Chapter 28: A Hero’s Welcome, A Detective’s Report - Martyr or Murderer: Jens Soering, the Media, and the Truth

Meanwhile, I informed Constantin that not only would I be happy to defend my November article, I also thought I might be on to a scoop: I would convince Terry Wright to publish his report openly. I would then pen a long piece in which I would not only defend my previous conclusions, but also summarize the Wright Report. Constantin informed me that the deportation process was complete, and Jens Söring would be landing in Germany on 18 December 2019. Could I have something ready by then? I couldn’t write a detailed response by that time, so I chose to focus the 18 December piece on two new facts. First, I would confirm that a former Scotland Yard detective who took Söring’s confessions had written a massive report debunking his claims. Second, I would address perhaps the most fascinating and disturbing component of the report: Terry Wright’s revelation that Söring believed Annie Massie mutilated the Haysoms’ bodies after Söring had left Loose Chippings, possibly as part of a group occult ritual.

Terry suggested I identify him by the formal service designation of “London Metropolitan Police”, but I insisted on “Scotland Yard”, since every German knows what Scotland Yard. Terry reluctantly agreed. My 18 December article revealed the existence of the Wright Report and promised a thorough analysis later. For now, I revealed an aspect of the report which cleared up a nagging question about Söring’s confessions: What did he mean when he said he might “confess” to something he “hadn’t done”? Was this a tacit admission that he was lying to the detectives?

No. Wright spoke with Söring for untold hours in May and June of 1986. They developed a relationship. Söring seemed to like Wright. Wright had taken careful notes when Söring spoke to him, and clarified the excerpt about Söring confessing to something he “hadn’t done”, which his supporters invariably cited as a warning from Söring himself that he was in the process of giving a false confession. Instead, I showed, Söring was referring to the “atrocities”, which insisted he had not committed. If he were offered a plea deal which required him to accept responsibility for everything, including the “atrocities”, he was telling the detectives, he would contemplate doing so, even though he “hadn’t done” them.

The FAZ article appeared on the same day Söring landed in Germany. At Frankfurt International Airport, Söring was greeted by a throng of supporters and press. The supporters included Steinberger and Vetter Killing for Love, Bernadette Faber, a religion teacher and longtime supporter, Petra Hermanns, Söring’s Frankfurt-based literary agent, and even Peter Beyer, a member of the German Bundestag from the center-right CDU party. Beyer was also German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s adviser for transatlantic relations, and a member of the governing cabinet. Beyer, who had been helping Söring consolidate his support in Germany for years, stepped to the microphone to proclaim his “joy” at Söring’s arrival in Germany. Here, in news report, we see Beyer smiling at Söring, with Marcus Vetter filming in the background.

Beyer’s praise for Söring irritated some of his center-right colleagues. A 1 January 2020 article in Focus by Florian Reiter quotes Sylvia Pantel, a domestic policy speaker, saying she “wouldn’t have done” what Beyer did. A speaker for the center-right FDP party, Alexander Count Lambsdorff, went farther: “Mr. Söring is not a guest of the state, but rather a criminal who has served his time. That’s why Mr. Beyer—as a representative of the Federal Government—should certainly not have been present at [Söring’s] reception in Germany.” Beyer was asked to comment on the fact that Wright had written a report debunking Söring’s claims which was about to be released (as I had announced in my 18 December 2019 article). Beyer said that only someone “unfamiliar with the case” could say that. Reiter drily notes that Beyer is referring to Terry Wright, a man who “personally questioned” Söring.

Söring gave a short statement in which he declared he was overjoyed to “finally” be back in Germany. He thanked his friends and supporters, then announced that he would need time to recuperate and adapt to life in freedom, but that he would then return to the public eye. Söring’s return to Germany made national headlines and was featured on nightly news shows. Immediately after his return, Söring moved into an apartment in Hamburg, Germany provided to him by the “host family” he had mentioned in interviews before leaving the U.S. The head of the family was a respected German doctor, and the family was well-off. The doctor’s daughter was Söring’s primary contact. She collaborated with her family and Söring’s network of German supporters, giving him a place to live and helping him financially in the first weeks after his arrival, and helping to find lawyers and PR agents to represent him during his upcoming media campaign. Söring’s homepage soon morphed into a polished professional website, complete with a circle-shaped logo, professional headshots of Söring, and embedded videos and documents.

