Chapter 3: Love, Manipulation, and Hate - Martyr or Murderer: Jens Soering, the Media, and the Truth

In speeches and interviews, Jens Söring claims he had “no motive” to kill Derek and Nancy Haysom. Indeed, none of the conventional motives for murder—such as greed, jealousy, or eliminating witnesses—applies. Söring does not fit the profile of a serial killer, and was not suffering from any mental illness which impaired his ability to judge reality. Fortunately, though, we have an excellent source of background information: Söring’s own words.

As we’ve seen, Jens Söring had already developed a fascination with violence and “crushing”, and had entertained strange fantasies about somehow causing the deaths of the Haysoms. Yet these musings, while disturbing, are far from concrete threats. To understand why Söring killed the Haysoms, it helps to look at how the relationship between Jens and Elizabeth developed in early 1985. Once again, our main sources are Jens and Elizabeth themselves.

A crucial source is the 11 December 1986 psychiatric report of Dr. John Hamilton. When he wrote his report on Jens Söring, Hamilton was Consulting Forensic Psychiatrist at Broadmoor Hospital, famous as being England’s main prison for mentally disturbed offenders, and a Senior Lecturer at the University of London. He was one of England’s foremost experts in assessing mental illness in the context of criminal cases. He was acting as a paid private consultant, and his substantial expert fees were likely paid by the Söring family, perhaps with assistance from the German government. Hamilton’s report was intended to lay the groundwork for Söring to plead “diminished responsibility” for the murder of the Haysoms.

Hamilton visited Söring on four separate occasions in 1986 at the Ashford Remand Centre and Brixton prison in the last half of 1986. On 11 December 1986, Hamilton filed his report. The report is a vital source of information about Söring’s background, mental state, and motivations. Hamilton was a friendly expert witness who was being paid by Söring’s own side. A convincing report from Hamilton could have ended up sparing Söring decades in prison. Söring thus had every motive to tell Hamilton the truth. Söring has never disputed the authenticity of the report.

Hamilton summarizes Söring’s attitude toward Derek and Nancy Haysom as follows:

Jens describes Mrs Haysom as being bizarre and [relates] how she had made Elizabeth pose in the nude when she returned to the United States at age 19 and later passed the photographs around [to] her friends. He also knew of Mrs Haysom’s complaints about her father poisoning her. Elizabeth told Söring that her parents were trying to ensure that she, as the only common child of the marriage would not make an unsuitable marriage as their other children had done. Soering had met the parents on two occasions at restaurants when they visited Elizabeth in Charlottesville. He had formed the opinion that her father was a “cold monster” and that her mother would humiliate the father in public.

Soering described his relationship with Elizabeth as being an obsessive one in which the pair of them became engrossed with each other to the exclusion of his other friends, leaving him no opportunity to test out the reality of their shared interests and beliefs. He describes his sexual relationship with her as being centred around her orgasms and that she always seemed to have a selfish need to obtain pleasure without any regard to his needs.

Another key to understanding Söring’s motivations was an extensive confession he gave to a German prosecutor. On December 30, 1986, Söring gave a full confession to the murders of Derek and Nancy Haysom to the District Attorney (Staatsanwalt) of Bonn, Germany, Bernd König. Söring was accompanied by his German lawyer, Dr. Andreas Frieser. The interview was conducted in German. A certified English translation was prepared and introduced into evidence at Söring’s trial.

