Problems with Jeremy moving to and from the farmhouse

[Erik Narramore]

Which route(s) did he take, there and back?

Roughly how long did it take him each way?

Did he use front and rear lights on the bike along this route that night?

What do you think he would have done had he come across somebody on the way back?

How did he slip out of Bourtree Cottage and Goldhanger unseen and return unseen?

Did he stage a call from Nevill or just make it up?  If he staged the call, what was the process and timings for this?

Why did he leave the bike at Bourtree Cottage for the police to find?

[Erik Narramore]

I've touched on this topic already, but this is a bit more detailed.

One technique I have when looking at this case is to think about difficulties and problems in reverse.  An example is Sheila being found forensically 'clean', which is said to be incriminating for Jeremy; but when you really think about it, actually it potentially points more to Sheila.

Here we will discuss the phone calls.  They are said to be a problem for Jeremy, but are they?  The essential problem here for the prosecution is that just as the phone calls tie down Jeremy, they also tie down the prosecution.  This is because if, as a hypothetical exercise, we assume that Jeremy is guilty, then the phone calls are related to Jeremy's movements that night.

Even if Jeremy planned all this, he didn't plan for Nevill to end up in the kitchen.  This is probably why he made the telephone calls, but even if he intended to make the calls anyway, it's still very risky and looks suspicious because he has to carry out the massacre under time-sensitive conditions.

What do I mean by 'time-sensitive' conditions?

I mean:

(i). Let's remember that Jeremy needs to fake the call from White House Farm to Goldhanger.

(i). He then needs to make his own call to the police from Goldhanger.

(iii). He doesn't know if the authorities and the phone company can log calls in some way.  If they can, then it looks suspicious.

(iv). This means he has maybe a 30 minute window, at most - at the very most - between completing the deed and making a call to the police, and even then it looks suspicious.  Anybody with a half-a-brain will ask: Why the 30 minute gap?  This problem becomes all the more acute if, as I suspect, the phone calls were the result of the incident going wrong, because he is then thinking on the hoof - quite literally, if my belief is right that he had to go on foot.

As it turned out, there really was a 'suspicious' gap between Nevill's call and Jeremy alerting the authorities, which is what you would expect if Jeremy is guilty, because he has to move from one location to another.  The gap reported by Jeremy was something like 20/25 minutes, I believe.

It also turned out that the authorities/phone company couldn't log calls, but Jeremy wasn't to know this. He's not a telecoms engineer and it would be risky for him to research the point, as he is then creating a paper trail and/or witness evidence.  For instance, if he asks at the local library or rings up the phone company, could somebody remember that enquiry months later and link it to him?

In fact, Jeremy's presumed lack of knowledge about civilian call logging is, in itself, a glaring flaw in the prosecution.  Quite simply, how does Jeremy know that the police can't find out when and where calls are made?  How does anybody know this in 1985?  Just because billing wasn't itemised then, it doesn't mean the authorities and/or the phone company don't have the capability to track calls made.

The main point of all this is that guilters need Jeremy to be able to move to and from the farmhouse in quick order.  They know he needs to be seen returning to Goldhanger, so that places him in Goldhanger.  Whether he really is seen there is beside the point.  It's dark anyway, but Jeremy won't risk not being there.  They also know that Jeremy can't do this by car or motorcycle/moped/scooter.  That's why they're keen on June's bike.  Otherwise, the only way he can do this is on foot.

And I think on foot is the only reasonable possibility.  It's simple and much, much less risky than by push bike.  If on the way back he is caught, on foot, in the environs of Bourtree Cottage, he could - at a pinch - make some excuse about being out of the house because he heard an intruder or something like that.  If he is caught with a push bike, he is done for.

The question is: If we give the prosecution the benefit of the doubt and say the gap is 30 minutes, could Jeremy have moved on foot within a time window of 30 minutes, so that he could get back to Goldhanger to place the second call?  Take into account that he would probably need to change and shower and dispose of clothes, etc., before he makes the call, in order to remove forensic traces, so he would have less than 30 minutes to actually cover the distance.

