Halfway Through "In Dubio Pro Reo": The first 27 Mistakes

A quick roundup of the errors in the first half of the book.

I’ve now read the first half of In Dubio pro Reo, which is still listed as unavailable on Amazon. However, a few days ago we got the first sighting in the wild of the book in the hands of a paying customer, so apparently it is being shipped.

As promised, I’m going to start with the simple mistakes in the book. These are all statements which are either factually wrong or which are contradicted by the evidence. Many of these errors have already been debunked on this blog, so I’ll just refer back to previous posts. The translations are all mine. I’ll provide a page-number citation after the quotation. All quotations are from Hillers, unless otherwise noted. JS = Jens Söring; AG = Andy Griffiths; RGR = Dr. Ralph Guise-Rübe. CR = Chuck Reid; BS = Bill Sizemore

• “Why do most people in Virgina [sic] today seem to be convinced of Söring's innocence” (22)?

—> Hillers presents no evidence to back up this claim. The official position the State of Virginia is that Jens Söring is guilty, and there is no evidence ordinary Virginians have a problem with this.

• CR: “We got all these denials [that an FBI profiled was created], and then [Stan Lapekas] was actually able to get written confirmation from the FBI that a profile had been created. I mean, that put the nail in the coffin. It was profiled, and Bedford always claimed it didn't happen.” (46) Hillers: “The creation of a perpetrator profile is still denied in some quarters today, but has been proven on the basis of the FBI file on the Haysom murders.” (63).

—> No FBI profile was ever requested, as Ricky Gardner has confirmed repeatedly, thus no profile was ever created. The brief reference to a profile in an anonymous Telex from early in the investigation (which Reid is referring to) was simply a mistake. If a profile had ever been created the FBI would have kept a copy of it, and would have released it upon request. Team Söring has had years to locate this supposed report without success, for a very good reason: it doesn’t exist. Long ago on my old blog I offered a reward of €1,000 Euros for the report, that offer still stands.

• “[Söring wrote books and led his innocence campaign] systematically from one of the toughest prisons in the world.” (56).

—> Prisoners in Russia, El Salvador, Thailand, Nigeria, Iran, and dozens of other countries would give their left nut to be housed in the worst prison in Virginia.

• “Jens Söring is also accused of having bribed (bestochen) official experts such as lawyers or expert witnesses, including the former Deputy Attorney General of Virginia - Gail Starling Marshall -- and DNA experts such as Professor J. Thomas McClintock to support his defence strategy and influence the evidence in his favour.” (53).

—> Nobody has ever accused Söring of bribing anyone. Where would have have gotten the money? I and others have pointed out that Söring’s lawyers and expert witnesses are partisans and that some received payment of some kind. Payment is not a bribe, it is compensation for the work an expert performs on the case. There is nothing unusual or suspicious about this, it’s how the U.S. criminal justice system works. The first question every partisan expert witness is asked during cross-examination is how much they were paid for their testimony. We’ll see many more passages in the book showing Hillers’ ignorance of the U.S. justice system.

• “Another critical point is the lack of comprehensive expert reports on the personality profiles of those involved, particularly with regard to social prognoses. This raises questions about the thoroughness and objectivity of the psychological assessment.” (55)

—> Elizabeth Haysom was a subject of one of the most thorough psychological evaluations in the history of the University of Virginia, conducted by three forensic psychiatrists at the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy (ILPPP) at the University of Virginia (UVA). Jens Söring was evaluated by two renowned British forensic psychiatrists, and before he was sentenced, Bedford County created a “pre-sentencing report”, a thorough psychological and social evaluation which is routine in every case involving a prison sentence.

• “Media reports repeatedly claim that the family’s daughter, Elizabeth Haysom, and her German boyfriend Jens Söring became the focus of investigators immediately after the murders.” (61)

—> Hillers does not cite a single media report which makes this claim, much less several ones which made it “repeatedly”.

