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

This book has told the story of a crime, a tragedy, and a failure. The crime is the brutal murders of Derek and Nancy Haysom. Their lives were cut short by a grotesque obsession they never saw coming. The forces unleashed by that act of violence tore apart two families. The only thing which mitigates the evil is that unlike in so many cases, the killers of the Haysoms were brought to justice.

The tragedy is the stunted life of Jens Söring. One complaint runs throughout everything Söring has said or written: This isn’t the life I was supposed to have. Söring’s supporters point to his many redeeming characteristics and decry how his talent and potential went to waste. Yet Söring can blame nobody but himself. His hamartia was a sense of arrogance and entitlement which he allowed to overpower his conscience. Söring is too smart to deserve forgiveness, were he ever to ask for it. He knew his thinking was becoming distorted beyond reason, but he did not confide in anyone or seek professional help. He recognized the cancerous “hate” eating at his soul and let it spread.

Ultimately, he concluded that murder was an acceptable price to pay to bind his “goddess” to him forever. After all, he wouldn’t be paying that price. During the four years in which Söring was a confessed double-murderer, the only reference to remorse was a brief hint at the beginning of his recorded 5 June 1986 confession. His descriptions of the murders are disturbing precisely because they are so dispassionate. Two elements show particular callousness. The first is the fact that he was more concerned about having accidentally run over a dog than he was about having intentionally stabbed two human beings to death. The second was his June 1990 request to Terry Wright, almost repellent in its chattiness, to send him copies of the travel diary so Söring could explore “commercial” opportunities from selling to “millions” of people the “divert[ing]” story of how he murdered two people.

The failure is one of journalism. It’s no exaggeration to say that millions of people have been deceived by Jens Söring and the journalists who covered his case. Time and again, journalists let their coverage be guided by class solidarity, anti-American prejudice, and a willingness to follow the late 1990s/early 2000s trend of seeing “wrongful convictions” in every criminal case. We are now witnessing the aftermath of the wrongful-convictions boom. Prestige projects such as Making a Murderer and Serial , once celebrated as (profitable) landmarks in true-crime journalism, have been exposed as misleading and sometimes outright deceptive. Killing for Love has long since taken its place alongside these supposed exposés of American criminal justice, which told us more about their creators’ prejudices and sympathies than they did about the system.

In my interviews about this case, I have tried to stress that I am not attacking Jens Söring, but defending the truth. Had more journalists been as diligent and courageous as Amanda Knox and Christopher Robinson, Jens Söring would never have been given a stage in the first place. His meritless claims, which have harmed so many reputations and upended so many lives, would never have reached millions of listeners and viewers. In a sense, Jens Söring was harmed most by the journalists who bought (and sold) his story. For decades, they helped him construct a house of cards built on delusion and defamation. Now—long after the journalists have moved on to other projects—it is collapsing.

The most frustrating consequence of the journalistic failure is the thousands of hours his supporters spent in the futile quest to prove his innocence. This effort could have been invested in investigating genuine cases of wrongful conviction, thousands of which remain to be discovered. Journalists should learn to judge claims of wrongful conviction not by a prisoner’s superficial charm or celebrity support, but by careful, impartial review of all the facts and evidence. If this book helps bring about that change in priorities, it will have served its purpose.