Whitehouse Farm stood in open fields, facing the bleak Essex salt marshes, its columned portico lit by the moon. It was a midsummer night, nearing 4 A.M., when a patrol car sped toward the property. Three police officers got out at the end of the driveway, and a silver car pulled up behind. The driver, Jeremy Bamber, was the twenty-four-year-old scion of a local farming dynasty; his parents, Nevill and June, occupied the Whitehouse. Bamber had phoned the police half an hour earlier to report a panicked call from his father. His sister, Sheila, had “gone berserk,” he said. Her six-year-old twin sons were asleep upstairs, and she had a gun.
Two of the officers told Bamber to follow them. The Whitehouse lay around a bend, concealed by tall trees, and they crept through the darkness until its rear wall came into view. Lights were shining in three windows: the kitchen, a bathroom, and the bedroom where Sheila’s twins were sleeping. But the only sound from within was the faint whining of a dog. They cut across a field to the front, where light filtered through the curtains of the master bedroom. Seeing a shadow looming at the window, the men ducked behind a hedge and braced for shots. When none came, they raced back toward the patrol car, the officers radioing for reinforcements.
At the car, Bamber made a confession. The previous night, before heading home from work on the farm, he had taken his father’s .22 Anschutz rifle out to shoot rabbits—and he had left the weapon in the kitchen, its magazine still loaded. “Oh, God,” he said. “I hope she hasn’t done anything silly.”
Bamber urged the officers to go to his relatives’ aid—“They are all the family I’ve got,” he said—but they refused to enter without backup. It was almost 5 A.M. when a van finally thundered up the lane, carrying a squad of armed officers. Bamber accompanied them to a staging area, a cattle barn facing the back of the house. For two and a half hours, as the sun rose over the fields, officers remained in place, calling through a bullhorn for Sheila to surrender. The only answer was the dog’s continual yapping.
At about seven-thirty, a raid team was finally authorized to enter. Inching toward the house, a forward officer reported seeing a woman on the kitchen floor, but it took time to get a better view. The back door was locked, requiring several blows with a sledgehammer to open. When the officers spilled inside, they encountered a gruesome scene. Nevill Bamber lay slumped over an upturned chair by the kitchen hearth, blue pajama pants around his knees, his face resting inside a coal scuttle. Brain tissue spilled from gunshot wounds to his head, and blood had pooled on the floor. He had been shot in the shoulder and the arm, and he appeared to have been battered in a struggle; shattered crockery and shards of a light fixture were scattered on the floor.
The woman whom the officer thought he had spotted was nowhere to be seen. The raid team proceeded quietly, communicating in hand signals and whispers. After hearing movement from above, they used an extending mirror to survey the upstairs landing. As they tilted the glass toward the master bedroom, they saw a woman collapsed in the doorway, her nightgown soaked in blood.
It was Bamber’s mother, June. A bullet had been fired between her eyes, and six more through her head, neck, chest, and limbs. The officers found the dog, a Shih Tzu named Crispy, cowering under the bed. Then, across the room, they saw Sheila. She was on her back, in a turquoise nightgown and jewelry. Her father’s rifle lay atop her body, her fingers by the trigger, its barrel pointing at a fatal gunshot wound through her chin. Beside her, a bloodstained Bible lay open to Psalms 51-55. The line “Save me from blood guiltiness” was underscored with a streak of red.
In the twins’ room, officers found the boys in bed. Daniel was curled on his side with his thumb in his mouth; Nicholas lay on his back, the covers pulled up to his chin. Five bullets had been fired through the back of Daniel’s head. Nicholas had been shot three times in the face. The officers paused, stricken. Then they radioed in the news.
Outside, an officer approached the patrol car where Bamber had been told to wait and tapped on the window. “I’m really sorry, Jeremy,” he said. “We’ve found everybody dead.” Bamber closed his eyes and began to cry. Another officer climbed in beside him.
“You said everything would be all right,” Bamber said.
“I know,” the officer said. “We like to think things will work out.”
Seemingly unable to process the news, Bamber begged to speak to his father. When he was reminded that Nevill was dead, he broke down again. “Sheila ought to be in a nuthouse for what she’s done,” he muttered. Shortly afterward, he was seen retching in a field.
