Chapter 22: The Promise / Killing for Love - Martyr or Murderer: Jens Soering, the Media, and the Truth

At some point after in the early 2010s, Söring landed a coup. Chuck Reid, a former Bedford County investigator who assisted Ricky Gardner in the early stages of the investigation, became an advocate for Söring. Reid had left the Sheriff’s Office in May 1986, a few weeks before Jens and Elizabeth were questioned in London, to work for a trucking firm. Yet as late as 2011, Reid showed no doubt about Jens Söring’s guilt. In an episode of the American documentary series Paula Zahn on the Case called “A Murder at Loose Chippings”, which aired in 2011, Reid said: “Elizabeth wanted them [i.e., her parents] gone. She found an individual whom she could manipulate and use to do her deeds for her.”

Before returning to Chuck Reid, it’s worth commenting briefly on Zahn’s short investigative feature. Zahn interviewed Söring. Like Kerner, she asked Söring a few probing questions, but—also like Kerner—she did not know enough about the case to evaluate Söring’s answers. For instance, asked to explain why Elizabeth would write about fingerprints on a coffee mug in the joint travel diary, Söring says she did so “specifically to incriminate me. That if I did not keep my promise to take the blame, she would have some kind of insurance policy”. Yet as we recall, at his trial 21 years before, he had dismissed this entry as “a joke”. And four years before that, speaking to Terry Wright, he had described the entry as notes for a crime novel he and Elizabeth were planning to write.

Söring tells Zahn his version of the conversation on the morning of 31 March 1985 Elizabeth, he insists, never described the murders. Instead, Söring claimed, Elizabeth urged Söring to guess how she had killed her parents, then she would tell him whether he was on the right track. Zahn says: “[That] sounds absolutely ridiculous to me. It’s hard to imagine that if someone has just committed a murder, that they’d sit down with you, and you would play-act through some plausible explanations of what had happened.” Söring can only insist: “That’s what we did.” Gail Marshall makes another appearance: “This was a terrible trial. This was a very unfair trial.” When Söring claims that the 2009 DNA testing “clears” him, Zahn points that it also “clears” Elizabeth (as her DNA was also not found at the crime scene) and that most of the samples yielded nothing. Asked whether he believes he’ll go free one day, Söring says “I have absolutely zero faith in the court system. They have bitterly disappointed me.”

As of 2011, Chuck Reid apparently still believed Söring was guilty. Sometime afterwards, he changed his mind. He then became the star of “Killing for Love”, a documentary which shapes perceptions of the Söring case to this day. The co-directors of the documentary were Karin Steinberger and Marcus Vetter, a documentary filmmaker based in Dortmund, Germany. The two had previously collaborated on a documentary about the 2008 financial crisis. While in the U.S. in 2013, Steinberger suggested she and Vetter interview a prisoner named Jens Söring, with whom she had been corresponding for years. They drove to Virginia and interviewed Söring. Steinberger told Vetter that she had been “bowled over” (geflasht) by meeting Söring. That interview became the spine of the documentary Killing for Love), released in Germany in 2016 and worldwide in 2017. It was featured in the BBC documentary series “Storyville” in 2017, and is still available on streaming platforms.

In a 2016 article for the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Steinberger wrote she had been working on this documentary for three years. It starts with footage of a rural Virginia road with the strains of “I put a spell on you”, foreshadowing the film’s portrayal of Elizabeth Haysom as Lady Macbeth. The interview with Söring takes place in German in a meeting room at Buckingham, with two visibly bored prison guards in attendance. Söring tells his story without interruption or follow-up questions. The filmmakers’ questions are edited out. Excerpts of Jens and Elizabeth’s letters are read by actors Imogen Poots and Daniel Brühl. The only figure in the movie who presents doubts about Söring’s claims is Ricky Gardner, who, as usual, is seen in only a few brief, isolated excerpts.

The stars of Killing for Love are, in order, Jens Söring, Chuck Reid, Gail Marshall, and Dave Watson, a private investigator hired by Gail Ball, who had represented Söring since 2010. who altogether account for perhaps half of the interview footage. Söring recites his account, which is by now familiar. We also see video excerpts from both trials, local news coverage, and fragments of an episode of Larry King Live featuring guests Robert Showalter and Ken Englade. Reid now says that during the October 1985 interview, he’d thought: “There’s no way this little boy could have done something like that”. Since Reid had left the Sheriff’s Office before Söring confessed, he missed his change to learn how the ”little boy” had, in fact, “done something like that”. One of the main themes of Killing is Reid’s fruitless search for a mythical FBI profile created during the initial investigation.

