How the "Two Unidentified Men" Theory Collapsed

A few comments on a video...about me!

I just thought I’d make a few quick comments about episode 3 of the Small Town, Big Crime YouTube channel, about 1/2 of which is about me and Terry Wright:

I found the video informative and entertaining. I also really enjoyed speaking to Rachel and Courteney. For my part, I can confirm that they have never once expressed any opinion to me on whether Jens Söring is guilty or not. They have remained scrupulously neutral on this question even in private conversations. In his German-language YouTube videos, Jens Söring has accused “Small Town, Big Crime” of being biased against him, but this accusation is false. As you will see in the video linked above, Söring tends to think of anyone who does not completely endorse his claims to be an enemy. This is long-standing behavior pattern.

My response to a few points:

3:25: Jens Söring sends out a group email to several of his supporters saying: “There’s this guy named Andrew Hammel in Germany and he’s trolling me, he’s crazy—he’s obsessed with me and my case, do not speak to him.”

Indeed, I had posted and written a great deal about Jens Söring’s case. But the reason, as I pointed out in the German media in 2020, was quite simple: At that time, in 2020, I was the only German-speaking journalist who had ever questioned Jens Söring’s innocence claims. There was nobody else, period. And in 2020, Söring was still getting invitations to speak before audiences of hundreds of thousands on publicly-funded television and radio shows and to deliver his point of view without any sort of objective context or challenge.

So if I didn’t correct what he was saying, nobody would have. It was tough, lonely work, but it was worth it!

4:17: Talking about me: “He seemed intelligent and well-informed, and did not seem like what you would imagine an internet troll to be.”

Aw schucks! (blushes).

4:30: “He does write in a way that could be seen as provocative.”

I would clarify that my primary target in writing about the case has been to try to get German journalists to do a better job covering this case. Everything I’ve written for newspapers has been framed not so much as criticism of Jens Söring, but primarily as a critique of German coverage of the case. And it worked! Germany’s most prestigious newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, confirmed that I had discovered “journalistic errors” (g) in the case. Germany’s premier public-radio channel, Deutschlandfunk, has also endorsed (g) this view. So I’m in pretty good company. And it’s clear that by now, in 2022, German media have fundamentally changed their approach. I very much doubt Söring is going to appear on any major TV talk shows again.

It is true that I occasionally deploy sarcasm and irony in commenting on the case, but they’re the spice that makes good writing tingle on the palate! I’m writing blogs and essays, not academic treatises or legal briefs. At certain points, the brazenness and mendacity of Söring and some of his supporters just calls for a vigorous response. And if you think my writing on the case is too much, just hop over to Jens Söring Guilty as Charged. Holdsworth makes me look like a teddy bear!

5:10: After I posted that I would be talking to “Small Town, Big Crime”, in 2020, “by that afternoon, we’d both gotten phone calls from Team Söring, asking why we were talking to him and just expressing concern. And we were like ‘Wow, they are monitoring this blog.’”

Aw shucks! (blushes).

The last half of the video explains how the journalists discovered that there simply was no genuine evidence of two other people being at the crime scene. It may interest the podcasters to know that Söring rarely makes this claim in public any longer. In all of his recent media appearances, he now says that “Only I and Elizabeth know who killed the Haysoms”. Make of that what you will!