Sandy Thornton Prepares for the Spotlight
She seems nice, but unfortunately, she's biased and her statements are stale, irrelevant hearsay.
Right now, somewhere in Virginia, Inspector Daniela may be interviewing the woman pictured above in a screenshot of a video by Jens Söring entitled “The Broken and Corrupt US Justice System” (he’s not one for subtlety). I added the bar across her face not because there’s anything sinister going on, but just because she has expressed some reluctance about press coverage, so I thought I’d try to give her a little privacy.
Who is Sandra Thornton and What’s Her Perspective?
Before we dive down this rabbit hole, Sandra Thornton seems to be a delightful person. She volunteered at a crisis shelter and became a special-ed teacher. She’s contributed more to humanity than most of the people reading this post, and certainly more than I have. She is acting in good faith from fine motives — concern about a possible miscarriage of justice. There’s no evidence she’s trying to mislead anyone. I look forward to hearing her in the upcoming Netflix series, where she will almost certainly appear.
Unfortunately, unless she’s been able to pull a rabbit out of the proverbial hat (hole?), her statements are hearsay about a stale issue rejected by all courts decades ago. Thornton is also biased. In 2020, she told the Virginia podcast “Small Town Big Crime” (STBC): “I would like to see that Jens did not do it. Did not murder [them]. That truth will be found. That whoever killed the parents, the mother and the father, will be found.” She even wrote an email to be used in Söring’s pardon campaign. Like many Söring supporters, Thornton has likely had contact only with Söring supporters, and doesn’t know about the ample proof Söring killed the Haysoms.
She was speaking in the time frame of 2016-2020, which was the Golden Age of Söring truthers — Team Söring claimed that DNA evidence “proved” there were two other males who “bled” at the crime scene. That was coup for Söring; for outsiders to the criminal justice system and lazy journalists, the three letters “DNA” have a hypnotizing effect. The initial goal of STBC was to discover who the “two unknown men” were. Closer scrutiny by me, Terry Wright, and STBC itself soon demolished the DNA myth. These days, Söring rarely mentions the “2 unknown men proven by DNA” canard. He knows his audience can Google the issue.
What Does Sandra Thornton Have to Say?
Back to the main issue. In Söring’s video, he says we will certainly hear “much more” about Sandra Thornton. What will we hear? We already know, because Thornton has already spoken to STBC in an episode called “The Witness”, which aired 3 years ago. The context here are the actions of the two Deadly Drifters, William Shiflett and Robert Albright. In early April 1985, they murdered and sexually mutilated a fellow drifter named Milliken in Roanoke, Virginia, which is about 30 miles from Lynchburg.
In 1985, Thornton volunteered for a “walk-in hotline crisis center” called “The Raft” in Blacksburg, Virginia. On April 7, 1985, at 9:15 pm, Shiflett and Albright were brought to the center by police. They wore stained, dirty clothes, and each had a knife, which was confiscated. Thornton helped admit the two men, then went home for the night. She said that when she came in the next day, some unidentified “volunteers”, along with a co-worker named Phil Hackett, reported that the men had watched TV. The Drifters became animated during news coverage of the murder they had committed the day before and by coverage Haysom murders, which had happened a week before.
According to Thornton, various unidentified shelter workers said the men had acted strangely, talked about a “rich bitch” who “didn’t pay us”, that the murdered drifter “must have had lot of money to live in a hotel” and that it was “probably his time to go anyway”, and that the men said they had committed “three murders”. The men checked out of The Raft the next day. Shortly thereafter, the police visited and seized some evidence. The workers at The Raft were so disturbed by Shiflett and Albright’s conduct they terminated the policy of letting people stay there overnight.
That’s it. That’s all Sandra Thornton had to say.
Is it Relevant?
Nope. First, it’s all double hearsay: Thornton herself wasn’t there. She heard of the strange behavior and statements the next morning, from Phil Hackett (now deceased), and also from various unidentified shelter workers. STBC was unable to get in touch with any of these people. Double hearsay is, of course, inadmissible in court because it is worthless. There is no way to verify what the men said, when they said it, or in what context. Especially after nearly 40 years. Anyone who has played a game of “telephone” knows how many distortions creep in when somebody reports what somebody else says somebody else said.
Thornton’s statement would not even be considered by any court.
