Söring is Suing Again, with Ralf Höcker's Help

German lawyer Ralf Höcker's firm launches a crusade against truth with a frivolous demand letter.

The two faces of Jens “Janus” Soering.

UPDATE: After reading the demand letter again, the threat of an emergency injunction was only implicit (because of the extremely short deadline), not explicit. So I have removed the discussion of injunctions, just to be on the safe side. Nevertheless, the extremely short deadline for Stang’s response is still inconsistent with Soering having waited three years to threaten a lawsuit.

There are two sides to Jens Soering. The public-facing side is anodyne. Amid plugs for his books and coaching business, Soering’s Facebook page shows him sipping wine, enjoying vacations, and giving presentations to rapt audiences.

Behind the scenes, however, Soering seethes with resentment. When the Virginia Department of Forensic Sciences reached a conclusion he disagreed with, he sent his followers an email in which he expressed a wish to mow down every single person who worked there, including the janitors, with an “AK-47”.

As journalist Bill Sizemore noted in the book he co-authored with Söring (A Far, Far Better Thing), Söring wrote to reporters:

I am an immensely, titanically angry man. My anger is so great that hopelessness really doesn’t stand a chance against it. When I came into prison in 1986 at the age of 19, I was a soft, naive, innocent child. Now, in 2016,1 am 50 and still innocent, at least of any felony. But I am not even a little bit soft or naive—quite the opposite. I suppose on some level I regret that. But if I had not become the hard, angry son-of-a-bitch that I now am, I would not have survived.

Yet Söring was hardly “soft, naive, [and] innocent” at 19.

By that time he had stabbed two people to death. He had also committed dozens of fraud offenses — he was convicted and served a year in prison for the crimes he committed in London. He had surreptitiously followed Ricky Gardner back to Gardner’s home and discussed a plot with Elizabeth to murder Gardner there to throw off Bedford County’s investigation.

Soering had also dreamed up a scheme to torture and murder his own grandmother to get her money. On his arrest in London, he had copies of Soldier of Fortune magazine, which at the time featured ads for hit men and mercenaries in its back pages. As Terry Wright noted in the Söring System podcast, on his arrest in London, Söring’s personal papers contained sketches and diagrams of bombs and weapons which could be smuggled onto aircraft.

Elizabeth Haysom reported that Soering became much more self-confident after he murdered Derek and Nancy Haysom. As Ken Englade reported in Chapter 19 of Beyond Reason: “Previously content mainly to talk about his sexual fantasies, [Söring] now began putting them into play. He became a porn freak, toting home stacks of magazines with wild sexual themes, many of which included some sort of violence.” He began to think of killing as a “nice occupation” and considered becoming a professional hit man to enable himself and Elizabeth to live underground. At Elizabeth’s 1987 trial, Dr. Robert Showalter testified that “[i]n Europe [Elizabeth] accepted physical beatings from Mr. Soering, his insults and participated in his bizarre sexual interests.”

Jens Soering was never the sweet summer child he claims to have been. Back then, he was a dangerous sociopath. He’s probably less dangerous now. But he’s still angry. After he was imprisoned for murder, and even after his release, he would explode in fury when he learned of adverse press coverage or when someone questioned his innocence claims. We see this in the sarcastic taunting with which he replied to Amanda Knox’s doubts about his innocence claims.

Söring’s Many Lawsuits and Complaints

Now, Soering conceals his hateful side from the public by hiring lawyers to harass critics of his innocence claims behind the scenes. In public, Soering projects a positive image, although the mask frequently slips. Söring never debates informed skeptics and never cooperates with any media project unless he believes it will be favorable to his innocence story.

This is why he blew his top about the Netflix series on his case: He assumed that the filmmakers would compliantly broadcast his side of the story without verifying what he said. Yet verify they did, and after reviewing the evidence and consulting independent experts they reached the same conclusion a unanimous jury had reached 33 years before: Soering was a liar, and had murdered the Haysoms.