Steinberger and Vetter claim their goal was objectivity, but the film was clearly intended to bolster Söring’s innocence claims. The primary technique the filmmakers use is selective editing. Of the hundreds of hours of footage of the Haysom and Söring trials, we are shown only snippets designed to make Elizabeth look evasive and vindictive and Söring sympathetic. Jim Updike is shown marching up and down the courtroom gesticulating, bolstering Söring’s description of his “flashy theatrics”. Judge William Sweeney is often shown grimacing or looking bored. We also see the Haysom children and some family friends in the courtroom gallery.

Yet the makers of Killing for Love went farther. The first example occurs about seven minutes into the film. Söring, with a pained and thoughtful expression, saying: “I have destroyed my life. I have destroyed my parents’ lives. I have brought so much sorrow to so many people…because I thought it was about love. But the love didn’t exist.” We then cut to Elizabeth Haysom departing from the plane which returned her to the United States in 1987. While handwritten letters are shown onscreen, Imogen Poots reads in Elizabeth’s voice:

My dearest Jens, the days go so slowly. It is time to risk all for the truth. You will not forgive me. Hate me, hit me, whatever but please hug me when we meet. Promise me Jens, whatever it takes now, promise [“PROMISE” is written in all caps] me you will not let me ruin your life. I’ve seriously fucked up on mine. Don’t let me destroy yours. This is the first real and good thing I have ever done. I would kill myself if I found you were compromising yourself for me. Don’t do it. Elizabeth.

Jens, sadder and wiser, comments: “Retrospectively, I know that I never knew this woman.” We then see Haysom testifying at her own trial. The viewer is invited to believe the excerpts from Haysom’s letter had something to do with the “promise” Jens Söring made to her. In fact, the excerpts are from the 11 March 1985 “Ramada Inn” letter discussed above in Chapter 3. Haysom is not asking Söring to take the blame for her murders—which had not yet happened when she was writing—she is asking him to contemplate running away with her to Europe.

The documentary also shows another tiny clip from an episode of the nationally televised American talk show Larry King Live featuring Ken Englade and Robert Showalter. Englade isn’t even allowed to speak. Showalter is shown saying Elizabeth has borderline personality disorder and that she complained about her parents’ controlling behavior. Larry King then says “it gets bizarrer and bizarrer”, before there’s a quick cut to trial showing Jim Updike asking Elizabeth: “Was there sexual intercourse between you and this man after you had attended their very own funeral?” The message is clear: Elizabeth is mentally ill and hated her parents, and might even be sexually perverted. The viewer is not informed that both Englade and Showalter, both of whom researched the case extensively, have no doubt Jens Söring murdered Derek and Nancy Haysom. Nor is the viewer informed that on the night of her parents’ funeral, Elizabeth was groggy from prescription sedatives, and claims that Söring forced himself upon her. Anything that paints Söring in an unflattering light ends up on the cutting room floor.

An even more blatant instance of manipulation is the documentary’s portrayal of Jens’ and Elizabeth’s questioning by London police. At about 35 minutes into the movie, we see Dave Watson listening to a tape player in his office and taking notes. The following exchange is played for viewers:

Beever: Tell me the truth, Elizabeth, you knew that morning that he was going for a confrontation with your parents.

Elizabeth: I did not know that.

Beever: And your parents were probably going to die as a result of that confrontation. You knew he was going to do it, didn’t you? Did you?

Elizabeth: I did it myself.

Beever: Don’t be silly.

Elizabeth: I got off on it.

Beever: Tell me the truth and look me in the face. You knew it was going to happen, and you were creating the alibi whilst he was committing the crime.

The English blog “Jens Soering Guilty as Charged” painstakingly analyzed this exchange in a 17 December 2019 post called “Killing for Love and the Doctored Audiotapes, Part 2”. The author, “Holdsworth85”, shows that this exchange was cobbled together from various isolated interview fragments—and not only from Elizabeth’s interviews. The filmmakers spliced in the phrase “Tell me the truth and look me in the face” from an interview with Jens. The intended effect is clear: Investigators actually heard Elizabeth confess to the crime, but their tunnel-vision focus on Jens led them to ignore this confession and force Elizabeth back to the approved “official” version.

