Chapter 1: Jens and Elizabeth - Martyr or Murderer: Jens Soering, the Media, and the Truth

— Part One: Murders, Confessions, Convictions —

Jens Söring was born on August 1, 1966 to German diplomat Johann Söring and his wife Anne-Marie*. Johann Söring was thirty at the time. Johann Söring had entered the German diplomatic service straight out of Gymnasium, the high school reserved for the most academically minded German students, and excelled at the special training academy for German diplomats. Johann Söring met his future wife at a diplomatic reception in the Netherlands, and married her in 1958. His wife Anne-Marie came from a prosperous German family with its roots in Bremen. Anne-Marie’s mother owned a villa in Switzerland and, as Söring would claim in a police interview, a copy of the Gutenberg Bible. Few photographs exist of Johann Söring, but images of him from Jens Söring’s 1990 trial show a balding man with a somewhat pinched face and a small nose, wearing small round glasses. Söring described his father as precise and efficient, but also remote and somewhat domineering.

The Sörings moved frequently as Johann Söring climbed the career ladder. The family moved to Cyprus in 1967, where Jens Söring’s younger brother, Karl*, was born. Johann was transferred to Bonn—then the capital of West Germany—in 1973. There, the young Jens Söring took fencing lessons. Johann Söring finally landed a coveted position: His next posting would be the German consulate in Atlanta, Georgia. The Sörings moved there in 1977. Johann Söring managed the West German consulate and was, by all accounts, an effective but strict leader. Jens enrolled in the Lovett School, a prestigious private school located on a 100-acre campus on the banks of the Chattahoochee River. Johann declined repeated promotions to enable his sons to continue their education without disruption. He was later transferred to the Detroit, Michigan consulate. He decided to leave Jens in Atlanta with Anne-Marie so that Jens could complete high school without the disruption of a move. By this time, most accounts agree, Söring’s mother had developed mental health problems aggravated by alcohol abuse, but was still able to function as a parent.

Söring’s classmates from the Lovett School remember him as bright but arrogant, with a sarcastic sense of humor. He was of average height and gangly, with full, pouting lips and long, center-parted hair. Weak eyesight forced him to wear bulbous glasses, further enhancing his nerdy appearance. Söring was intelligent—his IQ would later be measured in the mid-120s, among the top 5% of the population. Söring knew he was smart and didn’t shrink from letting people know—his tendency towards cutting remarks persists to this day. According to a 1990 article by journalist Amy Lemley, the mother of one of his classmates described him as a “real little shit”. Söring also prided himself on his eclectic and advanced tastes in books, music, movies, and art.

Yet Söring wasn’t an outcast. He participated in productions of Arsenic and Old Lace and Jonathan and played in a band called Ground Zero. In his senior year, he directed an amateur horror film with a group of friends. Lemley describes it:

“It was very rudimentary,” said one of those who participated. “We had cardboard tombstones and a fake coffin and all kind of things. The plot called for one of the actresses to be pregnant, and she was having her baby in the graveyard. It was a Rosemary’s Baby kind of thing. It was a hoot.”

But the father of one of the participants saw it differently. “It was macabre,” he said. “What really got to me was how serious Jens was about it. I hadn’t seen the other kids serious about anything.”

Despite his abrasive personality, Söring showed ambition and an ability to get his way by sheer force of will, something which would help him during decades of imprisonment. He was elected deputy class speaker in 10th grade and became a reporter for the school newspaper. In that capacity, he wrote an article criticizing the use of a supposedly cancer-causing additive in the orange juice served in the school, which earned him a suspension from his reporting job. In a later book, He later described this as a “key experience” which revealed to him the “power of the written word.” Söring also wrote an editorial in which he complained of being mocked as a “Nazi” because of his German accent. Söring took pains to erase as much of this accent as possible. Given his intelligence and way with words, he largely succeeded. Söring ended up with an accent which is a curious mixture of plain Midwestern American English, a slight German twinge to certain consonants, and occasional glimpse of British received pronunciation, doubtless influenced by Elizabeth Haysom, who spoke like a BBC presenter. Söring consciously avoided any hint of a southern accent, for reasons any aspiring cosmopolite would understand.

