Why Jeremy Could Not Have Staged A Call

[Erik Narramore]

To understand this, we have to bring together the following topics in a critical synthesis:

1. A likely plan for the murders, assuming Jeremy is guilty.
2. Crime scene choreography - i.e. what actually happened, people's movements and so forth.
3. Set-up of telephones inside the White House.
4. Telephone set-up at Bourtree Cottage

I reiterate that:

(i). Jeremy could not have planned the phone calls because he didn't plan on Nevill being in the kitchen.  The telephone engineer clearly confirms where the phone was prior to the shootings.  This is a gaping hole in the prosecution case.  It means that if Jeremy is guilty, the phone calls were an unplanned aspect of the murders.

(ii). It follows that Jeremy had no specific use for an answerphone and there is no evidence he owned one prior to the shootings anyway.

(iii). Apart from that, Jeremy could not have staged a call.  This is for a number of reasons that I have covered exhaustively.  One of them is tacitly conceded by the prosecution themselves: the timings just don't work.  The prosecution will never admit this, but it's clear from their own omission and deemphasis of the point.  Jeremy is hardly going to risk pretending to have received a phone call and then take 30 minutes (I would say more) to ring the police.  On reflection, the whole notion of staging a phone call is bizarre anyway.

(iv). Jeremy could have made a call up, but then he runs the risk that calls may be logged somewhere. Yet Jeremy prompted the police to check for a log of Nevill's call. 

(v). Jeremy also puts himself under some time pressure because the call to the police needs to be made from Bourtree Cottage.

(vi). This is where the whole prosecution theory starts to seem less-than-plausible.  The alternative is to simply accept that a phone call from Nevill woke Jeremy up and he answered the phone and the call was as Jeremy claims.  Instead of this simple explanation, we have to accept that a needlessly complex plot was put in motion by Jeremy that put Jeremy in the frame.

[Erik Narramore]

The call from Nevill to Jeremy that night can't have been a staged phone call.  That should be common ground between the defence and prosecution.  What this means is that if Jeremy is guilty, he must have just invented it and realised he needed to be back at Bourtree Cottage ASAP to call the police and give them his story.

[Erik Narramore]

I have already set out why Jeremy could not have planned the calls.  It makes absolutely no sense for him to have done so.  That being the case, we have to do our best to make the evidence fit the scenario of him inventing a call on the hoof, which is what he must have done if he is guilty.  His reasons for doing so then become secondary.  He either did or didn't.  The 'why' doesn't necessarily matter, and I could stop my answer there, as Jeremy could have just thought up the idea for no particular reason other than to give himself an alibi (as he saw it in his own head). But I will attempt an explanation of the 'why'.

On the topic of 'why', my thinking is that, if guilty, Jeremy did not have to invent a call.  He could have just turned up the following morning and that is what he should have done.  But he decided differently, and I think this is because:

(i). Nevill struggled with him, so Jeremy now became a bit more worried as his plan had gone awry.  He starts thinking about an alibi and the phone call idea forms in his mind; and,

(ii). at that moment, he took the view that the police would be suspicious that Nevill had ended up at a different part of the house to the other victims and he decided that he had to explain this by making it look like Nevill had gone for the phone and rang Jeremy, then left the phone off the hook.  This accounts for Nevill's movements in the house and for why no 999 call is received, so (in Jeremy's mind) it helps the plan knit together.

Now consider what the position would be without the invented phone call.  The police would conclude that there had been a struggle or fight in the kitchen, and may wonder why Nevill had not simply stopped Sheila.  The invented phone call is a gambit to distract the police a little and direct things.  It fills a gap in the narrative because it has Nevill occupied with phoning Jeremy while Sheila is potentially elsewhere in the house.  Clearly this is a naive approach, but this may be what Jeremy came up with at the time.

That's my best explanation.  You can disagree but still accept that Jeremy did not plan the calls.  If you do maintain that Jeremy must have planned the calls, then you have to explain why and how he planned to get Nevill in the kitchen.

You could try to argue that Jeremy's plan was to kill Nevill and June in the bedroom and then move the rotary dial phone back upstairs and, furthermore, the reason the digital handset was hidden between the magazines was that this was going to be the new kitchen phone, as part of Jeremy's plan.  But for that to work, you would have to believe that Nevill would interrupt himself in the middle of an assault by Sheila and make a call to Jeremy from the bedroom, which again makes little sense.

None of it really makes much sense.  I'm just trying to provide the best prosecution scenario possible.

[Erik Narramore]

Jeremy didn't stage a call.  There was no point in staging a call.  Just think about it logically, as you have now done with the 'planning' issue and you will realise I am right.

If Jeremy is guilty, he simply made a call up.

Tellingly, in a later police interview, Jeremy suggested that the police contact BT to verify that a call was made by Nevill.  Given that he can't have staged a call and must have made a call up, why would he say this to the police?

There was no reason for Jeremy to demand that they "check with the Telecom" earlier, because Jeremy was not officially under suspicion. He raises the point at the stage you would expect of an innocent person.  He is being challenged about the calls, so he says that they should check with the exchange.  He has no way of knowing whether the police can verify this with the exchange.  If anything, he must have guessed that the police would have thought of this already.  His actions suggest prior knowledge of the possibility of call logging at the exchange, so why would he make up such a call?  Remember that we have already established that he could not have staged the call.  The timings don't make any sense for staging a call.  Bear in mind as well that he could not have planned these calls.

