Chapter 16: The Horrible Year 2001 - Martyr or Murderer: Jens Soering, the Media, and the Truth

Söring’s loss in the U.S. Supreme Court in 2001 was a crushing blow. In his 2012 book Not Guilty! he attributed the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear his case to the Court’s preoccupation with the drama surrounding the 2000 Presidential election, which generated a case (Bush v. Gore) eventually decided by the Supreme Court in that year. This seems unlikely, given that the Supreme Court declines to hear 99% of the cases presented to it, and that Söring’s case had not posed any difficulties for lower courts. Söring had marched through all of the stages of the American court system. It had taken him eleven years. No judge endorsed any of his claims.

His only chance to leave prison alive was now either pardon or parole. That prospect was extremely remote for an unrepentant double murderer. However, 2001 was a landmark year for another reason: Söring lost the support of his remaining family members. His mother had died after a long illness in 1997, leaving only his younger brother Karl and his father Johann. Both had continued to support Jens Söring behind the scenes, arranging legal representation and sending money to Söring’s prison account, which he could use to buy extra food and personal items. In his 2012 German-language book Not Guilty! Söring describes the breach as a “surprise” which was “personally and emotionally” extremely painful for him. He even claims it threatened his well-being, since deposits to prisoners’ accounts significantly improve life behind bars, and without family support, many convicts lose all ties to the outside world.

Yet Söring does not reveal why his relations with his family ended. Later, Söring would tell us: The rupture was over his grandmother’s inheritance. Söring had long anticipated a windfall from his maternal grandmother. In his 6 October 1985 interview with Gardner and Reid, Söring told detectives hi grandmother was wealthy—she even owned a Gutenberg Bible—and that Söring was the only member of the family whom she liked. She was “old and sick”, Söring assured the police, and would likely die soon, leaving Söring a considerable inheritance.

However, she ended up living until 1999. What happened afterward is unclear. Neither Johann nor Karl Söring has spoken publicly about Söring’s case since 1990. Söring bitterly attacked his father and brother for using some legal trick or technicality to “help themselves” to his share of his grandmother’s inheritance. On an episode of the Amanda Knox podcast broadcast on 10 July 2019, Söring says:

In 2001, after 16 years, I inherited a bunch of money from my grandmother, and unfortunately my father and brother helped themselves to that money and I’m not allowed to say that they stole it, because it was all done legally, so these are men of honor. But somehow they ended up with all of my money and I ended up with absolutely none of it. And then I haven’t heard from them since 2002. Not one word. And I hope they’re enjoying all that money. It’s really funny. Again, you think you can trust somebody. I thought I could trust Elizabeth—wrong there. I though I could trust my father and my brother, I was wrong there, too. Oh well.

On 17 December 2019, as he was leaving Germany after being released on parole, he told Virginia journalist Sandy Hausman:

I have a father and a brother with whom I do not want any contact, because they broke off contact with me in 2001. I inherited money from my maternal grandmother, and I entrusted that money to my father, and then the two of them decided that it was theirs now, and they cut me off. I was stupid enough to trust my own father, and that was the second time in my life that I trusted the wrong person. The first time was Elizabeth Haysom, and the second time was my father and brother. And, uh, since 2001 I’ve made 3 attempts to reach out to them, and all three were rebuffed, and I have no desire to have any contact with those people unless they bring me the money back. They’ve had use of half-a-million dollars of mine—that’s what I inherited—for 18 years now.

Given Söring’s unreliability as a source of information, we can only speculate as to what happened. There may have been a legal obstacle to a convicted murderer receiving an inheritance from Germany. Perhaps Söring granted his father power of attorney to administer Söring’s share of the inheritance. Johann may have then asserted a claim against this share, on the not-unreasonable grounds that he had made massive financial and personal sacrifices to help his son, there were no more legal actions to finance, and a prisoner serving a life sentence was unlikely to have much use for a large cash windfall.

This is, of course, all speculation. What is clear is that after landing in Germany, Söring realized that every journalist would ask him how his family felt about his release. His attacks on his own family would now have to be swept under the rug. In Germany, he told interview partners only that his family had supported him admirably (vorbildlich) until 2001, when he had had an unspecified “falling-out” with his family. He then states that he does not wish to discuss details out of respect for his family’s privacy. Söring claims now to regret the breach, and hopes it can be healed. Unfamiliar with Söring’s background, the reporters to whom Söring told this story accepted his explanation at face value.