Söring did not have a genuine girlfriend during high school, instead dabbling in platonic relationships. He recalls his experience at the school prom as a “disaster”. In the summer of 1984, after graduating high school, Söring had a brief flirtation with a young woman during a three-week Mexican vacation, but this amounted to nothing. Söring would later tell investigators that later, while a student at the University of Virginia, he drank half a bottle of Kahlua and vodka to try to forget this affair, the result being a blackout, during which he tried to “attack” one of his friends.

Söring’s academic record at the Lovett School was outstanding, and teachers were eager to help him get into the best university possible. He chose the University of Virginia, not least because they offered him two scholarships—the Echols Scholarship, which offered only prestige, and the Jefferson Scholarship, which would pay his entire tuition. His initial majors, somewhat surprisingly considering his aesthetic pretensions, were Chinese and business management. He was set to receive an entirely free education from one of the world’s most prestigious universities. To paraphrase the 1986 hit from the band Timbuk3, Söring’s future was so bright he had to wear shades.

Elizabeth Haysom was born on April 15th, 1964 in Salisbury, Rhodesia to Derek and Nancy Haysom. It was the second marriage for both spouses, and Derek Haysom was 19 years older than Nancy, who had distant family connections to the Astors. Elizabeth had five elder stepsiblings, three from her father’s previous marriage, two from her mother’s. Owing to political turmoil, the family left Rhodesia shortly after her birth. They spent 1965 to 1968 in Luxembourg, Switzerland, and New York. They finally settled in Nova Scotia, where Derek Haysom managed a steel firm during a period of labor unrest. Elizabeth would later claim to have been assaulted by strikers. The family elected to send her to a boarding school in Switzerland. She would later claim to have been raped there by several French classmates at age 10. These accounts should be taken with a grain of salt, though, since Haysom has admitted exaggerating and fabricating some aspects of her past. She would later be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, one aspect of which is insecurity, an unstable identity, and a tendency to use extraordinary or implausible claims to seek attention.

Haysom spent her high school years at Wycombe Abbey, a prestigious and rigorous English boarding school where Princess Diana had also been a student. Haysom excelled in English classes and played tennis. However, she soon showed a rebellious streak, especially after her parents induced the school to enroll her in math and science classes. Derek Haysom wanted her to be an engineer. Her grades suffered, and eventually her parents relented. Haysom would later complain to Jens that her parents were intrusive and controlling; this episode could be seen as an example of this dynamic. Haysom was also apparently caught with drugs and accused of embezzling funds from a student group, resulting in black marks on her record. Her frustration mounted, and, together with a friend named Melissa, she decided to run away from the school. On July 1, 1983, they boarded a train saying they planned to go to a rock concert. Instead, they began a tour of the underbelly of various European capitals. They traveled through Germany, France, and Italy, experimenting with marijuana, hashish, and heroin, supporting themselves with odd jobs. They referred to each other as “Melie” and “Bunnie”. There were suggestions their relationship may have had a sexual component, but Haysom’s own statements on this are, like many other claims about her past, contradictory. Haysom later claimed to her University of Virginia classmates that she had encountered IRA terrorists on the run during her stay in Berlin. This claim would later play an important role during the interrogations of Söring and Haysom in June 1986 in London, England.

The nearly four months of total silence from her daughter took a severe toll on the Haysoms, especially Nancy. She sought every scrap of information she could find on her daughter’s potential whereabouts, and relied heavily on her circle of friends for emotional support. Elizabeth and Melissa eventually gave up on their odyssey on October 25th, appearing at the British Embassy in Berlin and asking for help getting home.

A friend of the Haysom family, an American army lieutenant colonel named Stuart Harrington stationed in Berlin, had been asked by the Haysoms to keep a look-out for Elizabeth. Harrington had spread the word around among his contacts, and they informed him that Elizabeth Haysom had shown up at the British Embassy. As Harrington later testified: “The night before had been very cold, they were out of money, had had a bad run-in at the place where they were staying in West Berlin which was essentially a commune-like occupied house, they had a bad time of it. I was told by the consular officials that they were in bad shape, it looked like drugs, other problems.” When Harrington met her, Elizabeth had a “Mohawk hairdo with a pink punk bit.”

