Söring Attacks his Ex-Girlfriend from 40 Years Ago...Yet Again

He tried letting go of his innocence claims, but he just can't quit them.

Hello everyone! Sorry about the radio silence, I’ve been earning my living and also wrote a piece on antisemitism in Germany which you can read here. First of all, thank you so much to all the new paid and unpaid subscribers, the YouTube viewers, and everyone who’s bought my book! By the way, there’s a new interview with me about the Adnan Syed case here.

I’ve actually begun making a tiny amount of profit from all this, which is nice, I can buy proper Scotch now. I’m grateful for all the support of any kind, paid or unpaid. I am of course working on more videos and waiting for the new book by Daniela Hillers, which I last posted about a month ago, so I can review it for you here. It’s currently listed on Amazon as currently unavailable, even though Hillers announced its official final release date a couple of days ago. In Hollywood, one would say the book is in “production hell”.

Another reason I haven’t been writing much is because Söring has recently been quiet about his innocence claims. He’s been touring various podcasts touting his life-coach business, which resolves around teaching “resilience”. He even claims to be an expert on “toxic relationships”. I have no real interest in these efforts; heck, perhaps his advice has actually helped people. If so, good on him.

But Jens Söring wouldn’t be Jens Söring if he could actually finally let go of his decades-old innocence arguments. His latest video is 9 minutes long in German and a bit shorter in English. and copies the style of my videos, with a relative close-up and little background (you’re welcome again, Jens, mon semblable, mon frère). It’s titled (my translation) “I did it myself, I got HORNY from it” (the English one is titled “I did it MYSELF, I GOT OFF on it!”). Söring has learned the YouTube lesson — capital letters get views!

Söring has disabled external links to the video, so you will have to click through. You won’t hear anything new. The videos consist of yet another series of insinuations that Elizabeth Haysom murdered her own parents. He focuses on the brief, flippant “confession” that Elizabeth uttered to Kenneth Beever in June 1986: “I did it myself, I got off on it”. Söring is trying to attract a new crowd of people who don’t know about his case, so he’s wheeling out all the old discredited arguments again.

If you’ve read my book, you know everything you need to know about Söring’s arguments. But as an introduction for newbies, here are the arguments Söring makes and why they are frivolous.

“I got off on it.”

Söring says Elizabeth said she “got off” on killing her parents because (1) she actually did kill her parents; and (2) she experienced orgasmic pleasure in killing her mother, who had “sexually abused” her for eight years. This explanation is not only distasteful, but ignores the fact that Derek Haysom was injured far more severely than Nancy Haysom.

Let’s go back to the facts. Kenneth Beever questioned Elizabeth intensely in early June 1986 about her involvement in the murder of her parents. At first, she denied even knowing that Söring had driven to Lynchburg planning to confront her parents. At this point, Beever already knew from Söring’s extensive confessions that Elizabeth was lying. Beever probed further, telling her that Söring had already spilled the beans, and accusing her of manipulating that “poor boy” into murder.

It was at this point that Elizabeth said, “I did it, I got off on it”. The phrase “got off on” is specifically American slang for having an orgasm, a Brit would not understand it. Beever thus asked her to clarify. She said she was just being “facetious”, i.e., it was a joke. She then admitted she did know where Söring was going and what he planned to do. Beever said that had the “ring of truth” to it, and Elizabeth then described her role in the plot.

This facetious remark was brought up at Söring’s trial when Richard Neaton cross-examined Elizabeth Haysom:

Söring now constructs his usual edifice of half-truths from this brief snippet. First, he shows the audience the autopsy sketches of the Haysoms showing their grievous wounds. He may not have copied them from my book, but I think he certainly got the idea from me, since I have used them repeatedly.

Söring then says that the only explanation for these severe wounds must be “hate”, and then tells us that only Elizabeth could have hated her parents enough to commit this “overkill”. Specifically, Söring claims Elizabeth hated her parents because her mother sexually abused her for “years”. He provides no explanation why she would have “hated” her blameless father. According to Söring, it was this “hate” which drove Elizabeth to “overkill” her parents, mutilating their bodies much more than necessary to simply end their lives.

Söring doesn’t explain how Elizabeth, who weighed 25 kilos less than her father, could have accomplished all this. (Söring was the same size as Derek Haysom). Perhaps it was the unidentified “drugs” she had taken along the way, which somehow drove her into a murderous rage but left her sober enough to complete an 8-hour round trip driving alone at night.