The documentary also wants to convince viewers to believe that Söring didn’t know what clothes Nancy Haysom was wearing, bolstering his false-confession claim. To that end, the filmmakers splice fragments of the interview tapes to make it seem as if Söring, when he was questioned about Nancy Haysom’s clothing, immediately answered “I think Mrs. Haysom was wearing jeans”. Simultaneously, the movie shows a crime-scene photo of Nancy Haysom lying on the floor in a dark-blue housecoat with floral appliques. As we saw above, this was Söring’s actual answer:

Soering: “What they were wearing… [long pause] … That’s a, that’s a very hard question. Let me try to think. I think, I think Ms. Haysom was wearing jeans… I think, uh.. but I.. like I said, um… it’s… I would say that part of it is very… very confused.”

Wright: “It’s vague?”

Soering: “Yes, very.”

The audience was left with the misleading impression that Söring’s mistake was immediate and spontaneous. Holdsworth85, after carefully documenting the directors’ manipulations of the source material, came to a withering conclusion:

All in all, the audio sequences played in Killing for Love represent an extraordinary effort to distort, mislead, manipulate and even fabricate evidence in support of Jens Soering. Not for the first time we see that no lie and no deception is too great in the service of his bogus innocence claim, but perhaps that’s inevitable. The truth is unbearable for all his supporters and therefore has to be suppressed at all costs.

Another example of manipulative editing, in this case relating to the FBI profile, will be addressed later in Chapter 28.

Yet perhaps the most sordid portion in Killing for Love is its assault on the reputation of a dead man: Jim Farmer. Farmer, the son of a Bedford County judge, was a fellow Jefferson scholarship student and friend of Jens and Elizabeth’s. Söring, of course, claimed Farmer was the “drug dealer” whom Elizabeth was going to meet in Washington, D.C. Elizabeth was afraid of Farmer, because if she acted as a drug courier for him, Farmer would be able to blackmail her by threatening to reveal this information to her parents. Courtroom observers were shocked by the brazenness of Söring’s lie. In Mortal Thoughts, Söring changed Farmer’s name to “Jack Bauer” (Bauer is the German word for farmer), repeating the accusations of drug trafficking and extortion against Farmer. In 2012’s Not Guilty!, Söring found another pseudonym for Farmer, “Jeff Ranchero” (Ranchero is the Spanish word for farmer).

Killing for Love decides to drop the pseudonyms and go after Farmer by name. We first see an excerpt from Söring’s trial testimony mentioning Elizabeth’s “drug dealer” Jim Farmer. We are then shown a black-and-white snapshot of Farmer in a suit and tie, at a Jefferson Scholars function. We see Farmer’s face, but the man to the right of him is blurred out.

The film cuts to Dave Watson in his office, researching online: “James Farmer,” Watson says, “there you go right here: He’s got a criminal record. But it’s probably traffic. Oh! No, possession of a controlled substance. He got jail time, too.” Watson then telephones Farmer’s father, who informs him Farmer is “ill”. Cut to a notepad with the words “James S. Farmer” and Jim Farmer’s date of birth.

In one of the rare moments of balance in Killing for Love, Ricky Gardner is permitted to observe, accurately, that nobody, including Söring himself, had mentioned Jim Farmer in relation to the Haysom murders until five years after the event: “This is coulda-shoulda-woulda hindsight.” After more from Söring’s trial, we return to Watson’s office, where we are shown a clear image of the funeral announcement of “James ‘Jimbo’ Sebrell Farmer, 48,” who died on “Tuesday, March 4, 2014”. Watson calls Gail Ball to tell her the news. Ball responds: “If he was involved in this thing, he carried [it] forever”.

Later we see Gail Ball, Chuck Reid, and Dave Watson sitting at a table outdoors, Watson smoking a cigarette. Chuck Reid says he now believes Elizabeth committed the crime with another person: “There’s no doubt in my mind some other people [are] involved.” Reid then sets out his new theory: Elizabeth drove the rental car from Washington, D.C. to Lynchburg. However, she knew that if someone saw the rental car at her parents’ home, they could trace it. So she deposited the rental car somewhere and got in another car with “some people”, murdered her parents with their help, then had them drop her off where she had parked the rental car and drove back to Washington, D.C. To make sure the viewers get the point, we cut to Gail Ball asking the group: “Can I ask you about Jim Farmer?”

