Bonus Episode of "Small Town Big Crime" on the Alibi and the DNA

How the alibi fizzled, and how the two unknown males at the crime scene disappeared.

Everyone in Söringland is excited about the upcoming three final episodes of Small Town, Big Crime, which drop tomorrow. As a teaser, the podcasters released a 25-minute “bonus episode” today for subscribers. You can go listen to it here, but you’ll need to subscribe, so do it. Journalism doesn’t come cheap.

Here, I’ll provide a short summary of the parts of the episode which might prove most interesting to Söring case aficionados. The podcasters first try to get to the bottom of the “alibi” evidence: movie tickets, room-service receipts, etc. Does the evidence prove that either Söring or Haysom stayed in DC? The answer is no. The alibi wasn’t checked in time, and the evidence has been largely destroyed. Incidentally, the podcasters report that Söring’s father claims he found the movie tickets in Söring’s dorm room in Virginia in 1985. However, as Terry Wright showed, that can’t be correct. Terry Wright has very good arguments for why the documentary evidence places Elizabeth in Washington, D.C., but I’ll let him make those. For their part, both Söring and Elizabeth Haysom said in their 1986 confessions that the alibi evidence was basically worthless (Söring would change his tune about this in 1990).

The podcasters also look into the “alibi timeline” created by Christine Kim who, as always, has wisely decided to keep out of everything to do with the Söring case. The podcasters did attempt to call the person whom Elizabeth Haysom claimed she called on the night of 30 March 1985 from the hotel room in Washington, but this person didn’t answer the podcasters’ inquiry. Again, it’s hard to underestimate how much normal people do not want to be dragged into this case.

The most interesting part comes in the last half of the episode, which mostly revolves around DNA. The podcasters quote Söring’s lawyer and Chip Harding (not John Grisham, as I speculated in my previous post) eagerly calling for more DNA testing. The podcasters then briefly recap the history of DNA in the case. Söring initally convinced two professors, Dr. Moses Schanfield and Dr. J. Thomas McClintock, to write reports broadly endorsing Söring’s claim that the blood-group and DNA evidence, viewed together, show that two unknown males left blood at the crime scene.

The podcasters, to their credit, familiarized themselves with the critiques of this argument. Terry Wright, in his report, demonstrates that Söring’s experts improperly conflated the blood-group and DNA results. Building on Terry Wright’s conclusions, I argued in my my January 2020 article for the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the DNA and blood-group evidence didn’t provide any proof of unknown males at the crime scene, since the few fragments of male DNA which were still testable in 2009 (using 2009 technology, which is now badly outdated) were almost certainly left by Derek Haysom.

The podcasters decided to contact Söring’s DNA experts in the fall of 2020 and see if they found Terry Wright’s and my critique convincing. The results were not good news for Söring. Schanfield refused to talk, claiming he didn’t have the time to comment on his report. McClintock, to his credit, did cooperate with the podcasters, eventually sort of becoming their DNA expert. The podcasters obtained DNA samples from both drifters and Jim Farmer, and McClintock helpfully eliminated all of them as potential donors of male DNA found at the crime scene. Further, after being notified that other DNA experts (and I) had concluded that the “unknown male” DNA at the crime scene may have all belonged to Derek Haysom, McClintock conceded this was indeed possible.

Söring’s Efforts to Find More DNA Experts

Söring seems to have realized at some point that he might need more experts to bolster his DNA claims. He reached out to Dr. Daniele Podini, a forensic expert at George Washington University — importantly, the same university where Moses Schanfield worked. (Schanfield died in 2021.) Podini wrote a brief report in 2018 which claimed that “hundreds” of people in Virginia or “thousands” of people in the USA could have contributed the “unknown male DNA” found at the Haysom crime scene. Interestingly enough, this is basically the same conclusion I reached in January 2020 in my FAZ piece: if the male DNA at the crime wasn’t left by Derek Haysom, then there were only a few hundred males who could have left it, since they all had to share several identical genetic markers with Derek Haysom. Here’s a Venn diagram illustrating the point:

Of course, this is not to scale — the circles for Derek Haysom and the approximately 800 people who shared his exact DNA markers would have to be tiny pinpricks compared to the vast ocean of the male population. Further, under Söring’s theory, there were supposedly two unknown males at the crime scene. Assuming they weren’t identical twins, this meant that, by sheer coincidence, two males who shared the same genetic markers as approx. .00000006% (800/119,000,000) of the male population of the USA happened to converge upon Loose Chippings on 30 March 1985 with murder on their minds.

