The prosecution argued that, motivated by a large inheritance, Jeremy had shot the family with his father's semi-automatic rifle, then placed the gun in Sheila's hands to make the deaths look like a murder–suicide.

Sheila became increasingly upset; on one occasion, when Colin left her 21st birthday party with another woman, she required hospital treatment after breaking a window with her fist.

[27] After the divorce, Nevill bought Sheila a flat in Morshead Mansions, Maida Vale, and Colin helped raise the children from his home in nearby Kilburn.

[28] At around this time Sheila became friendly with a group of young women who nicknamed her "Bambi", and who later told reporters that she often complained about her poor relationship with her adoptive mother.

[33] Sheila was readmitted to St Andrew's in March 1985, five months before the murders, after a psychotic episode in which she believed herself to be in direct communication with God and that certain people, including her boyfriend, were trying to hurt or kill her.

[40] Jeremy Nevill Bamber was born on 13 January 1961 to a student midwife who, after an affair with a married British Army sergeant, gave her baby to the Church of England Children's Society when he was six weeks old.

[45] Jeremy returned to England in 1982[46] to work on his adoptive parents' farm for £170 a week,[4] and set up home in a cottage Nevill owned at 9 Head Street, Goldhanger.

She told reporters that Jeremy used to provoke his parents, riding in circles around his mother on a bicycle, wearing make-up to upset his father and once hiding a bag of live rats in Wilson's car.

Ferguson told the Court of Appeal in 2002 that any suggestion that the children be removed from her care would have provoked a strong reaction from Sheila, but that she might have welcomed daytime help.

[79] Nevill's nephew visited the farmhouse on the weekend of 26–28 July 1985 and told the court that he had seen the rifle, in the gun cupboard in the ground-floor office, with the sight and silencer attached.

[84] He said he had spent time looking up the number, and even though his father had asked him to come quickly, he had first telephoned his girlfriend, Julie Mugford, in London, then had driven slowly to the farmhouse.

[97] After Jeremy was convicted, the trial judge, Mr Justice Maurice Drake, expressed concern about the "less than thorough investigation",[119] while The Times wrote about "blunders, omissions and ineptitude".

[123] Jeremy also began selling his family's belongings; Mugford's mother was offered June's car and an ad was placed in a local newspaper asking £900 for Nevill's.

He said he loved his parents and sister, and denied that they had kept him short of money; he claimed the only reason he had broken into the caravan site with Mugford was to prove that security was poor.

[152] Jeremy's trial, which lasted eighteen days, opened on 3 October 1986 before Mr Justice Drake and a jury of seven men and five women at Chelmsford Crown Court.

"[4] The prosecution case was that Jeremy, motivated by hatred and greed, had left White House Farm around 10 pm on 6 August 1985, after dining with his family, to drive to his home in Goldhanger.

Later, perhaps in the early hours of the morning of 7 August, he had returned to the farm on his mother's bicycle — which he had borrowed a few days earlier — cycling along a route that avoided the main roads and approaching the farmhouse from the back.

[158] A former boyfriend of Sheila's gave a written statement to the court that she had had some kind of breakdown in March 1985, in his presence, when she began beating the wall with her fists because the telephone line had gone dead during a call; she had said the phone was bugged and talked about God and the devil, and how the latter loved her.

Sentencing him to five life terms, with a recommendation that he serve a minimum of twenty-five years,[18] the judge told Jeremy: "Your conduct in planning and carrying out the killing of five members of your family was evil, almost beyond belief.

In March 2001 the CCRC referred the case to the Court of Appeal because of the discovery of DNA inside the silencer; this was found as a result of a test not available in 1986 and constituted fresh evidence.

[196] Mark Webster, an expert instructed by Jeremy's defence team, argued that Hayward's tests had been inadequate and that there was a real possibility, not a remote one, that the blood had come from Nevill and June.

[205] Campaign events included a supporter reading a letter from Jeremy to his parents at their graveside, and a "Bamber bake-off" featuring his mother's favourite recipes.

Crime-scene photographs not made available to the original defence show Sheila's right arm and hand in slightly different positions in relation to the gun, which is lying across her body.

Former Detective Chief Superintendent Mick Gradwell of Lancashire Constabulary, shown the photographs by The Guardian, said in 2011: "The evidence shows, or portrays, Essex police having damaged the scene, and then having staged it again to make it look like it was originally.

[219] In November 1985 a police report submitted to the Director of Public Prosecutions had argued that the burn marks were made with the hot end of the gun or with a poker from the AGA cooker.

[156] The defence commissioned a report from Peter Sutherst, a British forensic photographic expert, who was asked in 2008 to examine negatives of the kitchen taken on the day of the murders and later.

[224] Jeremy's lawyers argued that the 26 September 1985 letter to Mugford from John Walker, assistant director of public prosecutions, raised the possibility that she had been persuaded to testify in the hope that charges against her would not be pursued.

It invited his lawyers to respond within three months, extended the deadline to allow them to study all 406 crime-scene photographs,[226][227] and in September 2011 granted them an indefinite period in which to pursue an additional line of inquiry.

[228] The CCRC finally rejected the application in April 2012 in a 109-page report, which said the submission had not identified any new evidence or legal argument that would raise the real possibility of the Court of Appeal overturning the conviction.

[199][needs update] The case became the subject of a television drama series, White House Farm, starring Freddie Fox as Bamber and Cressida Bonas as Sheila, broadcast in January 2020 on ITV in the UK and HBO Max in the United States.