During this interview, Söring said his relationship with Elizabeth was “of very special importance” because “first person, …who loved me and who gave me the feeling to be loved”. Söring says he viewed Elizabeth as a “goddess”. Söring then described his obsessive love for Elizabeth and hatred of her parents in detail (emphasis added during the following excerpts):

During the first 2 months or the following time Elisabeth and I spent every free minute from early morning until very late in the evening together. I hardly slept during the second term since we spent the whole time together, it was then daily, I would even say still more when we talked about her past; I was told stories about what her parents had done to her. Well, that she was raped in Switzerland and the parents neglected her, that even a social worker in Canada was going to take her away from home because she had accused the parents of neglect. Such stories came out more and more. I believe it is quite right that I hated the parents more and more, because I loved Elisabeth so incredibly. She was my everything. I can only very poorly describe what feeling I had for her. I would say that in the last month before this happened, there were talks, not very detailed, which arose from the feeling of hate. ‘Man, we must really put them [i.e., the Haysoms] into a car and let them roll down hill’. The matter with these conversations was that I, in any event, did not take them seriously and it is for this, that I also said that I did not drive to Lynchburg with the intent to kill these people. To this I should perhaps still add something, that I also was in the previous years politically rather left, always very much against war, against violent acts etc, and also wrote for a newspaper. I was the editor of a student newspaper. I always was critical of violence in TV and cinema. Violence was strange to my character, but I have hated these people also very much and these feelings of hate I have expressed in conversations through fantasy games, as for example one should put them into a car and push them down a hill. Something with a remote controlled bomb, burn down the house. During the last days I still remembered another thing. Something with a bath tub and piranhas. I remember that Elisabeth in fact called a pet shop in Washington and enquired about the fish. This was a reaction for me. I loved this girl.

I did believe her everything. I believed that the parents mistreated her terribly, abused and attacked her, and it was a way of releasing the emotions in fantasy games. It was nothing seriously meant. In hindsight I must say that I believe that on her part it could have been meant seriously.

König then quotes a portion of an interview Söring had previously given the English and American detectives in June 1986 (emphasis added):

You are supposed having said [sic] that you felt during the trip to Lynchburg hatred and anger for the later victims, the parents of your girlfriend, because they exercised pressure on your girlfriend to end the relationship. Is that so?

That is right without doubt. But this concerns a general feeling which was building up in me anyway over months…

Near the end of the interview Söring himself provides a summary of all of the forces in his life—including the alcohol he consumed on the night of the murders—led to him stabbing the Haysoms:

The way I see it, to say it cruelly, for many years certain problems have built-up inside me, which perhaps other people around their 18th [year] have, teenagers, etc. All these problems appeared to come to a solution when I met Elisabeth, and I believed that the relationship with Elisabeth prepared me for this matter and certain tendencies within me which led to this act increased and that the matter on this evening ended as it ended, since I drank alcohol for the first time after a long period and for me relatively much and that because of the alcohol all these things erupted and the entire anger and all these problems were discharged.

Jens’ growing obsession with his “goddess” did not go unnoticed among their fellow students. Eric Greenberg was also interested in Elizabeth, a fact which Elizabeth made no attempt to hide from Jens. As Greenberg recalled in a 1990 article by journalist Amy Lemley, things came to a head in December 1984, when Jens made a move to obtain Elizabeth for himself. Jens “confessed his love for her,” Greenberg recalls Jens telling him. Elizabeth seemed to fully embrace Jens’ advances. From that point on, the pair were inseparable. Yet the relationship was unequal, according to Greenberg: “For Jens, it was almost pathological. I’m a great lover of romance, but this was his whole life.”

Lemley goes on to note how after classes resumed in January, Jens “synchronized” his schedule so that the two could spend the maximum amount of time together. Elizabeth occasionally spent some afternoons away from Jens, only to return finding notes like “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for six hours.” Elizabeth was flattered and intrigued by Jens’s “love without lust” style of obsessive admiration, but attributed Jens’ unwillingness to engage in full intercourse to sexual dysfunction.

For her part, Elizabeth claimed she still allowed herself an occasional dalliance with other men. Elizabeth told Lemley that Jens seemed totally unaware of these trysts: “He didn’t perceive any other threat except my parents.” The word “threat” is revealing. As with his “pathological” relationship to Elizabeth, we see an imbalance in Söring’s feelings and perceptions and those of the people around him. During court testimony, Elizabeth summed up the attitude of her parents to her relationship to Jens:

They felt he was too young for me, they thought that he was very brilliant, they thought that he tried very hard to be courteous and gentlemanlike. They didn’t want me to spend too much time with him; they always advised not to single any one particular person out but to see people in groups and go out with various numbers of people, and they were concerned that I might be seeing too much of him, too exclusively.

