Chapter 17: “That Article Started Everything” - Martyr or Murderer: Jens Soering, the Media, and the Truth

Until recently, Steinberger proudly proclaimed that it was her 2,700-word article in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung from 5 January 2007 which “started everything”. The article indeed contains almost all of the tropes which would dominate public perception of the case for more than a decade. Jens Söring’s case would come to define Karin Steinberger in the public eye for 13 years, earning her film contracts and accolades. However, it would also prove to be her downfall. Since 2019, when Steinberger’s work on the case began to be scrutinized, she has said nothing in public about Söring, even to defend herself against accusations of bias and misleading reporting. At one point, it seemed likely that Steinberger would tour Germany with Söring in 2020, the released prisoner side-by-side with the journalist/activist who had helped him regain his freedom. Instead, Steinberger has had to watch her reputation suffer as more and more German news consumers realized how much evidence of Söring’s guilt exists.

The 2007 article, “Forgotten Behind Bars” starts with one of Söring’s favorite tropes: identifying himself by his inmate number (179212) and a count-off of how many years, days, and hours (including time zones) he has been in prison: 20 years, 7 months, 4 days, 19 hours. Steinberger notes that Söring is eligible for parole and has in fact applied for parole, but claims everyone serving life in the U.S. will die in prison. Praising Söring’s knowledge of the American criminal-justice system, Steinberg says Söring knows that the U.S. prison system is “a gigantic business, often privatized and extremely profitable”. Steinberger seems to share Söring’s fondness for superlatives. Unfortunately, both she and Söring are wrong; only 8 percent of American prisoners are in private prisons, which are not particularly profitable.

Söring says there are 130,000 prisoners serving life in the U.S.: “130,000 people who will die in the custody of the state”. Also incorrect, since most of those prisoners are eligible for parole and many will get it. Söring says he has applied for parole and hopes to visit his mother’s grave one day. Steinberger mentions that Söring “had a dispute” with his father in 2001, but goes no further.

Steinberger then turns to Gail Marshall, who represented Söring during his last parole hearing. Marshall apparently agreed to continue representing Söring, which is all to her credit. Steinberger incorrectly identifies Marshall as the former Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Attorney General is a prominent elected statewide office which is a springboard to a governorship; in fact it is common for Attorneys General to resign to run for Governor. The Attorney General represents the state in legal proceedings, and employs hundreds of lawyers for this purpose. Gail Marshall was one of these hundreds of lawyers, not the Attorney General.

Gail Marshall would become Steinberger’s second source of information about Söring’s case after Söring himself. This is a problem: Steinberger’s two sources are both deeply biased. Gail Marshall is a zealous advocate and true believer in Söring’s innocence. Every comment she makes is deeply infected with spin, which is what one would expect from a committed, aggressive lawyer. Marshall tells Steinberger that Söring is only one of two clients she’s ever had who she believes were innocent, and tells the Parole Board that “some confessions are false, and juries sometimes make mistakes”. It is obvious Steinberger was convinced by Söring and Marshall, and assumed the truth of their claims without question. Steinberger’s lack of independent verification would come back to haunt her.

Steinberger conveys Söring’s complaints about prison life: it’s boring, repetitive, meaningless, a “shadow world” without true friendship, hope, work, or edible food. Söring then tells Steinberger his story: He met Elizabeth in 1984, whom he calls “the mistake of my life”. Söring tells Steinberger he confessed because he thought his immunity would protect him, which she relays without skepticism. Then comes this sentence: “As the questioning [by Gardner and Reid] became too uncomfortable, Elizabeth Haysom and Jens Söring fled to Europe. Steinberger here adopts four elements of pro-Söring spin: (1) She does not mention Söring’s refusal to provide forensic samples; (2) She does not mention that Elizabeth had already provided such samples; (3) She implies that the decision to flee the U.S. was a joint decision; and (4) she lists Elizabeth’s name first, implying that Elizabeth fled first.

The next sentence is again pro-Söring spin: “At first, both confessed, later they pointed the finger at one another.” More inaccuracies: Jens confessed first, on 5 June 1986. Jens also accused Elizabeth first, that same day, as an accomplice to murder. Elizabeth never confessed to personally killing her parents. Finally, Jens remained a confessed murderer for four years. Steinberger’s vague formulation serves a deeper purpose: It paints the competing accusations of Söring and Haysom as an insoluble “he-said, she-said” dilemma. The message is: There’s no reason to pay attention to what Elizabeth says, it’s all just a confusing crossfire mash of competing accusations. It’s an ingeniously indirect way of diverting attention from Elizabeth’s story.