• “It is interesting to note Chuck Reid's position that he has never changed his mind [about Söring’s guilt] - a fact that is often misrepresented.” (71)

—> In 2011, Reid gave an interview to the American news show On the Case with Paula Zahn in which he said this:

Elizabeth wanted them gone. She found an individual who she could manipulate and use to do her deeds for her… And unfortunately, Jens, he was just madly in love with a girl he thought that really cared for him. She played him for a fool ’cause she knew that all she had to do was plant a little seed and back off and then pretend, OK, I was just joking about this, but in her own mind knowing he’s gonna do it.”

One assumes that if Chuck Reid really were racked by guilt since the 1990s at his part in sending an innocent man to prison for life, he might have mentioned this fact in 2011. Hillers cites no evidence to show that Chuck Reid had publicly aired his doubts about Söring’s guilt before his interview with the makers of Killing for Love.

• “It is a remarkable fact that in Virginia, a state where access to firearms is comparatively easy, [Söring chose to use a knife, instead of a gun, to kill the Haysoms].” (86)

—> In the mid-1980s, handgun sales were illegal in the District of Columbia. As the Supreme Court noted in 2008: “[Washington, D.C.] generally prohibits the possession of handguns. It is a crime to carry an unregistered firearm, and the registration of handguns is prohibited.” In Virginia, customers must be 21 years old to buy handguns, and must present photo ID to do so. Söring was 18 at the time of the crime.

• “In a later trial, Elizabeth will recant these accounts and admit that the story about Söring's fingerprints on a coffee cup during the interrogation in Bedford is fictitious - as are all the other entries of 12 October 1985 (trial transcript of 14 June 1987, pages 163 and 164). Elizabeth states that this specific diary entry is a lie she wrote to manipulate her boyfriend.” (115)

—> As I’ve pointed out before, this is a blatant lie by omission. Hillers singles out a passage in Elizabeth’s cross-examination by Neaton in which she says that some of the entries in the joint travel diary were fabrications by her, but not all. Just a few moments before, during her direct examination by Updike, she confirmed that the comment about the coffee mug was truthful:

Q: Then in single quotes, ‘the case is about to be solved’. In brackets, ‘perhaps fingerprints on coffee mug used by Jens in Bedford interview gave him away’. What is that statement all about?

A: Well as I stated earlier, the — it was our belief that the police had fingerprints, a partial fingerprint in blood, and we thought that it was Jens's, and we thought that when he had gone to Bedford and had his interview with Ricky Gardner, that the coffee cup that he had used, they had lifted the fingerprints off of the coffee cup and matched it to this fingerprint.

I posted this information on this blog on 6 November 2023, 5 months before Hillers’ book was released. For Hillers not to inform her readers that Haysom herself had specifically verified that the coffee mug comment was not “fictitious” is deceptive in the highest degree. By the way, Söring claimed at his trial that the comment was a “joke”, then changed his story later.

• RGR: “It was legally questionable for Terry Wright to enter and search the couple’s flat. On the basis of the cheque fraud, there was no legal basis for this — and above all, there was no reason to go through the letters.” (123-24)

—> As we will see, Judge Ralph Guise-Rübe (and others) apparently does not understand that criminal suspects in the UK and US can waive their rights. This is pretty shocking, since suspects can also waive their rights in Germany, as in every other legal system on the planet. Either that, or Guise-Rübe does not know that Jens Söring consented to the search of his apartment, as Söring himself admits he did. The search was thus perfectly legal. Terry Wright himself also notes that under British law at the time, police were generally entitled to search the premises of those who had been arrested for serious crimes, including check fraud, an offense for which Söring and Haysom spent a year in prison.

