gun at White House Farm".

The 10-man back-up squad arrived at the farm at about 7am.

At this point, as they waited outside the building, one officer noticed, again according to a newly obtained statement, what "appeared to be a rifle leaning against the window" in one of the first-floor rooms.

At 7.35am, six officers entered the house by smashing down the back door with a sledgehammer.

The radio log states: "07.37: one dead male, one dead female in kitchen".

The body of the "female" was reported as being "just inside the kitchen door".

At 7.48am, there was a message from the scene asking the police surgeon to attend "to examine two bodies".

At 8.10am, the crime scene incident log recorded that the rest of the house had: "now been thoroughly searched by firearms team" and "now confirmed further three bodies found - five dead in total".

So at this time, there were two bodies downstairs and three elsewhere - yet the official record of the case is that there was one - Nevill Bamber - downstairs and four upstairs - Sheila's, June's and those of the two boys.

How did one of the bodies leave the kitchen and go upstairs?

This evidence casts a wholly new light on events at the farm. Taking into account the mysterious figure the police originally reported seeing moving around inside the house, and the locations of the bodies, a very different scenario to that described at Bamber's trial emerges.

In fact, it appears to prove Bamber's innocence and the belief of the first team of detectives that the deaths were murder and then suicide by a disturbed Sheila Bamber.

This may be what really happened... First, at about 7am, as police numbers around the house grew, four people already lay dead inside: the children, Nevill and his wife June.

Their killer, Sheila, however, was still alive and watching the activity from an upstairs window.

As the police considered tactics, she took the gun that was leaning against the window, and went downstairs to the kitchen where her father's body lay.

She shot herself and lost consciousness.

When the police got close and peered through the kitchen windows, they thought they saw two bodies - one male and one female. However, Sheila was not dead.

It was a popular misconception that she could not have shot herself twice.

The medical evidence is conclusive: the first shot to the neck would not have killed her instantly.

"A person having suffered such an injury," commented Lord Justice Kay at the appeal court, "may have been able to stand up and walk around for a little time."

As police were breaking into the farmhouse with a sledgehammer, the noise and clamour caused Sheila to regain consciousness.

She panicked and went up the back stairs (there were three staircases in the house).

Without going into the kitchen, officers made their initial check of the scene, found three bodies in the upstairs rooms and then re-assembled in the farmhouse hallway and reported on the radio what they had seen: two bodies downstairs (seen through the kitchen window) and three upstairs.

Then one of the officers heard a "sound", which must have come from someone alive upstairs.

The officer said in his statement: "I began to challenge [shout] up the stairs - I was calling to Sheila to make her whereabouts known to me."

Sheila went into her mother's bedroom, where she shot herself again.

This second shot was delivered with the muzzle pressed against the skin - so the gun's report, in the large farmhouse, may have been slightly muffled, and perhaps not heard by all those there.

The police were still taking precautions and, before going further, used "an extending mirror to look at the landing area upstairs".

The next crucial question is what happened to Sheila's body.

When officers first found her, the gun (a .22 Anschutz automatic rifle) was on top of the body.

One officer stated: "The rifle was lying on the body with the muzzle close to her throat." The senior officer, DCI Jones, simply noted that "on her body there was a rifle".

There was also a Bible which, according to some officers' statements, was "alongside" her body.

Later, however, the gun was no longer on her body. A detective inspector noticed the "rifle by her right side".

The coroner's officer, whose original handwritten notes are now available, wrote: "I believe that the gun had been removed from the body of Sheila when I saw her."

So why was the gun moved? In the statements that are now available, three officers refer to blood "leaking" or "running" from the corners of her mouth.

The inference is obvious: at that point, Sheila had only just shot herself and officers reached her quickly.

They put her in the recovery position and desperately tried to revive her. Crime scene photographs show blood flowing in rivulets across Sheila's upper arm.

Blood, of course, does not flow sideways. So this strongly suggests that she was put on her side, in the recovery position.

Evidence that the body had been moved was ruled inadmissible on technical grounds by the judges at the 2002 appeal, although they did comment on it in their judgment.

They believed that Bamber must have moved Sheila's body, thus proving his guilt; they were unaware of the evidence that police at the scene had moved it.

Photographs also showed a handwritten note sticking up from between the pages of the Bible.