She added that they had taken a similar view of her other love interests in her past. Yet Jens’ unrequited “hate” for them was growing.

One reason was his increasing obsession with Elizabeth. According to Lemley, Jens had become increasingly possessive of Elizabeth, wanting to travel in Europe with he over the summer and move in with her in the coming fall semester. She refused. Elizabeth’s parents, she would later recount, told her to use their supposed disapproval to curb over-eager suitors. She did just that, telling Jens that her parents disapproved of the plans to take a joint vacation and room together.

Elizabeth’s mother had arranged for Elizabeth to spend spring break (a week-long vacation period at American universities) of 1984 on a ski vacation with Howard Haysom and his wife. This further angered Jens; as over Christmas, he would be separated from Elizabeth during vacation. Jens responded by bursting into her room and saying of her parents: “I could blow their bloody heads off!” Lemley writes: “The fury behind this exclamation scared Elizabeth. ‘At that particular time, I took it seriously.’”

Elizabeth did go to Colorado in early March, 1985, just weeks before her parents would die. She sent Söring a letter handwritten on Ramada Inn stationery and dated 11 March 1985. This letter would play a crucial role in the later trials. It begins:

My Dearest Darling,

This is going to be a difficult and strange letter to write so I’ll make an effort to be legible and coherent. I love you very much, I know now more than ever how much I need you, how much I love you, how incredibly important you are to my life. I cannot conceive of life without you.

By now, it seems, Elizabeth’s feelings for Jens had deepened considerably. Elizabeth now goes on to describe the wealth her family possessed and the potential size of her inheritance. She claims that she will inherit a townhome from “her mother’s aunt” on Eaton Square in London upon the aunt’s death.

The only condition was that Elizabeth had to attend Cambridge or Oxford, behave well, and “do something for the betterment of mankind”. She tells Söring her parents were overjoyed by this future bequest but also held it over her head, constantly reminding her she had to follow the straight and narrow path in life or risk losing this million-dollar property. Elizabeth rebelled against her parents by running away to Europe: “I didn’t need their money or anybody else’s,” Elizabeth wrote Jens, “I took off to Europe to prove my point, how much I hated them. I would not sell myself for their easy money.”

Her parents, she claimed, intended to exploit their financial control over her indefinitely: “If they … didn’t like my beloved, when I was thirty-five, they could still say [that if you] go out with him, marry him…you will be poor.” She tried to “remodel” her “soul”, but they were still not satisfied: “But they only insist on more and more. They are now ruling over me because I’m a good girl. I will be rich, but until they die they will hold out … I think you are getting the picture. I have very wealthy parents who won’t give me a dime unless I act out their fantasies.”

Repeatedly, Elizabeth tells Jens she will never be free to live her life as she chooses—that is, by his side—as long as her parents are still around:

They are now ruling over me because I’m a good girl. I will be rich, but until they die they will hold out … I’m not prepared to act it out any longer. Why spend an entire lifetime chasing the carrot and being incredibly miserable when the carrot will eventually come your way. They can’t write me out of their will completely.

Her parents, she claims, have given her an ultimatum: If she goes to Europe with Söring over the summer, as Söring desperately wanted her to do “I can kiss lots of lolly [money] goodbye.”

She then declares her intention to simply break away from her life and go abroad, come what may, even if it entails forgoing a fortune (“I don’t give a fuck about money”). She understands this puts Söring in an agonizing position, because if he wanted to join her, he would have to sacrifice his scholarship and future: “I hated myself for deceiving you and for my own weakness. I couldn’t bear for you to reject a lifetime with me. Now I hate myself even more for the deception because it will cause you so much pain.”

