Foreword - Martyr or Murderer: Jens Soering, the Media, and the Truth

I’ve known who Jens Söring was all of my adult life. I heard about the murders of Derek and Nancy Haysom in 1985, when their murders made nationwide news. I followed his 1990 trial, one of the first to be televised. Indeed, it was one of the reasons I went to law school in 1993. After graduating from law school, I represented death row inmates. During that job, I cited the case of Soering v United Kingdom, a 1989 decision of the European Court of Human Rights which held that Jens Söring could not be extradited to stand trial in Virginia unless Virginia agreed not to seek Söring’s execution.

When I relocated to Germany to become a law professor in 2003, Söring followed me here—students occasionally asked me what I thought about his case. I told them I hadn’t looked into it. That remained the case until 2018. By that time, I had left academia and started a career as a writer and translator. Like so many people before me, I was soon mesmerized by one of the most grandiose, perverse, and disturbing criminal cases in history. I finally published a long study of the case in one of Germany’s leading national newspapers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in November of 2019. By pure chance, the article came out the same day as Söring’s release from American prison, which made national headlines in Germany.

Since that time, Söring’s fate and my own have been inextricably linked—against both our wills. In early 2020, I was the only German-speaking journalist to have ever doubted Söring’s claims. Since Söring was trying to build a media career in Germany, people asked me to comment on Söring’s latest utterance, or defend my previous work. I gradually amassed an archive of original documents and media files. I also built a network of sources and contacts who had inside knowledge of Söring’s media strategy and goals. This book draws on these sources extensively.

Part I of this book dives into the facts of the case. Whenever possible, I will rely on the gold standard of historians: primary documentary sources such as police reports, witness statements, forensic reports, and trial testimony. I will also draw on prior reporting, such as Ken Englade’s 1990 book Beyond Reason and Amy Lemley’s 1990 article for Albemarle magazine “Misfit, Murderess, Martyr: The Changing Face of Elizabeth Haysom”. Another source is Jens Söring himself. He has published hundreds of thousands of words about his case in various books, letters, blog entries, and interviews, and I have read almost all of them.

Part II starts with a key turning point: Jens Söring’s testimony at his 1990 murder trial. During this testimony, Söring changed his account radically, insisting that Elizabeth Haysom, not he, had killed Derek and Nancy Haysom. The jury did not believe this story. Söring was sentenced to two life terms, and disappeared into the Virginia prison system. However, Söring had no intention of accepting his fate. Working with only pen and paper—and later a basic word processor—he launched a campaign to convince the outside world that his 1986 confessions were false, his 1990 trial testimony was the truth, and that he was an innocent man.

Over the years, Söring built support in the outside world, writing articles about spirituality, prison life, and his own case. He was smart, articulate, charming, and convincing. People wanted to believe his story, and more and more did. Eventually he could boast a galaxy of celebrity supporters including Martin Sheen, John Grisham, and a former President of Germany. Söring’s case was the focus of a 2016 documentary film, English title is Killing for Love, by German journalists Karin Steinberger and Marcus Vetter.

The film made the case that Söring’s 1990 trial had been a miscarriage of justice and that Elizabeth Haysom, perhaps with accomplices, had murdered her parents. Söring was convinced that the film, his celebrity support, and sympathetic press coverage would eventually force Virginia to release him. He was already planning his post-prison life: He would make a living as a writer and speaker, describing his wrongful conviction and denouncing the harsh injustice of the American criminal-justice system.

Part III starts with Jens Söring’s release from prison. On 25 November 2019, the Virginia Parole Board announced that both Jens Söring and Elizabeth Haysom would be granted parole. Each would be deported to their country of citizenship—Germany for Söring, Canada for Haysom. They would be banned from entering the U.S. for life. The Parole Board announced that after an “exhaustive” investigation of Söring’s innocence claims, it had found them meritless. On 26 November 2019, the day the news of Söring’s release reached Germany, Germany’s most prominent newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, published a 5,000-word article by me in which I challenged Söring’s innocence claims and critiqued press coverage of the case.

The timing was sheer coincidence, but it established me as the only German-speaking journalist willing and able to counter Söring’s innocence narrative, which had been adopted and propagated by hundreds of German journalists. Söring’s account was also challenged by Terry Wright, a Scotland Yard police officer who had taken Söring’s confessions in 1986. Wright published a 450-page report carefully analyzing Söring’s claims and finding them wanting. Nevertheless, Söring plunged ahead with his planned media offensive, signing book and film-rights contracts with a value well into the six figures. Söring appeared on dozens of television and radio talk shows and released a German-language book advancing his innocence claims in 2021.

Nevertheless, a growing number of journalists and commentators began publicly airing their doubts about his claims. As this book goes to print, two major documentaries—one by Netflix, one by the German national broadcaster ARD—are set to be released in early November 2023. Neither will uncritically endorse Söring’s innocence claims. I and other critics of Söring’s claims will feature prominently in both programs. It seems probable that after these documentaries are released, the public’s understanding of the Haysom murders and Jens Söring’s role in them will change irrevocably.

I’ve chosen to write this book without footnotes. For online sources, I have tried to provide enough information to allow the reader to easily find the original document using a search engine. I have also created a page on my website, hammelwords.com, with an archive of case-related documents such as trial transcripts, reports, and interviews. Every quotation in this book comes from a document I have access to or a statement someone has made to me. Some of the information in this book comes from confidential sources I have cultivated during five years of research.

German free-press law is notoriously complex and riddled with innumerable caveats designed to protect individuals’ privacy, reputations, and secrets. As a result, German journalists are forced to paraphrase documents, invent aliases for sources and subjects, and completely obscure the identities of anonymous sources. This makes German investigative journalism more opaque in its sourcing than is customary in the U.S. or U.K. Whenever I have created an alias, I will note that with a simple asterisk after the first use of the name.

Readers who wish to learn more about my sources are invited to contact me. If I believe the request is justified and made in good faith, I will be happy to provide additional background, subject to suitable confidentiality protections. I would prefer a different approach, but I respect German law, which has its own entirely legitimate cultural logic. I have used the original spelling of Jens Söring’s name except in quotations where it is spelled “Soering”. I refer to Jens Söring and Elizabeth Haysom sometimes by their first names, since there are many people named “Haysom” in this narrative.

This book draws on the insights and information of dozens of people. Thanking them all would require a separate book in itself, but I would like to single out Terry Wright, Eva Beck, Holdsworth, Ricky Gardner, Francis Wheatley, Phyllis Workman, Courteney Stuart, Rachel Ryan, Johanna Behre, Dr. Alice Brauner, David Ziegelmayer, André Hörmann, Lena Leonhardt, Ben Wozny, Siegfried Stang, Matthias Dell, Willem Konrad, Amanda Knox, and Chris Robinson.

I’d also like to thank those who have contacted me privately and anonymously with insights, feedback, and information. Most of them requested confidentiality, for reasons which will become clear. Commenters at my blog and on the German website allmystery.de provided an invaluable forum for testing ideas and tracking down sources. Needless to say, any errors or omissions in this book are exclusively my responsibility.