I’m trying to avoid too much editorializing here, but let me point out two things. First, Guise-Rübe clearly knows nothing about English law. Second, his comments here and elsewhere seem to suggest a bizarre kind of regret that this crime was solved. He seems to wish nobody had read the letters, and that Söring hadn’t confessed. If we actually applied the standards Guise-Rübe thinks should govern criminal cases (or perhaps just this one), the murders of Derek and Nancy Haysom would have gone unsolved. Is that the outcome he would have preferred?

• JS: “It seems a sheer coincidence that we were dealing with British investigators from a small village of all places, where the police still seriously had time to read every letter. That would probably have been unthinkable in a smaller district.” (124)

—> I’m not sure what this internally inconsistent statement is supposed to mean (why would a “smaller district” be different from a “small village”, but apparently Söring wants to convey to us that Richmond, England was a sleepy backwater where police had plenty of time on their hands. This is false. Richmond, England is a part of Greater London, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world. If you asked the average Londoner whether Richmond, London was a “small village”, they would burst out laughing, and tell you that the posh blighters who live there wish it were, but it most definitely ain’t.

• BS: “The question of the motive for the murders was never fully answered. The story the prosecution wanted the jury to believe was that Elizabeth's parents disapproved of Jens and tried to separate the couple. But there was really no evidence presented at trial to support this theory.” (130).

—> Evidence of what the Haysoms thought about Söring is irrelevant; it’s his state of mind, not theirs, that counts. Even so, Elizabeth testified to the Söring jury that her parents would never have allowed Söring and Haysom to travel together to Europe in the summer of 1985, which angered Söring. After Söring killed them, Jens and Elizabeth indeed traveled to Europe in the summer of 1985.

Elizabeth also testified that Söring was angry that Elizabeth would be moving out of student housing and into her own apartment in the fall of 1985. He was also angry because, Elizabeth assured him, it was “out of the question” that the Haysoms would permit Söring to move in with her, which was what he desperately wanted (she eventually decided on her own not to let him shack up with her). So eliminating her parents removed two significant obstacles to deepening the relationship between himself and the “goddess” whom he adored.

As for what Söring thought about the Haysoms, the only relevant factor, he felt “intense anger” and “hatred” toward them and threatened to “blow their heads off”, so there’s that.

• “For example, Nancy Haysom’s best friend, the doctor’s wife Annie Massie, who found the two bodies, has a life-size nude statue of her teenage daughter in the doorway. Everyone who passes through the entrance passes by the image of the young daughter. The wife of a witness named Robert Hallet, who is said to be the only person to have seen wounds on Söring, is also a member of the circle of women artists in Bedford who create art involving their naked daughters.” (133-34).

—> Wait, what?! OK, must avoid commenting on…lesbian incest ring? since we don’t know that’s a mistake (yet). This post is only about mistakes. And here we have two of them. First of all, the witness who testified to seeing wounds on Söring’s face was named Harrington, not “Hallet”. Hillers here appears to be confusing Harrington with Robert Hallett, the impression examiner who compared Söring’s sockpring to the one found at the crime scene. And (chef’s kiss) she misspells Hallett’s name.

• “[The lawyer for Johann Söring, Jens Söring’s father] made a copy of [Jens] Söring's cinema tickets pasted onto a sheet of paper - this sheet also contains handwritten notes by [Johann] Söring.” (139:). “[Johann] Söring went to lawyer Edward Hogshire, who made a copy of the sheet with the cinema tickets and his handwritten notes.” (160) “The sheet with the tickets, with words written on it, was made by Söring’s father - [Johann] Söring’s handwriting can be seen on it.” (161).

—> First of all, the tickets were stapled, not pasted. Johann Söring, whose name I’ve changed, is Jens Söring’s father. These statements are Hillers’ clumsy attempts to explain away the inconvenient fact that Jens Söring’s handwriting appears on the piece of paper to which the tickets had been stapled. That is inconsistent with what Söring’s father testified to at trial, which is that he had found the tickets “loose” in an envelope in Söring’s dorm room in December 1985, two months after Söring had fled the USA.

