Chapter 19: Interlude: What Germans Knew in 2007 - Martyr or Murderer: Jens Soering, the Media, and the Truth

Having surveyed coverage in the crucial year of 2007, we can now see how the media narrative around the case looks. In the U.S., there was still almost no interest in Söring’s case outside his circle of friends and supporters. He had been convicted, lost all his appeals, and was now serving a life sentence. His case hadn’t been in the national news for almost two decades. Those following the case in Virginia probably thought Söring should consider himself lucky for having avoided capital punishment and being parole-eligible (Virginia largely abolished parole in 1995). Although Söring had established a reputation as an eloquent and prolific prison writer, there was little press interest in his innocence claims.

The situation in Germany was different. Söring entered the German public sphere in 2007 as a blank slate. Outside his circle of friends and supporters, nobody knew who he was. German-language news coverage of his trial was nearly impossible to find, since the trial had occurred before the Internet. Ken Englade’s 1990 book Beyond Reason had been translated into German that same year under the title Where all Mercy ends: The Shocking Story of a Double Murder Nobody can Comprehend . The book was not reviewed in any major publication, and sales were modest. A German looking for information about Söring in 2005 might well have overlooked this moldering paperback, since its title does not contain the name “Söring” or “Haysom”, and the front cover illustration shows only Elizabeth Haysom.

As of the end of 2007, an ordinary German news consumer interested in the Söring case would have had the following base of information: Söring was a German national and a diplomat’s son who was convicted of killing his girlfriend’s parents in Virginia in 1990. He had at one point faced execution, but the European Court of Human Rights had quashed that penalty. Söring had once confessed to these crimes, but at some point “recanted” these confessions, now claiming Elizabeth Haysom was guilty. His “appeals” had been “denied” in 2001. It would have been nearly impossible to learn more in 2007. Söring didn’t get a German-language Wikipedia entry until 24 July 2007, and even then, it was only a few hundred words long. The earliest capture of a website for Jens Söring is dated January 2004. The site is in English.

Although our average German news consumer had been offered few details about Söring’s case, he or she already had a wealth of arguments against his guilt to choose from, including that his judge was biased and had perjured himself to maintain control of Söring’s trial, his sole defense lawyer was mentally ill and made “any number” of mistakes, Söring’s “confessions” were full of inaccuracies which detectives never followed up, he was denied access to a lawyer, the bloody sockprint could not have been made by him, and Söring was routinely denounced in the U.S. press as a “German monster”. Most importantly, they had been told that Elizabeth Haysom was a “pathological liar” and “schizophrenic” who had been sexually abused by her mother and who used hard drugs. Elizabeth, Söring assured viewers, had personally confessed to killing her own parents in a drug-fueled rage, then turned on Söring, perjuring herself in court to send him to prison for life in a callous act of betrayal.

German coverage of Söring’s case swept past Söring’s confessions with the brief comment that he had “recanted” them. This suggests that Söring’s recantation was a significant legal act; that confessions somehow don’t “count” anymore if the suspect disavows them. This is not the law in the U.S., or for that matter in the U.K. or Germany or anywhere else. Defendants recant their confessions (after realizing how much trouble they got themselves in) every day, either by claiming the confessions were coerced, as Söring did in March 1990, or by claiming the confessions were false, as Söring did in June 1990.

Our hypothetical German news consumer heard many claims about Söring’s trial, but had no German-language sources to put any of these claims in context. The only sources on the Internet were the opinions of the Virginia Supreme Court and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. A look at the Internet Archive shows that Söring does not appear to have ever put links to these decisions on his website during the nearly 19 years of its existence. It would have been nearly impossible for the average German to locate these documents, since news coverage of Söring’s case stated only that Söring’s appeals had been “denied,” without linking to the decisions or even revealing when they were reached or by which courts. Even if a German had managed to find the documents, they contained long passages of technical legal analysis which would have been incomprehensible. Most people cannot understand legalese in their own language, much less one which they studied, if at all, only decades ago in high school.

For the next twelve years, there would not be a single German-language newspaper story or feature questioning any of Söring’s innocence claims. The grossly biased narrative about his case not only took root—it grew into an oak so mighty it took three years to fell it.