[Erik Narramore]

The guilt side may say Jeremy was bluffing with the police.

The way I look at it is this: if an important aspect of the case against Jeremy relies on supposing that he was bluffing, or that he was 'cocky and arrogant', then it can't be a very good case.  The burden is on the Crown at all times.  We can't incriminate Jeremy by supposing he was bluffing or putting everything down to arrogance.  We either have evidence for the point being advanced or we don't.

The reality is that we can't disprove that he received that call.  The Crown's case at trial was based on the idea that this could be disproved: by referring to Nevill being shot in the mouth.  Yet Jeremy can't have planned the call in the first place, and he can't have staged a call either due to the timings, and if he can't have planned it or staged it, we have to suppose that he made it all up on the hoof and tried to bluff his way through a criminal investigation.  It may be true, but does it seem likely that somebody would do that when he had the safer alternative of simply finding the bodies the following morning?  Is it likely that he would tell the police to "check with the Telecom", if he had made a call up?

[Erik Narramore]

Further points to consider:

(i). A staged call was impossible to orchestrate without third party assistance, so if a call had been logged at the exchange, that would all-but establish Jeremy's innocence or at least throw doubt on the prosecution case.

(ii). However, we can also see that it was illogical for Jeremy to plan a phone call from Nevill.  This means that had there been an attempt by Jeremy to stage a call, perhaps with the assistance of a third party, this in fact could only have further incriminated Jeremy as it would have meant that multiple calls were logged between the two locations, the White House and Bourtree Cottage.

(iii). The police would never check with BT because that would run the risk of revealing a staged call, which weakens the prosecution.  See (i) above.  The police were shrewd in this case (had to be) and considered every move, disregarding (ii) because they could not be sure at that point about timings and what had occurred.  We can see it now, but we have the leisure of hindsight that the police lacked.

(iv). The defence would also never check with BT because that would run the risk of no call being logged, or a technical inability to log calls.  The first weakens the defence, the second doesn't help.

(v). I believe the witness statement obtained by Essex Police from the BT engineer about this issue may have been deliberately vague, to cut off an avenue of inquiry that was dangerous for both prosecution and defence to pursue exhaustively.  It was a stalemate position on the phone calls and it was never central to the trial, as far as I can tell.

[Erik Narramore]

If Jeremy didn't stage the call, then he just used the push bike for convenience.

If we assume he is guilty, then I believe - taking everything together - he didn't plan the phone calls.  The need for the phone calls arose due to Nevill ending up in the kitchen.  I don't believe he staged a call from Nevill.  He just made it up.  It wouldn't have occurred to him at that point that calls might be logged at the PB exchange.  I think he went to the farmhouse by foot, but due to the need to stage a call, he realised that he needed to be back at Bourtree Cottage as soon as possible, so he returned on the ladies bike.

In other words, it was the crime scene sequence itself, specifically Nevill in the kitchen, that put him under time pressure.

This is the only scenario that works in logical terms.  All other scenarios are flawed.

Jeremy can't have planned the phone calls in advance.  It would be illogical.  But most people, even on here, can't wrap their heads round this and just want to stay in the same groove of thinking.  The other problem that the prosecution have is that a scenario in which Jeremy stages a call can't really stand up on timings.  This is what tripped up Adam in my previous exchanges with him.  He kept having to bring the times forward and in the end he just gave up (but wouldn't admit it).  Adam and others also can't accept that Jeremy could not have had an answerphone, still less planned to use one.

The only way a Jeremy scenario works is if he makes up the call from Nevill on the spot and, as I say, uses the bike on the way back purely because he realises that a call to the police can only work if it is made from Bourtree Cottage - obviously.  He realises he can't dawdle.  He has to return quickly.

Whether he was right in this calculation is irrelevant.  Personally, I think he was wrong.  He could have walked back and just found the bodies later that morning on his arrival for work.  But that doesn't matter.  This is about what Jeremy must have thought.  My point is that this was the calculation he made.  You have to get inside his head, put yourself in his shoes, and match his thinking to the evidence.

On a related point, as I have suggested before, it is also quite possible that either Nevill or even Jeremy himself made a real 999 call that was aborted and this may explain Jeremy's confidence that a 999 call was made, despite him being guilty.

[Erik Narramore]

If Jeremy rings himself, that means he is staging a call.  If he is staging a call, that can only be because he thinks some sort of log of calls will be made somewhere, otherwise there would be no point to the exercise.  He could instead just make a call up, couldn't he.  Since Jeremy thinks there is a chance that calls are logged somewhere, he won't be ringing himself at 2.45 p.m.

Then we must ask: Why would Jeremy want to stage a call from Nevill anyway?  Why not just turn up at the farm the following morning to find everybody dead?  For Jeremy to plan ahead to stage a phone call from Nevill would require that Jeremy plans for Nevill to be in the kitchen, since we know from a statement by the telephone engineer that the phone was already downstairs before the shootings.

There's also the fact that Jeremy did not have an answerphone before the shootings, so if he did use an answerphone that night, he must have hidden it at Bourtree Cottage.  Buying it would also have been risky. He must have bought it from a shop while disguised, perhaps as an Arab sheikh?

Some guilters also believe Jeremy could cycle back to Bourtree Cottage in 10 minutes.  The ground was muddy during this period and the Brook House Farm route was a dirt track.  That's before we get into the inherent risk of being seen or stopped, or having to stop, while cycling, and the noise of a bike and the need to use lights, etc.