Chapter 25: A Skeptical Englishman - Martyr or Murderer: Jens Soering, the Media, and the Truth

Between 2016 and his release in 2019, Söring was riding high. He had the support of a millionaire political fundraiser and a former President of Germany offered to be his “mentor”. Hundreds of German Bundestag members had signed petitions supporting his release. Peter Beyer, the adviser on transatlantic relations to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Knut Abraham, the director of the Legal Department of the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. pleaded his cause at every opportunity. His team of supporters now boasted one of the world’s most famous celebrities, billionaire author of legal thrillers John Grisham. In late July 2019 Grisham met with Virginia Governor Ralph Northam to discuss politics and Jens Söring’s case. For 30 minutes, Grisham laid out what he considered to be evidence for Söring’s innocence. He urged Northam not to let politics influence his parole decision. Northam insisted he would not even imagine doing so.

Onlookers now simply assumed that Söring’s arguments must be legitimate—otherwise, why would all of these highly-qualified, prominent, intelligent people stake their reputations on them? The importance of Söring’s supporters cannot be overestimated: Especially from 2016 on, the first fact about Jens Söring news consumers were told is that John Grisham, Martin Sheen, the former President of Germany, and the current Chancellor of Germany supported his release. Söring’s case was now interesting and relevant primarily because of who backed him, not because of the strength of his claims.

On 3 December 2019, days after Söring’s release, Ricky Gardner joked bitterly to Tim Saunders of Roanoke television station WDBJ that he was the “last man standing” defending Söring’s conviction. Aside from Ricky Gardner, there seemed to be only one person left willing to publicly challenge Söring’s claims: “Holdsworth”, author of the blog Jens Soering—Guilty as Charged. Holdsworth had chosen his moniker based on the English jurist Sir William Holdsworth, author of a 17-volume History of English Law.

In reality, Holdsworth is a solicitor from an English coastal city. He had started his blog on 17 December 2017 with a post with the characteristic title: “The Many Lies of Jens Soering”. Over the next four years, Holdsworth would post once every few months. The posts overflow with quotations, citations, and weblinks. Every time Team Söring announced a new piece of “evidence” or a new podcast or show, Holdsworth published a critique. Holdsworth’s tone sometimes veers into sarcasm, showing his exasperation at the uncritical acceptance and enormous reach of arguments he shows are belied by the record of the case. Holdsworth accused Söring and some of his supporters of using two rhetorical tactics favored by conspiracy theorists. The first is “anomaly hunting”, in which a person “seeks to give enormous significance to small apparent discrepancies” notwithstanding the fact that they “mean little or nothing when judged against the bigger picture”. The second is repetition of the “big lie” until people begin to believe it.

Two things become clear from reading Holdsworth’s blog: He knows a lot about Söring’s case, and he has access to insider information. Holdsworth often quotes from documents which, although not confidential, are otherwise unavailable online. He circulated some documents for the first time to a wide audience. For instance, Holdsworth published the full psychological evaluation of Söring by Dr. John Hamilton, which provides invaluable insights into Söring’s motive for murdering the Haysoms.

Holdsworth also published the English-language transcript of Söring’s interview with the German prosecutor on 30 December 1986. This transcript had been introduced at Söring’s trial and became part of the record. However, there were only 5 or 10 copies of Söring’s trial record, and they consisted of large, heavy printed volumes. Some news organizations had transcripts, but after the stories were printed or broadcast, the bulky transcripts were usually consigned to some storage facility. Others with copies of the Söring and Haysom trial transcripts were either Söring’s own lawyers or his supporters. They were hardly going to release a document as damaging as a full confession made in Söring’s native language in the presence of Söring’s own German lawyer.

Holdsworth, however, had no such compunctions. For decades, the only documentation of Söring’s confessions generally available were brief snippets, usually provided by Söring partisans to prove one of their points. The standard approach in the Söring camp was to briefly acknowledge the “confession” and proceed straight to Söring’s “recantation” of it, without mentioning the four years which elapsed in-between. Now, anyone interested in the case could actually read one of Söring’s many confessions in full. Further, there could be no debate about the circumstances of this confession; Söring’s lawyer sat at his side as he delivered it.

When I read this document for the first time, I was plunged into confusion. For years, I had fed on a steady diet of mainstream news coverage, most of which suggested Söring had been unjustly convicted. Yet, as a criminal-defense lawyer, I had read hundreds of confessions including ones which were coerced or false. Söring’s confession to Bernd König was not one of them. Söring was relaxed and ready to speak, the tone was casual, even friendly. Nobody yelled at, lied to, or threatened Söring. He answered at length, volunteering far more details than he could have obtained from Elizabeth Haysom at second hand. After reading the December 30 interview, I—like thousands of others since—became convinced that Jens Söring had murdered the Haysoms. Which, in turn, meant his innocence campaign was built on sand.