Soering did not sue Netflix, likely aware they boast phalanxes of lawyers. So Soering looks for more vulnerable people: Those who have come forward on their own to correct his false statements and inaccurate claims. The most recent wave of Soering’s behind-the-scenes harassment campaign came in 2022. His hired guns filed a complaint against Annabel H., trying to torpedo her career. They filed a complaint (over 50 pages long!) against Deutschlandfunk protesting an interview the broadcaster had conducted with the producers of the Söring System podcast. He filed a defamation lawsuit against me.

All of it came to nothing, because we all had truth on our side. The complaints against Annabel and Deutschlandfunk were dismissed, and Söring was forced to retract his defamation lawsuit against me and to pay my attorney's fees. After these fiascoes, Söring seemed to have decided to stop filing meritless lawsuits and complaints. Assuming his lawyers charged him for their time (see below), it must have cost him thousands of Euros, all for nothing. Further, none of the targets of his harassment backed down. Annabel H. is still employed, Deutschlandfunk continued reporting on the case, and I wrote a book.

After the Netflix series and the German documentaries were released in November 2023, Soering’s reputation sank back down into the mud whence it had briefly emerged in the late 2010s. Millions of people realized his innocence claims were bogus and that he was, in fact, an unrepentant double-murderer. Soering launched a counter-offensive with the “Chuck Reid” report and a pamphlet by a sleazy German lawyer named Burkhard Benecken, but it fizzled out. Nobody was interested in a re-hash of Soering’s decades-old complaints.

Söring was forced to try to recruit new supporters by a vigorous social-media campaign, including hundreds of TikTok videos. Exploiting his new audience’s ignorance of the facts, he has recruited a modest new fan base to add to the remains of his former fan base. It’s not much, but it’s enough to allow him to travel Germany giving speeches about his prison time, notorious inmates he met, and his favored theme of “resilience”.

Enter Ralf Höcker’s Firm

Everything seemed to have settled into a pattern: Soering travels the country reciting his story to small crowds in restaurants, slowly sinking back into obscurity. I assumed Soering realized nuisance lawsuit threats and complaints had been an expensive failure, and he would concentrate on rebuilding his life rather than trying to shut down skeptics of his claims.

But I was wrong! Söring has hired the firm run by one of Germany’s most famous media lawyers, Ralf Höcker, to write a demand letter to one of his critics. As I pointed out previously, Höcker and Soering established contact shortly after Soering returned to Germany in late 2019. Soering was looking for a lawyer to represent him and negotiate what he believed would be lucrative contracts for the rights to his life story.

Höcker was interested: He had been given a copy of the 2016 pro-Soering movie Killing for Love and, like many gullible Germans, had been fooled by it. He and Soering spoke for about an hour on the phone, and Höcker offered to represent Soering for a “capped” (gedeckelt) fee. That wasn’t good enough for Soering, who has always been money-conscious, so he chose another firm.

Knowing of Höcker’s interest in Soering, I recommended Höcker read my book in a tweet I sent on October 27, 2023, just before the Netflix and the German documentaries and my book were released. I thought as a lawyer, Höcker might be interested in gaining a complete picture of the facts of the case.

In response, Ralf Höcker lost his marbles in grand fashion, tweeting: “You are a sick, misanthropic, merciless, arrogant, biased, obsessed person who has found no meaning in his life and will probably never find any.” After I emailed him to try to find out why his response was so deranged, he fired back an email laden with yet more demented insults, and invited me to publish it online.

Which I did! The resulting post brings a chuckle every time I read it.

Höcker’s Firm Sends A Frivolous Lawsuit Threat to Siegfried Stang

It turns out Ralf Höcker’s evident devotion to Jens Soering may have been more than just a personal matter. One of the lawyers at Höcker’s firm just sent a demand letter/lawsuit threat (formally an Abmahnung or “warning”) to Siegfried Stang, the author of the book Nebelkerzen (“Smokescreens”). Three years ago, on September 5, 2022, Stang, a trained lawyer and former police chief, released his book on the Soering case. It is meticulously researched and well-reasoned. I read Nebelkerzen and posted a very favorable commentary on Stang’s book on this blog in October of 2022.

Stang met with Soering for hours in late 2021 to discuss the case. Soering brought along his own laptop to share evidence, and pled his case with gusto. Yet Stang, who had reviewed masses of evidence with a detective’s keen eye, was skeptical of Soering’s claims. Politely, Stang pressed Soering on inconsistencies and problems with his account.