So Podini basically agrees with me; if you assume unknown males at the crime scene, you can certainly come up with a scenario in which this happened. But that scenario, as I noted in my FAZ article, is literally millions of times less likely than the alternate theory: all the DNA came from Derek Haysom.

STBC wanted to talk to Podini, so they emailed him in fall 2020. Oddly enough, they got a reply from Schanfield, not Podini! Podini later responded, but merely claimed that he couldn’t remember the case and didn’t have time to comment.

That’s a very common response among Söring supporters these days, and I think we’ll hear a lot more of it in the new STBC episodes.

After their failed attempt to get Podini to defend his conclusions, the podcasters mention an email which Söring received in early 2020 from a German DNA expert, Dr. Christa Augustin, Professor of Forensic Genetics at the University of Hamburg clinic. Söring had reached out to her and attempted to convince her to back his claims about the two unknown males. The podcasters had that email translated into English. In the email, Augustin declined to endorse Söring’s claims about what the DNA showed in his case. She also commented — and this gives me great pleasure — that the analysis of the DNA I delivered in my FAZ articles (you can read the most detailed version in the German original here) was basically accurate.

So, to sum up: Söring went looking for experts to back up his claims in 2016, after he discovered the supposed discrepancy between the blood-group testing in 1985 and the DNA testing (which, let’s recall, was not performed at his request) in 2009. He found two. One of them, McClintock, has since basically jumped ship. He then went searching for more, and found one, Dr. Podini, who wrote a short report in 2018. After his release in 2019, Söring believed he needed to find new experts — German experts — to support his DNA claims. A native German speaker would surely prove more convincing in the German newspapers and TV shows Söring planned to appear in. He began inquiries, but at least one of the people he contacted refused to cooperate, saying the evidence did not justify the conclusions he wanted her to endorse.

There’s an fun postscript to this story which I heard about from journalistic circles. In preparation for one of the interviews he gave in Germany 2020, Söring provide his usual “media pack” to the journalists, and mentioned Podini’s report. But the journalists were skeptical. They accepted Podini’s conclusion that — assuming Derek Haysom wasn’t the source of the male DNA at the crime scene — then there were “hundreds” of people in Virginia, and “thousands” in the USA, who could have left that DNA. Söring apparently found Podini’s conclusion to be important evidence bolstering his innocence claims.

But the journalists rejoined with the objection which should have been obvious to everyone (my paraphrase): “Hold on, Mr. Söring. You’re saying that you have an expert who says that there are ‘hundreds’ of people in Virginia in March 1985 who could have contributed male DNA to the crime scene. But there were about 3 million males living in Virginia in 1985. That means that the probability that one of those random males left the DNA was incredibly tiny. And you also have to consider that you say there were two, not just one, but two, unknown males there. Why is that more likely than the theory that all the remaining fragments of DNA came from Derek Haysom, who matches all the required markers, and…who left literally liters of blood all over the crime scene”?

Söring, it will come as no surprise, didn’t have a good answer to this question. Which may be why he abruptly changed his story in 2020, now claiming that he has “no idea” who actually murdered the Haysoms. Later, he added an even greater caveat, publicly admitting that it was impossible for him to prove his innocence. He now mentions DNA in his case very rarely in public, especially when speaking in ways which could end up on the Internet.

Lessons…learned?

The journalists mentioned above, however, chose not to report the fact that Söring could not answer their question. Which brings us full-circle to the main point of this blog, which is not to prove Jens Söring is guilty (that’s already been done), but to explore why so many journalists both in the USA and in Germany did such a terrible job covering this case. If you do a search in either English or German, you will find hundreds of news articles which straight-out say that new DNA evidence “places two unknown males at the crime scene” and “supports Jens Söring’s innocence claims”.

All any of those journalists needed to do was to look at the documents Söring based his claim on. Those documents are in the public record for all to see. Terry Wright looked at them and spotted the problem. I looked at them and spotted the problem. But none of the German journalists who wrote about the case ever bothered to check Söring’s claims, or spotted the obvious problems with his reasoning. They wanted him to be innocent, and they wanted his experts to be right, so that’s what they published.

Some American journalists came out looking a bit better. 20/20, in its feature on the case, did hire independent experts to check Schanfield and McClintock’s assertions. Even better, Small Town, Big Crime spoke to me and read my work and the work of other critics of Söring’s claims, and followed up on the information and analysis we provided to them. But alas, the vast majority of American journalists just accepted what Söring and his lawyers said at face value.

I’m hoping the efforts of myself and other critics will turn the Söring case into a learning opportunity for journalists on the criminal-justice beat: Trust, but verify.