Chapter 20: Prisoner Transfer Efforts and DNA Round 1 - Martyr or Murderer: Jens Soering, the Media, and the Truth

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Söring’s lawyers continued to push for his transfer to Germany. In his 2012 German-language book Not Guilty!, Söring claims that one roadblock to transfer was that Söring needed a signature from a family member who willing to support him in Germany. As Söring writes: “My life in 2008 was so full, rich, and satisfying that I wanted to pursue reconciliation here as well. I wanted to renew our relationship, and that would of course be easier in Germany.” Söring needed only a signature from his father. “Yet he refused. He didn’t even answer. Instead he wrote my lawyers that he was too ill.” Söring inflicts the sting: “Oddly enough, his health was good enough to write down this letter to my lawyers.” Söring got a letter from another family member.

The efforts to have Söring transferred nearly succeeded in 2010, as departing Democratic Governor Tim Kaine, in one of his last acts, signed a letter officially declaring that the Commonwealth of Virginia would not object to Söring being transferred to Germany. Kaine justified the move by saying that he wanted to save Virginia taxpayers from paying for Söring’s upkeep, and that Söring would never be allowed to return to the U.S. In a 2011 interview with the Associated Press, Kaine said: “He is not a sympathetic character, that’s true. I would never grant him clemency. But I did feel like Virginians have paid for his incarceration for a very long time. Let the Germans pay to keep this guy.” Kaine won election to the U.S. Senate in 2012, and became Hillary Clinton’s vice-presidential running mate in 2016.

Incoming Republican Governor Bob McConnell, saying he had been deluged with complaints about the matter, wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder countermanding Kaine’s letter and insisting that Söring remain in Virginia. A McConnell spokesman said: “Jens Soering committed a heinous and gruesome crime when he killed two innocent Virginians. The governor believes he must serve his full sentence in the Commonwealth of Virginia. That is why he revoked the transfer agreement put in place by the prior Administration.”

Members of the Söring family sent letters opposing the transfer. Richard Haysom called it the family’s “9/11”. Howard Haysom wrote that Söring “has turned himself into a cottage industry of falsehood, criminal celebrity and evil.” Söring challenged McDonnell’s action in a Virginia court but lost. The issue played a minor part in Kaine’s later political career, as opponents accused him of allowing Söring’s extradition even though, if transferred, Söring would only have served 2 or 3 more years in a German prison before being released. Ricky Garder noted that if the transfer had gone through, Söring would have ended up spending less time in prison than Elizabeth, even though he was the actual killer. That, Gardner insisted, would have been a “travesty of justice”.

Prisoner transfers in cases as severe as Söring’s are incredibly rare. Söring came close to getting one because of high-powered political support on both sides of the Atlantic. In the U.S., Richmond Catholic Bishop Walter Sullivan, whom Söring called a “special friend” in Not Guilty!, met personally with Kaine to plead Söring’s case. A 2016 Daily Beast article quotes Kaine’s then Chief of Staff, Larry Roberts, as saying that Kaine had gotten “a lot of inquiries about [the Söring case] from the German government, including the German ambassador.” On 28 June 2012, Söring published an article in the Washington Post complaining about how his case was being used to attack Kaine during Kaine’s 2012 Senate race. It begins “My name is Jens Soering, my prison ID number is 1161655, and this fall I could influence the future of the United States.” Söring refers to DNA tests which “revealed that none of the blood at the crime scene could be linked to me, although 11 blood samples did belong to an unidentified third person”. Söring ends by claiming Kaine was merely trying to “live by his Christian values, as opposed to just talking about them at campaign rallies”.

At this time, I was teaching common law and comparative law at the University of Düsseldorf. My classes were held mainly in English. Many students, having read one of the growing number of interviews and articles about Söring, approached me. They knew I had been a criminal-defense lawyer in the U.S., and wanted to know if I knew anything about Jens Söring. I did, I told them, I had watched his trial and studied the European Court of Human Rights case Soering v UK. “No, no, they corrected me: What did I think about Kerner and Söring’s innocence claims?” I had no idea, I said. But I promised them I’d look into it when I had time. At the point, I was busy writing academic articles and drafting the proposal for my 2010 book about the worldwide campaign against capital punishment, Ending the Death Penalty: The European Experience in Global Context. I’d noticed one or two articles about Söring popping up in my news feed, but did not pursue them.

