"Ricky Gardner...is not telling the truth"

Judge Ralph Guise-Rübe slanders Ricky Gardner again. And again.

Mandatory plug: If you’re interested in this case, consider buying my book. It’s pretty good!

There’s a great new word out there: Smugnorant. Urban Dictionary defines it as follows: “When hubris and ignorance combine to create blindness” This word could have been invented to describe the podcast “The Jens Soering Case: A New Verdict”, released by by ghostwriter Daniela Hillers and Judge Ralph Guise-Rübe. Originally in German, has now been released in an English version. I’ve now listened to most of the German original. Why haven’t I listened to the whole thing? Because I have to stop every 10 seconds to note down a mistake, omission, or lie.

The two hosts are incredibly confident in their judgments despite a slight handicap: they have no idea what they are talking about. Throughout the podcast, Dr. Guise-Rübe’s primary target, for some reason, is Ricky Gardner, the Bedford County Sheriff who (along with Terry Wright and Kenneth Beever) cracked the case by getting Jens Söring to confess. Apparently, Guise-Rübe thinks good police work is an unforgivable sin. Guise-Rübe accuses Gardner of unprofessionalism, “more than unprofessionalism”, and “gigantic mistakes”.

Guise-Rübe even goes so far as to falsely accuse Ricky Gardner explicitly of lying in the Episode entitled “Suppressed and new evidence”. Start listening at 20:30. Why does Guise-Rübe call Gardner a liar? Because Guise-Rübe insists on believing, without evidence, that an FBI profile was created which pointed to Elizabeth Haysom. He affirms his claim in this non-existent document by saying it must exist, since creating a profile is “routine” in capital murder cases (it isn’t).

Let’s review the facts. Ed Sulzbach, an FBI agent, visited the crime scene in April 1985. At the time, Sulzbach was not an FBI profiler, he was merely assigned to gather preliminary information in cases where local law enforcement might request a profile later. As Ricky Gardner stated in the 2017 book A Far, Far, Better Thing, Bedford County did not request the creation of an FBI offender profile. Doing so requires the local agency to fill out extensive questionnaires, which, in Gardner’s colorful phrase, would have required “three college professors” to complete.

The fact that no profile was created is confirmed by two independent sources. The first is Stan Lapekas, a retired FBI agent who submitted a request for the entire FBI file on the Haysom murders. The FBI provided him with the entire file. Since the Haysom murders were a state-level case and the FBI played no role in their prosecution, the FBI file was quite thin. The Haysom murders case has long been closed, so the FBI would have released a profile if one had existed. The FBI gave Lapekas everything it had, which did not include a profile.

The second independent confirmation comes from Terry Wright, who worked at FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, as a liaison officer between the FBI and Scotland Yard. Wright confirms what every law enforcement officer, historian, and student of criminal-justice has known for decades: The FBI never, ever throws away any report, memo, file, document, or piece of evidence. It is all sorted, stored, and archived for perpetuity. If the FBI had ever created an offender profile, it would have disclosed it to Stan Lapekas. It bears repeating that Terry Wright worked for years at the headquarters of the FBI.

In sum, we have three law enforcement officers — including a Söring supporter — who provide independent confirmation that no FBI offender profile was ever created.

But a German judge thousands of miles away across the ocean knows better!

This is not the only error Guise-Rübe commits. He claims the FBI profile was exculpatory evidence which could and should have been submitted in court. I advised German readers in 2020 of the fact that FBI offender profiles are not admissible in court. Guise-Rübe was apparently too lazy to read the piece. He was also too lazy to type in “FBI profile admissible evidence” into Google.

The man’s ignorance is cartoonish.

Guise-Rübe deserves all the criticism (and potential legal trouble) he is going to get for this slander-fest. He is a judge, for God’s sake, and should know better. I have a little more understanding for Daniela Hillers. She is also dripping with smugnorance, but she strikes me as not the sharpest knife in the drawer. God only knows what drove her to take on a subject for which she has zero qualifications. Yet every time I’m tempted to take pity on her, she goes and slanders someone.

Boom, there goes the pity.

Her errors in the podcast are also legion, but this “Suppressed Evidence” episode had one I find particularly funny. Hillers claims nobody in Bedford, Virginia wanted to talk about Nancy Haysom’s supposed abuse of her daughter Elizabeth because the town is “arch-Catholic”. I burst out laughing. She claims she visited Virginia, and apparently there is proof that she has. Virginia is full of churches, from practically every Protestant denomination you can imagine. She drove past all of them: Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopalian, Baptist (20% of the population) all the way to Full-Gospel Pentecostalist.

The last thing Virginia is is a stronghold of the Catholic faith. Unless 2.9% of the population constitutes a stronghold.

I will continue to update you on the ludicrous errors in this podcast. Eventually, I will do an entire YouTube video about it. I’m really looking forward to that.