Johann’s testimony raised the question of how Jens Söring’s handwriting got onto the piece of paper the tickets were stapled to, given that in Johann’s telling, the tickets could not possibly have been stapled to the sheet of paper before December 1985, by which point Söring had long fled the USA for Europe. Both Terry Wright and I have pointed to this glaring anomaly, and Team Söring 2.0, four years too late, has finally realized this gigantic hole in Söring’s story needed to be patched up somehow.

So Hillers simply invents, with no evidence, her claim is that it was Johann, not Jens, who wrote on the piece of paper. Here is the writing:

The note says “3/30 Rocky Horror Picture Show”. Hillers doesn’t provide us with a statement by Johann Söring saying he wrote these words. Nor does she present us with a sample of Johann Söring’s handwriting for comparison. Do we have any handwriting samples from Jens Söring? Yes, handwritten parts of the Christmas letter:

I’m no handwriting expert, but I’d say that’s a match, the “r”’s are especially telling. Of course, the one person who could clear this up is Johann Söring, but Hillers doesn’t provide any evidence he wrote the note next to the ticket, she just hopes we’ll accept it on trust. But even if that doesn’t convince you, here’s another question. How would Johann Söring, who was working as a vice-consul in the Detroit, Michigan German consulate on 30 March 1985, have known that this single torn ticket stub, which has no identifying information except the name of the theater, was for the 30 March 1985 showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show in Washington, D.C.? Did he have psychic powers?

• “Since Haysom testified in her 1987 trial that she had not purchased any tickets, Söring’s lawyer Neaton could have convicted Haysom of lying by presenting the original tickets.” (149-50)

—> During her 1987 trial, Elizabeth Haysom did testify to buying the movie tickets, Here she is under examination by Jim Updike and others:

A I didn't question him at all. I was getting out of the car. I was going into the cinema. He said buy a couple of tickets.

Q But it doesn't make sense to me.

A Well--

Q You bought two tickets for a cinema. You come out of that cinema, you go to another cinema that he didn't know that you were going to. He was still away with his friends for the day as you say and you buy two tickets for another cinema. (107)…

Q So you said you went to the movie.

A Yeah.

Q You bought two tickets?

A Well, yeah. Nobody believes that [i.e., nobody would believe that actually establishes an alibi, as Haysom had just stated].

Q So why did you buy two tickets then?

A I don't know, he asked me to. (108)…

A So what eventually happened is that took me to a movie up in, I'm not sure where it is, north of Georgetown I believe, and he dropped me off at the movie. And as soon as he was gone--he watched me go in an buy the tickets. As soon as he was gone I was out and I went to a bar next-door. (167)…

Q How about the purchase of your tickets, was that part of you all's alibi that you discussed afterwards?

A Yes, sir, that was--the tickets wasn't so much a story for an alibi about the killings, it was supposed to be an alibi to show where we were. So I'm not being very clear. (318)

Again, we see that Hillers either hasn’t read Elizabeth Haysom’s trial or didn’t understand it. She was apparently unable to simply type “tickets” into the pdf search bar, which is got me all these references within 20 seconds. The most charitable assumption is that Hillers is conflating “I didn’t watch the movies” (which is something Elizabeth did say) with “I didn’t buy the tickets”, which is something she didn’t say.

This mistake is particularly important, since if the reader believes Hillers’ false assertion that Elizabeth denied buying the tickets, the only logical conclusion is that Jens bought them, thus massively strengthening his case — on specious grounds. This is either inexcusable sloppiness or outright deception.

• “According to the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, any individual is allowed to refuse to co-operate with the police without having to give a reason.” (150-51).

—> The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees due process of law. It is the 4th and 5th amendments which give citizens the right to remain silent and refuse searches .

