Chapter 32: Tailoring a Story for German Audiences - Martyr or Murderer: Jens Soering, the Media, and the Truth

Despite the Lanz interview—or perhaps because of it—some German reporters began to question Söring’s account. In late May 2020, I was interviewed for a media podcast called Medienwoche (The Week in Media). The episode was entitled: “Herr Hammel, Why are the German Media so enamored of Jens Söring’s story?” I told them that, in my view, it was a number of factors. First, the inherent interest of the story, which of course has been captivating true-crime fans worldwide for decades.

Another factor is Germans’ fascination with the American criminal justice system, which they see dramatized in movies, books, and television series. I tied Söring’s claims into a broader strain of anti-Americanism I had encountered among the thousands of German law students I had taught. Many believed that the American criminal justice system was so tainted by politics and populism that it was fundamentally unreliable. Jens Söring knew all about this anti-American stereotype, and was exploiting it in every public appearance.

To understand this attitude, we need to step back briefly and examine some differences between German and American criminal justice. German prosecutors and judges are civil servants selected from among the best law students by means of a rigorous examination process. The guilt or innocence of criminal defendants is decided by the judge. For serious cases, the judge is joined by two laypersons, but the lay judges agree with the career judge almost without exception. Because there are no juries in German courtrooms, there are few rules of evidence: An experienced judge, it is assumed, will know to distrust hearsay or question shaky expert testimony.

In the German prosecutorial model, the prosecutor is obliged to research every aspect of the case, regardless of whether it points towards the defendant’s guilt. The goal is to come as close to possible to understanding the truth of what really happened. German defense lawyers are not the aggressive partisans they are in the U.S. In fact, Germany does not even provide defense lawyers to people charged with low-level felonies—the assumption is that the prosecution’s duty to investigate all facets of the case, coupled with the judge’s duty of objectivity, is enough to protect a defendant’s rights.

German criminal trials, which I have attended, are astonishingly informal by American standards. A judge may interrupt a witness’ statement to ask the defendant whether they agree with what’s being said. A defense lawyer will often listen to the prosecution describe the importance of some piece of evidence and agree: “Yes, that sounds about right”. In one trial I saw, a man was charged with assaulting a police officer during a demonstration. The defendant himself told the judge: “Come look at this cellphone video my friend took”. The judge got down from the bench and watched the video on the defendant’s own laptop, pointing it outward so the parties and the visitors could see. The video showed that the defendant had only shoved the police officer because he himself had been pushed by other demonstrators. The judge dismissed the charges then and there, and the prosecution agreed.

Matters get more adversarial when the charges are severe, but never as adversarial as American court proceedings. Cross-examination is essentially unknown: The judge will decide whom to believe, and will only be alienated by courtroom theatrics. Much better to simply argue directly to the judge why a certain witness’ testimony might be unreliable. Most German criminal trials are, in other words, rather dull affairs. The expert lawyers—judge, prosecutor, and defense counsel, if there is one—invite witnesses, who tell their stories in their own words with no objections or interruptions. They then discuss the importance of what they’ve heard among themselves.

Most German criminal cases are resolved by confessions. Defendants confess because they are guaranteed a sentence reduction under German law for assisting the authorities. Defendants have little incentive to lie and deny, since criminal sentences in Germany are only a fraction of those in the U.S., or even the U.K. A realistic sentence for a first-offense armed robbery with a knife, for example, is 5 or 6 years. The defendant can reduce that by confessing, and, with good behavior, can expect to return to society in 3 or 4 years. German law grants prisoners anonymity after their prison sentence. Their criminal might be revealed during job applications or other official business, but nobody can search online and find out that you have been convicted of a crime.

A grasp of how the German system works makes it easier to understand why many Germans regard the U.S. justice system with mingled fascination and dismay. Although a majority of Germans thinks their own system is too lax, the decades-long prison sentences handed down by U.S. courts seem too harsh. Germans cannot conceive of a system in which judges are elected and ordinary citizens can change criminal laws—even introducing or eliminating capital punishment—with a simple referendum. Polls reveal that four out of five Germans reject a U.S. or U.K.-style jury system in the belief that untrained laypersons cannot be expected to reach accurate and fair judgments.

Yet disapproval is mingled with fascination: American criminal trials are the most dramatic the modern world has to offer. Unlike German lawyers, American lawyers are trained to be dynamic public advocates. Like all American law students, I was trained to make concise, compelling, arguments which might sway a jury or intrigue a bored appellate judge. We also learned how to cross-examine hostile witnesses: control the conversation with tight yes-or-no questions, listen to answers and probe for weak points, pause for effect after damaging revelations, never ask the ultimate question. After the testimony, the lawyer delivers a closing argument in which she distills the complexities of fact and law into a language laypeople can understand.