Steinberger then lists the fateful “coincidences” which ruined Söring’s life:

[T]hese damned coincidences: that he met this woman, that he covered for the murders, that it didn’t happen in Germany, where the prosecutor would have asked for a maximum of eight years in prison, juvenile law, that his lawyer in the U.S. was incompetent, he was later disbarred. That this is a case without DNA, without evidence.

Steinberger simply assumes Söring’s story about covering for Elizabeth is true. She does not inform her readers that Söring’s claim of lawyer incompetence was rejected unanimously by all appeals courts. As for the case being “without evidence”, it is hard to understand what Steinberger means by this. If Steinberger wanted to examine the evidence which led the jury to convict Söring, it was all right there in Bedford County: the entire transcript of Söring’s trial is a public document which anyone can view for any reason. The judicial opinions of the courts denying Söring’s claim, which conclude his conviction was supported by “overwhelming” evidence, were all available online.

Two claims in this paragraph deserve extra attention because of their ongoing role in Söring’s story. We’ll call them the “juvenile sentence” claim and the “DNA testing” claim. Steinberger claims a German prosecutor would have agreed that Söring should be tried as a juvenile and that he should only serve eight years’ imprisonment, a curiously specific number. Neither statement is accurate. German law allows for offenders who committed crimes between 18 and 21 years of age to be tried either as juveniles or as adults. It does not require that they be tried as juveniles. In fact, it’s likely Söring would have been tried as an adult.

The relevant German law is Section 105 of the Youth Courts Act (German abbreviation JGG). It provides that when someone between 18 and 21 commits an offense, a judge shall apply juvenile law if:

1. An overall evaluation of the offender’s personality, including conditions of his environment, show that at the time of the crime, the offender was, in light of his moral and intellectual development, in a similar position as to a juvenile, or

2. In light of the type of offense, the circumstances, or the motives, the act appears to be the kind of misconduct typical of young people.

Let’s review Söring’s case in light of these rules. First, a double murder in cold blood is, one might hope, not the kind of misconduct typical of young people.

As for Söring’s “moral and intellectual” development, Söring was highly intelligent and well-read, had lived in four different countries, spoke two languages fluently, gotten accepted with a full scholarship to of the world’s great universities, had an outstanding academic record, had a drivers’ license, and was even allowed to drink. Söring’s case is the opposite of a case of arrested development. Had Söring been tried as an adult under German law, which was not just possible but likely, he would have been convicted of murder. Under Germany laws, an intentional killing will be classified as murder if the defendant “kills a human being out of murderous intent, to satisfy sexual desires, out of greed or otherwise base motives, insidiously or cruelly, or with means dangerous to the public, or in order to commit or cover up another crime.”

Homicide becomes murder under German law if it is committed “insidiously”—that is, by exploiting unsuspecting victims. That applies to Söring. Other potential murder definitions might also apply. So if tried as an adult, Söring could have been convicted of murder, which carries a mandatory life sentence with a minimum parole date of 15 years. Söring’s crime, however, could also have qualified as being one with “special culpability” as Söring butchered two people and showed no remorse. If the court finds special culpability, the presumed minimum parole date is 25 years. German courts would likely be reluctant to find special culpability for an eighteen-year-old offender, but it would remain a possibility.

The only source for Steinberger’s claim that Söring would have received a mere eight-year sentence for a double murder thus seems to be Jens Söring. Söring has every reason to misstate the law on this point, which he does. The most likely outcome if Söring had been tried in Germany would have been a life sentence with eligibility for parole after about fifteen years. In other words, almost exactly the same sentence he received in Virginia.

Now we turn to Steinberger’s claim that Söring’s conviction was unsupported by DNA findings. This claim is accurate. In 1985, forensic DNA testing was still virtually unknown, British scientists Alec Jeffreys was still refining his research protocols. When Söring was tried in 1990, DNA testing still required pristine, coin-sized deposits of bodily fluids such as blood or semen. At trial, prosecutor Jim Updike called an analyst named Elmer Gist, Jr., a supervising forensic scientist for the Commonwealth of Virginia, to testify about whether the evidence in Söring’s case could yield DNA results. Updike notes that samples in the Söring case had been submitted to Gist on 7 June 1989 for this purpose:

Q: And these items which we just listed were submitted to you on June 7th, 1989?