Harrington immediately contacted Nancy Haysom, who was “naturally quite exultant” that her daughter had been found. Nancy Haysom told Harrington to tell Elizabeth that all was forgiven, any debts she had run up during her trip would be paid, and that her half-brother Julian, with whom she was close, would be in London to meet her.

Harrington hosted the girls at his home for “an intense” eight days. He said the atmosphere was tense at first, and he was concerned the girls might “leave and disappear into the underground in Berlin in which case I was worried about their safety, as to whether they would even survive it.”

Harrington described his interactions with Elizabeth:

“Yes, I did. It was clear to me from my talks with Elizabeth that she was a confused kid. She had serious problems about what she perceived to be a too well-arranged family life, perceived her mother as someone who arranged everything for her to a degree where at the age of nineteen she wasn’t comfortable with it.

It was also clear that she had an image of herself as a European and didn’t regard Lynchburg as the sort of place where she wanted to pursue her education.

And it was also clear, although Elizabeth didn’t tell me this, but it was clear that she had a very close intimate relationship with Melissa and that going back to Lynchburg would probably have meant a separation from Melissa. And while it was too uncomfortable for her to lay that on the table to me, and I could understand that, that was also clearly a motivation.”

We have a description of the first meeting of Jens Söring and Elizabeth Haysom from Söring’s own hand. It makes up the first chapter of a book which Söring published on the Internet in 1995 entitled Mortal Thoughts. Söring and his supporters have since tried to scrub this book from the Internet, for reasons which will become plain later on. But the Internet never forgets, so we can experience that fateful first meeting in Söring’s own telling:

I keep returning to the night I met Elizabeth Roxanne Haysom, picking over the memories again and again, searching for some meaning to all that followed. Everything, everything flowed from those first few hours Liz and I spent together: our grand, obsessive passion, the murders of her parents, the escape from Virginia to Yugoslavia and onto Thailand, our arrest upon returning to England, the extraditions and trials, and the inevitable appearances on “Inside Edition”, “Hard Copy” and “Geraldo Rivera”. But as often as I have relived that first night and the ensuing disasters, I have yet to find any meaning, any purpose to it all. Perhaps there is none.

Even this brief passage reveals aspects of Jens Söring’s personality which continue to mark him to this day: the unmistakable tinge of narcissism, the weakness for purple prose, and the conviction that his existence is part of a sweeping narrative infused with broader meaning. Söring then turns to the moment they met, at an August 1984 reception for honor students:

Elizabeth certainly did not look prepossessing, pale and skinny beneath her purple denim jeans and a T-shirt that would have been white if she had washed it more frequently. But the dubious impression created by her appearance was soon dispelled by her manner. Standing at right angles to [a fellow student named] Karen and me, she threw a sharp sideways glance in my direction, so she would not have to look up at someone [i.e., Karen] whose scholarship was inferior to her own. Then her blue-grey-green eyes turned back to the crowd, measuring everyone coolly from beneath the fringe of short, unkempt, dirty-blonde hair. One leg was cocked to the side, one hand rested on its hip, and the other hand slowly brought a cigarette to her lips for a long addict’s drag.

This passage reveals another feature of Söring’s personality—his hatred of Elizabeth Haysom, which still burns bright even as Söring enters middle age. In Söring’s alternate history of his own life, Elizabeth Haysom is the quintessential femme fatale, a term he and his entourage still use to describe her (Söring supporter David Flom would even refer to her as “the devil”). Like a conniving divorcee in a film noir, Elizabeth seduced him, manipulated him into taking the blame for her own crimes, then refused to lift a finger as he wasted his entire adult life in a succession of squalid American prisons. Every description of Haysom by Söring is laced with barbs like the ones in this paragraph: She’s “unkempt”, arrogant, aloof, snobbish, and—of course, an “addict”.

