Chapter 21: Not Guilty! And German Politics - Martyr or Murderer: Jens Soering, the Media, and the Truth

By 2012, Söring had built a significant support network both in the U.S. and in Germany. He told a reporter that he was writing something like 100 letters a month around this time. His website, first created in 2004, looked increasingly professional. 2012 was also the year in which Söring published his first book written in German, under the (since changed) title Not Guilty! How I Became a Victim of American Justice. Söring wrote the book in English, then had it translated by Ulrike Strerath-Bolz. The cover illustration was credited to Karin Steinberger. The first half of the book is a translation of the 1995 book Mortal Thoughts into German. Söring acknowledges this fact briefly in Not Guilty!, but does not mention Mortal Thoughts anywhere else. As Eva Beck, a former leader of the “Friends of Jens” told me, “We did everything we could to remove Mortal Thoughts from the Internet”.

Söring’s friends wanted to scrub Mortal Thoughts for a few reasons. One, as we’ve seen, is that the version of Söring’s story published in 1995 accuses Elizabeth Haysom of murdering her own parents single-handedly. After the DNA results from 2009. Another reason to suppress Mortal Thoughts was that it repeats the accusation that Ken Beever threatened Elizabeth Haysom:

What I could not prove through documentation or witnesses was that Detective Beever issued his threat [to harm Elizabeth] at some time between 7:00 p.m. and 7:40 p.m. [on 5 June 1986]… At 7:45 p.m., shortly after Detective Sergeant Kenneth Beever threatened to harm Elizabeth, I asked the station’s desk sergeant for permission to telephone the German Embassy. But instead of reaching a consular officer who could contact my lawyer, I was only able to speak with the embassy’s night watch man. As soon as he learned of this attempted telephone call Detective Beever fetched me from my cell, and at 8:05 p.m. I signed the first of many Miranda waiver forms.

By 2012, Söring had was no longer willing to accuse Kenneth Beever in print of the crimes of assault, extortion, perjury, and perverting the course of justice. Söring does, however, reprint the attacks on Elizabeth Haysom as a “poisonous spider”, among many other insults.

Söring does, however, keep another accusation of perjury in Not Guilty! During Söring’s trial, a Lynchburg business executive named Donald Harrington testified that, at Haysoms’ funeral, he had seen Söring with bandages on his fingers and a bruise on his face as if he had taken a “good right cross”. In Mortal Thoughts, Söring admits that he showed Detective Gardner the scars on his hands: “Showing Detective Gardner those scars during questioning in 1986 was stupid even by my standards, but I was worried that he would not believe my ‘confession’ if I did not offer at least some corroboration.” Söring says this about Harrington’s 1990 trial testimony (Söring calls Harrington “Fishton”): “Strangely enough, Mr. Fishton only went to the police with his tale of seeing wounds on me after I mentioned the scars on my fingers during my London ‘confession’, more than a year after the funerals.”

The implication is clear: Söring had shown detectives the scars on his left hand during his confessions in June 1986. Detectives, searching for corroboration of Söring’s story, persuaded Donald Harrington to testify falsely that he had seen bandages on Söring’s fingers. That testimony would have to have been false, since Söring (by the time he wrote Mortal Thoughts) claims that he did not have any fresh wounds or bandages on his fingers at the Haysoms’ funeral. Again, it’s useful to spell out Söring’s claim: Donald Harrington, a respected local business executive, committed perjury during a first-degree murder trial. Perjury is a Class 5 felony in Virginia punishable by up to 10 years in prison. As a corporate executive, Harrington would have been immediately fired if he had been charged with perjury. Any company which kept a senior executive employed even though he was under suspicion of a “crime of moral turpitude” such as perjury—especially perjury in a murder case—could be sued by shareholders and investors, not to mention government agencies.

If Söring is to be believed, Harrington thus risked his reputation, his livelihood, and perhaps even his freedom as part of a plot to frame someone he didn’t even know for murder. Söring does not provide any rationale for Harrington to do this. But is it nonetheless true? The answer is no. Here is Harrington being cross-examined by Neaton:

Q: I asked you when you reported it to the police.

A: Approximately a week, 10 days later.

Q: Do you remember the name of the police officer to whom you spoke?

A: Mr. Updike, and Mr. Gardner

Q: So that would have been in the middle of April?