German coverage of American courts and prisons is uniformly negative. We have seen examples in this book, whether it is Claas Relotius inventing a woman who travels the U.S. indulging her drive to watch executions or Karin Steinberger dismissing Söring’s trial as a farce. German coverage of American criminal cases—and there is a lot of it—gives the reader the impression that the entire system is dysfunctional and corrupt, and that accurate and fair judgments are exceptions to the rule. Söring, of course, is aware of these German attitudes, and exploits them fully. Here’s an example, from Söring’s 2021 book Return to Life:

In contrast to my defense lawyer, the prosecutor in my case was a brilliant jurist. Updike successfully made me look like a fool during cross-examination and convinced spectators I was an arrogant snob. At the end, he gave a steak knife to the jury. Although it had nothing to do with the case, everyone felt a chill run down their spine as they imagined this knife might look like the murder weapon. With creativity and subtle psychological tricks, he was able to win the case despite the meager evidence in the case.

Söring’s arguments fit hand-in-glove with German prejudices. His testimony fell flat because of Updike’s showmanship, not the flaws in his story. He loads the presentation of the knife to the jury with sinister significance. In fact, allowing the jury to inspect the murder weapon, or one like it, happens in all criminal cases. It helps the jury answer crucial questions such as how to account for patterns in knife wounds or gunshot residue. Söring’s final ploy is to describe the “evidence” (Beweislage) as meager. Any lawyer who called five hours of recorded confessions and hours of testimony by a remorseful co-conspirator “meager” evidence should turn in her bar card.

Söring’s spin hammers home the message for even the dullest reader. Given how transparent Söring’s manipulations are, it’s alarming how many reporters have fallen for them. Following Söring’s playbook, they dismiss his confessions with a brief reference to his “recantation” and move straight to the question of whether sufficient “physical” evidence ties him to the crime scene. This violates the cardinal directive of the American legal system (and the German one), which Söring’s jurors were sworn to follow: A defendant’s guilt can only be decided by consideration of all the evidence as a whole.

Another key to Söring’s popularity among German reporters, I argued, lay in his personality, appearance, and manners. Söring, a thin, bespectacled man, does not appear physically threatening. He has no visible scars or tattoos. He speaks polished German. He speaks, dresses, eats, and exercises like an educated middle-class German. Reporters see him as someone like them. If his name had been Ali instead of Jens, I said only half-jokingly, interest in his case would have been more limited.

The interview with Medienwoche went well, I thought. It raised eyebrows, as it was the first German-language feature ever to present a reasoned case for Söring’s guilt. My FAZ articles had appeared behind a paywall, but this interview was open access, and the Medienwoche podcast has the ear of influential players in the German media landscape. After the podcast, I was contacted by reporters looking for guidance as to whether Söring’s story was credible. I was also contacted by more people who had inside information on Söring’s media strategy.

Meanwhile, I continued blogging about the case. I posted the entire audio of his interviews on 5 and 6 June in England and showed how Söring had gradually opened up under questioning in a classic “rolling confession”. I posted excerpts from Söring’s testimony at the suppression hearing in March 1990, in which he falsely accused Kenneth Beever of threatening Elizabeth. I published a chronology of how Söring’s story had evolved over time. I provided a summary and analysis of Söring’s cross-examination. I delved deep into the record of the case to provide context for Söring’s claims of judicial bias and ineffective assistance of counsel, and showed that these claims had been examined and rejected by multiple appeals courts. Most of all, I kept a running commentary on German and American news coverage of the case, scolding journalists who broadcast Söring’s claims without any attempt to verify them.

After the interview with Markus Lanz broadcast in May 2020, Söring dropped out of the spotlight. He had long had Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook accounts, but posts trailed off. He gave almost no interviews. As usual, he did not engage with my blog or my other articles about his case. Other members of Team Söring followed his lead. For example, I located a copy of U.K. confessions expert Andy Griffith’s report on Söring’s supposedly “unreliable” confessions (which Team Söring had never released) and wrote almost 5,000 words criticizing its conclusions. I invited Griffiths to respond to my critique and defend his work both privately and publicly. The result was silence. I also emailed some of Söring’s American and German supporters, asking them whether they had read the Wright report and whether they might want to reconsider their public support for Söring’s innocence claims. More silence.

Meanwhile, Terry Wright and Eva Beck had agreed to join Dr. Brauner’s project for a documentary which would probe Söring’s innocence claims and explain how he had managed to recruit so many celebrities and politicians to his cause. The documentary would be released as a podcast. Meanwhile, another podcast series was already underway. In December 2019, two Charlottesville journalists, Courteney Stuart and Rachel Ryan, had launched an investigative podcast called Small Town, Big Crime. They dedicated its first season to the Haysom murders. Söring gave Stuart and Ryan an interview and his team sent them a standard “media pack”.

The first episode of Small Town came out on 17 December 2019, just as Söring was deported to Germany. More episodes followed in 2020. On its official homepage, the podcast describes the purpose of its first season as an “investigation to determine who really killed the Haysoms”. The episode titles are a short history of Söring’s claims: “The Confession”, “Jens’ Story”, “The Crime Scene”, “The Motive”, “The Two Men”, “The DNA”. I followed the podcast with interest and was impressed with the journalists’ fair-mindedness and tenacity.

