Jeremy Bamber Innocence Campaign
Press release (2025)

‘The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) say Jeremy Bamber’s alibi, and other exculpatory evidence, “has not yet reached the threshold for a referral to the Court of Appeal”, raising more fears over their competence.

The alibi
After more than four years of prevarication, the CCRC recently sent Jeremy Bamber’s
(JB) lawyers a Provisional Statement of Reasons (PSOR) regarding their on-going review of the 10 grounds submitted to them in March 2021.

The PSOR said that they have provisionally decided that four of the grounds “do not
currently reach the threshold for a referral to the Court of Appeal” .

The CCRC committed to continue looking at the other six issues, and expressed a
willingness to revisit the first four grounds, in light of any further representations by
Jeremy Bamber.

However, despite these assurances, there are serious concerns over the CCRC’s
continuing failure to investigate submissions either properly, or in some instances, at
all.

These fears are exemplified in the PSOR in the CCRC’s handling of one of the four issues that they said failed to reach the threshold.

This involved the submission of evidence that a 999 call was made from White House
Farm (WHF) at 6.09 am on 7th August 1985, which would exonerate JB, because it would
show that someone that he was convicted of killing was still alive in WHF when he was
standing outside with dozens of police officers.

The initial evidence for this submission came from a Metropolitan Police enquiry (called
“Stokenchurch”) before JB’s 2002 appeal.
It was further bolstered by an interview by the Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, Heidi
Blake, with Nicholas Milbank, the officer who Stokenchurch identified as taking the 999
call, in 2024, the relevant parts of which were published in a 17,000 word article in the New Yorker magazine in July 2024.
Mr Milbank confirmed to Ms Blake that he had taken a 999 call from WHF at that time,
and that, although no-one spoke to him on the call, this, “of course”, strongly suggested that someone was alive in WHF at that time.

Mr Milbank also said that a typed, unsigned, statement produced by Essex Police before
the 2002 appeal, that said that Stokenchurch’s evidence was all “a misunderstanding” , was not written by him, and he had no recollection of making any statement in the Bamber case in 2002, or at any other time.

In 2002 JB’s defence had just accepted Essex Police’s assurance on the issue, and had not raised the matter at appeal.

The CCRC’s response, to the evidence in the submission on this issue, was nothing
short of astonishing.

Instead of speaking with Mr Milbank (who has since passed away), and Ms Blake,
themselves, and investigating the undisclosed evidence surrounding the issue (e.g. the recordings, and records, of the 999 call), they just handed the whole issue to Essex Police.

Unsurprisingly, Mr Milbank, who was still a civilian employee of Essex Police at the time,
gave a further statement to EP , in which he did not directly deny making the statements
that he did to Heidi Blake, but claimed that she had misrepresented herself to him, and
that, by implication, his quotes in the article were unreliable.

Unbelievably, the CCRC just accepted this revisionist account, and endorsed the view
that Ms Blake, and the New Yorker, had obtained this material under false pretences,
and it was, consequently, not worth considering.

Ms Blake, and the New Yorker flatly reject this claim, and have issued a statement
standing by every word in their article, and confirming that the quotes were obtained
from Mr Milbank in a totally honest, and transparent, way, and that all information “had been extensively fact-checked”.

Fortunately, from JB’s point of view, the New Yorker will shortly be releasing the audio of
Ms Blake’s conversations with Mr Milbank, that will show that EP’s claims are, on a most
generous interpretation, totally unfounded.
The other exculpatory evidence the CCRC have considered so far The CCRC also said that other evidence in the 2021 submissions, reinforced in the New Yorker article, failed to currently meet the threshold, including: the fact that there were two moderators involved in the case, and not one, as the prosecution (and now the CCRC) steadfastly maintain; the multiple defects in the blood evidence that was central to the case, the evidence that Nevill Bamber also call police at the start of the incident (which also exonerates JB), and the wide-spread interference with the crime scene,
before it was recorded.

The reasoning used in making their assessment of these further matters again showed that no investigation had been done into them, and that the CCRC had just accepted EP’s explanations, some of which bordered on the surreal.

Regrettably, the PSOR was riddled with factual errors, faulty reasoning and irrelevant
material that sought to justify their conclusions.

The document could almost have been designed to highlight the numerous criticisms of the CCRC in the Henley Report into their handling of the Andrew Malkinson case.

It appears that these failings have not been address by the CCRC, and continue to form
the basis of their evaluation of cases.
This “catalogue of failures” identified in the Henley Report include: a failure to
investigate key issues, serial failures to obtain relevant files from the police and other bodies supporting the prosecution, and a readiness to accept police and prosecution assertions without challenge, amongst many others.

As a consequence of the CCRC’s failings in appraising these four issues, Jeremy
Bamber intends to contest the findings of the PSOR in the strongest possible terms.
His legal team will also be requesting that Dame Vera Baird, the new Chair of the CCRC, personally review the conclusions of the PSOR.

Dame Vera has only just arrived in post, but her public analysis of the failings of the
CCRC, as highlighted in the Henley Report, before she took up her position, showed
great insight, and the reforms that she suggested she would enact gave considerable encouragement that the CCRC’s failings were finally being addressed.

We accept that the decisions in the PSOR were made before Dame Vera was in place,
but the fact that the PSOR was one of the first decisions released under her new regime makes it all the more disappointing.
As well as a robust response to the CCRC itself, Jeremy Bamber’s legal team will be
taking other legal measures, including a judicial review, to hold the CCRC to account for the deeply flawed reasoning in the PSOR, should the CCRC not revise this interim
decision.’