Meanwhile, Söring was finding more support. The September 2007 Johannes B. Kerner episode, seen by 1.5 million people, capped off a banner year for Söring: His case had been profiled in two major newspapers and two televised specials. Söring had a group of supporters, called the Freundeskreis (literally, “Circle of Friends”, but usually referred to in English as “Friends of Jens”) for years by that time, but its membership grew significantly after 2007. Söring says he lost his Catholic faith precisely on 23 July 2008. In 2009, he quit the practice of “centering prayer”. In mid-2009, Söring’s fifth parole application was denied. As before, the Board citing the circumstances and severity of Söring’s crime. In the summer of 2009, Brunswick Correctional Center was closed, and Söring was transferred to Buckingham Correctional Center, a medium-security prison near Dillwyn, Virginia. After the transfer request and parole application had been denied, Söring writes, he simply “gave up” trying to regain his freedom.

And then a bombshell arrived in the mail. As we’ve seen above, DNA exonerations in the 1990s prompted Virginia to pass a 2001 law allowing prisoners to apply for post-conviction DNA testing, an opportunity Söring never took advantage of. Three prisoners who did were exonerated, contributing to the nationwide debate in the U.S. about the possibility that hundreds, or even thousands of prisoners might be serving time for crimes they had not committed. The Commonwealth of Virginia decided the 2001 law wasn’t enough. In September 2004, Virginia Governor Mark Warner ordered the Virginia Department of Forensic Science (DFS) to re-test a random sample of 31 sex-offense cases. The testing yielded three more exonerations.

Governor Warner was horrified at the miscarriages of justice the testing had revealed. As recounted in a 2019 report issued by the Virginia State Crime Commission, the DFS proposed a plan:

In 2005, as recommended by DFS, Governor Warner ordered a full review and DNA testing of biological evidence in the remaining archived case files for all felony crimes against persons. The Department of Forensic Science then completed a review of over 530,000 archived case files to identify those that contained biological evidence believed to be suitable for DNA testing and at least one named suspect.

The actual testing would be conducted by an outside laboratory, The Bode Technology Group, Inc., to ensure neutrality. The program cost Virginia $5 million. After review, the program identified 860 cases which fit the program’s criteria.

Söring’s was one of those cases. The document Söring received is entitled “SUPPLEMENTAL REPORT FS Lab # W85-01536”. It was signed by Shelley S. Edler, Forensic Scientist at the DFS. It is available on the Internet. Edler revealed that 42 evidence samples from the Söring case which could potentially yield DNA had been collected. The evidence in Söring’s case had been stored under the worst possible conditions: It was simply jumbled together in an evidence locker in a warehouse, subjected to swings in temperature and humidity. Further, many people had access to it. In the 2007 German TV feature “Buried Alive”, the filmmakers are escorted into the Söring trial storage locker, where two clerks fondle the evidence from Söring’s trial.

Given the storage conditions, it is not surprising that most of the samples, when tested using 2009-era technology, yielded little information. Twenty-four samples yielded no results at all. Others allowed a conclusion as to whether the biological material had been deposited by a male or female, but no DNA results. Two items yielded a partial female DNA profile inconsistent with Elizabeth. Nine results yielded a partial male profile inconsistent with Jens. The laboratory had been unable to obtain a DNA profile from Derek or Nancy Haysom (both of whom had been cremated), so Edler could only speculate as to who the partial profiles could belong to. However, since the nine partial male profiles were largely consistent, Edler suggested that they likely came from a “common male contributor”. Although the Report does not state this conclusion, the likeliest candidate for this male contributor would be Derek Haysom. Not only had he bled profusely at the scene, other biological material from him, such as skin cells, was likely omnipresent in Loose Chippings.