Detective Chief Inspector Taff Jones, a bluff, ruddy-faced Welshman, was ordered to lead the police inquiry. He examined the windows and doors, determining that the house had been locked from the inside. The police surgeon and the coroner’s officer examined the bodies and confirmed that Sheila appeared to have slaughtered her family before turning the gun on herself. As more detectives arrived, Jones told them that they were dealing with a clear-cut murder-suicide—a horrific crime, but one with a simple solution.
News of the shooting, which took place on August 7, 1985, tore through the sleepy rural community of Tolleshunt D’Arcy, where the Bambers were regarded as local gentry. The next day, the massacre filled the front pages of the national newspapers. Sheila had been a successful model—known to the press as Bambi—and the papers printed her portrait under such headlines as “Farmhouse of Death.” In Britain, where gun ownership is tightly controlled, mass shootings are rare, and the public’s shock was heightened by the Bambers’ social status. Nevill, a former fighter pilot with silver hair and periwinkle eyes, was a staunch Conservative and a longtime magistrate; June was a devout Christian who arranged church flowers and regularly stepped out in her tweed skirt to bring food to the poor. The Bambers’ murder instantly became one of the most infamous crimes in the country’s history.
Both June Bamber and her daughter, Sheila, suffered psychotic episodes. Sheila feared that she would harm her twin sons, but also feared leaving them with June.Photograph from Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy
The story gained new salience when reporters discovered that Jeremy and Sheila had been adopted: his biological father was a senior Buckingham Palace official who had conceived him during an affair, while her mother was the teen-age daughter of a chaplain who participated in the Queen’s coronation. The Whitehouse itself—a Georgian manor set in the landscape that featured in Susan Hill’s famous ghost story “The Woman in Black”—acquired a kind of ghoulish celebrity. The occupant before the Bambers turned out to have drowned himself in a water tank. His father had also died by suicide, drinking poison in his room.
The Bambers had kept their personal affairs private, but as police began making inquiries a troubling picture emerged. June had been racked by mental illness since soon after their wedding, apparently brought on by grief at their inability to conceive. She had been hospitalized with depression, psychosis, and paranoia, undergoing multiple courses of electroshock therapy. Her psychiatrist told police that her illness had caused a “distortion of her already strong religious beliefs,” so that she saw “everything in terms of good and evil”—a pathology that, he said, had done terrible harm to her daughter.
Sheila had complained that, from her earliest years, her mother had treated her coldly. In her teens, June called her “the Devil’s child” and ascribed her youthful behavior—flirting with boys, sunbathing naked—to satanic impulses. By seventeen, Sheila had left for London, launching her modelling career and falling in love with an artist named Colin Caffell. The couple moved in together, but the relationship was turbulent. “Violence was just below the surface,” Caffell later wrote. “There were even times we could have killed each other.” When Sheila became pregnant, June insisted that they get married—but, soon after the ceremony, the baby was stillborn. Another pregnancy ended in a miscarriage, and Sheila, who saw the losses as divine punishment, came to believe that she exuded an “evil aura.” After she finally gave birth to Nicholas and Daniel, Caffell left her for another woman.
Alone with the twins in her London flat, Sheila unravelled. Besieged by hallucinations and paranoia, she contacted social services and said that she feared she might harm the babies. When the twins were four, her family arranged for her to be treated at St. Andrew’s Hospital, the exclusive facility where her mother had undergone electroshock. June’s psychiatrist, Dr. Hugh Ferguson, saw clear symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. “Sheila had bizarre delusions,” he later told police. “She thought her sons would seduce her and saw evil in both of them”—particularly Nicholas, who she feared was “a woman hater” and “a potential murderer.” Her gravest concern was that she might be capable of killing the boys. Yet Ferguson considered this unlikely. He prescribed an antipsychotic and discharged her.
On her own, Sheila began skipping her drugs and self-medicating with cannabis and cocaine. She said she was hearing voices and being chased by the Devil. Five months before the killings, she was home with the twins in London when she flew into a frenzy, beating the walls with her fists and accusing people who approached of trying to kill her. “I was extremely scared for everyone’s safety,” a friend who was present told the police, noting that Sheila “was behaving like a person possessed.” She claimed to hear the voice of God.
Nevill arranged for his daughter to be readmitted to St. Andrew’s, where Ferguson noted that she had “relapsed into an acute psychotic state” and that she believed those around her were conspiring in “an attempt by the Devil to take away her godliness.” He discharged her a few weeks later with a prescription for a new antipsychotic—to be administered intravenously each month, so that she couldn’t skip a dose.