Faced with polite but persistent questioning from an expert interrogator, Soering made several admissions he surely did not intend. First, he implicitly conceded that Tony Buchanan’s story from 2011 was far-fetched. Soering excused himself with the observation that he was behind bars for a crime he hadn’t committed, so he was eager for any kind of evidence to help his case, no matter how dubious.

Soering also admitted to Stang that he had indeed confessed the murders of the Haysoms to a fellow prisoner during his 1986 stay in the Ashford Remand Centre, Matthias Schröder. Schröder was being held on remand for fraud charges and was the only other German in the facility. Söring and Schröder struck up a casual friendship based on their shared nationality.

In 2018, Schröder sent a letter to the Virginia Parole Board stating that Söring had confessed the murders of the Haysoms to him in 1986:

He told me that Mr Haysom had a fierce opinion and he could not convince him to change his mind. That was the point when he decided to kill him and his wife. Mr Haysom had a significant strength and was stronger as he thought. After he had cut the neck of Mr Haysom, he was able to defend him somehow, still. The mother of Elizabeth started to come from behind hammering with her fist on his back. Then she went off while he killed Mr Haysom and she had a knife in her hand. Then, he had to struggle with her until she were dead.

Then, he drove back to Washington and told to Elizabeth that there would not have been any alternative.

After a while, the Virginia police was interested to interview Jens Soering and he was asked to give his foot and fingerprints. He told me that there was an investigating police officer who was eager to proof his guilt. He considered killing him, as well. Elizabeth did not like the idea and saved thus the chief investigating officer his life. Jens Soering said that he denied to give his fingerprints because he thought he could have left fingerprints on the crime scene.

It was then when he feared that he could get forced to give his fingerprints and then he persuaded Elizabeth to go with him on the run. He stole blank German passports from the office of his father and got a new identity by this way. He was eager to live on fraud in the future.

He told me about a visit they spent to his grandmother in Switzerland. Jens Soering told me that he considered even to kill his grandmother because he saw the risk that she could call his parents and tell them about his whereabouts. He feared that the phone of his parents could have been intercepted (taped) and this could give him away. Elizabeth did not like this idea, either. She convinced him not doing this if he really would have loved her.

For this reason, Jens Soering did not commit another murder, but they disappeared in a jiffy. Jens Soering stole valuables (jewels and money) before he left with Elizabeth the house of his grandmother, he told me. Jens Soering had in his mind a story like Bonnie and Clyde. After I mentioned that I could not understand his philosophy of life, he asked me if I had fallen ever in true Love with someone? He told me that he would have done everything just for being together with Elizabeth, doesn’t matter whatever could have been the price for it.

You can read the full letter here. I have always treated Schröder’s letter with caution. After Schröder returned to Germany, he was convicted of manslaughter and other crimes and spent considerable time in prison in Germany. You can read the whole startling story here.

In short, I regarded Schröder as a fairly unreliable witness. Although it was true Söring and Schröder had been held at the same time at the Ashford Remand Centre, Schröder’s own credibility was suspect. Like Söring, Schröder was convicted fraudster. Unlike Söring, Schröder had only killed one person, not two. But still, not the most credible of witnesses.

Nevertheless, Soering was concerned about Schröder — after all, Schröder’s letter had been published on a website which he carefully monitored even from prison, and which people interested in the Haysom murders would certainly read. Privately, he assured his supporters that even thought it was true he was confessing to people constantly in 1986, he hadn’t confessed to Schröder. Publicly, he of course avoided mentioning anything about Schröder, since Söring was well aware of the Streisand effect.

Yet sometime before late 2021, when he spoke to Stang, Soering decided, as he so often does, to change his story. Instead of denying he had confessed to Schröder, he would admit he confessed but then add an “innocent” explanation: He confessed to the double murders not because he had committed them, but rather to show his toughness and gain respect behind bars.

Yet now, four years after that conversation and three years after the publication of Stang’s book, Söring is now claiming that he never told Stang he had confessed to Schröder, and that Stang is a liar.