Edler’s “Supplemental Report” had been written on 24 Sept 2009. Söring claims that he was surprised when he received the letter from the DFS on 2 October 2009. To this day, this seven-page report—which he referred to in 2012’s Not Guilty! as “my beacon, my weapon, my sun, moon and stars”—remains one of Söring’s overriding obsessions; as late as 2022, Söring released two YouTube videos (later deleted) discussing the DNA evidence in his case. Söring’s first reaction, as he records it in 2012, was satisfaction: None of the DNA profiles matched his own. Söring would proclaim he had been “excluded” by the 2009 DNA test, but this is spin. Given the badly degraded samples—none of which yielded a complete profile—the test results were of limited value.

However, the test offered another potential hook for Söring to hang an argument on: Most of the male DNA had been deposited by a “common male contributor”. That male contributor could have been an as-yet-unidentified male perpetrator, and this is what Söring would argue. However, the likelihood these 8 matching partial profiles came from Derek Haysom is overwhelming. Many of the samples which yielded partial male profiles were certainly left by Derek Haysom. For example, one sample, called “DR7 (dining room) Napkin”, was taken from the napkin in this photo, which lay beside Derek Haysom’s own table setting:

Another of the male profiles came from a sample called “8DR—Seat”. There were two chairs in the dining room with large bloodstains on them. One was a splash pattern along the front edge of a chair. In Söring’s confessions, he stated that after he slashed Derek Haysom’s throat, blood had run down into Haysom’s “lap”. That is consistent with this photo:

The other chair in the living room has a bloody handprint made by Haysom has he lifted himself upright to continue struggling against Söring, something Söring himself said happened more than once:

A third sample which yielded a male DNA profile from the “common male contributor” was identified as “6LR—Dried stain at W.R. Derek Haysom”. These three stains were made up of Haysom’s blood. There were five more stains with consistent partial profile.

Could the contributor of all these DNA profiles be an unknown male perpetrator? It’s theoretically possible, but this would require that this unknown male left DNA within eight separate large bloodstains generated by Derek Haysom, including one found right next to his body. Occam’s Razor holds that all things being equal, the simplest explanation is the best. These male DNA profiles all belonged to Derek Haysom.

There is another reason to presume the male DNA profile came from Derek Haysom: The DNA results themselves. Boiled down to its essence, forensic DNA profiling rests on the simple statistical premise of cumulative probability. Assume you roll a 4-sided die, a 6-sided die, and a 20-sided die, then add up the result. What was the probability you would get the result 3-2-19? That probability is 1/4 * 1/6 * 1/20, or 1/480. Put another way, there are 480 possible three-number combinations from that set of dice, so your chance of getting any one number is 1/480. This is how forensic DNA profiling works.

The DNA of most humans is largely identical, since our bodies all need to produce certain proteins in order to function. The British scientist Alec Jeffreys, the father of forensic DNA testing, realized that there were several sections of human DNA (called “alleles”) which exhibited great variability. He showed that those variations were independent; i.e. the fact that a human had one of these alleles was unrelated to what other variants he might have, just as the roll of one die does not influence the results of the next die roll. Jeffreys, Victoria Wilson and Swee Lay Thein published their landmark paper “Hypervariable ‘minisatellite’ regions in human DNA”, on 7 March 1985. Building on Jeffreys’ landmark achievement, forensic scientists across the world eventually settled on a set of 13 alleles which satisfied the necessary criteria of variability and independence. As the die example shows, even a set of 3 variables can quickly generate very long odds. Add up 13, and you will soon receive odds of 1 in millions or even billions.

Even this basic understanding lets us interpret the chart of DNA results from the 2009 testing. The Bode lab used a set of 16 alleles, which are listed in the following two charts. Each row relates to a sample which yielded at least some DNA results (the rest are not listed).

Amel stands for Amelogenin, a gene which reveals whether an individual is male or female; that is, whether they have an X and a Y chromosome (male) or two X chromosomes (female). The other alleles are used for generating the actual DNA “fingerprint”. The chart reveals two things. First, the samples were too degraded to yield a single definitive DNA profile (hits on all 16 alleles) using 2009 technology.

