Developing A Sheila Scenario

[Erik Narramore]

My Sheila scenario has her running up the main stairs, with Nevill ending the call to Jeremy and chasing after her.  She turns and fires at Nevill, projecting cases on to the main landing and goes after him back to the kitchen, continuing to fire.  Nevill is trying to draw Sheila away from upstairs where June and the twins are.  Nevill tries to reason with her and they struggle for the rifle, probably in the foyer, with Sheila pushing Nevill back into the kitchen.  Nevill is already gravely injured, so ultimately Sheila prevails and kills him.  She then re-loads maybe twice more to kill June and the twins.  June might well have descended the stairs to try and establish what was going on and Sheila might have chased her back up to the master bedroom.  She probably shot June in two fusillades, allowing June to crawl around the bedroom in between.  She then washes and changes and kills herself.

To do this, she would have needed to be familiar enough with the rifle to know how to operate it.  That's all.

We know Sheila went on shooting trips and on at least one occasion she used a shot gun.  She wanted to have a go and fired it in the air.

Where does Colin say that it would have required a marksman?  I don't understand that as this took place indoors, virtually all the shots were at close or close-ish range, and bullets went astray.

Also, I think it has been mentioned before that Colin has claimed he was trying to get back with Sheila.  This ties in with what I had understood too, except that my understanding of it is that it was Sheila who was trying to get back with him and Colin told her emphatically the marriage would not be resurrected.  She spoke to him before they got to the farm.  I had thought the conversation was on the way there, but it looks like Colin makes no mention of such.  It could be that it was before the day of the drive out there, maybe at the party that Jeremy also attended.  The significance of it would be obvious.

[Erik Narramore]

In my view, the only way a phone call to Jeremy can work is if Nevill is using the phone call as a ruse - a sort of stalling tactic - and he feigns a 999 call or he tells her that he is ringing Jeremy, then when Jeremy comes on the phone and he mentions she has gone crazy with the gun (or something along those lines), she runs.

Jeremy would take time to answer the phone, which explains why he doesn't remember hearing anything other than his father's voice, as by that stage Sheila has maybe calmed down a bit, but Nevill then terminates the call to follow her upstairs.

[Erik Narramore]

Maybe a bit of arrogance or complacency entered Nevill's head?  She is a woman, small and slight.  She is mentally-ill.  He just thinks that she won't do much damage.  I have speculated along these lines before.  I also recall Lookout has mentioned a lot on here about how women like that can sometimes surprise men and catch them off-guard, and I find that is true.  Also, remember that it's his daughter, so she has a psychological advantage over him.

Of course, it's worth emphasising that here I assume Sheila is the killer, but should not be taken to mean I think she was.  It's just exploration of a scenario, as you say.  The phone call has to fit in to this for Jeremy to be innocent, and in my view that allows for only one possibility: that Sheila is with him when he makes the call.  I can't make the scenario work otherwise.

[Erik Narramore]

Nevill would never let Sheila wander off, armed or not, yet we have the fact that, if we accept Jeremy's defence, Nevill has to make a phone call to Jeremy at some point.  This can only mean that Sheila was with Nevill or close by when Nevill made the call.  There is also the uncontested fact that the boys were asleep when shot.  I think the facts default to her not spending time with them.

I do not say Jeremy is innocent, but in broad terms, it is the only plausible alternate scenario if Jeremy is innocent.

I say Sheila was standing in the kitchen, opposite Nevill, with the rifle, as Nevill made his call to Jeremy.  When Jeremy answers, she runs out of the kitchen and Nevill follows her, terminating his call with Jeremy.

[Erik Narramore]

I don't put much stall in Stan Jones' words about the phone/kitchen in that COLP interview, simply because he is referring to the state of the phone and/or kitchen post-incident.  It is common ground that the phone was working - which, for me, is the important observation.

The point is: There's no phone in the master bedroom and the phone in the upstairs office is behind a locked door.  They don't have mobile phones at that point in time.  On this basis, if we assume Jeremy is telling the truth, then I am deducing that the call to Jeremy was made from the kitchen.  This also makes sense because of where the rifle and magazine are.  Sheila must go downstairs at some point.

The twins aren't downstairs, they're upstairs.  Nevill is making the call downstairs, not upstairs, and he has to make the call before anybody else is shot, otherwise he would dial 999, surely?  He must also make the call before he is shot, or again he would attempt to dial 999 and he certainly would not be speaking to Jeremy.

