In an exclusive interview with Newsquest, award-winning journalist Heidi Blake discusses her new true crime podcast, which has uncovered bombshell new claims in the White House Farm murder case.
The case against convicted mass murderer Jeremy Bamber has “crumbled away” and he would be found not guilty in a retrial, an award-winning investigative journalist has claimed.
Heidi Blake made the comments in an exclusive interview about Blood Relatives, her new true crime podcast about the controversial north Essex murder case.
The six-episode series contains new interviews and evidence which she says critically undermine key evidence that put Bamber behind bars.
Bamber was jailed in 1986 after a jury found him guilty of shooting to death his parents, sister and twin nephews, then staging the scene to suggest his sister had carried out a murder-suicide.
He has always maintained his innocence of the so-called White House Farm massacre in the village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy.
Now former police officers have made allegations in Heidi’s podcast that colleagues restaged the crime scene and fabricated evidence.
But, she said, Britain’s beleaguered miscarriage of justice watchdog simply dismissed all her new evidence out of hand.
Jeremy Bamber was convicted in 1985 of murdering his parents, his sister and his twin nephews – but has always maintained his innocence (Image: ECN)
Heidi formerly worked for the Sunday Times Insight Team, winning national awards for exposing corruption at FIFA, before running investigations for Buzzfeed into tennis match-fixing and suspected Russian assassinations.
In 2022 she joined the New Yorker, whose Pulitzer Prize winning true crime podcast In The Dark previously helped free Curtis Flowers, a black man in America’s Deep South who spent decades in prison for a quadruple murder he didn’t commit.
She has spent two years investigating the Bamber case for this latest series, Blood Relatives.
Asked whether she was convinced of Jeremy Bamber’s innocence, Heidi said: “It’s not possible to say for sure what happened inside White House Farm that night… Police horrendously botched the investigation.”
But, she added: “What I would say is that the case against Jeremy Bamber, presented by the prosecution at trial, has crumbled away to virtually nothing.
“If you took this case to trial and you presented it now to a jury, with the evidence as we now understand it, I do not believe that Jeremy Bamber would be convicted.”
Heidi Blake formerly worked for the Sunday Times Insight Team and has led investigations into FIFA corruption, tennis match-fixing and suspected Russian assassinations (Image: New Yorker)
Heidi trawled through original case documents – many hidden from Bamber’s defence before his trial – and tracked down witnesses who made bombshell claims.
Some of her findings even formed the basis of an application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which has the power to grant or refuse a new appeal.
“I’ve been very shocked by the way the CCRC have responded to the fresh evidence I unearthed,” Heidi said.
That included finding and interviewing PC Nicholas Milbank, who said somebody had dialled 999 from inside White House Farm while police were outside with Bamber on the night of the killings.
If true, that alone would exonerate him.
When his lawyers unearthed the previously hidden claim in 2002, Essex Police produced an unsigned statement in PC Milbank’s name claiming he’d been wrong and there was in fact no 999 call.
But speaking to Heidi 20 years later, PC Milbank stood by his original account and said he had not written the statement produced by Essex Police in his name.
Blood Relatives, the latest series of Pulitzer Prize winning true crime podcast In The Dark, reinvestigates the White House Farm murders in north Essex, uncovering bombshell new claims from former police officers (Image: New Yorker)
“I truly believed that the CCRC would take all possible steps to investigate that,” Heidi said.
But “the CCRC, astonishingly, did not interview him, or make any effort to interview him, themselves. They instead allowed Essex Police to go and interview Nick Milbank.
“Essex Police then produced a statement in Nick Milbank’s name, saying that he had not spoken to me and completely disavowing the conversation that we had, which is quite extraordinary.”
It is also “demonstrably false”, she said, claiming she explicitly told PC Milbank in writing she was a journalist and his recorded interview would be in the podcast.
“He responded with two thumbs-up emojis,” Heidi said. “So it’s quite amazing to me that the police produced this statement in his name.”
PC Milbank then died, leaving the CCRC with only Essex Police’s claims to go on – which it accepted at face value, rejecting Heidi’s interview with him as a ground for appeal.
“I did find that genuinely shocking,” she said.
Forty years into his life sentence for five murders, Jeremy Bamber continues to fight to overturn his convictions (Image: Jeremy Bamber Campaign)
The CCRC also criticised the New Yorker for not turning over its new interviews.
“That is a common principle across US news organisations – that you don’t turn your source material over to the authorities because of the precedent it sets,” Heidi explained.
“It makes it harder for us to protect confidential sources when we need to do that, and we need to preserve our editorial independence… But what we have done is put the tapes in the podcast.
“Actually hearing people like Nick Milbank describing that 999 call, it’s just really compelling.
“It’s clear that he is describing a specific memory of something that happened in a pretty clear way – and you can just hear how naturally that unfolds, and also his absolute insistence that he did not give the statement that police have produced in his name.”
The CCRC has undergone major changes in the past year amid intense criticism, after Andrew Malkinson spent 17 years in prison for a rape he hadn’t committed because the CCRC repeatedly failed to test DNA samples that eventually proved his innocence.
Its CEO and chairwoman both resigned. Barrister Dame Vera Baird has been installed as interim chairwoman.
“I hope that she will get to grips with this case, that she will review the fresh evidence that’s come to light and she will seriously consider referring it for a fresh appeal, which is what I think it clearly deserves,” Heidi said.
“But on the basis of what we know about how flawed the CCRC is as an organisation, how under-resourced it is and how willing its caseworkers and its commissioners seem to be to look away from clearly exonerating evidence, I think there is a very troubling possibility that Jeremy Bamber and other innocent people may well remain behind bars.”
Both Essex Police and the CCRC declined to respond to Heidi’s comments.
Essex Police said repeated reviews had upheld Bamber’s conviction.
The CCRC said work was continuing to assess further grounds of appeal proposed by Bamber.