But wait, you may ask, why would Elizabeth claim she “got off” on murder? Is there some explanation for this? Why yes! In 1983, I was a 15-year-old living in Houston, Texas. In that year, one of the most infamous murder cases in American history happened right there in Houston. A drug-addled drifter named Karla Faye Tucker joined with a pair of other addicts to steal a motorcycle from some acquaintances. During the robbery, Tucker murdered two men by chopping them to death with a pickaxe. She later said, she “got off” (in American slang, achieved orgasm) with each blow of the pickaxe.

This story had it all: an attractive female murderer, a double-murder with an unusual weapon, and as they say in the newsroom, “a sex angle”. It could have been concocted in a lab precisely for the purpose of garnering worldwide attention. Liebestod pur. It was one of the most talked-about criminal cases in the U.S.A. for decades, and it still is. It was the subject of thousands of stories on local news channels across the U.S.A.

The story of Karla Faye Tucker was the subject of innumerable movies and documentaries. It spawned books and scholarly studies and dissertations. Every single person in my school knew about it. People made up obscene rhymes based on the famous Lizzie Borden poem (another female murderer who killed two people with an ax and remains world-famous more than a century later):

Lizzie Borden took an axe

And gave her father forty whacks

And when she saw what she had done

She gave her mother forty-one

“Karla Tucker took an ax…” the poem went, but I won’t quote the rest of it because this is a family publication. Stand-up comics and drunk people at parties would mimic the act of swinging a pick-ax followed by a shuddering orgasm. Tucker converted to Christianity behind bars and was eventually executed in 1998.

Yet her fame lives on even on other continents: Here’s a news story from the British Sun in 2020 showing the enduring popularity of this story:

Here’s a 2022 podcast in which a police officer involved in the case is interviewed.

You get the picture. Elizabeth’s remark was a reference to what was then — and what remains — one of the most notorious murder cases in American history. A tasteless joke, of course, but not a confession to murder. And in fact everyone realized this at Söring’s trial, including Söring’s own defense lawyers. Neaton did have Elizabeth briefly confirm she had made the remark on page 113 of the transcript, but then immediately moved on to other points. I have reviewed the defense closing argument and found no reference to the remark.

The reason neither of Söring’s lawyers — including seasoned Virginia criminal lawyer William A. Cleaveland — called her remark a “confession” at trial is that it was obvious to everyone in the courtroom that it wasn’t a confession. They weren’t going to insult the jury’s intelligence by pretending that it was. That would only have undermined their credibility. The reason they mentioned it at all was to paint Elizabeth in a negative light — as someone who would joke about the murder of her own parents — not to claim it was a confession to a crime.

The vodka bottle, cigarette butts, etc.

Söring also points to the fact that Elizabeth Haysom’s fingerprints were found on a vodka bottle, and cigarettes from her brand, “Merit” were found outside the house. These arguments are all decades old — Söring’s defense lawyers hammered on these points during his trial, to no avail. The problem with all these pieces of “evidence” is that there is no indication they were left during the crime itself. Elizabeth lived at her parents’ home while on holiday and visited frequently. In fact, she had visited Loose Chippings the weekend before the murders. She also drank cocktails while at home, which explains the fingerprints. Naturally Söring conceals these facts from his fresh, gullible audience.

Overkill proves the crime was personal.

Söring now deploys another stale trope from his trial 33 years ago: The crime showed signs of “overkill” (i.e. infliction of injuries going beyond what was necessary to kill the victims) which means it was motivated by hate. I didn’t hate Elizabeth’s parents, but she did. Ergo she killed them.

There are any number of reasons why the jury rejected this argument. First of all, there is no one reason why some killers inflict more wounds than necessary to kill their victims. First-time murderers who kill with knives — like Söring — often stab victims repeatedly just to stop the victims from groaning or moving or begging for help. Adrenaline and shock come into play as well. No experienced detective would ever claim that the only reason for overkill is that the offender hated the victims.

The other main reason this argument failed at trial is that Söring in fact did hate the Haysoms. Here are a few quotes from the psychiatric report of Dr. John Hamilton, which you can read in full here on this blog:

“Soering describes these discussions [of killing the Haysoms] as being pure fantasy on his part but having a purging effect on the feelings of anger towards the Haysoms engendered by Elizabeth's "horror stories" of their treatment of her.”