As the crow flies, it's 2 miles.  Allow more than that for having to perambulate over fields, streams and ditches, and circumvent populated locations and various obstacles, natural and man-made. He's a fit young 24 year old man, and he knows the land, so he can walk over fields and climb over fences, etc., without needing a torch.  In theory, he could do it, but it would be hard.

[Erik Narramore]

This particular enterprise was high risk for all sorts of reasons.  I keep being told he planned it, so it seems to me he must have take measures to minimise the risk.

Maybe weeks before, he could have used a push bike to case out the countryside (as well as walking around and observing from his tractor/combine when he was out in the fields).

I think if he thought it through properly, he eventually must have decided he would go on foot on the night itself.  Maybe he also got hold of June's bike as a back-up and left it at the farm in case he needed to make haste, then he later returned it to Bourtree Cottage after the incident, or Julie did.

Having planned everything, he knew that by going on foot he could avoid being seen or identified for most of the route, but had to be careful around Goldhanger, especially in the environs of Bourtree Cottage.  I have to say I find it incredibly difficult to imagine him taking the risk of leaving and then returning to an overlooked house surreptitiously.  Even at those times, there was a reasonable risk of being seen.

But the issue for me here is timings.  If we accept he had a 30-minute window to make it back to Bourtree Cottage, does this mean I'm wrong and he did use the bike after all?  I really doubt that, yet there's a problem because he didn't plan for Nevill to be downstairs, did he.  So this means he must have reasoned everything out very quickly, in the early hours of the morning.  Or did he plan the phone calls all along and the peripatetic Nevill was a minor hitch on the night that fitted with his plans, placing Nevill in proximity to a phone?  But if that's the case, why doesn't the phone have blood on it?

The red flag I am raising here, for anybody who is interested, is that the case against Jeremy doesn't quite fit together.  There is that underlying, lurking sense of doubt that arises due to various bits and pieces of improbability and implausibility.

Is 30 minutes enough time for Jeremy to make it back and shower and change, and do whatever else, including make a phone call to Julie?  Maybe it's enough in theory, if we assume he ran most of the way and really knew where he was going, but the reality of the situation was quite another matter.  Personally, I am far from convinced.  I think this is another flaw in the prosecution cause.  It's something that hasn't been thought about in a joined-up way that would relate it to the other aspects of the case.  The jury should have been taken on a tour of the area and walked the land and the vicinity of Bourtree Cottage to see and recognise the problem.

[Erik Narramore]

My argument here is based on a premise that he had a 30-minute, or so, gap.  30 minutes is suspicious enough as it is.  Much more than that, and it starts to become a serious problem for him.

And you will note that indeed there was a suspicious time gap in reality - I think of about 20/25 minutes, which he was able to explain away.

What underpins the 30-minute theory is two main things:

First, Jeremy doesn't know if the calls will somehow be logged somewhere by the phone company, for disclosure to the authorities.  It turns out they weren't, but Jeremy is not to know this, and I believe even the police made enquiries about this after the incident. Jeremy may have raised suspicion if he had tried to confirm the point before the incident, or he may not have been able to establish the position one way or the other.

Additionally, consider that if Jeremy is faking a call from White House Farm, that means the phone could potentially be heard ringing by his neighbours at Goldhanger and it is possible they may then pin the ringing to a rough time bracket, even a specific time.  I assume Jeremy would have made use of his answerphone so that the call was 'answered' at Goldhanger, and he then picked it up at the other end on his return, but he needed to make sure that the call to the police was placed within 30 minutes at the outside, and it needed to be done from Goldhanger.

The alternative way of looking at it, which would say I am wrong, is that Jeremy perhaps doesn't bother with a call back to Bourtree Cottage, he just returns home whenever and calls the police.  It could be that he somehow knew that calls are not logged and he was confident in relying on this information, and he also didn't care whether neighbours heard the phone ringing.  Or maybe he didn't want to risk waking them so didn't place the fake call to his own house, or he was sure they would not hear it anyway - it was the early hours of the morning.

[Erik Narramore]

I know the area well - perhaps as well as Jeremy did.  It's not just him knowing the terrain, it's also what is there and whether he would have had the time and could have done it.  I accept that in theory he could have done it, but it would have been extremely risky, especially around Goldhanger; and it becomes difficult if he was under a strict time constraint, either due to Nevill ending up in the kitchen or because he planned out the phone calls in advance and created an additional rod for his own back in that sense.