Why did Reid need to invent a new theory about a car-swap? Because of Tony Buchanan, who plays a major role in Killing for Love. Buchanan tells his story about Elizabeth Haysom bringing a bloody car to his garage. While Buchanan says: “This is the guy I’m thinking was in the shop”, we see a picture of Jim Farmer, with the man to Farmer’s right blurred out

Moments later, Buchanan throws the directors a curveball: Instead of pointing at Jim Farmer, he points to the blurred figure at the right, who is identified as “Ned B.” Gail Ball then emails Ned B. to tell him Tony Buchanan “recognized you as the person who came to pick up a car that contained a bloody knife that was placed in the front seat”. Ball then informs us that “Jim Farmer, Elizabeth, and Ned [bleep] were in the same club at UVA. It was called ‘The Gay Club’. They had similar aspects to their lives and activities.” One wonders how much thought Steinberger and Vetter gave to outing Jim Farmer and Ned B. in front of a worldwide audience of millions.

Watson tries to interview Ned B. at a hotel where he works, but he isn’t there. Ned then emails Gail Ball: “I have no intention of becoming embroiled in this matter. I know nothing about the murders and have no opinion about the murders.” He would not allow his face to be shown or his name to be used. Christine Tan, by now a professor, refuses to speak with Watson and says she will call the police if he returns to campus.

Jim Farmer, alas, didn’t have that choice, as he died as the movie was being made, and is thus open season. We learn that he suffers from a chronic illness, Gail Ball tells us he was a member of the “Gay Club”, and his face, full name, and date of birth are displayed onscreen. We are also informed that he has a “criminal record” for “possession of a controlled substance” and even did “jail time”. We watch Jens Söring call Farmer a “drug dealer”, imply he was going to blackmail Elizabeth and even hear insinuations that he might have been involved in the Haysom murders.

This portrayal of Farmer would have invited civil and even potentially criminal action under German law, which affords individuals strict privacy protections which extend, in many cases, after their deaths. In the U.S., by contrast, the general rule is that a person’s rights to privacy and freedom from defamation extinguish when they die, although there are exceptions. I spoke to someone who knows the Farmer family to ask if they had ever contemplated legal action against the filmmakers for the portrayal of their son, who died at 48. I was informed that the family did not plan to do so. In their view, everyone would recognize these as desperate allegations from a mendacious murderer. Anyone who knew Jim would find them laughable.

There has never been any evidence at all that Jim Farmer was a drug dealer, or that he had anything to do with the Haysom murders. In 2022, podcasters obtained a sample of DNA from a Farmer family member which showed the DNA found at the murder scene could not have been deposited by him. The only reason Jim Farmer is involved in the case at all is Söring’s decision to slander Farmer during Söring’s 1990 trial. Söring needed to construct an alternate reality to pin the blame on Elizabeth, so he inflated her drug use. He needed a “dealer” to threaten and manipulate her, so he inflated Farmer from a college pothead to a sinister drug lord. Söring repeated these lies in books and interviews until he convinced people—people who should have known better—to take them seriously. Söring, his lawyers, and their staff and investigators spent hundreds of hours trying to scratch together a case against Jim Farmer. The only thing they accomplished was invading his privacy and besmirching his name.

The average viewer of Killing for Love had no way to assess the movie’s reliability. As of 2017, when the movie was widely released, all press coverage of Söring’s case was sympathetic to his claims to one degree or another. Reviews were full of praise for the movie and amplified its message that Jens Söring was framed by a corrupt justice system. The Internet Movie Database lists it as winning three awards and being reviewed by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Der Spiegel, and almost 100 other German and English outlets. The film currently enjoys a 100% rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes.

However, the rambling, elliptical structure of the movie and its total lack of background and context baffled many reviewers. In a 5 November 2016 review in the Guardian, for example, Kate Connolly conflates the rental car and the bloody car from Tony Buchanan’s story: “Why were no attempts made to track down the hire car Haysom and Söring had rented on the weekend of the murders, which was later found with bloodstains in it?” Connolly also asks why Judge Sweeney “dismissed” attempts to explore Elizabeth’s sexual abuse claims, although he did not do so. Referring to Tony Buchanan, she asks why he wasn’t called to testify at the trial, despite the fact that he came forward 21 years after the trial was over. Despite missing the movie’s core points, Connolly insists it shows that Söring’s trial was a “jumble of omissions and inconsistencies—and casts doubt on the veracity of his conviction, which was based purely on his initial guilty plea and the print of a bloody sock found at the crime scene.” Söring, of course, did not plead guilty. Connolly’s colleague Chitra Ramaswamy, writing on 8 March 2017, noted: “It’s hard to see what this convoluted film adds to the mystery beyond turning it into an entertainment.”

Error-filled reviews such as Connolly’s show Killing for Love isn’t so much a case of the blind leading the blind, but rather the biased leading the blind.