Second, the partial profiles were all similar to one another. This is a vital fact. Even if none of the samples yielded results on at least 13 alleles, the minimum for a formal genetic fingerprint admissible in court, they yielded some results on some alleles, in the case of Swab 35K, 11 alleles. Further, the other alleles also yield largely consistent results, which exponentially increases the reliability of the findings.

What this means is that the probability is overwhelming that only one person contributed all the male DNA recovered from the crime scene. In fact, anyone can calculate the odds using publicly available databases of forensic DNA alleles, for instance the website STRBase, maintained by the American National Institute of Standards. For a 2020 article, I plugged 5 of the male contributor alleles from the Söring crime scene into the database: D8S1179: 13 = 0,2683 (that is, 26% of the population has this allele); 14 = 0,2336; an D21S11: 30.0 = 0,2476; 27 = 0,0386; an D7S820: 12 = 0,2346; an D13S317: 13 = 0,1163; 12= 0,3050; an D5S818: 12 = 0,3533. Multiplying only the probability of just these 5 alleles yields a probability of 1 in 567,828. That is, of the 119 million males living in the USA in 1985, only about 838 would have exactly this combination of alleles.

These findings were confirmed by two independent scientists hired to review the case. Dr. Dan Krane, Wright State University professor of biology and president of the firm Forensic Bioinformatics, was hired by the American news show 20/20 to review the evidence for a 2018 feature. Krane concluded there was no “positive evidence” that the DNA found at the crime scene came from anyone but the victims. Betty Layne Desportes, a criminal defense lawyer with a Master’s in Forensics, and President of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in 2017-2018, told a reporter for the Richmond Times in 2016 that her review of the DNA evidence also showed no signs of an unknown male at the crime scene.

This conclusion was also supported by experts Söring himself consulted. Söring sent the DNA findings to a leading German genetic biologist by email in early 2020, hoping to recruit a German-speaking expert to bolster his unknown-male claim. (Since she never prepared a report, I will not identify her). She emailed him back that the most likely scenario was that Derek Haysom had contributed the DNA; she also said that my analysis of the DNA situation in Söring’s case, which had appeared in the German press by that time, was “essentially correct”.

On May 25, 2018, Dr. Daniele Podini, Professor of Forensic Molecular Biology and of Biological Sciences at the George Washington University Department of Forensic Sciences responded to an inquiry from Söring’s lawyer about the DNA evidence. Podini, after reviewing the documents concluded that “that any one of hundreds of Virginia residents, or thousands of U.S. residents, could have been the source of the unidentified blood at the crime scene,” echoing my conclusion. Söring provided the Podini letter to journalists covering his case, apparently in the belief that it bolstered his claims. However, many of them noted that the possibility that one of only “thousands” of males in a country of 119 million seemed rather unlikely.

Was the male DNA at the crime scene deposited by Derek Haysom, or by an unknown male DNA contributor? It is impossible to know with 100% certainty as we have no DNA profile for Haysom. However, we can know with something like 99.99% certainty. For the “unknown male” theory to be accurate, we must assume that an unknown male left DNA containing identical partial DNA profiles at the crime scene inside large spatters and stains of Derek Haysom’s blood. If we assume that even just one of the positive samples was in fact Derek Haysom’s—for instance the one collected next to his body, or from bloodstains on his napkin—that means the unknown male must have shared all the relevant alleles with Derek Haysom. The Haysoms, therefore, must have been attacked by someone who, by random coincidence, happened to belong to a group of just “thousands” of American males out of a population of 119 million which included not only the unknown male but also Derek Haysom.

The other explanation for these results, advocated by me, Terry Wright, Dr. Dan Krane, former President of the American Academy of Forensic Scientists Betty Layne DesPortes—and implicitly confirmed by two experts Söring himself consulted—is that the male DNA donor in the 2009 tests was Derek Haysom, whose blood was spattered, dripped, and smeared all over the crime scene. Söring’s argument is scientifically weak, but it would prove rhetorically powerful. For the decade after 2009, Söring and his supporters incessantly proclaimed that “DNA tests” had shown there was “at least one unknown male” at the crime scene. The case was no longer a “he-said, she-said” battle. DNA, the “gold standard” of objective scientific evidence, now proved there was a serious flaw in the state’s case.