The Lawsuit Threat

About a week ago, a member of Höcker’s law firm — whom I will call “Chip!” — sent a demand letter to Siegfried Stang. There is only one allegation: Stang had defamed Söring by falsely claiming, in Nebelkerzen, that Söring had admitted confessing to Schröder in England in 1986. The demand letter blatantly accuses Stang of lying about this. It even promises that if it comes to a lawsuit, Soering will swear out an affidavit denying Stang’s account.

The demand letter is seven pages long, and one of the poorest pieces of lawyering I’ve ever read. Chip! quite obviously has no grasp of the case. For one thing, he repeats the discredited argument that Söring was “denied” a lawyer during his 1986 interrogations. Söring never requested to speak to a lawyer, and you can’t be “denied” something you never requested.

Chip also resorted to typical tricks German lawyers use to try to intimidate people engaging in free speech. The lowest rung of the legal profession in Germany is inhabited by what are called “Abmahnanwälte”: roughly: “Demand-letter shysters”. These lawyers expoit aspects of German law by issuing large volumes of demand-letters complaining of defamation or insult or copyright violations or unfair competition, or whatever else they can think of.

The letters look formal and intimidating: A law firm is accusing you of violating German civil law with potentially huge liability. They set an absurdly short deadline of one or two weeks and put it in boldface font. They announce they will sue you unless you sign a “waiver” in which you agree not to repeat whatever supposedly illegal behavior they accuse you of engaging in. What many people do not realize is that if you sign and return this waiver, you become responsible for paying the fees of the lawyer who wrote the letter — usually between €500 and €1500.

Sending out these demand letters is a profitable way for untalented lawyers to make a living. 80% of people who get one of these letters know they’re usually empty threats sent out for nuisance purposes. They contact their own lawyer and either settle the claim for a small fee or simply ignore it altogether.

But 20% of people who get these letters (especially foreigners unfamiliar with German legal language) are intimidated, and cough up some cash. If you send out enough of these lawsuit threats you can make a decent living. Most people will ignore them if the claim is not valid, but even if one recipient is intimidated enough, you can cash cash in €400 in legal fees for just writing a simple letter.

This system is obviously open to abuse and ordinary Germans — especially owners of small and mid-sized companies — hate it. However, so far German lawyers have been successful in preventing major reforms. There was a minor reform in 2020, but it only addressed parts of the problem. There are still thousands of lawyers in Germany who make their living by sending out dozens, if not hundreds, of these letters each day. They are considered the bottom-feeders of the German legal profession.

Am I calling Chip! a bottom-feeding lawyer? Of course not! Nor am I calling Ralf Höcker’s entire firm a group of bottom-feeding “warning-letter shysters”. I would never do something so rude and uncollegial! Granted, Ralf Höcker called me “a sick, misanthropic, merciless, arrogant, biased, obsessed person who has found no meaning in his life and will probably never find any”. But I will not descend to Höcker’s level. As Michelle Obama once said: “When they go low, we go high.”

However, I will call the Höcker firm’s lawyer Chip! incompetent, based on this demand letter. I have two main reasons for this assessment. First of all, Chip! used a common tactic of bottom-feeding “warning-letter shysters”: He sets a short timeline for the letter’s recipient to respond, just days.

Chip!’s First Mistake: What’s the Rush?

The first mistake Chip! makes is that he demands Stang take immediate action for statements which were made not three days, or three weeks, or three months ago. The remarks which must now be removed within days were published to the world three years ago, on 5 September 2022. Just weeks after his book was published, I wrote a commentary on this blog on October 13, 2022 which contained the following passage:

“Page 678: Söring admits he confessed the Haysom murders to Matthias Schröder. “To my surprise, Söring simply told me that he had admitted the murders [in the Ashford Remand Centre] to earn the respect of the other inmates.” This bolsters Schröder’s credibility.”

Söring reads everything I write about this case immediately. Even if he never read Stang’s book, which seems extremely unlikely, he certainly read my blog entry. Which is almost three years old.

But wait, you might be asking: If the false statement is so urgent Stang must remove it within days, then why did Söring wait three years to send a demand letter to Siegfried Stang? Is that an emergency situation? Of course not.

In his demand letter, Chip! provides no explanation for why Söring is immediate for a statement which has been public knowledge to the entire world for three years.