The words at the top of the note are "love one another". The same words were written on a banner over a religious community in Jonestown, Guyana, where 909 people died in 1978 in a mass murder-suicide.

However, the evidential value of what was inside the Bible cannot now be gauged; Essex police have informed Bamber's lawyers that the note has been destroyed.

The photos contain another clue. It was always part of the prosecution case that the gun had been damaged in a fight downstairs in the kitchen between Jeremy and his father, with the result that a piece of the butt had been broken off.

However, there is no visible damage to the gun in the crime scene photographs.

The bodies were removed and taken to the mortuary at Chelmsford and Essex Hospital.

The post-mortems were conducted there that afternoon by Dr (now Professor) Peter Vanezis.

He found that Sheila's stomach contents included "partially digested food". The family had had their evening meal all together, yet there were no stomach contents in the bodies of the other victims.

So this indicates that Sheila had had something to eat after that meal, and only a few hours before her death.

Was this while she was alone in the house in the early morning - after she had murdered her parents and her sons?

One of the issues that harmed Bamber's chances at the last appeal was that Sheila's hands showed only "very low levels of lead".

If she had been handling, firing and re-loading a gun for a period of time, the prosecution argued, there would have been significant traces of firearms residue on her hands.

However, if she had eaten after the killings, she would very probably have washed her hands, thus washing off the residue.

The amounts of lead that were detected could have been consistent with firing the two shots that killed her.

The post-mortem also showed traces of cannabis and psychiatric drugs in Sheila's body and Professor Vanezis noted that she was menstruating and commented, according to notes he made at the time, that this "may well have been significant as it could have made her more unstable".

None of this evidence was heard at trial. The jury, however, were clearly swayed by the testimony of Julie Mugford.

On September 3, she had learned that Bamber had asked out another girl.

Furious, she threw an ornament box at him and slapped him. He ended their relationship.

Four days later, she went to the police and told them Bamber had shown no remorse over the murders and had thrown money around and clearly enjoyed himself.

Furthermore, he'd talked to Julie before the killings about wanting to get rid of them all, speculating about the perfect murder.

On the night of the massacre, she claimed, Bamber rang to say: "It's tonight or never."

He added that he'd hired a hitman, called Matthew McDonald, for £2,000.

The Crown argued that Bamber detested his parents for having sent him to boarding school, and resented Sheila's success and the allowances they made for her state of mind.

The murders were carried out in a frenzy. Nevill was shot eight times, June seven, and the boys were shot respectively five and three times.

Immediately afterwards, several key people all concluded that Sheila was responsible.

It was thought that, in her precarious mental state, she may have been pushed over the edge by a family discussion about having her sons fostered.

The coroner's officer reported that "there was nothing .. . which gave me cause for concern in relation to the murder/suicide theory".

Prof Vanezis, concluding his examination of the five bodies, wrote that "numbers 1, 2, 4 and 5 shot by No.3 [Sheila] who then shot herself".

When the exhibits were sent to the laboratory on August 9, the officer explained that it was a case of 'murder/suicide'.

From the start, there were gaping holes in the prosecution case - as the two jurors who wanted to acquit Bamber presumably understood.

There was never any adequate motive for Bamber to have committed such a terrible crime.

First, though he would have come into an inheritance, he hardly needed it, as he lived in a rent-free cottage and had all he needed.

In any event, the inheritance did not include the farmhouse, which was rented by Nevill and June from a local charitable trust.

Second, there was no evidence whatever that Bamber had returned to the farmhouse during the night.

In forensic science terms, the crime scene management was a disaster. Astonishingly, 29 people (26 of whom were police) went into the farmhouse that day and vital evidence was lost.

Ballistics experts were asked to attend but the forensic lab, citing a staff shortage, refused to send anyone.

Nor was any fingerprint expert asked to go. The first time a scientist went to the scene was on September 7 - exactly one month later.

When the murders occurred, Sheila had already been diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic.

The Daily Mail's original headline - "Drugs probe after massacre by mother of twins" - almost certainly put the blame where it lay: with the uncertain and sometimes extreme reactions of psychiatric patients to particular medications.

At the time, in 1985, there had been few serious incidents of this kind; there have been mounting tragedies over the years since.

The criminal cases review commission is now examining this new evidence. For Jeremy Bamber, it may be the turning point in his long campaign finally to prove his innocence.