This means that in a Sheila scenario, there must be a stand-off between Nevill and Sheila in the kitchen, and more than likely, Nevill makes the call to Jeremy with Sheila present.  The more I think about it, the more I believe he rang Jeremy because it was the first thing that popped into his head in a panicked situation.  All sorts of things would have been running through his mind: his daughter, the safety of the twins and June, his firearms certificate and his reputation as a magistrate, obviously with the twins at the forefront of this mind.

It could be that your scenario fits all this in that Sheila goes downstairs and intends then to return upstairs with the rifle, but Nevill stops her in the kitchen.  She then starts ranting and raving and that may have gone on for some time, before a confused and worried Nevill rings Jeremy, maybe as a way of keeping her in the kitchen, but the ploy backfires as Jeremy's involvement only makes her angrier.

As for Sheila's motivations, I am not sure because I am unsure whether loss of custody would have bothered her.  That might sound like an odd thing to say, but she was ill and may even have welcomed Colin's offer to take on the burden on the understanding she had contact.  On the other hand, Dr. Ferguson seemed to think a threat of loss of custody would have been cataclysmic for her psychologically.

[Erik Narramore]

I agree we cannot know exactly what happened, but we can look at the evidence and make logical inferences.

My scenario addresses perfectly what would happen at both ends of the call, if Jeremy is innocent.

Nevill is using the phone call to Jeremy to stall Sheila.  Whether it was wise of him to do so is another matter and not important to the validity of the scenario.

Jeremy eventually awakens to the phone ringing, but understandably won't remember much about it.  As soon as he answers, Sheila runs upstairs and Nevill follows her, terminating the call.

Jeremy claims what he claims about what Nevill said to him, but I don't consider it reliable because, if he is telling the truth, he was woken in the early hours of the morning and we can't expect reliability under those circumstances.  He will have been confused and will have fumbled about for some minutes while deciding what to do.  If he is innocent, then he is simply telling himself what he thinks he heard, which is not necessarily what he heard but what he has convinced himself of what he heard, which may have been influenced by subsequent events.

If, on the other hand, Jeremy is guilty and has invented a phone call (as opposed to staging one - a different thing), then he has taken a very fundamental risk because he was not a telecoms engineer or employed in that field, so would not know for sure whether there would be a traceable record of a call at the exchange, and he had no ready means to research and ascertain the position without running the risk of creating a witness or paper trail.

If, instead, he staged the call in the belief that some sort of record of calls may be held at the exchange, then he has the problem of how to get back to Bourtree Cottage within a set time limit without being seen.  If he is seen, by anyone, at any point, it's over (the exception being that if he is seen immediately outside the Cottage, he can explain that away).

[Erik Narramore]

I believe June's movements are also addressed adequately in the scenario.  June does not necessarily realise what is going on and initially could simply be sat up in bed waiting for Nevill to come back.  When she hears a commotion, she may go out on the landing and then hear the melee in the kitchen, before she is confronted by Sheila.

[Erik Narramore]

Isn't the problem that if Sheila was the killer, then when killing herself she must have got quite a tight grip of the rifle?  This is especially the case when you consider her slight frame and the angles at which she supposedly shot herself, twice.  That being the case, shouldn't there be more than one single fingerprint on the gun from Sheila, if she did it?

I am willing to accept that Sheila herself could have wiped/cleaned the rifle before killing herself, and this may explain the smudging.  Let's allow that, and let's also remember that Ron Cook handled the rifle without gloves.  Even so, wouldn't she have still left more recordable prints?

On the other hand, if Jeremy is the killer, then we may only see one single print from Sheila because Sheila has not put any manual pressure on the rifle, rather Jeremy has positioned the rifle in her hands, probably after shooting her at least once, and he has perhaps deliberately attempted to make prints from her fingers, and succeeding in establishing one.  Gloves may also have caused the smudging of prints resultant from normal handling of the rifle prior to the incident.

Do we have a diagrammatic representation, or even photographs, of where the smudged prints are and the pattern formed?

[Erik Narramore]

A problem with Nevill downstairs is that Nevill would be barefoot or slippered and simply in his pyjamas while sat in his chair downstairs.  That just seems unlikely to me, especially when you add that there were signs that Nevill's side of the bed had been slept in or used.