A: That’s correct, by Deputy Sheriff S. C. Rush.

Q: At this time through the Division of Consolidated Laboratory Services for the Commonwealth of Virginia, is the DNA analysis available to us here in Virginia at this time?

A: At this time it is, yes, sir.

Q: And the DNA procedure, without getting into any type of detail, is that the genetic fingerprinting procedure -

[Söring’s lawyer Bill] CLEAVELAND: Your Honor, I’m just going to note an objection, because this trial has gone on probably three days too long already, and I don’t —

UPDIKE: Objection.

CLEAVELAND: And don’t like to be interrupted with regard to Mr. Updike’s examination, but my only point is that I don’t see the relevance of going on at this point. He’s already asked and answered the question.

UPDIKE: I just wanted to identify what it was, first of all, whether the procedure is available now, whether it was available at the time. Counsel has made a point of trying to say what we did and did not do, and what was done since the time of the statements in June [1986]. This is something that has been done.

CLEAVELAND: Well, he’s asked the question, and the result was negative, and that’s—that’s all I have to say about it.

THE COURT: Well, I rule that we will not—we will leave it where it is, we’ll not go into this anymore. But I will ask counsel on both sides to please refrain from making side comments about the length of the case or anything that hasn’t got anything to do with the objection.

CLEAVELAND: I apologize to the Court.

BY MR. UPDIKE: (continuing)

Q: I would however, like to ask this question this DNA procedure, was it available here in the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1985?

A: No, sir, it was not, nor was it available anywhere in the world at that time.

Q: How long has this procedure been available in the Commonwealth of Virginia?

A: I believe approximately a little over a year.

This exchange is revealing. As soon as Gist even mentions DNA, Cleaveland intervenes to shut down the questioning. Söring’s lawyers apparently did not want the jury thinking about whether the brand-new technology of DNA “fingerprinting” might be relevant to Söring’s case.

Since the late 1980s, forensic DNA testing has advanced by huge leaps. Scientists have devised ways of amplifying meager samples, removing impurities, and refining comparisons. The decoding of the entire human genome in the year 2000 also had knock-on effects for forensic DNA testing, enabling yet more precise analyses. During the 1990s, DNA testing revealed that dozens of prisoners across the United States had been convicted for crimes they did not commit, sparking an anguished national discussion. As a result, many states passed laws allowing prisoners to request DNA testing of the physical evidence in their case, assuming none had been conducted before. Virginia passed such as law in 2001. It can now be found as § 19.2-327.1 of the Code of Virginia.

Söring was entitled to ask for testing under this law: No DNA testing had ever been conducted in his case, he was convicted before DNA testing had become viable, and there was much evidence in his case which might now be testable. Since Söring’s trial, advances in polymerase chain reaction (PCR) techniques, which are used to amplify tiny samples of DNA, allowed researchers to develop profiles from much smaller samples than was the case in 1990. The results could have potentially cleared Söring. Assume, for instance, that the Type O bloodstains were tested and found to yield a clear profile inconsistent with Söring’s or the Haysoms’ DNA, which matched a DNA database entry for a serial killer active in the area in 1985.

Questions would have remained about Söring’s statements, but this result would have been a major boost to his innocence claims. The same goes for a match with Jim Farmer or some other person Elizabeth knew from UVA. Clear matches with Elizabeth’s DNA drawn from bloodstains would also have been a major breakthrough for Söring. Any of the above results would have catapulted Söring’s case into the spotlight and convinced observers that his conviction was at least highly questionable, if not unsound. Söring thus had no reason not to request DNA testing under the 2001 law. The procedure for doing so was a simple questionnaire which inmates could, and usually did, fill out without a lawyer’s assistance. The testing is free of charge. Söring had nothing to lose: The best outcome could have earned him a new trial or even release from prison. The worst outcome would have merely been no clear results.