Meanwhile, in early 2020, I was busy working on my “rebuttal” to the letters from Chip Harding and the “Friends of Jens”. In all, the letters, which included a few insults directed by way (“clueless” being one of them) had raised perhaps 15 different issues with my November piece, all of them familiar. I now had a secret weapon to bolster my response, direct access to the Wright Report, with its innumerable quotations from source documents. I told Constantin that I would not only address every point in the two letters to the editor, but also summarize the report, and allow the FAZ to publish it for the first time anywhere. Needless to say, Constantin was interested. For the next few weeks I wrote furiously.

The article was finally published on 22 January 2020, clocking in at some 17,500 words, making it one of the longest articles the FAZ has ever published. After preparing his report for broader publication, Terry Wright generously allowed me to publish it alongside my article in the FAZ. I cited the report 61 times in my article. My piece starts out with a lawyerly explanation of the importance of Söring’s conviction being final. Söring had exploited every avenue of appeal available to him to challenge his conviction, and had lost each time. Every modern criminal-justice system has rules to safeguard the “finality” of convictions. Once a defendant has had a full criminal trial on the merits and that trial has been reviewed by appeals courts, the law presumes he is guilty—in legal terms, his conviction is now final. These rules are vital. Many prisoners file endless appeals, hoping to find a sympathetic judge. After all, they have all the time in the world to do so.

As a result, all legal systems proclaim defendants guilty after their conviction becomes final. If they permit additional appeals—many legal systems do not—the defendant bears a heavy burden of proving their trial was unfair. I quoted the 1977 U.S. Supreme Court case of Wainwright v. Sykes, which justified limits on appeals, stressing that the trial must remain the “main event”, not just a “tryout on the road” for later appeals. In 1971, legendary Supreme Court Justice John Harlan wrote: “No one, not criminal defendants, not the judicial system, not society as a whole is benefited by a judgment providing a man shall tentatively go to jail today, but tomorrow and every day thereafter his continued incarceration shall be subject to fresh litigation on issues already resolved.”

After his appeals were denied Söring had the burden of proving his claims. The burden is high: well over 90% of all criminal appeals are denied, both in the U.S. and in Germany, which has similar rules. This, I argued, is a good sign: It means that trial courts are generally getting things right. Wrongful convictions are a nightmare, but they are rare. According to the University of Michigan’s National Registry of Exonerations, there have been some 3,700 exonerations in the U.S. since 1989. Concern and outrage over these cases has prompted many necessary reforms. But it’s necessary to keep things in perspective. According to the Courts Statistics Project, U.S. courts process well over three million felony criminal cases per year. The vast majority are resolved by guilty pleas. Wrongful convictions do happen, and they are not always detected by appeals courts.

Contrary to what some activists claim, however, they are incredibly rare. University of Utah law professor Paul Cassell published a detailed analysis in a 2018 article called “Overstating America’s Wrongful Conviction Rate? Reassessing the Conventional Wisdom About the Prevalence of Wrongful Convictions” and concluded that the best estimate for the frequency of wrongful convictions is 3.1 cases per 10,000. The likelihood that Söring’s conviction was unjust was thus vanishingly small as a statistical matter. Söring’s fruitless appeals are another indicator. In genuine wrongful-conviction cases, it is common for at least a handful of appeals judges to write dissenting opinions arguing the defendant was unfairly tried. That did not happen here. Yet Karin Steinberger, and all other German journalists, brushed aside an appeals process which lasted over a decade as if it were a meaningless formality.

After clarifying the standard Söring needed to meet, I analyzed his claims. Like Terry Wright, I started with the DNA issue, to which Wright devotes almost 100 pages. Wright examines every test performed on every piece of evidence, and comes to the same conclusion the independent experts did: The male DNA found at the crime scene came from Derek Haysom. The 1985 blood-group tests which seemed to undercut that conclusion were the result of contamination. Blood-group tests can only be performed on human blood or certain other bodily fluids, and do not reveal gender. Modern DNA tests, by contrast, can yield results from any source of human DNA, including skin cells, skin oils, sweat, saliva, tears, mucus, or hair follicles.

This is why the 2009 DNA report does not even use the word “blood”: the DNA it found could have come from any one of these sources. While Söring struggled to the death with Derek Haysom, he wounded himself and bled profusely, as he told detectives. Blood, skin oils and cells, saliva, and sweat from Söring and from Haysom, mixed together, stained Söring’s hands and dripped from his knife. In 1985, imprecise blood-group tests indicated the two stains on the front door and front screen door were, overall, Type O blood. By 2009, however, the samples had deteriorated.