A: I assume that period, yes.

Q: In 1985?

A: I assume that year, yes.

Q: You don’t know what year you reported it to the authorities?

A: It was within a week to 10 days—I did not report it, they contacted me I did not report it to the police, the police contacted me

Q: Okay, did they contact you after Mr. Soering had been indicted in this case?

A: I don’t know when Mr. Soering was indicted, but it was within 10 days to two weeks after the murders.

In Söring’s telling, Harrington has just committed perjury a second time. First, he lied about seeing the bandages and bruise, now he is lying about when he reported them.

Söring’s accusation against Harrington, Jim Farmer, Kenneth Beever, Judge Sweeney, and many others reveal one of his less appealing character traits: Söring will not hesitate to falsely accuse persons of perjury or other misdeeds if he believes it is in his interest to do so. Many of his accusations were libelous. While Söring was in prison, he was relatively safe from lawsuits. Few people pay much attention to what convicted murderers say, and most lawyers won’t sue penniless prisoners who cannot afford to pay any judgments. As we’ll see, after Söring left prison and received well over €100,000 in rights and royalties for his story, he became more careful about his public statements.

Not Guilty! marks the debut of Tony Buchanan, a figure who would play a role in Söring’s case for a few years, before being quietly dropped. In 2011, Buchanan, who had owned a car repair garage in 1985, came forward and swore an affidavit at the request of Söring’s then-lawyer Gail Ball. Buchanan stated that, 26 years beforehand, a woman who resembled Elizabeth Haysom had visited his transmission-repair shop with an unknown young male who definitely wasn’t Söring. The pair brought along a towed car with a broken transmission whose interior, Buchanan recalled, was bloody and contained a knife. According to Buchanan, this happened “several months” after the Haysom murders, in the summer of 1985.

Buchanan’s account raises more questions than it answers. First, Elizabeth Haysom was traveling in Europe with Jens during most of the summer of 1985. Further, why would Elizabeth Haysom have left a broken-down car filled with evidence which could send her to death row lying somewhere (where?) for months? And why then personally take the car, still filled with that evidence, to a complete stranger to repair? Why, for that matter, did Buchanan wait 26 years after the most famous murder in Lynchburg history to come forward with his story?

Even assuming any of these questions had answers, there is the issue of Buchanan’s credibility: When interviewed by New Yorker reporter Nathan Heller for a 2015 article called “Blood Ties”, Buchanan pointed a pistol at Heller, then claimed that Elizabeth’s mystery accomplice looked like Heller himself. Buchanan had also doodled “crazy droopy hair” on the comparison photos he had been given. Buchanan’s affidavit could have no effect on Söring’s case, since Söring’s appeals had ended long ago. Even if it could have been raised in an appeal, it would not have helped Söring. To say courts view affidavits produced decades after the events in question is an understatement; they usually dismiss them out of hand.

The case of Tony Buchanan illustrates a maxim known to every detective: High-profile cases attract unstable (or just mistaken) people like moths to a flame. This happens so often that detectives have a strategy to deal with it. When assigned to investigate a crime which will attract press attention, detectives designate certain evidence—for instance, the cause of death—as “hold-back” evidence to be kept from the public. Detectives then use this evidence to separate the many false confessions and eyewitness accounts from accurate ones. If a witness confidently proclaims she heard gunshots, but the victim was strangled to death, they know they’re dealing with someone who’s at least mistaken.

In any event, even Söring has conceded that Buchanan’s story is unconvincing. In November 2022, Söring spoke to a retired German police commissioner and author named Siegfried Stang, who wrote a book on the case called Smokescreens: The Haysom Murders and the Search for the Truth. During their 7-hour conversation, Stang pressed Söring about the problems with Buchanan’s account. Stang paraphrases Söring’s response: “He basically told me that back then, he had to seize on anything he could to try to get out of prison. That answer was enough for me.”

Not Guilty! sold reasonably well in Germany, keeping interest in Söring’s case alive. As we’ve seen, Söring’s first attempt to be extradited to Germany, which had attracted modest press attention, failed definitively in 2012. Söring had attracted the attention of Christoph Strässer, a member of the German Bundestag and a speaker on human rights for the German Social Democratic Party. He persuaded 54 members of the Bundestag —including members of all German political parties—to sign a letter in support of Söring’s request for repatriation. As an 18 July 2012 article in the Tagesspiegel newspaper by Mathias Meisner and Ulrike Scheffer put it: “Söring has no lack of lobbyists”. In the letter, the representatives “humbly” ask Söring to be paroled or transferred to Germany as a sign of “friendship” and an “important humanitarian gesture”.