• “At the beginning of the confessions, Söring states that he returned to the house twice — the second time to switch off the outside lights. However, when the investigators arrive at the crime scene, the outside lights are switched on.” (170)

—> As Terry Wright noted, Söring never mentioned the outside lights. He says he returned to the house because the lights inside the house were on: (Gardner) “Jens said he arrived at the dumpster, and he realized that he had left the lights on in the house.”
”Furthermore, all the lights were on in the house and I was afraid that somebody would notice it during the next day and then go there to examine why there was light…”

• “[Söring] went back into the house to get a sweatshirt from Mr. Haysom and turn off the outside light [wrong, see above]. Mr. Haysom was lying near the front door, so he thus had to turn around and step over the dead Mr. Haysom. An absurd bit of theater and buffoonery in the police force in England in 1986, looking at the big picture today.” (171)

—> It’s often hard to discern Hillers’ point, but it seems to be that the police should have known Söring’s confession was false because it would have been absurd for Söring to return to the crime scene, since this would have meant stepping over Derek Haysom’s body. But there’s nothing particularly odd about that, since Söring had by definition already stepped over Haysom’s body when exiting the house the first time, and probably stepped back and forth over it a few times as he used towels to “smear around” the blood in the living room and obscure his shoe prints.

Further, as the diagram of the ground floor of Loose Chippings shows, there was no need for Söring to step over Derek Haysom’s body:

From left to right the rooms are the kitchen, the dining room, the living room and the ground-floor bedroom including bathroom. When Söring returned to Loose Chippings, his purpose was to retrieve a bedsheet and clothes from the ground-floor bedroom to replace his bloody clothes and to turn off the inside lights. As the pink arrow shows, there was no need to step over Derek Haysom’s body, since the bedroom and bathroom were to the right of the entrance.

• AG, responding to Hillers’ comments about how hard she found it to locate Loose Chippings: "You know what? No one has ever said that before. This is completely new information for me. And that's really interesting because he's only been there once with Elizabeth. He went to their home twice in the absence of the Haysoms (173).

—> So what was it, once or twice? Also, as I’ve pointed out before and will have occasion to point out again, Söring had been to Loose Chippings twice, had a map drawn for him by Elizabeth, and even 13 months after the murders recalled the area well enough to draw a detailed map of it during his interrogation by Ricky Gardner.

• “So if it is not at all unusual (nicht unüblich) for people to make false confessions, why are the investigators in the Söring case trying to hide this fact?” (182)

—> False confessions are in fact very unusual. It’s very difficult to pin down a number, since you have to establish a base rate of true confessions and then arrive at a satisfactory definition of a proven false confession. As expert Gisli H. Gudjonsson notes, “There are no central records kept of false confessions nationally or internationally.” The results are all over the place, and the ones we have (such as Gudjonsson’s finding of 13.8% among Nordic adolescents) are unreliable because they’re based on self-reporting. Gudjonsson and Team Söring also like to cite the statistic that 25% of wrongful convictions involve false confessions, hoping the casual listener will conclude that 25% of confessions are false. They are not.

Studies of false confessions based on self-report are of limited value, since defendants obviously have strong psychological, moral, and legal incentives to disclaim their previous confessions. Law enforcement officials, judges, psychologists, and criminal lawyers with day-to-day experience almost invariably report that in their experience, the vast majority of confessions are accurate. The reason people find it hard to believe that someone might confess falsely is because it is, in fact, extremely unusual for this to happen.

• “Until 1990, Jens Söring publicly stuck to his version of the events and lied to everyone - including his parents - about the night of the crime and his involvement.” (193)

—> In 2007, on nationwide German TV, Söring told reporter Johannes B. Kerner that “of course” he had told his family “the truth” about the incident; i.e. that he had lied to protect Elizabeth:

Since then he has gone back and forth about this, telling whatever story he thinks he can get away with.

• “The term Miranda Rights goes back to the defendant Ernesto Miranda, whose lawyer was able to obtain an acquittal for his client in 1963 before the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court of appeal, after he had previously been found guilty of murder and rape.” (202)

—> Miranda v. Arizona was decided in 1966, not 1963, Miranda was never charged with murder, and Miranda was not acquitted.