[Erik Narramore]

What the prosecution are suggesting, then, if I am understanding it right, is that Jeremy must have killed them maybe two or three hours before, allowing time for the phone calls and returning to Goldhanger and showering and changing, etc.  You think he then wanted to delay the police entering the farmhouse, otherwise it might be obvious that the five had not only just been shot.  By delaying, it ceases to matter, so one avenue of suspicion is allayed.

Personally I'm not sure it makes a lot of difference to how the bodies would have appeared.  I think we must also assume Jeremy would have made sure they were all dead before he left the scene, so no risk of survivors or a wish to delay for that reason.  If he had rung 999, he would still be ringing the furthest police station, and he has no control over what the police do or how they react.  Chris Bews requested firearms support promptly.

In the prosecution scenario, wouldn't there be a fear running through Jeremy's mind that he could be caught out by the phone calls?  He would have that fear anyway, and did because he evidently delayed, but what if the police were able to somehow uncover call logs from the exchange and pinpoint calls?  It's unlikely Jeremy would have been aware of whether this was possible.

[Erik Narramore]

He didn't have all the time in the world, yet by the same token, he had a generous potential window of 2 or 3 hours.  Yet he also makes these phone calls.  If we say he's guilty, then the call from Nevill was fake.  Was that call completely invented by Jeremy or was a call actually made, but by Jeremy to himself?

If the former, then I would assume you are right, and he had time to go to and back by foot, but that being the case, why has he made things more complicated for himself by inserting a 20/25 minute delay in his call to the police?  If the latter, if he placed a call to himself, then that suggests he wanted to ensure there would be no doubt about a call having been placed, which in turn does place him under time constraints and may also explain the gap in his story of 20/25 minutes or so - i.e. the gap is the result of these self-imposed constraints, rather than inadvertent self-sabotage.

Otherwise, why does the gap exist at all? If Jeremy is making this call up out of thin air, then why doesn't he make a time up out of thin air and say that he got the call from Nevill at, let's say, 3.24 a.m., tried to call him back immediately, couldn't - can't remember why exactly or whether it was engaged, just knows he couldn't - so rang the police station straight-away at 3.26 a.m., or maybe rang Julie first, or whatever [insert varied times to suit]?  Why all the palaver, which seems to make his position more difficult?

[Erik Narramore]

Back this thread, as I understand it from posters above, the pro-guilt position on this issue is as follows:

(i). Jeremy did not make a call from White House Farm back to Goldhanger, he simply invented the call.

(ii). Within a broader time bracket of two or three hours, he was free to take his time moving to and from the farmhouse.  (I will assume he went on foot both ways, as I think common-sense points that way).

(iii). Therefore, Jeremy undertook the calculated risk or gamble (depending on what he already knew) that phone calls cannot be logged or pinpointed in any way by the authorities.  Or, it's that he came up with the phone calls idea on the hoof because Nevill ended up in the kitchen and he didn't think to actually stage a real call, or maybe the idea came later if he thought he'd been seen when re-entering Bourtree Cottage after carrying out the shootings.

(iv). If the phone calls were planned and if Jeremy did make enquiries about this issue prior to carrying out the shootings, he managed to do so unobtrusively, without leaving a paper trail or potential witnesses.  Either that, or again, he gambled, or maybe there were witnesses or other evidence, but Essex Police regarded it as non-material evidence and it's somewhere in Mike's archive or not disclosed yet and we don't know about it.

To be honest, I am struggling to give credence to the idea that Jeremy would take the risk of not staging a call and fitting his movements around this.  If guilters are right about this, then surely Jeremy would be worried and concerned on the morning of 7th. about police enquiries with the phone company?  I know I would be.  Why wouldn't Jeremy just call the answering machine at Goldhanger, then terminate the call, then dispose of the tape at the other end when he reaches Bourtree Cottage?