As of 2001, therefore, Söring was in a grim position. His appeals had been denied, parole was out of the question, and Söring had alienated his own family. As he reports in Not Guilty! Söring now had only two friends in the outside world, an American clergywoman named Rev. Beverly Cosby (who died in 2002) and a school friend from his time in Atlanta who at that time lived in England (presumably the University of Kent graduate student who had published Mortal Thoughts). Söring’s first action was to file another appeal, this time representing himself. It was rapidly denied.

In the following years, Söring concentrated on taking advantage of the opportunities prison life afforded well-behaved prisoners, taking jobs such as visiting-room photographer and librarian. Söring converted to Catholicism in Easter 2002, on the urging of Monsignor Dr. Bernd Kaut, a German priest who was the confessor for the German diplomatic delegation in Washington. In the court of his conversion, Söring claims in Not Guilty!, he formed a “very special” friendship with Bishop Walter F. Sullivan.

Söring also wrote. As he reported in Not Guilty, he wrote 48 articles in 2003 and 2004, which earned him small amounts of money. He also wrote books. In 2003, he published a book called The Way of the Prisoner: Breaking the Chains of Self through Centering Prayer and Centering Practice, which was published by Lantern Books. The book focused on Christian mysticism and meditation, and received favorable reviews by priests, pastors, and activists. In 2004, Söring published An Expensive Way to Make Bad People Worse: An Essay on Prison Reform from an Insider’s Perspective, whose title is self-explanatory. 2006 saw the appearance of The Convict Christ, which argued that solidarity with prisoners was a key Christian obligation and denounced the hypocrisy of American politicians who claimed to be Christians but imposed long sentences and harsh conditions on prisoners. Söring drew the themes of these prior works—Christian spirituality and prison reform—for 2008’s The Church of the Second Chance: A Faith-Based Approach to Prison Reform.

Judging by publisher blurbs and reviews on Amazon, these books were thoughtful and well-written, and inspired many readers. Söring now had an excellent reputation among religious figures and prison-reform advocates. As a rule, people in these circles do not focus on prisoners’ crimes or legal cases; their goal is to care for prisoners’ souls and improve their lives, not help them win their legal appeals. However, support from prominent outside figures can help prisoners gain parole. If Söring cultivated these contacts in part to try to improve his chances of release, there is no reason to blame him.

Nevertheless, a parole board is not a confessional. Parole board members invariably concentrate on one crucial question: Has the prisoner shown remorse? If a prisoner doesn’t admit guilt, the answer is obviously “no”. Prisoners who maintain their innocence do receive parole nonetheless, but much more rarely than prisoners who show remorse. Söring would not admit guilt, and thus could show no remorse. In fact, Söring showed no remorse even when he was confessing his crimes in detail. His descriptions are distanced and clinical, and always focused on his reactions and his feelings. The only time he expressed any remorse for murdering the Haysoms was during an early, unrecorded conversation on the afternoon of 5 June 1986.

Even as he was practicing centering prayer and writing books about prison reform, Söring was still proclaiming his innocence to anyone who would listen. One of those persons was the German Msgr. Kaut. Söring explains Kaut’s crucial role in Not Guilty!: “In 2007, after he returned home, Bernd spurred the first newspaper articles and television programs about me in the country of my birth [sic, Söring was born in Thailand]. And this publicity helped create a second network of friends and supporters—a second family—in Germany.”

Söring had recruited another supporter in Germany, Karin Steinberger. Steinberger, born in 1967, is an editor at the Munich-based Sueddeutsche Zeitung (“South German Newspaper”), one of German’s most prominent nationwide newspapers. According to Steinberger, she first met Söring for an interview in prison in 2006. Here is her description of that meeting, from a decade later: “Even back then, he had spent more than half of his life in prison. Even back then, he said: It wasn’t me. A German in an American prison. Jens Söring knew that in the U.S., a life sentence usually means: dying in prison.”

Either Kaut or Steinberger convinced a German talk-show host called Johannes B. Kerner to interview Söring in prison in 2007, and then later broadcast a show based on that interview. This crucial appearance immensely heightened Söring’s profile in Germany.