The blog also painted a more balanced and humane picture of Elizabeth Haysom than Team Söring’s vicious propaganda. Since testifying at Söring’s trial, Haysom had avoided the media spotlight. Her priority had been to salvage something from her ruined life by focusing on rehabilitation, not media attention. In the 26 years from her 1990 interview with Amy Lemley to 2016, Haysom gave no major media interviews, refusing hundreds, if not thousands of requests. On 11 September 2016, Haysom broke her silence by giving an interview to Frank Green of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. She had gotten wind of Söring’s “new” DNA findings, and was frustrated: “I feel like there’s this juggernaut of propaganda ... and things are getting further away from the truth”, she told Green. She was loath to perpetuate “the whole he-said/she-said thing”, but she said she felt that Söring was “playing the system,” which is “bad for people who really are innocent.” Haysom then said that after “years of reflection,” she had concluded her mother’s actions toward her indeed constituted sexual abuse, and that this was a significant part of her motivation to kill her parents.

Söring pounced on this remark with glee. Speaking to Green by telephone, Söring said Elizabeth was lying because her hopes for parole rested on her denial that she was at the crime scene. Told about her new claim concerning sexual abuse, Söring said that Elizabeth had made a true statement “for the first time in 30 years”. He professed amazement that she would “admit” that the motive for the crime was sexual abuse. Söring then wove this admission into a fresh argument against his conviction. Elizabeth, he now charged, had committed perjury at his trial by denying that her mother had sexually abused her. Her admission that of this abuse furnished Elizabeth with a powerful motive to kill her own mother. This was a motive Söring did not share—at least to the same level of intensity—since Söring had only met Elizabeth’s mother once and, in his telling, had no strong feelings about her. Elizabeth has been lying about the facts because otherwise, Söring maintains, she would have to admit “to keeping an innocent man in prison for over 30 years.”

The self-serving nature of Söring’s response is clear. Nevertheless, given the favorable media climate, Söring’s claims probably struck some readers as plausible. Elizabeth, for her part, resolved to give no more interviews, ever. For one thing, any statement from her would inevitably result in news stories following tired “he-said, she-said” framing. For another, Söring would eagerly dissect her every word, twisting them to fit his preferred narrative. In conversations with her family, Elizabeth referred to Söring as a proverbial “tar baby”, referring to an American folktale about a baby made of tar, which sticks to everyone who touches it. According to Wikipedia, the term has since come to stand for “a problem that is exacerbated by attempts to struggle with it, or by extension to a situation in which mere contact can lead to becoming inextricably involved”.

Elizabeth broke her silence only once afterward, in an essay called “Reflections”, published on Jens Soering Guilty as Charged on 20 November 2019. Haysom begins by documenting the horrendous impact the notoriety of her case had had on the Haysom family:

Instead of being allowed to grieve or be angry, they have had to contend with an onslaught of public statements, interviews, articles, books, lawyers, film-makers—the full panoply of the true crime entertainment industry—as well as grotesque legal machinations stomping through their lives, their pain, their privacy. And for more than 30 years… Nor, mind you, has this intrusive barrage served the truth, but has abetted the evolution of a lie.

Elizabeth says she has followed many cases of wrongful convictions: “[I]n none of them did anyone resort to blaming or accusing innocent bystanders, especially when those people were no longer alive and therefore unable to defend themselves.” The reference to Jim Farmer is unmistakable. When she testified in 1987 and 1990, she admits, she “was not yet able to face the full extent of my reprehensible words and deeds”. Thus she invented “stupid lies about buying and taking drugs”. Jens, in turn, “fully exploited my moments of failure” to “fabricate his alternative history”.

Yet “Reflections” is not a plea for pity. Haysom says she has enjoyed “amazing opportunities”, learning to train guide dogs and working at a job in computer-aided drafting. She was able to complete her bachelor’s degree. Her main concern is the damage Söring’s innocence campaign is doing to her own family and friends, whom she describes as “remarkable people [who] have also forgiven me for my floundering and wavering as I bumbled my way to a better version of myself”. Haysom concludes with a plea to respect her family’s privacy:

I have been angry and deeply frustrated by the warped reality Jens has built around our relationship and around our crime, but in the ascetic cocoon of prison I have been getting on with my life, while at the same time my family has had no safe haven and no closure. And yet, because they are exceptional people, resilient and fair-minded, they have flourished anyway. Articles should be written about how they have coped and managed with such dignity, but my family would be too modest and too private to air their emotional grit. However long it has been for Jens and myself, it has been much longer for them.

Therefore I ask you, in the midst of all the melodrama of finger-pointing and blaming, in all the talk of pardons and parole—of who deserves what—to spare a quiet, gentle thought for all the victims: the truly innocent.

Elizabeth’s plea would not be answered; the Söring case would soon be back in the headlines owing to Virginia’s surprise decision to parole her and Söring in late November 2019. However, at least one of Elizabeth’s concerns would be addressed: Söring’s “warped reality” would finally be openly challenged. And not just in an anonymous blog, but in Germany’s most prestigious newspaper. On the very days the news of Söring’s parole reached Germany. And it would be challenged by me.