At least, that is the worst outcome in a universe in which Jens Söring did not murder the Haysoms. In a universe in which Söring did kill the Haysoms, the worst outcome would have been clear profiles drawn from bloodstains which indicated Söring’s presence at the crime scene. Steinberger complains about the lack of DNA in Söring’s case, but never informs her readers that Söring could have requested DNA testing at any time over the last 5 years before she interviewed him, but had not done so. Perhaps she did not even know about the law.

Steinberger now turns to a question many readers must have been asking themselves: If the case against Söring was so weak, why was he convicted? In sentences dripping with condescension, Steinberger explains:

It didn’t make a favorable impression back then as [Söring] sat in the courtroom grinning. The court reporters described this pampered German diplomats’ son as arrogant and snotty. No remorse, a double murderer who was said to have danced in the blood of his victims. They wanted a monster, so they saw one.

Steinberger does not inform her readers that Söring testified in his own case, even though this is one of the crucial turning points in his story. Nor does she point to any coverage in which American reporters call Söring “arrogant” or “snotty”. Steinberger here assumes that American reporters are as opinionated as their German counterparts (Steinberger herself being a good example), which is not the case. Steinberger says that Söring was accused of dancing in the blood of his victims, which is false. Steinberger then reads the minds of everyone in the courtroom, proclaiming they wanted to see a “monster”, so they invented one.

As usual, Steinberger isn’t reporting facts, but telling readers what to think. The claim that Söring was known as the “German monster” recurs incessantly in Steinberger’s coverage, and in many of the thousands of German news stories which have been written about Söring. In fact, Steinberger used the phrase “German Monster (“deutsche Bestie”) in the title of one of her later articles. Yet Steinberger does not cite a single article or commentator who ever called Söring a “German monster”, and none appears in searches of coverage of Söring’s trial. It is possible some excitable British tabloid scribbler once referred to Söring as a “German monster”, but no American journalist has ever done so. As always with Steinberger’s coverage of Söring’s case, we must keep in mind that it was almost certainly not Steinberger who invented this myth; she simply transcribed Söring’s claim that he was called the “German monster” without checking it. But by making the claim herself, she lends it new legitimacy.

Söring wants his supporters to believe that his conviction was the product of bias and prejudice, not evidence. The jurors found him guilty because he was well-educated, because he was arrogant, because he was the son of a diplomat, because he smiled at inappropriate times, and because Jim Updike’s “flashy theatrics” bamboozled them. And most of all, they convicted Söring because he was a German. Söring complained both at trial and in Mortal Thoughts that he was teased and taunted as a “Nazi” while attending school in the U.S. Later, he even claimed that residents of Bedford County, where he was tried, had a general antipathy to Germans because a large number of soldiers from Bedford County had died in World War II. (Söring fails to mention that the jury was drawn from a different County).

Steinberger adopts Söring’s own spin and once again invests it with her own legitimacy as a respected German journalist. In doing so, Steinberger reveals her own anti-Americanism. Steinberger asks readers to believe Söring was convicted mainly because the jury personally disliked him and harbored a deep-seated bias against Germans. In her view, the American criminal justice system is so arbitrary that it convicts people based merely on personal animus and prejudice against certain groups. By implication, American appeals judges are so blind or biased that they rubber-stamp these obvious injustices.

Steinberger’s article conveys no contextual information about the American criminal-justice system or how it operated in Söring’s case. She never tells her readers, for instance, how Söring’s jury was selected, what standard of proof the prosecution had to meet, what instructions the judge gave the jury, what evidence was used to convict Söring, or why American appeals courts rejected his claims. She merely recites Söring’s spin as to all of these questions.

Steinberger concludes her piece by reprinting Söring’s complaints about prison life, which are many. She claims that the books Söring published on prison reform are “not exactly the type of thing that will speed up parole”. Steinberger’s assumption is incorrect: Debating current events is considered an important step in rehabilitation. The idea that American parole boards will be offended by criticism of prison conditions is also naïve. Steinberger again claims that prison is a “profitable” industry, without explaining how paying to house, feed, and provide medical care and education in return for almost nothing of economic value could be profitable. Especially jarring is her claim, again presented without proof, that drug abusers and disabled persons are being “fed into” (unterjubeln) the “prison business” merely to boost profits. Americans as a whole receive another swipe from Steinberger just before the article ends: “Here, punishment is punishment and most people have no mercy and make no concessions to sinners.”