I also knew they were chasing rabbit trails. For instance, the description of their 30 June 2020 episode spoke of “new DNA evidence showing two unidentified men bled at the Haysom crime scene”. Drawing on this assumption, the podcasters devoted several episodes to the “Deadly Drifters” Shiflett and Albright, uncovering some suspicious statements they had made at a homeless shelter shortly after the Haysom murders, but nothing more. In a 2023 YouTube video entitled “Behind the Scenes—The Wright Report”, Stuart and Ryan reveal that mid-2020 was a crucial time in their podcast. They had investigated the alternate-suspects angle but had come up empty. They were wondering where to go next, and how they should “wrap up” the podcast.

In July 2020, I reached out to Small Town via Facebook “out of the blue”, as they noted. I offered to demonstrate the strength of the case against Söring and sent them a link to the Wright report, which they were unaware of. Stuart and Ryan reached out to Jens Söring in Germany to ask him about me. Even before I contacted them, Stuart and Ryan had already been “warned” about Andrew Hammel. They had received a “group email” from Söring to his supporters in which Söring said (in their paraphrase): “There’s this guy named Andrew Hammel in Germany, he’s trolling me, he’s crazy, he’s obsessed with me and my case, do not speak to him.” Söring’s warning of course had the opposite effect.

I set up a Zoom conference with Stuart and Ryan. In their later “Behind the Scenes” video, they say they were apprehensive and didn’t know what to expect. They found me “intelligent and well-informed” and said I didn’t resemble an “Internet troll”. They called their conversation with me “sent us on a new path”. I had announced on my blog that I was looking forward to talking to the people behind Small Town, Big Crime. The same day I posted that entry, both Stuart and Ryan got telephone calls from “Team Söring” asking why they were going to speak to me and “expressing concern”.

Stuart and Ryan were intrigued by how closely Team Söring was monitoring my blog. Team Söring also warned the podcasters about the Wright report:

We had also been hearing from Jens and his attorneys that there were questions about the authenticity of this report: Who was behind it? Who would be motivated enough to do this? And they were sending us inconsistencies: ‘The signature looks different from Terry Wright in 1985 versus his signature on this report in 2020’, and English and American spellings were sprinkled throughout this report, signs of a second author or maybe multiple authors.

At this time (fall of 2020), Terry Wright still had no social media profile and was declining to respond to media inquiries, which made it harder for the podcasters to independently verify that he had written the report. At one point, they had even contemplated hiring a London-based private investigator.

Eventually, they received indirect confirmation of the report’s authorship from Terry Wright, who said he had listened to their podcast and did not wish to be interviewed for it. Yet my interview, and the Wright Report, alerted Stuart and Ryan that there were flaws with Jens Söring’s theory of the two unknown men. As they report in their 2022 “Behind the Scenes” video, they decided to probe the “theory” which I, Terry Wright, Dan Krane, and BettyLayne DesPortes had advanced: namely, that the male DNA found at the crime scene came from Derek Haysom.

The podcasters devoted the rest of the podcast to exploring what the DNA evidence proved and, later, what new testing might show. They called up Jens Söring’s DNA expert, J. Thomas McClintock, who had earlier endorsed the “two unknown males” claim. They told McClintock they had not only obtained DNA samples from Shiflett and Albright, but also a “familial” DNA sample from a relative of Jens Söring. They asked McClintock whether any of these samples were match for the male DNA found at the crime scene. McClintock confirmed they were not.

Confirmation by one of Söring’s own experts ended speculation about whether Shiflett, Albright, or Farmer were involved in the murder. That alone was already a signal journalistic achievement. Yet the podcasters went further. They obtained Elizabeth Haysom’s forensic DNA profile and sent it to McClintock. Although no DNA profiles for Derek and Nancy Haysom existed, the podcasters asked McClintock to compare Elizabeth’s profile with the male DNA profile from the crime scene, looking for family ties. After receiving an ambiguous email response from McClintock, they scheduled a Zoom call and pressed him on the issue.

The call was part of the 27 October 2020 episode of Small Town, Big Crime called “The Battle Lines”: “Looking at the same data to exclude Shiflett, Albright, and Farmer, and Jens, Dr. McClintock confirmed that Derek Haysom cannot be excluded from any of the unidentified DNA.” McClintock seems to have not thought of this possibility before and also seems somewhat dismayed by the result. They contacted Söring’s other expert, Dr. Moses Schanfield. Schanfield refused to answer any of their specific questions about DNA, merely reiterating his conclusion that the blood group testing was reliable. The podcasters asked Söring and his attorney Steven Rosenfield for their response, but “Jens and Steve refus[ed] to speak with us.”

In October 2020, Small Town, Big Crime went quiet for 18 months. Yet they hadn’t stopped researching the DNA issue. The result would be a series of podcasts in mid-2022 which brought a major new shift in press coverage of the case.