An obvious Sheila scenario is Sheila carrying on upstairs, which wakes June and gets Nevill out of bed.  He then follows her downstairs without troubling to put on any footwear as there may have been some urgency to it, maybe because Sheila already has the rifle at this point.  They then have a confrontation in the kitchen, at which point Nevill maybe rings Jeremy as a psychological ploy, which then backfires as Sheila runs upstairs as soon as Jeremy comes to the phone.  Sheila then fires back at Nevill on the stairs and they end up back in the kitchen.

I haven't really given much thought to the marks on Nevill's arm so far.

[Erik Narramore]

June would not go back to bed with Sheila in possession of a firearm.

I think the only way a Sheila scenario works is if Sheila is present when Nevill makes the call to Jeremy and Nevill ends that call because Sheila goes for the stairs.

I cannot think of any other way a Sheila scenario could work logically.  For instance, if you place Sheila downstairs and Nevill upstairs, then how does the call to Jeremy happen?

[Erik Narramore]

I believe the blood in the kitchen can only be Nevill's, due to the improbability of blood transference.

I do not see how the blood in the kitchen could be June's, given the evidence we have in the master bedroom.

The blood need not be Sheila's, even if she is the killer, and we currently have no expert findings that she was injured in a struggle.  Furthermore, had Nevill struggled with her in that manner in the kitchen, it seems to me doubtful that she would have committed the massacre.  Nevill would have overcome her.  The theory that Sheila is the killer rests on Nevill not making that attempt and Sheila not having been injured prior to shooting herself or being shot - which, again, is consistent with the evidence, whether the killer is Jeremy or Sheila.

[Erik Narramore]

Though Nevill was a magistrate, Nevill and June can't be expected to have understood much about the ins and out of fostering, so from that angle, what you say seems plausible.

As for Sheila, assuming the letter you refer to exists and is genuine, then your scenario is promising, but to answer your question, I would need an answer to another question:

Was Sheila happy with the arrangement in which Colin had majority custody of the children?  Did she express any definite unhappiness with it?

The reason I ask is to gauge what affect a threat from Colin to take full custody might have on her.  I assume she would still have supervised contact with the children under those circumstances and Colin must have reassured her of this.  I don't doubt she loved her boys, but was she a keen mother?  Dr. Ferguson did say after the trial that his evidence would have been different had he known about the custody issue.

Another question I have, on an entirely different matter, is if we assume your scenario, then at what stage are we saying Nevill made the call to Jeremy?  How does it fit in?  You obviously must realise that Nevill can't have been shot when he made that call, so the call was made before Sheila starting shooting and probably also was made with Sheila present.

Maybe Sheila goes downstairs in the middle of the night with the intentions you mention.  She starts fiddling around with the rifle and magazine.  June has heard her, and wakes Nevill, who goes to investigate.  Nevill then confronts Sheila in the kitchen.  Nevill is faced with his daughter pointing a loaded gun at him and perhaps going psychotic.  He could rush her, but it's not that simple.  Maybe he picks up the phone and rings Jeremy because that's the first thing he thinks of and it's a way to keep Sheila talking/occupied/distracted.  When Jeremy comes to the phone, Sheila then runs upstairs and Nevill terminates the call.

[Erik Narramore]

My view is that if it was Sheila, it would have all started downstairs.  Probably with both Sheila and Nevill in the kitchen and Nevill ringing Jeremy while Sheila was present.  In the scenario I imagine, the phone call was intended to placate or delay or somehow distract Sheila but it has the opposite effect.  It aggravates her and she then runs upstairs with the loaded rifle.

I don't accept that we can assume that either Nevill or both Nevill and June would have handily overcome Sheila.  She had a loaded rifle.  She was presumably psychotic.  It's not hard to imagine one or both parents having difficulty subduing her or taking the rifle off her.  She could use the butt end of the rifle as a bludgeon.  She was smaller than Nevill and flighty and could maybe dodge him and outrun him and break free from him if he caught her.  Raw strength isn't necessarily the determining factor in such circumstances.

It could even be that at the point Nevill rang Jeremy, he had already subdued her but she then took hold of the rifle again (if Nevill had carelessly left it nearby), or she may have found a second rifle.  Is Nevill supposed to have used the past or present tense in the call Jeremy claims to have received?