Chip’s Second Mistake: Trusting his Client

Back when I was learning law in Houston, Texas in the mid-1990s, an experienced lawyer told me two things: “Son, there are two rules to being a lawyer. The first is your clients always lies to you. Second is don’t believe your own propaganda.”

Chip! violated the first of these two rules. Chip! claims on behalf of Söring that Söring never admitted his guilt to fellow prisoners during his incarceration in England. Chip! apparently simply chose to believe Söring’s statements to him. Chip! argues in his demand letter that Söring would never have confessed to fellow inmates, because it would have damaged his legal defense.

Poor Chip! He did not check his client’s statements against the factual record — or even his client’s past public statements. In his 2017 book A Far, Far Better Thing (linked above), Söring described his conduct in prison in England in the late 1980s:

With a nervous stutter I asked my attorneys what my legal status would be if I were innocent.

They gasped with shock. For heaven’s sake, anything but that!

Not innocence, please! In order to have any chance at all of obtaining a binding guarantee that the death penalty would not be carried out, it was absolutely essential that I did not withdraw my confession during the extradition proceedings. If we admitted that I had even the slightest defense against the murder charge, then the appellate judges would immediately conclude that I did not need any binding assurances. No innocent man could possibly be convicted in an American court at all. Legally, it was absolutely essential for us to maintain the so-called seriousness of the risk of execution, my lawyers explained.

If I wanted to live, no one could know that I had not killed the Haysoms.

So according to Söring’s own account, he told everyone he murdered the Haysoms until mid-1989, when the European Court of Human Rights ruled in his favor.

So why wouldn’t he tell Mathias Schröder he had killed the Haysoms? Chip! doesn’t know the answer to this question.

Höcker/Chip!’s Second Mistake: Ignorance of the Facts

The second humiliating mistake Chip! makes is he did not verify what his client said to him. (“Your client always lies to you.”) As I’ve shown above, in 2019, Söring told his followers he had not confessed to Mathias Schröder. Then in 2021, he told Siegfried Stang he did confess to Schröder.

Chip! accuses Stang of lying about this.

But Chip! made a humiliating mistake. He didn’t research the facts. Chip! claims Siegfried Stang is a liar who made up the story that Söring admitted confessing to Mathias Schröder in the Ashford Remand Centre in 1986.

Söring presumably assured Chip! that Söring had never admitted to anyone that he confessed to Mathias Schröder in the Ashford Remand Centre in 1986. But he had! As I describe in my book, I was interviewed for about 7 hours in a villa in Essen, Germany, in spring 2023 by the directors of the Netflix documentary, André Hörmann and Lena Leonhardt. During a break they asked me whether I knew how to get in touch with Mathias Schröder.

I told them I had no idea how to get in touch with him. I then asked them why they were interested. They told me that during their interview with Söring, Söring had admitted that he did in fact confess to Mathias Schröder. Just as he had done with Stang, Söring explained that he had only confessed to Schröder to “gain respect” in prison for his toughness. Since I already knew this from Stang’s book, I was not surprised.

So there are two other independent witnesses who confirm that Söring admitted he confessed to Mathias Schröder. Chip! seems totally unaware of this. In his frivolous demand letter, he claims Söring would never have told anyone that he had confessed the Haysom murders to Mathias Schröder. But he did. To Strang and Hörmann and Leonhardt. Independent witnesses with no axe to grind.

Chip!, your demand letter is frivolous. First, you’re provide no explanation why Soering waited three years, then gave Stang mere days to correct the allegedly false statements. Second, you claim Söring has never admitted he did confess to Mathias Schröder. But he did admit this to the directors of the Netflix documentary about his case.

In my expert legal opinion, Chip!’s demand letter is an example of an incompetent lawyer sending out a frivolous demand letter based on the the false factual allegations of a convicted fraudster and double-murderer.

What kind of lawyer does that? The kind of lawyer Ralf Höcker hires. Chip!, please rethink your priorities. The law can be a noble profession. But alas, not the way you are practicing it now.

I would promise to update you on what happens after this demand letter, but it would be pointless. The demand letter is meritless, and nothing will come of it. Except another black mark on the reputation of the firm of Ralf Höcker, valiant defender of free speech…except when he’s not.