She signs the letter “With love and guilt, anxiety, love, love, love, love, love—oh where have you led me.” There is an important postscript: “Promise me Jens ABOVE ALL ELSE—even if it means no more ‘us’, whatever it takes now—promise me you will not let me ruin your life. I’ve seriously fucked up on mine … I would kill myself if I discovered you were compromising yourself for me.” The 2016 documentary film Killing for Love would juxtapose these words with images of Elizabeth Haysom landing in the United States and testifying in court, implying that Elizabeth was here apologizing to Jens for “ruining” his life by testifying against him. In fact, this apology, as hysterical as it was disingenuous, was intended to spur Jens into action. Elizabeth was presenting Söring with a choice: Either carry on your drab existence of security and respectability, or throw caution to the wind and depart on a grand romantic adventure with the woman you love, and who loves you more than life itself. For someone as smitten as Jens, it was no choice at all.

There was only one problem: Elizabeth’s parents. Elizabeth admitted at her trial that “there is no other way to describe it, this letter was written to manipulate” Söring. However, she claimed her goal was not to induce Söring to kill her parents, but rather to persuade him to leave the university to embark with her on a life of adventure. Yet that explanation does not hold water. The letter also stresses her “hate” for her parents, which Söring by this time shared, and implied she would become rich after they died. Elizabeth’s references to invaluable London real estate, her parents’ wealth, and the fact that they had not changed their “will” to disown her, played on Söring’s desire for financial security. Söring, after the murders, expected them to have direct financial benefits for him and Elizabeth.

For Söring, the final straw came just one week before the Haysoms were murdered. Elizabeth spent the weekend of 23 and 24 March 1985 at home with her parents, while Jens remained at UVA. The weekend went surprisingly well—Elizabeth had long, constructive conversations with her parents in which they agreed to grant her considerable autonomy and financial independence. Elizabeth had been interested in learning German, and her parents had spoken to the head of the German Department at the University of Virginia about her spending the summer at the Goethe Institute in Salzburg, Austria. Elizabeth had also visited the German Department and learned about the possibility of a year-long internship at the United Nations offices in Vienna. Her parents approved and promised support.

As she testified in her 1987 trial, Elizabeth expected Jens to be delighted by this news:

I came back [to UVA on 24 of March 1985] and I was jubilant, I was overjoyed. And I steamed up to the dorm and I said it’s fantastic, everything that I have been working for, everything that we’ve talked about is going to happen … I told Jens I said oh, it’s fantastic, mamma and daddy said I can go to Europe for the summer and he said oh, that’s great. And I said, you know, I’m going to get to the [Goethe] Institute in Salzburg, and he said well that’s also great because I’m going to be with you.

Elizabeth cautiously approved, but noted that she would be working and studying and only available on the weekends. “But he didn’t see it that way,” she testified, “He saw it as—that it wasn’t what we were working towards, we were obviously working towards different things. I was overjoyed and he was very angry.”

Yet there was worse news, from Söring’s perspective, arising from Elizabeth’s weekend with her parents. Elizabeth told Söring that she had gained her parents’ consent to move out of student housing and into a private apartment for the 1985-1986 academic year, which would begin in September. Her parents had agreed to foot the bill, especially since her roommate would be a grounded, ambitious graduate student named Christine Tang*: “I would have the whole top floor to myself,” Elizabeth testified in 1987, “it was two rooms and a bathroom. So I had some privacy, which I craved.”

When Elizabeth told him she planned to live there alone, Jens was “extremely angry about that because he wanted to live with me in the physical sense.” The couple argued about these plans throughout the week.

Jens would get ahold of something and go on and on about it and he would try and persuade me why this wasn’t right and that my parents were just pretending to be making concessions to me … he was very angry. He felt that I was letting him down, abandoning him in some way.