As we recall, by 2009, most of the samples were so degraded they yielded no DNA at all. The partial profiles from the 2 “unknown male” samples were from fragments of Derek Haysom’s DNA, which had deteriorated only partially, perhaps because it was contained not just in blood cells, but perhaps in a tissue or bone fragment which somewhat protected the DNA from exposure. The only other explanation was that two unknown males who shared numerous genetic markers with Derek Haysom had been involved in the crime. As I pointed out in Chapter 20, the odds against his were literally astronomical. There was, and is, no evidence of “unknown males” at the crime scene.

I now turned to the letters to the editor. I noticed something interesting about them. Neither the Circle of Friends letter (1862 words) nor the letter from Chip Harding (3482 words) mentions Tony Buchanan’s bloody-car story, which was a major theme of Killing for Love and the 20/20 special. As Söring later implicitly conceded in a 2022 interview with retired German police commissioner Siegfried Stang, his earlier reliance on Buchanan was a product of the need to advance any argument to gain release. Also memory-holed were the two drifters Shiflett and Albright, a focus of Söring’s appeals in the 1990s. One might have thought the new DNA findings placing two unknown males at the crime scene would have meshed perfectly with the murderous-drifters theory. Team Söring apparently did not.

The letter from the Friends of Jens began by noting, in wonderment, that nobody involved with the case had ever heard of me. “What is his expertise?” they asked. They called me ignorant (ahnungslos) and labeled my assertions “false” and “unproven”, and castigated the FAZ for publishing my piece without checking to see whether I knew what I was talking about. I passed over the insults and looked at their specific claims. Considering that Karin Steinberger—who claims she “researched” the case for over a decade—helped write this letter, its arguments were surprisingly easy to refute: Elizabeth Haysom’s fingerprints were found on a bottle of vodka: Yes, but they weren’t bloody, and could have been deposited at any time. None of the DNA traces pointed to Söring: True, but insignificant as most of the DNA was too degraded to yield results. Elizabeth confessed to the crime, saying “I got off on it”. This was a joke. The letter then turns to the sockprint, with the typical recital of Söring’s case: Hallett was a mere “belt and tire” expert, the prosecution told the jury the print fit Söring’s foot like a “glove”, etc. The letter also cites a forensic report from 7 April 1985 in which an examiner suggests the person who left the print had a size 6 ½ to 7 ½ foot (in American sizes), whereas Söring’s foot is 8½.

This, I wrote, was just one of those random anomalies that crops up in all complex investigations. What is important is not what qualifications Hallett had or whether a lab tech was able to correctly guess shoe size from a foot impression (which is very hard to do). What is important is that the jury was able to inspect the evidence first-hand and come to its own conclusions. Indeed, in Mortal Thoughts, Söring himself admitted that the “resemblance” between his footprint and the sockprint was “remarkable”. At the end of the day, I insisted, the jury had been able to inspect the relevant evidence, which showed that Söring could have left the sockprint. Updike’s comparison to a “glove” was apt since gloves can fit thousands of people.

The letter continues: Elizabeth changed her story and lied. For that matter, I countered, so had Söring. In any event, Elizabeth was cross-examined for hours by Söring’s lawyers, who highlighted her inconsistent statements, questionable motivations, and character flaws. The jury had all the information they needed to evaluate her credibility. Elizabeth Haysom wasn’t the “star witness” against Jens Söring—Jens Söring was. Howard Haysom thought Elizabeth was at the crime scene. But he had no proof, so his opinion was irrelevant. There was no mug at the Bedford interview, only a Styrofoam cup. This was irrelevant; the point was not whether the police actually had Söring’s fingerprints, but rather whether Söring thought they had them. His flight from the country is itself compelling evidence of his guilt: Fleeing the area or faking an alibi is classified under the law as showing “consciousness of guilt”. Neaton lost his law license and said he was mentally unstable at the time of Söring’s trial. Söring had two lawyers, and the whole world could judge their performance since the trial was televised. Further, Söring had raised this point on appeal and lost after a court found Neaton and Cleaveland had competently defended Söring. “Any criminal defense lawyer will tell you how hard it is to win a case when the defendant has confessed,” I wrote, “and Söring confessed not just once but several times.”