They received no answer to the letter. Strässer, furious, declared that politicians in Virginia were “merciless” (knochenhart) and fueled by “sheer vengeance”. Yet, as the Tagesspiegel article reports, “German politicians are still doggedly pursuing the matter. The human-rights speaker for the government, Markus Löning [of the center-right Free Democratic Party], knows Söring personally. He is in constant contact by letter, and visited Söring in prison in February 2011.” Katrin Göring-Eckhardt, a leading Green Party politician and then-Vice-President of the Bundestag, wrote Söring a letter of support.

Reporters Meisner and Scheffer called Maja Liebing, a specialist on the U.S. for German Amnesty International. Liebling reported that Amnesty had bigger fish to fry when it came to human rights in the U.S.—for example, the death penalty. She also noted that Söring did not fall into another category of interest to Amnesty, as he was not a “non-violent political prisoner”. She then goes on to give one of the very few critical assessments of Söring’s claims to appear in the German media before 2019: “There are no indications that he is innocent”. It’s a bit unusual that a representative of Amnesty, of all organizations, would say something like this. Perhaps Liebing was frustrated by the fact that Söring’s case was attracting so much attention when actual injustices went unaddressed.

Karin Steinberger continued her one-woman campaign on Söring’s behalf, releasing articles on a regular basis. Each of them contained the standard litany of complaints about Söring’s trial. For example, Steinberger published a short interview with Söring on 17 July 2012 called “Crying? Not an Option”, which describes Söring’s trial thus: “It’s a case without witnesses, without fingerprints, there were errors, problems with the trial, biased judges.” Steinberger declines to inform us which new biased judges she has found. She returned to the subject on 29 October 2012, writing: “It was a case without eyewitnesses, with innumerable errors at trial, suppressed evidence, contradictory confessions, biased judges.” Steinberger had never furnished her readers with any evidence to back up these claims, simply repeating them like a mantra.

As Söring’s case gradually became more prominent, Steinberger was soon joined by other journalists. On 16 June 2014, the German daily Die Welt published a piece by Susanna Zolke which is typical of the press coverage in Germany at this time. The title is “His First Love got him a Life Sentence.” The tone is, as usual, sentimental, focusing on Söring’s (and the author’s) feelings rather than facts, of which Zolke has only a loose grasp.

The first error comes in the first sentence, in which Zolke claims that Söring yearns for his homeland, the “Bonn of the 1980s”, even though Söring spent the 1980s in the United States. Zolke, who telephoned Söring in prison, then recites the standard account of the case: No witnesses, murder weapon never found, judge had been a “friend of the victims’ family” for 40 years. Söring was seduced by the “queen bee” Elizabeth Haysom, who murders her parents; Söring agrees to take the blame out of romantic idealism and because he thought he would be protected by diplomatic immunity. Newspaper articles before his trial refer to him as the “German Monster”.

Zolke then lists further complaints: The sockprint was “too small” for Söring, which was “scientifically proven” only after his trial. No fingerprints from Söring were found at the crime scene, but fingerprints from Elizabeth were. This doesn’t change the mind of the Bedford County authorities, who operate on the principle: “When in doubt, convict the defendant.” After this smug insult, Zolke quotes Söring’s then-lawyer Christian Mensching, who employs a rhetorical device which is also typical of coverage of Söring’s case. First, he says there are many reason to doubt Söring’s guilt. Then comes the pivot: Even if Söring is guilty, he has spent enough time in prison and should be released. Zolke then invokes a fresh trope, the “21-Day Rule”. Misspelling Tony Buchanan’s name as “Toni”, she notes he came forward in 2011 to provide exculpatory evidence for Söring, but claims incorrectly the courts didn’t consider it because Virginia says inmates can only submit new evidence within “21 days” of conviction. Zolke claims that by now (2014) 160 members of the German Bundestag have signed a petition urging Söring’s transfer to Germany. Like all other articles about Söring’s case until 2019, this one repeated Söring’s story, with no questioning, verification, or pushback.