The discussions would continue throughout the week leading up to the murders of Derek and Nancy Haysom.

The motives which led Jens to kill the Haysoms were complex, but they share a common foundation: His relationship to Elizabeth Haysom. British forensic psychiatrist Dr. Henrietta Bullard, who submitted a psychiatric report to the European Court of Human Rights, found that Söring (in the court’s summary of her findings) “was immature and inexperienced and had lost his personal identity in a symbiotic relationship with his girlfriend—a powerful, persuasive and disturbed young woman.” The court quoted Bullard’s view that “Miss Haysom had a stupefying and mesmeric effect on Söring which led to an abnormal psychological state in which he became unable to think rationally or question the absurdities in Miss Haysom’s view of her life and the influence of her parents.”

Jens Söring often says he had no motive to kill the Haysoms, that he did not hate them, and that they were not even particularly hostile to him. This argument shows Söring’s ability to craft arguments which sound plausible and even contain a kernel of truth. The Haysoms indeed did not hate Söring; they considered him just another one of Elizabeth’s boyfriends. For his part, Söring did not hate the Haysoms as people because of their treatment of him. Yet, as we have seen, he did in fact hate them, and said so openly, as did Elizabeth. He hated them because of what he believed they had done to Elizabeth, and more importantly, because of the danger they posed to his relationship with his “goddess”. He sensed that they were working to gently pry Elizabeth away from him, and that they were succeeding.

By March 1985, the Haysoms believed Elizabeth had outgrown her rebellious streak and developed more mature judgment. They showed understanding for her desire for independence and a willingness to help her realize her dream of returning to Europe, this time with sound prospects. As Elizabeth put it:

[Jens] certainly was unhappy with the fact that the weekend went so well, he was very unhappy with it—I was a little less reliant. We had been very, very dependent upon one another, I was certainly extremely dependent on him, but I was more dependent on my parents. And I guess it became obvious over that weekend that my parents and I had made a pact again, and I was drawing closer to them, and less likely to be so dependent on Jens. I was having a little bit of money coming to me, I was going to be able to do my own thing over the summer, I had plans further on down the road that did not include him, my housing arrangement, for instance.

If Söring wanted to keep Elizabeth in his life, he would have to relocate to Austria for at least a summer, and potentially a further year if Elizabeth got a UN internship in Vienna. That would scramble his own life plans and, worse, entail much less contact with Elizabeth than if they continued at UVA. Elizabeth’s parents would also help Elizabeth pay for an off-campus apartment, where Jens would be less able to track her comings and goings, in particular with men.

But there was a solution to these problems, from Söring’s perspective: “getting rid” of Derek and Nancy Haysom. Their disappearance would eliminate a force which was undermining her dependence on him. Elizabeth had suggested to Söring that if her parents were to die, she would come into a small fortune, enabling the two to lead the carefree bohemian existence both craved. Finally, and most importantly from Söring’s point of view, killing Derek and Nancy Haysom would create a bond far stronger than marriage between him and Elizabeth: Shared knowledge of a secret dangerous enough to destroy both their lives.

In his 1995 book Mortal Thoughts Jens, of course, never mentions his long conversations with therapists or Elizabeth’s testimony. In his version, early 1985 was a time when Elizabeth subtly sank her claws into him, literally:

And I loved being in her hand, oh, it was a downright turn-on! I still have to smile when recalling the shock of her hand on my crotch as we sat drinking wine in O’Halloran’s, the blood rushing to my face and loins. Pushing my glasses back up my nose I peered around the bar to see if we had been noticed. Simultaneously I reached under the table and tried to pull Liz away—but she refused to let go! A public wrestling match over my penis was even worse than her surreptitious groping, so I gave up. Instead I asked her politely to relinquish her hold on my member; I demanded; I cajoled; I begged; I pleaded. But Elizabeth just smiled and smiled.

Söring, as we’ll see, has a tendency to boast about how intensely carnal his relationship with Elizabeth was.