The Wright report drove the final stake into the persistent rumor that the FBI had prepared a psychological profile of the Haysoms’ killer. In 1985, Sheriff Carl Wells had suggested Bedford County might request a profile. In 2018, Stan Lapekas, the retired FBI agent, sued to obtain the FBI file on the Haysom murders. The file contained no report, but did contain a telex with the following information:

As I would later discover, the blank sections at the bottom of the document had been removed by a Söring supporter named Eva Beck at Söring’s behest. The reason? They identified the “possible suspect” as Mary Fontaine Harris, the ex-fiancée of Julian Haysom, who was later cleared as a suspect.

Leaving this information in would have distracted from Team Söring’s preferred narrative that the “FBI profile” had identified Elizabeth Haysom as the probable killer. The FBI agent (not profiler), Ed Sulzbach, had been interviewed in Killing for Love. However, despite clever editing obscuring the issue, Sulzbach never confirms that he completed a full psychological profile. Ricky Gardner, interviewed in 2017 for A Far, Far Better Thing, denied requesting a formal profile. To request a profile from the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, a local law enforcement agency must fill out long, detailed questionnaires. In Gardner’s words, it would have required “three college professors” to fill out the paperwork.

The detectives didn’t feel the game would be worth the candle. Whoever wrote this anonymous telex was thus mistaken. To mix metaphors, it was Terry Wright who finally drove the stake through the red herring of the “FBI profile”. He was in a position to do so because he had worked at FBI Headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, as a liaison officer between the FBI and Scotland Yard. He confirmed the FBI’s legendary obsession with record-keeping; the agency never discards any documents it has created. Since the Söring case was long closed, there would have been no objection to releasing a profile, especially in response to a request from a former agent such as Lapekas.

No FBI profile, Wright confirmed, because none ever existed. Ricky Gardner—who had told the Killing for Love team: “Chuck Reid absolutely misspoke when he said there was ever any profile done on this case”—was right. Even if an FBI profile existed, I added, it could not have influenced Söring’s trial, because behavioral profiles (which studies show are accurate only 50% of the time) are not admissible as evidence. Killing for Love never revealed this fact. The alleged FBI profile, mentioned in dozens of documentaries, interviews, and news stories for over a decade, had always been a pointless distraction.

Chip Harding’s letter raised many of the same points, but added a few others. For instance, Harding claimed luminol testing should have revealed blood in the rental car. Citing Wright, I pointed out that Elizabeth had cleaned the interior of the car twice, including with Coca-Cola, whose power against bloodstains had long been proverbial among American housewives. The car was described as “spotless” upon its return. Further, Chuck Reid had performed the luminol testing sometime after Elizabeth Haysom’s 8 April 1985 interview. Even if Reid had done so the next day, that would still have left 9 days between the Haysom/Söring rental and the luminol testing. The car might well have been rented out and returned several times, and of course would have been cleaned with powerful industrial cleaners each time. Siegfried Stang, the author of a 2022 German-language book on the Söring case, made a crucial discovery: Reid had actually performed the luminol testing on 25 June 1985, 87 days after the murders. The luminol test on the car was irrelevant.

I next turned to the supposed “errors” in Söring’s confessions, raised by both Harding and the Circle of Friends. The first was Söring’s inability to recall what Nancy Haysom was wearing. As we’ve seen Söring was essentially guessing about the answer, warning detectives his memory was “vague” and “confused”. The second error was the orientation of Derek Haysom’s body. His crime scene sketch shows Haysom’s body lying through the doorway between the living room and dining room when it was actually lying across the doorway. The position of the body was correct, only the orientation was wrong.

Overall, Söring’s description of the evening at Loose Chippings and the crime scene matched the crime scene well. Retired German police commissioner Siegfried Stang concluded that Söring’s confessions matched the crime scene 99%. As for the minor discrepancies, he came to the same conclusion any experienced detective or criminal lawyer would: They were irrelevant. Human memory is not a camera; mistakes and biases are a part of life. Veteran detectives and lawyers understand that every witness statement contains errors and inconsistencies, and develop a sense for which of these are important. Söring’s were not.

Terry Wright picked up on one part of Söring’s confessions which was particularly revealing. Söring told detectives on 5 June 1986 that he had returned to the Marriott Hotel with no pants on. We now know that the hotel’s cameras were not recorded. Söring did not know this Söring believed either that the detectives already had the tapes, or that they would shortly obtain them. Either way, Söring was trapped, so he decided to come out and admit the fact to show detectives he wasn’t playing games with them. Söring’s statement about the pants, Terry Wright astutely observes, cannot be squared with his claim to have only learned about the crime from Elizabeth Haysom. Even if there hadn’t been many other grounds for disbelieving Söring’s story, this one unguarded remark would suffice.

