Did Jeremy Bamber kill his family 30 years ago? Make up your own mind, says local author Carol Ann Lee

Yet she is also a woman who is fascinated by the dark side of human life - and by the impulses that sometimes make us do awful things.

A bestselling 'true crime' author, her books have tackled some of the worst crimes of the last century.

Carol Ann Lee

Several of her early books dealt with the holocaust - focussing on Anne Frank and her family as a way of examining the treatment of innocents in a time of evil.

She then, in 2010, wrote a book in which she tried to get inside the mind of the Moors murderer Myra Hindley - travelling up and down the country to interview people who knew her, talk to the families of victims, and delve into reams of previously unpublished case files. Her verdict: Hindley was a cold, controlled, emotionally detached woman who took part in the gruesome murders because she wanted to. But was she evil? Readers would have to make up their own minds, Carol said.

She  followed up with a book about Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. Yes, Ellis was a murderer, Carol accepts. But she was also a very likeable woman. "You could have had an interesting evening with Ruth Ellis - a lovely evening."

For her latest book Carol, who still lives in Wilberfoss with her 15-year-old son River, has turned her attention to another famous murder: one that gripped the nation back in 1985.

A beautiful young divorcee, Sheila Caffell, had apparently killed her adopted parents and her own six-year-old twins, before turning the gun on herself.

Sheila Caffell

The alarm was raised by Sheila's 24-year-old brother, Jeremy Bamber, who told police he'd just received a phone call from his father saying Sheila had 'gone berserk'.

It seemed like a case of murder/ suicide. Sheila, it quickly emerged, was a disturbed young woman who had suffered from schizophrenia.

At the funeral, a tearful Jeremy was photographed with his then girlfriend, his face a tragic mask.

Yet a year later, he himself had been convicted of the murders - and despite his repeated attempts since to get himself declared innocent, he has remained in prison ever since.

Jeremy Bamber with then girlfriend Julie Mugford at the funeral of three members of his family a year before he was convicted of their murders

Carol was 16 and living in Cornwall at the time of the murders. But she remembers them - and the subsequent funeral and trial - as vividly as if they were yesterday.

There was something very cinematic about that funeral, she says, and those photographs of the young Jeremy Bamber. And as for Sheila... she was utterly unforgettable.

"She was absolutely stunning," Carol says. "And people I have interviewed who knew her say she had a real sweetness and innocence. Her beauty wasn't just skin deep."

As usual, Carol did exhaustive research when preparing to write the book, which was officially launched at Waterstones in York on Thursday. She interviewed detectives who had investigated the case; spoke to crime scene photographers and pathologists; talked to Sheila Caffell's best friend and her psychiatrist; and visited White House Farm at Tolleshunt D'Arcy in Essex, where the murders took place.

White House Farm

Most of all, Carol spent three years corresponding with Bamber himself.

She desperately wanted to meet him in person, she admits. Bamber was at Full Sutton prison near York before being moved recently, and he himself put in a request for her to visit. But it never happened. Bamber eventually wrote to her saying 'not in a million years' would the prison authorities allow him to talk to her while he was inside, adding optimistically: "I will see you on the outside."

In some ways, she concedes, it might have been a good thing that she was never able to meet him in person. "People would have accused me of being duped by him." But you always get a much better idea of what someone is really like if you can meet them face to face, she says.

Nevertheless, his correspondence gave her a good grasp of Bamber's character - or at least, of the character he wanted to project. "He was extremely pleasant in his letters. He's obviously well educated, he went to a good (public) school - Gresham's. He's very articulate, not a good speller, but very bright."

Jeremy Bamber today

He was also obsessed, however, with the idea of proving his innocence. He promised Carol 'access to the truth' and was consumed with highlighting inconsistencies in the case against him, she says. At one point, their correspondence touched on Jimmy Saville, and the way evidence of what he had done was 'covered up'. He felt like that about his own life, Bamber wrote to her: that the truth about what had happened had been covered up.

He was also deeply sensitive about being regarded as a killer.