If you're a detective in this situation, isn't this one of the very first things you would check?  Even if you knew it could be futile, wouldn't you contact the phone company?  Everything hinges on the claim of a call from Nevill and the call to Julie in the early hours (at whatever time it was) looks suspicious.  I realise they didn't have itemised billing back then, and I also appreciate there were probably detectives within Essex CID who had raised the same question before on other major investigations, nevertheless this was a major incident and I would not leave any stone unturned.  Surely Jeremy would have assumed this too?

On a different note, in all seriousness, could this explain the involvement of Essex Police Special Branch in an otherwise mundane criminal matter?  County Special Branches will be involved in national security and civil contingency and maybe Essex CID contacted them to ascertain what, if anything, could be done to establish whether certain calls had been made.  This is a murder inquiry and it would have justified.

[Erik Narramore]

I'm talking about what Jeremy is likely to have anticipated.  Whether police really did check things is not the point.  I'm not looking at things in hindsight, I'm endeavouring to look at things with foresight, or whatever foresight we can reasonably allow for Jeremy as a fairly bright and physically-fit 24 year old man.

If, as most guilters claim, Jeremy planned all this out, then this has implications for how he carried out the act.  I personally don't believe he planned it, and I suspect the phone calls were the result of 'thinking on the hoof' due to something that occurred on the night, but let's assume I am wrong and he did plan it.

I will grant that he may not have planned it very well, but he must have given thought to the phone calls.  Are we seriously suggesting that he invented the call from Nevill out of thin air?  Isn't it more likely that he used the phones and his answering machine to stage a call in the belief that otherwise phone records might reveal no call was placed at the likely time?  If he did stage a call, that ties the killings quite close to the approximate time bracket that he made the calls to Julie and the police, meaning he had maybe 30 minutes at the most to make it back to Bourtree Cottage.

Just as an additional technical note, I do not believe the possibility can be ruled out that there was some sort of call record logged at the exchange.  During the 1970s, the Post Office were running experiments in call logging for the purposes of collecting Call Data Records (CDRs) at mechanical and electronic exchanges, as they were then prior to the introduction of the digital exchange.  These experiments and trials were successful and the technology was compatible with the old Strowger exchanges, and so it is possible that there was a CDR available and either the police didn't check or they did and they have withheld what they found.

[Erik Narramore]

I think guilters may wish to ponder this issue further.  If Jeremy planned this, then did he invent the call from Nevill out of thin air or did he stage it?

If he invented the call, that means he is taking a huge risk in assuming that the police won't be able to log calls.  How will he know this one way or the other?  It is said that he asked the police to check with the phone company that certain calls were made.  Was that a bluff?

If, on the other hand, he did stage the call from Nevill, this seems to accord much more with some of the known facts, such as his slowness in notifying the authorities - including messing around looking through the phone book and ringing two different police stations - and later asking that the police check with the phone company.

If we are saying that the call was staged, this means that, from the point he ended this staged call, Jeremy had a maximum 30 minute window to make it back to Bourtree Cottage and notify the police.

During this 30 minutes, he had to:

(i). Wait for the answering machine at the outside end to beep, so that the call lasted a decent period.
(ii). Terminate the call.
(iii). Clean the phone.
(iv). Change into fresh clothes.
(v). Leave the farmhouse through the window (or howsoever he made his exit).
(vi). Return to Goldhanger, on foot.  This is roughly 2.5 miles as the crow flies, but he will need to negotiate and circumvent obstacles along the way, such as fences and ditches and what not.
(vii). At the outskirts of Goldhanger, hide his incriminating clothes and change footwear, for retrieval later on the night of the 7th./8th.  This was necessary because he doesn't want to be seen near his house with a rucksack.
(viii). Sneak back into Bourtree Cottage, or if seen, make an excuse such as having received an emergency call or heard an intruder, or whatever.
(ix). Shower and change again into fresh clothes.
(x). Make the brief phone call to Julie.
(xi). Call Witham Police Station and let this ring out.
(xii). Dial the number for Chelmsford Police Station for P.C. West to answer.

Even if it can manage all this in 30 minutes, it still looks suspicious, but not as suspicious as 35 minutes or 40 minutes.

Could Jeremy have carried out (i) to (xii) above in 30 minutes?

Now let us consider some timings.