Söring, never one for subtlety, hammers the point home as the story unfolds: “Her secret was, I think, her innocent knowingness. That bored look as she blew smoke through her nostrils was designed to remind us that she was experienced, while we were merely fresh-faced ignorant teenagers, interchangeable in our eager naivete.” She had “the natural actor’s gift of enlisting her audience”; “Elizabeth began playing her piper’s magic tune again, but this time in a darker, melancholy key.”

Söring’s account of their budding relationship is, like everything else he has written about his life, a mixture of accurate statements and spin. In Söring’s telling, he attracted modest interest from other girls in the gifted dorm, but his fascination with the exotic, older Elizabeth only grew. He found, to his astonishment, that his feelings were requited. By November 1984, they were meeting daily, often in a campus snack bar called the Tree House. They traded grand theories and literary notions, and Elizabeth opened up about her past:

Of course Liz regaled me with countless tales of her travels in Europe…. She made it all sound like so much fun: sleeping on the beach in Italy with her lover Miranda, cracking open pay telephones to finance their heroin addiction, moving into a Hare Krishna shelter near Rome when the money ran out, living on lentils and curds and chanting Buddhist prayers at dawn, and running away again, this time to Berlin, to a commune near the old Reichstag and the Wall.

But she also revealed a darker side:

While attending an elementary boarding school in Switzerland, Elizabeth had been raped in a particularly brutal manner. Her whole life had been altered by this trauma, she told me. Soon after the rape she began abusing drugs and seeking physical affection from other girls at her single-sex boarding schools. Of course she found it impossible to trust others, especially men.

This passage highlights something else that must be kept in mind while following this story: Elizabeth Haysom’s tendency to invent and embellish is almost as pronounced as Söring’s. As the German detective Siegfried Stang pointed out in his 2022 book “Smokescreens”, Haysom would have been only ten years old when this supposedly brutal rape occurred, and it is hard to believe that such a horrifying crime would not have created a major scandal and triggered an investigation—none of which happened. Haysom would later admit that the incident (if it even happened) was more along the lines of indecent exposure, with no physical contact.

Elizabeth recalls the meeting in later court testimony:

I met him the very first day I was there, it was for the Echols Scholars there and I was introduced to him. And my very first thought of him was that he was very rude, he was very hostile, he was very aggressive, but he was also very brilliant.

And he was introduced to me as a Jefferson Scholar and as a German, and I think that appealed to me. The fact that he was European was very superficial, but I missed Europe and I missed talking to people who knew about Europe, and that was my initial attraction to him I suppose, because he was European.

By Christmas break in 1984, Elizabeth testified, she and Jens were “officially in love”: “He had declared to me that he was in love with me, and I had reciprocated that feeling.” A classmate, Eric Greenberg, later observed that while Elizabeth continued to flirt casually with other men even after this declaration of love, Söring had a very different attitude: “For Jens, it was almost pathological. I’m a great lover of romance, but his was his whole life.” Söring, as we’ve seen, portrays his infatuation with Haysom as the outcome of subtle manipulation on Elizabeth Haysom’s part. Like so much of what Söring says about his history, this is spin: A ray of truth forced through a prism of self-justification and special pleading. Elizabeth was clearly eager for attention from the peculiar, intriguing young German, and seems to have plied him with personal confessions and professions of love as a sort of experiment, to see how he would react. For the insecure, virginal Söring, however, Elizabeth Haysom blazed like a supernova. During the spring semester of 1985 and beyond, his behavior would come to resemble stalking: He synchronized his class schedule with hers, expected her to spend all of her free time with him, and left desperate notes when he couldn’t find her. A 1990 article by the journalist Amy Lemley describes the dynamic:

Denial is an instrument of sweet torture, and Elizabeth recognized in Jens the perfect victim, creating a reward system that shifted power over to her, Elizabeth loved Jens, but love for her “represented a form of pain, of complex manipulation and control,” she says now. Jens’ dependence was exhilarating; the tables had turned, add she was the sole object of devotion.

Elizabeth thought the relationship was too volatile to last, but she was wrong.