The realisation of how he had been "conned" by Elizabeth into developing feelings of intense anger towards her parents and his consequent actions in killing them has led to his developing remorse for all that has happened, a knowledge that he has in addition ruined his own life and to suicidal ideation.

And here are some quotes from the interview with German prosecutor Bernd König, which you can also read in full on this blog:

I believe it is quite right that I hated the parents more and more, because I loved Elisabeth so incredibly. She was my everything. I can only very poorly describe what feeling I had for her. I would say that in the last month before this happened, there were talks, not very detailed, which arose from the feeling of hate.

….Violence was strange to my character, but I have hated these people also very much and these feelings of hate I have expressed in conversations through fantasy games, as for example one should put them into a car and push them down a hill. Something with a remote controlled bomb, burn down the house. During the last days I still remembered another thing. Something with a bath tub and piranhas. I remember that Elisabeth in fact called a pet shop in Washington and enquired about the fish. This was a reaction for me. I loved this girl.

I did believe her everything. I believed that the parents mistreated her terribly, abused and attacked her.

Assuming the overkill was motivated by hatred of the victims, Söring had more than enough hatred to fit the bill.

Ed Sulzbach said she did it

Next Söring invokes good old Ed Sulzbach, the FBI agent (not a profiler back then) who never filed a full FBI psychological profile on the killers of the Haysoms. Söring here resorts to the discredited pro-Söring propaganda film from 2016, Killing for Love. The directors of that movie, Marcus Vetter and Karin Steinberger, used a confusing mishmash of snippets of an interview with Sulzbach and a phone conversation between Sulzbach and Chuck Reid to suggest that Sulzbach believed Elizabeth Haysom had personally killed her parents. As Holdsworth pointed out long ago, this movie is edited in a deceptive and misleading manner. If you want a full, complete, deepest-of-the-deep dive into what Sulzbach actually meant, I have one for you right here on this blog.

Söring does reveal an interesting fact: “Killing for Love” is now on YouTube. The link is, as usual non-embeddable. Here’s the channel it’s on and the description:

This description basically means: “We’re just dumping this out here for clicks; we don’t have the rights to it.” This is another bad sign for a documentary film which isn’t even a decade old. The first bad sign was when “Killing for Love” was unavailable on any streaming platform when the Netflix documentary on the case was released in November 2023. You’d think that some streaming service would have wanted to profit from a global uptick in interest in the Söring case by featuring a recent documentary on the same subject, but apparently nobody was interested. And now the filmmakers and distributors are apparently no longer interested in defending the movie’s copyright, since the video’s been available for free on an anonymous YouTube account for three months.

Will Söring ever give up?

Söring says that he tried to stop talking about his case, but that the recent Netflix documentary was so misleading that he finds himself forced to confront it again. I imagine he found the occasion welcome. Yet Söring misses a glaring irony. He criticizes the Netflix documentary for not mentioning Elizabeth’s joke…but the fact that Netflix didn’t mention Elizabeth’s “confession” shows how irrelevant it is. After all, the entire theory of the Netflix documentary was that Elizabeth was personally present at her parents’ murders and may have even participated in them. Elizabeth’s remark thus directly bolstered their theory of the case. That is, if they could convince anyone to take it seriously as a confession. Netflix, like the investigators, Söring’s own defense lawyers, and the jury, saw that it would be silly to try to puff up an offhand joke into a “confession”, so they didn’t even try.

Söring seems unable to stop ruminating on the events of decades ago, and obviously still hates “Elizab*tch” Haysom with a purple passion. Just when you think he’s turned the corner to a new life, he rummages through the creaky wooden box of old arguments, blows the dust off a few of them, and presents them to his unsuspecting newbie followers as if they were sizzling revelations.

Sometimes I have a nightmare vision of the year 2055: A tiny, ancient, wizened Jens Söring wakes up inside his Automated Eldercare Sanitary Pod at the Hamburg Senior AI Assisted Living Facility. He fires up his Model 3000 iHologramcorder™ with shaking, liver-spotted hands and begins quietly croaking: “And here’s another thing about the bloody sockprint…” Let’s hope it remains a mere vision.