• “One of the investigators in the cheque fraud case who gained greater notoriety in 2019, who was involved in the Haysom murder case because he attended the interrogations in London, is police officer Terry Wright. He was never assigned to the murder case because, as a British police officer, he cannot and is not allowed to work on an American case.” (205)

—> Law enforcement agencies in different countries cooperate to solve cases all the time, in fact that was Wright’s specialty as liaison officer between the FBI and Scotland Yard later in his career. Of course he was “assigned” to work on the Haysom murder case: Wright travelled to the United States several times to testify in Haysom’s trial and in Söring’s trial as a key witness. His travel expenses and time were reimbursed because he was on official business.

• “The exact reason for the search of the apartment is also still unclear today, as the check fraud in London at the time was a misdemeanor, not a felony.” (205)

—> Again, the exact reason for the search of the apartment is known: Jens Söring explicitly consented to the search. Further, as Terry Wright pointed out, the police could have performed the search anyway, since, at this time, they were entitled to search the premises of arrestees at this time without a court order. And of course they would have done so to find more evidence of check fraud, which they did indeed find. Hillers and Ralph Guise-Rübe seem to think check fraud is no more serious than double-parking. In fact it is a serious crime, and both Söring and Haysom spent one year in prison for it.

• AG: “It is noted that Söring asks to inform his parents when he was imprisoned; there is no record of this having happened.” (209)

Söring didn’t ask to notify his parents as soon as when he was imprisoned on April 30, because he was still claiming to be “Christopher Noe”, and asking to notify his actual father would have given away the game. After he was forced to admit lying about his identity, Söring was permitted to call the German Embassy in London repeatedly, with the understanding that they would inform Johann his son was in custody. Johann was himself part of the diplomatic corps, and Söring’s arrest for the murder of two people in the USA held the potential to become a major diplomatic incident (which it did).

Even if Johann Söring didn’t already know his son was in jail in England, he would have found out very shortly after his son left a message at the London embassy. I doubt a secretary would look at a message: “German diplomat’s son arrested for double murder in the capital city of a close ally of Germany” and say: “Oh well, probably nothing important, I’ll clock off like normal now.”

• AG: “The UK had changed the law and the change came into effect just a few months earlier — now, any questioning or interrogation of suspects had to be recorded and equipment provided.” (217)

—> Griffiths, the interrogation expert, is wrong. He is referring to the English Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE), which formally came into force on January 1, 1986. However, this law did not immediately require all interrogations to be recorded. As Terry Wright correctly notes in his Report, implementation of PACE across Great Britain came gradually and in phases, so that local police departments could alter their training and buy the necessary equipment. According to this UK Home Office statement, taping of statements only became mandatory in the Metropolitan Police District (i.e., Greater London) on 1 January 1991. It was thus no problem that some portions of Söring’s statements to go unrecorded. For that matter, Virginia and German law don’t require full recording of questioning to this day.

• AG: “We don’t know why the entire questioning period wasn’t recorded.” (217)

—> For some reason, members of Team Söring seems unaware of the basic legal principle, dating back millennia, that rights granted to criminal suspects can be waived by those suspects. And as we’ve seen, Söring did not even have a right to full recordings of all questioning sessions. It was Söring himself who determined which sections of his questioning would be recorded and which would not. You can even read this happening in the transcripts of the confessions themselves, when he asks detectives to turn off the tape recorder and they comply! Did Griffiths read these transcripts?

OK, that’s enough for now. I’ll keep track as I read the rest of the book, but I’m not going to keep writing long blog posts because I just don’t have enough time to comment on the hundreds of problems with this book. Nevertheless, I will post more highlights as I come across them.

I hope, however, that this list makes clear that Hillers’ book cannot be trusted as a source of information on this case. It’s what we all expected, and it is indeed what we got.