If I understand correctly, Jeremy claims the call was from his father at roughly 3.10 a.m.  Obviously we must be reasonable and allow that Jeremy's timing may be considerably out.  It could have been 3.00 a.m., but equally it could also have been later than 3.10 a.m. - several minutes later even.  Essex Police also inadvertently assisted Jeremy by getting their timings wrong, but it does seem likely that the explanation for the time discrepancy at Chelmsford HQ is simple: West accidentally recorded the start time of the call as its end time, 3.36 a.m., thus Bonnett was correct that his phone or radio call with West commenced at 3.26 a.m.  This allows for Jeremy to call West at, say, 3.24 a.m.  That makes sense.

Having established this, the timings look very tight for Jeremy to be guilty and the whole thing doesn't look very plausible.  To make the pro-guilt position seem more plausible, we'd have to suppose that Jeremy is wildly out on his own time for Nevill's call.  This is possible, of course, because Jeremy has a vested interest in pushing forward the time of Nevill's call, and even if Jeremy assumes that calls are somehow logged, he may be counting on 'winging it' by pretending there is some sort of mix-up or he was confused or tired.  But the problem with this is that we can only stretch the timings this so far.  It looks suspicious enough as it is.  At some point it will simply be rejected as not credible.

I selected 30 minutes for Jeremy's time window arbitrarily because, psychologically, that seems to be the maximum outside parameter for Jeremy to 'dilly-dally', but if Jeremy is telling the police he got the call at 3.10 a.m., would it not seem strange and suspicious if it turned out from the examination of call logs at the exchange that he had in fact received the call at, say, 2.54 a.m.?  And even if we assume that he could brazen it out and get away with it, could he really have made the call from White House Farm at 2.54 a.m., perhaps waiting a minute or so, then terminate the call, and carry out all the other steps (i) to (xii) above and manage to dial the number for Chelmsford Police Station by, say, 3.24 a.m.?  Does this not stretch credulity?

Where does this leave guilters?

The options:

1. The first option is to say he returned to Goldhanger by some quicker method, such as a push bike.  I view this as extremely unlikely on basic common sense grounds and would dismiss it.  It's too complicated and risky.  Lots of things can go wrong with the bike, it means he has to use footpaths and bridleways, he is more likely to be seen or heard by somebody, and he will need to use lights; he is also more likely to run into somebody on one of the footpaths if he is on a bike, he won't want to carry the bike if something goes wrong, and if he decides to leave the bike or abandon it somewhere then that entails the risk of it being found and reported to the police.  When you put it all together, it looks like a total non-starter.  But the bike idea, while immensely risky, does have one advantage: it allows him to return quickly, which means that the phone calls side of the plan knits together much better because he can more plausibly stage a call from Nevill and then call the police from Goldhanger within the 30 minute window.

2. The second option is to abandon the idea of a staged call and rely on the supposition that Jeremy just invented the call out of thin air.  This would grant considerable latitude in the timings and avoids the problem of Jeremy having a narrow time window to return to Bourtree Cottage and make his calls, and do everything else he has to do in the process.  However, this raises a new problem: How does Jeremy know that the police can't retrieve call information from British Telecom? How does he explain himself if they do or if they come back and claim that there is no record of any such call from White House Farm to Goldhanger?  Can he wing it?  What does he say?  Or do you think he researched the point?  If he did research it, how does he go about that without leaving a paper trail and/or witnesses?  Or do you think he relied simple-mindedly on the bills not being itemised, assuming that meant no calls would be recorded or pinpointed?  That would make him perhaps a bit dense, but as it turned out, it was the right calculation, at least as far as this matter is concerned.

3.  The third option is to accept there is reasonable doubt on the basis that there are difficulties with his moving between the farmhouse and Goldhanger and making the calls, meaning that there is a reasonable possibility that in fact the call from Nevill really happened and was not staged or made-up.

These options are not mutually-exclusive, especially 2 and 3.  You could accept them in some combination, depending on how convinced you are that Jeremy could and would pull this off without staging a call from Nevill.