Söring and his team exploit what is known as the “CSI effect”, named after the hugely popular television show Crime Scene Investigation, which premiered in 2000 and spawned several spin-offs. In CSI, researchers catch criminals using the latest in cutting-edge technology, usually some kind of advanced DNA analysis. American criminal lawyers have long complained of the “CSI effect”: jurors now expect to be shown conclusive forensic proof in every criminal case, and will discount other forms of evidence, even though they are just as powerful. Both prosecutors and defense lawyers now build “anti-CSI-effect” arguments into their jury arguments, cautioning jurors that not all crime scenes yield forensic evidence and that circumstantial evidence is just as reliable as forensic evidence or eyewitness reports, and can conclusively prove a defendant’s guilt even when no forensic evidence exists.

Yet the three magic letters “DNA” still exercise hypnotic power over millions of lay observers of the criminal justice system, which is why Söring and his supporters began every speech, interview, and article by mentioning them. When Söring’s supporters approached journalists, pundits, celebrities, or politicians, they used the DNA results as a battering ram to break down resistance: “We already have proof—reliable, objective, scientific proof from Virginia’s own laboratory—that the state’s case against Söring must be wrong and that at least one other people must be involved in these murders.” Bewitched by the CSI effect—and faced with people willing to exploit it—hundreds of journalists and reporters took the bait.

For Söring, there was only one problem: Never before, whether at trial or in Mortal Thoughts, had Söring said Elizabeth had an accomplice when she killed her parents. In 1995’s Mortal Thoughts, Elizabeth says “I killed my parents,” not “we” did. “Derek and Nancy Haysom,” Söring wrote “died at the hand of their own daughter.” He even claims she had her own parents’ blood on her forearms. The outdated “Elizabeth did it alone” story is likely one of the reasons Söring’s supporters deleted Mortal Thoughts from the Internet, where it lives on only in the recesses of the Internet Archive. Söring now needed to update his story to add one unknown male at the crime scene (he would later increase the number to two).

This he did in his 2012 German-language book Not Guilty! At the very beginning of this book, Söring declares that his life took a turn towards disaster the day he met Elizabeth Haysom. He then goes on to revise this judgment: Now he believes his downfall began even earlier, when Elizabeth Haysom began plotting with the “male accomplice” who would later kill her parents. In Söring’s telling, Söring was merely a patsy whom Haysom seduced into taking the blame for the crime committed by her—and the unidentified male who had left is DNA in eight bloodstains left by Derek Haysom in Loose Chippings.

The unknown male had, of course, emerged only after Söring received the 2009 DNA report. Söring says his reaction to the report was “disappointment and rage against unjust fate: We were so close! I was so close to finding the identity of Elizabeth’s accomplice.” Alas, the DNA profile from the crime scene did not match any entries in databases of known criminals. Which, of course, would not have contained a profile from Derek Haysom. Söring claims he contemplated filing a legal appeal based on the lab report, but Gail Marshall and others convinced him it would fail.

It’s worth re-stating the argument Söring puts forward in Not Guilty! Writing in 2012, Söring claims that Elizabeth had begun planning to murder her parents with an as-yet unidentified male even before she had met Söring. Elizabeth then seduced Söring, presumably always with the intention of pinning the blame on him for the murder of her parents, which she had already planned. She then carries out the plan, joining the male mystery man in killing her parents. Afterwards, she tells Söring she committed the act alone, for some reason never mentioning the mystery male. Elizabeth then dupes Söring into taking responsibility for her crime.

After pulling off this scheme, years in the making, Elizabeth reaps the reward: a 90-year prison sentence. The fact that thousands of people were induced to believe this preposterous tale is a testament to Jens Söring’s charm, persistence, and organizational ability. And to the intellectual laziness and lack of imagination of his supporters.