Chapter 38: Documentaries Galore - Martyr or Murderer: Jens Soering, the Media, and the Truth

As of late October 2023, Söring has been silent on social media for four months. On 1 November 2013 Netflix will release a documentary series about the case. The German title is Deadly Passion, the English one Soering v. Haysom: Till Death do us Part. Just before, on 31 October, the German national broadcaster ARD will broadcast a documentary on Söring’s case and his media campaign in Germany called Murder, Power, and Media. I will be in both documentaries as an expert on American law and on how Söring’s case has been perceived both in the U.S. and in Germany. In 2020, Söring told Small Town he thought Netflix would give him what Virginia Governor Ralph Northam had not: confirmation of his innocence of the Haysom murders.

He may be disappointed. Netflix interviewed me in the spring of 2022. The producer for Netflix, Arne Birkenstock of Fruitmarket Media in Cologne, had contacted me months before. I was initially skeptical. German journalists had already produced one shoddy movie about the case. Why, I asked Birkenstock, did Jens Söring seem to think the documentary would clear his name? Birkenstock assured me that Netflix intended to produce a balanced, fact-based series which would also address the evidence pointing to Söring’s guilt. Söring, he assured me, had no creative control over the project, and had only been paid a modest sum for access to his personal archives.

At one point I suggested that instead of an interview, Netflix film a debate between me and John Grisham on Söring’s case, at a place and time of Grisham’s choosing. Grisham declined. Eventually, I decided to give an interview. One of the directors, André Hörmann, picked me up in Düsseldorf and drove me to the nearby town of Velbert. Netflix had rented a restored 19th-century villa often used for historical dramas, and had even created an ersatz “office” including a “conspiracy wall” with case-related documents and photos. I met the other director, Lena Leonhardt.

Both Hörmann and Leonhardt were polite, earnest, and well-informed. They told me their primary focus was on the facts of the case, not Söring’s current media campaign. I told them that suited me fine. We spoke for almost seven hours. The directors’ questions were knowledgeable, and they gave me time to explain myself. Many of the questions seemed to be inspired by various theories Söring’s has floated about the case from time to time, but has since discreetly abandoned.

The interview with Netflix proved to be useful practice. Delivering arguments aloud in a conversation helps establishes out what works and what doesn’t. In 2023, the lessons learned from my with Netflix proved valuable. ARD, one of the two major nationwide television channels in Germany, had decided to make its own documentary about the case, to be released at the same time as the Netflix production. Their documentary, which would be ninety minutes long, had a dual focus. It would explore the case against Söring and his innocence claims. However, the directors, Ben Wollny and Willem Konrad, were even more interested in how Söring had used the media—especially the German media—to gather support for his claims from journalists, celebrities, and politicians.

We met for interviews twice in Düsseldorf. This time, the emphasis was on the media. I gave my view on German coverage of Söring’s case, which was none too complimentary. Journalists on both sides of the Atlantic, I argued, had been too ready to buy into the pre-formulated narrative offered by Team Söring. They had ignored most of the evidence produced during Söring’s lengthy trial—including his confessions—and the judicial opinions dismissing Söring’s claims. They had treated the statements of a fraudster and killer with a record of lying under oath as equivalent to the arguments of veteran law enforcement officers with impeccable service records. German journalists had allowed anti-American biases to infect their reporting on the case, suggesting without foundation that Söring’s case demonstrated deep-seated “problems” with the American criminal justice system.

The producers and directors contacted Söring’s supporters and the journalists whose work I had criticized to ensure balance. Yet by mid-2023, there were problems getting people to speak on the record on Söring’s behalf. Did they refuse because Söring instructed them not to cooperate, or because they no longer had confidence in Söring’s claims? A reporter I spoke to in summer 2023 for the German media magazine ZAPP even asked me if I could put her in touch with supporters willing to go on camera.

I suggested a few names, but she had already sent requests to those people and had either received no response or refusals. One key Söring supporter who had been at Frankfurt airport for his arrival in December 2019 declared (in the reporter’s paraphrase) that they wanted nothing whatsoever to do with Söring. I gave the reporter a few names of others who I thought might still be willing to openly support Söring’s claims. We’ll know if they came forward when the documentary is released.

Just as I was finishing this book, Söring’s narrative endured another blow: His supporter and friend Amanda Knox read the Wright Report. In 2007, Knox was an American exchange student in Perugia, Italy. One of the roommates in the house where Knox lived, Meredith Kercher, was sexually assaulted and stabbed to death by a man named Rudy Guede. Local police and prosecutors believed Knox and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, had something to do with the crime. After a coercive interrogation, Knox gave the police vague incriminating statements.

