What was the emergency?

[Erik Narramore]

What was the emergency?

[Erik Narramore]

The call was ambiguous.  "Sheila's gone crazy, she's got a gun."  Then it ended.  Does it mean Sheila is on a murderous rampage or threatening as much?  Or does it mean she's gone crazy and she's also got a gun?  I think there's a distinction between the two, which is blunted or lost now only because we have the benefit of hindsight.  Jeremy may also have thought that the call meant or implied that the police are already there and Nevill is letting Jeremy know.  Or does it mean Nevill wants Jeremy to help rather than the police?  Or does it mean Nevill has rung the police and has now also rung Jeremy?

Jeremy was in a situation where his father had rung him, and he did not know if his father had also rung the police or what exactly was going on.  He tried to call his father back but could not do so, as the line was engaged, perhaps suggesting to Jeremy that the police were being called.  It's not necessarily clear what was going on and Jeremy may have been unsure about what to do.  To be fair, the police did ask Jeremy why he had not rung 999 and nowadays you would definitely expect someone to ring 999, but at the same time, the police were only expressing surprise about it after an explanation from Jeremy once he had clarified it all for himself in his own mind by giving Nevill's ambiguous call the worst possible interpretation, and only when they were all stood outside the farmhouse with no apparent sign of life.

Jeremy could, in the alternative, have said: "I've received an urgent call from my father.  He says my sister has gone crazy and got a gun, but then the line went dead or he stopped talking.  Has my father already called you?  If not, I'm confused because I don't understand why he would call me instead of the police."  Maybe 999 is the call he should have made to say this, but the situation was different then because people often had the number of their local police station and that was often used to ring the police.

Of course, another possibility is that Jeremy is innocent but was stalling intentionally in the hope that Sheila would kill the family.  Maybe that was Jeremy's plan?

[Erik Narramore]

Perhaps Jeremy hoped Sheila would kill the family?  It is just a theory, though.

I doubt Jeremy and Sheila would be confederates.  They did not have that sort of relationship, though here I am reliant on secondary sources and the claims of people who want Jeremy to be guilty.  We can't know for sure the truth of it.  Jeremy claims his relationship with Sheila was good and she did say something positive about him in her diary that evening, and she did walk the boys to see him on the tractor in the rape field that same evening.

[Erik Narramore]

Anyway, has it occurred to the guilt camp that the criticism of Jeremy concerning the phone calls can be turned around against his accusers?  If Jeremy is guilty, why wouldn't he just ring 999?  Why weaken his murder plot by ringing a local police station and making himself look silly and perhaps suspicious, thus needlessly drawing attention to his own actions?

[Erik Narramore]

If he was staging calls in a way that depended on establishing times, he would not have delayed at all.  He would have rushed back by bike and made his call straight-away.  He then explains his delay in whatever way he likes - messing around with the phone book, etc.

On the other hand, if he wasn't staging a call, then he had all the time to prepare himself and invent a time for the call from Nevill.

I believe we have established in these discussions that he did not have an answering machine, so he had no technical means to stage a call; ergo, he must have invented the call, so there was no reason for him to construe reasons for a delay.  If he was ready at 3.20 a.m. after 'cleaning himself up', etc., then he could ring the police at 3.21 a.m. and say he had just had the call from Nevill, and he could later say it was 3.20 a.m.  Or he could make a mistake and say it was 3.25 a.m. and if challenged claim that he just mixed the times up as it was the early hours of the morning.