At one point, Carol wrote to him about a conversation she'd had with a taxi driver, who had described Bamber as the 'most evil man in Britain'.

"I said 'How does it feel to have someone who has not met you describe you as the most evil man in Britain'," she says.

It was the only time Bamber let his anger show. "He said 'how would you feel if someone said you were the most evil woman? I don't see myself like that. I'm innocent of the crime.'"

"He doesn't like it that people believe him to be a psychopath," Carol says.

So is he, a psychopath? After reading his constant protestations of innocence, does she believe him - or does she think he is, after all, guilty?

"I'd rather not say," she says. "I want people to approach the book with an open mind: to look at the evidence, and draw their own conclusions."

There is a huge amount of evidence in the book, all presented in Carol's trademark gripping, almost novelistic style - but all based, she stresses, on fact and on painstaking research.

It is Bamber's murdered family, and the relationships between the family members, which really intrigues her, she says. They were, in many ways, a gilded family, who seemed to have it all: wealthy farmers - Jeremy actually worked on his parents' tenant farm - who lived in a beautiful village and seemed to have wonderful lives.

Jeremy himself lived a lavish lifestyle; his sister had been a model; their parents were extremely well liked in their neighbourhood - especially the father, Nevill. "The Bambers were incredibly good people," Carol says. "Nobody had a bad word to say about Nevill."

But clearly something went terribly wrong, culminating in those savage murders in the early hours of August 7, almost 30 years ago.

Carol herself won't be drawn on whether she thinks Bamber was responsible. But plenty of other people will. "Everyone I interviewed who had spoken to Jeremy or who was involved in the investigation ... they all believe him to be guilty," she says. "But I want people to make up their own minds."

• The Murders At White House Farm by Carol Ann Lee is published by Sidgwick & Jackson, priced £16.99.

Now read an extract from the book...

By Carol Ann Lee

‘Suicide Girl Kills Twins and Parents’ bellowed the Daily Express headline on 8 August 1985. Beside a hauntingly beautiful photograph of the young woman and her two smiling children the article began: ‘A farming family affectionately dubbed “the Archers” was slaughtered in a bloodbath yesterday. Brandishing a gun taken from her father’s collection, deranged divorcee Sheila Bamber, 28, first shot her twin six-year-old sons. She gunned down her father as he tried to phone for help. Then she murdered her mother before turning the automatic .22 rifle on herself.’ Twenty-four-year-old Jeremy Bamber had raised the alarm shortly before 3.30am on Wednesday, 7 August 1985. He told police that he had just received a phone call from his father to the effect that Sheila had ‘gone berserk’ with a gun. Officers met him at the family home, White House Farm in Tolleshunt D’Arcy, Essex; Jeremy worked there but lived alone three miles away. Firearms units arrived but it wasn’t deemed safe to enter the house until 7.45am. They found sixty-one-year-old Nevill Bamber in the kitchen, beaten and shot eight times; his wife June, also sixty-one, lay in the doorway of the master bedroom, shot seven times; Sheila’s six-year-old twin sons, Nicholas and Daniel, had been repeatedly shot in their beds, while Sheila herself lay a few feet from her mother, the rifle on her body, its muzzle pointing at her chin and a Bible at her side. The two bullet wounds in her throat caused some consternation, but the knowledge that she suffered from schizophrenia, coupled with Nevill’s call to his son and the apparent security of the house, convinced police that it was a murder-suicide.

For weeks to come, the tabloids gorged themselves on salacious stories about ‘Hell Raiser Bambi’, the ‘girl with mad eyes’, whom they claimed had been expelled from two schools before becoming a ‘top model’ with a wild social life that resulted in a £40,000 drug debt linking her to a string of country house burglaries. June Bamber, too, was condemned as a religious fanatic with little else to her character. (But) when journalist Yvonne Roberts visited Tolleshunt D’Arcy that September for a more restrained article in London’s Evening Standard, one local told her: ‘What upsets us is that the whole family’s life has been reduced to a series of newspaper headlines. And none of them has got it right.’..."