[Erik Narramore]

Jeremy's clothes would be incriminating:

1. First, I have him changing before he leaves the farmhouse.  This is so that he doesn't leave blood traces as he leaves, which is especially important if he is exiting in the way the prosecution say. He then needs to get rid of these clothes, or at least wash them.  In any event, he carries them with him to the outskirts of Goldhanger.

2. Second, I have him hiding those clothes outside Goldhanger, probably in a rucksack or similar, and retrieving them later on the night of the 7th./8th.  He doesn't want to be caught outside Bourtree Cottage carrying his clothes because if he is caught re-entering the immediate vicinity of Bourtree Cottage, he needs to have a plausible excuse, such as that he has received an emergency call or he is dealing with an intruder or whatever and, in my view, a rucksack or bag of clothes would look incongruous.

I think he would also change and hide his footwear outside Goldhanger.  If on foot, he would be using walking boots or work boots, and he would change these to normal footwear.

[Erik Narramore]

Just as an addendum to this.  One potential reason the bike had mud on it, and the reason he needed the bike, is that he could have been using it during the daytime and early evenings to scope out routes.  He could have gone along the farm tracks and the sea wall path on it, but are there any eye witnesses to him on that bike, at all, ever?  Did anybody see Julie on the bike?

[Erik Narramore]

My opinion of it is:

(i). Jeremy has provided a plausible reason for having the bike.

(ii). The reason for the bike involves Julie.  Let us note that Julie makes no mention of the bike in relation to the incident.  (I appreciate that Julie wouldn't do so because she said the killer was Malcolm Macdonald, but that being the case, where does that leave us with Julie?  Doesn't that suggest she was indeed a constructive accomplice, as I have theorised?).

(iii). (Assuming Jeremy is guilty) obviously neither of us know for sure how he did this, but even if he did use the bike on the night, my point is that I don't find it very likely that he did use it.  I find it more likely he went on foot (mixture of walking, jogging, running), so I'm going to say he went on foot.  In other words, I'm applying the most simple and reasonable solution against the available evidence, rather than complicating things needlessly by shoehorning in an isolated piece of evidence just for the sake of it.

(iv). Notwithstanding what I have said above, the bike may well have been a factor in some other way.  For example, if you take the view that Jeremy planned all this, then Jeremy may have used it to scout routes and he may have deliberately done this some months before.  Jeremy may also have wanted the bike available either at Bourtree Cottage or White House Farm as a back-up and last resort, just in case he needed to move with greater haste some of the distance between the two locations.

[Erik Narramore]

I've looked again at Julie Mugford's statement and the part about the bike, which I think is at Sheet 5. 

She is lying or (if she is telling the truth) she has misconstrued him, because he wouldn't use a bike for a trial run.  He would go on foot.  He would quickly realise that, just thinking about it for five seconds.  He would use the bike to scout routes, if at all.

The fact she mentions the bike in that way just increases my suspicion.  It's not realistic.  It sounds like the bike is being shoehorned into this, by Julie and/or the police - for reasons I explore on another thread.  It also conflicts with her evidence that Matthew Macdonald did this.  Maybe Jeremy originally planned this himself but if so, why does he then tell her he used a hitman?  That doesn't make sense.  He'd already, according to Julie, gone on and on about how he was planning to kill his family, so why not just tell her he'd done it, if indeed he is guilty?

Apart from all that, what she says in that statement doesn't change my belief that if he did this, he must have gone on foot.

[Erik Narramore]

He would go and return on foot, because that's the simplest and least risky way.  He would not cross fields on a bike in the pitch dark - not unless he's stupid, as well as having a screw loose.

He may - I only say may - have scouted routes beforehand with the help of a bike (as well as scouting on foot, of course, and keeping an eye out when he is out in the fields working).

I appreciate there is no necessary contradiction between June's mention of the bike and her later account of Matthew Macdonald, but it seems inconsistent because, if she is telling the truth, it means that he started by telling her he would do it, then he told her he got somebody else to do it, then it turns out (according to you) that he did it himself and he was lying about somebody else doing it.  It's possible, of course, but it raises its own questions.

It does look to me like the prosecution are shoehorning the bike into it, simply because it's there, especially as it wouldn't make sense for him to use a push bike in farmer's fields in the dark.