After a long odyssey within the Italian court system, Knox’s case ended with her exoneration by the Italian Supreme court in 2015. Knox returned to the U.S., married poet and novelist Christopher Robinson, and started a number of media projects, including a podcast The Truth about True Crime. As part of that project, Knox and Robinson had done a 9-part series on Söring’s case in 2019, which was entirely sympathetic to Söring’s innocence claims. I have quoted from this podcast several times in this book. Knox and Robinson even flew to Germany in 2022 to interview Söring for their later podcast, Labyrinths. That interview, called “The Ultimate Putz”, was described as follows:

When we first met Jens, he was still serving a life sentence for a double homicide he didn’t commit. We devoted a whole season of our prior podcast, The Truth About True Crime, to his case. Now, after 33 years in prison, he’s free, and rebuilding his life in his native Germany. We flew to Hamburg to meet him in person for the first time and to learn how he’s been navigating the labyrinth of freedom.

Knox and Robinson were not only supporters of Jens Söring but also friends.

That made it all the more surprising when, in the summer of 2023, I received a message from Knox. She said she had read the Wright report and wanted to get in touch and discuss the case with me. I was somewhat suspicious, since Söring followed my actions closely and had already sued me once. Was Söring trying to obtain information about my plans and projects through a proxy? Perhaps, but on the other hand, I had followed Amanda Knox’s various media projects since her return to the U.S., and she struck me as earnest and thoughtful.

I decided to respond. I soon struck up a lively email correspondence with Knox and Robinson. They had many questions about my experience, motivations, and views on the Söring case. In particular, they were interested in what I thought were the most important pieces of evidence against him. I responded at some length, happy to finally find supporters of Söring who preferred good-faith dialogue to silent stonewalling. I provided them with access to many primary documents, including the full trial transcript, and encouraged them to verify my claims.

During the interview, I assured both Knox and Robinson that I was not a reflexive defender of law enforcement, and was not a part of the “innocence fraud” movement, which regards almost all claims of wrongful conviction as disinformation concocted by unscrupulous lawyers and activists. I also assured Knox that I regarded her own case as an example of an unreliable confession and wrongful conviction. However, I maintained that Söring’s conviction was sound. He had given multiple confessions over time clearly explaining how, when, and why he had murdered the Haysoms. Given these confessions, the state was not obliged to prove his guilt from a baseline of nothing; it was merely required to find enough evidence to corroborate the confessions.

I argued that the evidence was more than sufficient. I also pointed out that all of the detectives and lawyers who had heard Söring’s confessions believed, at the time, that they were truthful and accurate. During their series on Söring’s case, Knox and Robinson had interviewed English confessions expert Andy Griffiths. I revealed to Knox and Robinson that I had secured Griffiths’ entire report—which Team Söring had never made public—and produced a 5,000-word analysis on my blog. Griffiths ignored my public and private invitations to respond to my critique, no doubt at because Söring ordered him to ignore me. Here, Robinson interjects: “This is in fact exactly what Jens told us. He said that Andrew Hammel was just like the guilters who profess that Amanda is guilty. He is a crazy obsessive hell-bent on ruining Jens’ life.”

The interview was cordial, but I wondered whether Knox and Robinson would publish it. After all, they still considered Söring a friend. Only one Söring supporter, Eva Beck, had ever publicly distanced herself from Söring—although dozens had reached out to me privately. Would Knox and Robinson, who had done so much to broadcast Söring’s innocence claims, have the moral courage to go public with their doubts? The answer, to my surprise, was yes. On 20 September 2023, they released Labyrinths episode 74, “Debunking Innocence”. They said the decision to publish the episode was the hardest one of their broadcasting careers.

Behind the scenes, Söring’s had pushed the needle in favor of publishing the interview. When Knox and Robinson contacted him and expressed their doubts, Söring reacted with typical paranoia and hostility. Söring sent Knox an email arguing that there was more evidence that she was a murderer than that he was. This accusation was as wounding as it was ludicrous. I concluded the interview by noting that Elizabeth Haysom had never contested her part in the murders of her parents, had accepted a 90-year prison sentence without complaint, and had used her time in prison to learn new skills and mend fences with her family.

Elizabeth, I had learned from her relatives, now lives under a new name in Canada and is thriving in freedom. The one thing she and her family wish for, more than anything else, is for the whole sordid business of the Haysom murders to fade into the background. Jens Söring’s continued media campaign was making that impossible. I urged Söring to accept his gift of freedom, focus on the future, and live out the last half of his life in comfort and safety in the small north German town where he now lives.

The podcast ended with Knox and Robinson’s reflections:

We reached out to friends in the innocence movement, DNA and false-confessions experts to get their opinions. We sought opinions from law enforcement and DNA specialists among our own patrons. And all these sources confirmed the skepticism we felt about Jens’ innocence claims. We also felt that we owed it to Jens to be honest with him. We reached out with that very difficult news, effectively shattering our relationship with him. But we also felt that we owed it to all of you listening out there, to Elizabeth, to the detectives and investigators in this case, and to Derek and Nancy Haysom. We may never know definitively if Jens killed the Haysoms, but we think there’s a lot of compelling evidence for his guilt after all, and very little in the way of exonerating evidence. We also think that after three decades in prison, Jens has done his time, and is no longer a danger to society. And we hope that Jens can someday understand our commitment to the evidence. to the truth, and our refusal to accept comfortable, easy answers.

I think this sincere, honest statement is a good way to end a narrative which has so often had to address the opposite of those virtues.