Why Did Nevill Ring Jeremy And What Did He Say?

[Erik Narramore]

The gun was fundamental to it, so the gun must have been mentioned in the call, but looking at this from a neutral standpoint, I honestly don't believe you can rely on what Jeremy says about the phone call or read too much into the semantics of 'gun' and 'rifle', etc.  He may have thought that he would look stupid if he just said, 'Sorry, can't remember exactly what my father said, I only know that he mentioned Sheila carrying on and I think he mentioned the rifle'.

It's not a point that is intended to help or hinder him.  It's just what I think is a realistic view of it.

[Erik Narramore]

Thinking about it, I don't think Jeremy could have heard Nevill say what he claims he heard.  It could have been something completely different and Jeremy has re-constructed the call in his head in light of what subsequently happened.

I find it more plausible that Nevill said something like: "Jeremy, come over will you, your sister's with me now and she's upset and I just need a hand..."

[Erik Narramore]

If Jeremy is innocent, then my suspicion is that he couldn't remember what Nevill said other than that it was imperative he come over, and he then decided that he needed to tell the police what was said with some certainty, so he has made the wording up, perhaps believing that what he claims was said must approximate to what was actually said, given what subsequently happened.  Am I making sense here?

[Erik Narramore]

Weren't guns found all over the house?

As for using the term 'gun', as explained, I don't believe we can rely on what Jeremy reports of what Nevill said to him, even if he is telling the truth and did receive that call.  You can't hold him to a specific form of words.  It was the early hours of the morning.

[Erik Narramore]

A point from the other side of this:

Let me ask a hypothetical question.  Let's say you are awoken at 3 a.m. (or whatever time it was) by a phone call.  Would you be able to recall word-for-word what was said?  Even 10 minutes later, could you recall it?

I have to be honest and say that I think I would struggle and I'm impressed by Jeremy's feat of memory, as well as his ability to bounce out of bed at all hours.

I am sorry to say that Jeremy's ability to recall what Nevill told him with some precision does lend itself to the impression that the call never actually happened and Jeremy was reading from a script when he spoke to PC West and has been reading a script ever since.

I would have found it more plausible if he bluntly admitted that he couldn't remember exactly what was said and what he was reporting was just a representation of the call's theme - i.e. "My dad said Sheila was carrying on, he mentioned a rifle, and told me I needed to come over right away".

But I don't say I know.  I draw no firm conclusions.  Really, only Jeremy knows if he took that call because there is no independent technological way to corroborate either that he did or didn't.  If we're honest, we have to admit that.

[Erik Narramore]

Nevill wasn't ringing Jeremy to get a reaction from Sheila.  He was ringing him to stall her and maybe as part of an effort to hand over the gun.  He may also have been feigning a 999 call or a call to the police.  Or it could be that Sheila was just stood or sat there with the gun and he rang Jeremy during a lull in the drama.  I don't know.

What I am fairly sure of is that she must have been present with him for a Sheila scenario to work.  As I have said, this or some variation of it is the only plausible alternate scenario I can come up with.

[Erik Narramore]

I am commenting from the starting-point of assuming that Jeremy is guilty and I am asking why a guilty person would grant that concession.  It could be arrogance or a miscalculation, but it does seem odd.  Surely a rational calculation would be that the risk of suspicion arising from a missing silencer is much easier to deal with than the risk of an incriminating silencer being found?

Furthermore, if Jeremy was supposed to have put the silencer back, then logically we must assume he cleaned it, but by the family's own admission, it wasn't clean.

The whole thing simply doesn't make sense.

[Erik Narramore]

I've never understood the fuss people make about Jeremy's failure to ring 999.  The ITV drama made a lot out of it in the courtroom scene of Jeremy's cross-examination.  To me, it's a total non-point, for two reasons:

First, if Jeremy is telling the truth and Nevill did ring him, it needn't have been an emergency at that point.

Second, there are a number of sound reasons why Nevill would have been reluctant to bring official attention on a gun-related incident involving Sheila (obviously on the caveat that she wasn't harming anybody at a given point).  Anybody who has looked into the case in some depth will know what those reasons are.  If Sheila was just waving the gun around but had not yet actually harmed anybody, ringing Jeremy does not seem an unreasonable thing to do.

A related point is that people ask why Nevill would not just take the gun off her.  I went into that question on another thread.  For reasons I won't go into, I know a thing or two about this sort of thing.

I explained that taking a loaded gun off somebody weaker and smaller than you is not necessarily as simple as it sounds.  The closest analogy I can offer you is, if you are a man, think back - assuming this applies to you - to a time you had a fight with another man who was shorter than you.  It's quite hard.  Sheila may have been running around with the gun, and Nevill may have called Jeremy as a way of distracting Sheila from the children upstairs or as a way of encouraging her to give up (not appreciating that bringing Jeremy into it could aggravate her and make things worse), etc., etc.

[Erik Narramore]

Arguing over what Nevill may or may not have said to him over the phone is, in my view, a fool's errand - for the reasons given earlier in the thread.  He could easily have been lying about it and still be innocent.  I see that in his statement given on 7th. August 1985, he gave more of a summary of what was said, which sounds more plausible than how he reported it later.  I appreciate that he doesn't say in so many words that his father told him to come over, and it could be that he didn't and this partly caused Jeremy's uncertainty and confusion as to what to do.  We'll never know and I doubt Jeremy could even remember what Nevill told him minutes after he took the call - if there was such a call.