The Crimes

Scene of the Crime

On 7 August 1985 at 3.26am Bamber rang the police to report that his father had just phoned frantically to say Sheila was going berserk with a semi-automatic rifle.

When the police broke in to the farmhouse they found several bodies and a scene of near carnage. Neville’s corpse, bludgeoned and shot, lay downstairs in a pool of blood. It appeared that he had been shot upstairs but had been beaten as he struggled to the kitchen to summon help.

June's bullet-riddled body was in a bedroom and Sheila's twins had each been shot several times in the head while in their sleep, one of them still sucking his thumb. Sheila, who was also in a bedroom, had been shot in the throat and was clutching a .22 rifle and a bible.

Sheila had a long documented history of illness and it seemed clear to the police that she had shot her parents, children and then finally herself. When Bamber was interviewed at the scene of the crime he appeared genuinely distressed and was comforted by an officer and given tea and whiskey.

So convinced were the police by Bamber’s insistence that his sister perpetrated the dreadful act, that they even agreed to burn carpets and bedding in the house at Bamber’s request. Soon the press were reporting the sensational story.

‘Bambi’ had always wanted fame as a model and ironically she had now won it, briefly, on the front pages of the tabloids as an alleged mass murderer.