Söring confessed, I wrote, for reasons any criminal lawyer understands: He knew his goose was cooked. He assumed Elizabeth was likely spilling the beans a few doors down. He believed the police already had, or would soon have, tapes of him pantsless in the elevator. He knew his flight from the U.S. was evidence of guilt. He suspected he hadn’t been able to clean all his prints from the crime scene, as shown by his concern over the “coffee mug” at the Bedford Sheriff’s office. Now his fingerprints were in the UK system, to be followed at some point by his blood type information and foot impressions. The police had read the letters and diary, which he admitted during his 7 June questioning were “incredibly damning”. The alibi he and Elizabeth had tried to concoct was a joke.

Söring realized it was futile to claim innocence. So he pursued a three-pronged Plan B. First, he would curry favor with the police by being honest with them. He also ingratiated himself by immediately implicating Elizabeth; his revelations about her involvement got her to confess. Second, Söring wanted to convince the detectives he had not committed “the atrocities” against the Haysoms. Yet he could not explain what he hadn’t done to the bodies without admitting what he had done. Third, Söring wanted to build a defense of diminished capacity. That is why he stressed his extreme mental state and the cocktails he had drunk before the crime, especially (after lawyers’ advice) in his 30 December 1986 interview.

I also pointed out Söring’s readiness to defame other people if he felt it served his interests. German readers, for the first time, discovered that Jens Söring had accused Kenneth Beever of threatening Elizabeth, an allegation Söring had removed from his 2012 German book about the case. I quoted from Judge Sweeney’s ruling that Söring had lied under oath. These facts proved disturbing to many readers. Söring had accused Beever of serious crimes which could have cost him not just his career but his freedom. It was a calculated lie, delivered under oath. When not under oath, Söring was no more respectful. Söring had accused Judge Sweeney, Donald Harrington, Elizabeth Haysom, and Ricky Garder of perjury, and Jim Updike of prosecutorial misconduct. Last but not least, he and his supporters had painted Jim Farmer as a gay drug-dealer who had threatened extortion against Elizabeth and may even have helped her murder her parents. When it comes to protecting his interests, I wrote, “other peoples’ reputations mean nothing to Jens Söring”.

Söring’s conviction, I concluded, was the opposite of a miscarriage of justice. It was the result of careful, fair, and astute police work. Two law enforcement agencies from two countries had joined forces to solve a brutal crime. All of the detectives involved had earned commendations and promotions. So how had Germans come to believe the opposite of what had actually occurred? Because German journalists, most prominently Karin Steinberger and Marcus Vetter, had failed them. They had been blinded by Söring’s personal. They were also driven by anti-American bias, as shown in their contempt for the rulings of American juries and courts. They had relied on partisan sources instead of experienced law enforcement officers and appellate judges.

It is appropriate to give the last word here to Terry Wright, in a passage I quoted in my FAZ article. After 400 pages of painstaking analysis, citing hundreds of documents, Wright sums up:

During my research into what Soering has said since 1990, I read a draft copy of his book “Mortal Thoughts” circulated on the internet. Soering claims that this book is a true account of the murders but, almost every paragraph is either made up, or it’s a lie. There are so many lies, about so many things, that it cannot be a simple case of a differing opinion, or a different interpretation of the facts, Soering is clearly saying things that I know to be untrue.

But Soering claims that his book is a book of truth. He tells his readers that the account in his book is what actually happened. I was there during the arrest of Soering for fraud offences. It was me doing the investigation over the following weeks. It was me who asked the American officials to come to the UK to interview Soering and Haysom regarding the murders. I was there when Soering was arrested on suspicion of the murders, and I was there when he was booked in at the police station and later interviewed about the murders.

While he was in custody he was treated with respect, courtesy and exactly as the law prescribed. But Soering says this is not so. I know without any doubt whatsoever that Soering is lying about that. He was treated well, and more importantly he was treated according to UK and US law at all times. He was never denied any rights. What Soering says now, and what he said in his book, is just not true. He is lying, and there is no doubt that he is lying.

Virtually everyone who reads the Wright Report comes to the same conclusion.