Nevertheless, it might be relevant if it led to admissible evidence, or were corroborated in some way. It didn’t, and wasn’t. There was no evidence the drifters:
Were in Boonsboro at the time of the murders
Were at the scene of the crime
Had access to a car, which would have been necessary to reach the Haysom home unobtrusively (disheveled drifters wandering aimlessly around in wealthy neighborhoods attract a lot of attention)
Knew the Haysoms
Had any motive to kill the Haysoms
Knew who Elizabeth Haysom or Jens Söring were
Possessed any property from the Haysom home
Confessed to killing the Haysoms
To believe Shiflett and Albright had anything to do with the crime, you have to assume that
they obtained access to a car
as disheveled, smelly drifters, convinced Derek Haysom to let them into his home
brutally murdered Derek and Nancy Haysom for no reason
cleaned up the crime scene well enough to eliminate all evidence of their presence, and, last but not least,
left the home without stealing any of the alcohol, cash, vehicles, prescription drugs, TVs, stereos, and thousands of dollars worth of jewelry the Haysoms possessed
Further, SMBC obtained DNA probes from both men and compared them to the DNA samples obtained at the crime scene. There was no match. The reason there was no match is that the handful of garbled, partial male DNA samples which could still be tested in 2009 came from Derek Haysom.
Innovative DNA technology not available in 2009 may well be able to find much more DNA from the existing samples: M-VAC technology can yield up to 200 times more DNA hits than previous methods, and cutting-edge algorithms can allow reliable profiles to be spliced together even from degraded or contaminated samples.
Söring was handed the opportunity to use these brand-new techniques on the evidence in his case on a silver platter by Small Town, Big Crime, and the current District Attorney of Bedford County indicated he would cooperate if Söring chose to do so.
Söring of course refused, and he will never agree to new DNA testing under any circumstances. We all know why, don’t we?
To get to Roanoke from Lynchburg you need to be on 460. That's an easy ten miles from Boonsboro. If you came into Lynchburg on Rt. 29, say from Charlottesville, some miles to the north of 460, you would find yourself at the gorge above the James River at Madison Heights with the old city high up on the southwestern side. It is a steep city. Going down and crossing the bridge you would climb up to Rivermont Avenue, and if you were going to Boonsboro you would take a right and follow Rivermont Ave, past the Massie's (as I shall always note) near the hospital, through the suburban area to the point where it becomes Boonsboro Road, otherwise known as 501. That has to be some nine miles and though you don't see it, you are running along the river, though that river run deep somewhere a few miles to the east beyond nice neighborhoods, such as Peakland Place, where there are beautiful, champion dogwoods now growing at intervals along the old trolley line. The three Benedict kids must have taken that trolley to school sometimes. Their team was known as the Hilltoppers, which gives you an idea about Lynchburg. They were there with their mother during the war. Their father, a geologist, was an important figure in a federal agency that controlled certain vital war mineral resources and was stationed I forget where. I don't recall there being much at Boonsboro. There was a store called Mitchell's there, and to get to the Haysom's on Holcomb Rock Rd. you would turn right and go at least a mile and one half. Something like that. From the Haysom's the road drops down an incredibly long, steep slope through forests to the river. Off on the right going down there is a spring said to have the best water in the region. There is a blue-collar settlement at Holcomb Rock called Perch, with thirty chained snarling dogs, and a dam. There is another dam further up the river towards a place called Big Island. From 501 you can get up to the Blue Ridge Parkway, a lonely drive for me where I suddenly found myself keeping an eye on my system lights. Indeed, at Bedford, going down from the Parkway, like you were coming in for a landing, I actually smelled my brakes. The houses along the road to the Haysom's had land around them, there were some estates, and the whole area gives an impression to me of being on an escarpment --a long forested ridge that falls away to the north across fields and down to the river hidden behind woods. High up on the other side somewhere in the forest is a place called the Eagle's Eyrie, a Baptist conference center. It was believed by some that a giant black man who was a hermit lived down there, and maybe he did. From down in front of the Haysom's the river bends east maybe less than a mile or so to the dam at Perch and Holcomb Rock. There is a little beach down there which is a sex spot for the young. The James River here is surprising to someone from Tidewater. It is in a gorge, there are cliffs all along the eastern Amherst County side, and I would think that the bateau in the Eighteenth Century taking hogsheads of tobacco down to Richmond would have had to be careful navigating. During Hurricane Camille the river rose seventy or eighty feet at Holcomb Rock and would have been terrifying all the way down to the city and beyond. It is a pleasant enough county gentry neighborhood by day but I know that Nancy Haysom didn't like being alone there at night. They had spot- lights on every corner of that house that could be turned on with a switch over the Shaker bed. To me, strangely, they had no weapons. Not that in this instance, one would have helped.
There is no way that two random hitch-hikers could have found this place.
And both of these young men wore state brogans in large sizes, one, I recall, being twelve, and another, possibly size fifteen.
I can see them now staring in horror at the three LR's. "Hey, who's that!? There's somebody else here!"
Also: Why and how would the “deadly drifters” have locked the front door when leaving after the murders?