The 3-Step Söring Shuffle

First step: I Want to Believe. Second Step: Ad hominem. Third step: Motte and Bailey.

So far I’ve received no answers from Daniela Hillers or from Die Welt about their error-filled interview. However, I have a pretty good guess what’s going on behind the scenes now, because it’s happened so often in the past.

I call it the Söring Shuffle. Here’s how it plays out.

Step I: “I want to believe”

A prospective member of Team Söring, let’s call her Diana, meets Söring in person or by video. Söring understands that many people find his story interesting (“I’ve never met someone who’s been in prison for over three decades!”) and his personality at least superficially likable. This is why he is eager to arrange for in-person contact whenever possible.

Söring then delivers his carefully-scripted story, complete with sighs, eye-rolls, changes in intonation, and self-deprecating jokes. Diana is fascinated and charmed. Now she wants to believe Söring, which is always the crucial first step. This desire to believe Söring’s story can be driven by various factors: attraction to Söring, sympathy for his plight, admiration at his ability to survive three decades in prison, generalized dislike and distrust of the U.S. and its courts, and a fervent wish to believe in his inspiring story of obsessive love and noble self-sacrifice. Who doesn’t like a romantic?

The combination of factors differs from person to person, but as soon as the “I want to believe” locks in, Diana loses any interest in critically scrutinizing Söring’s story. She will overlook inconsistencies and logical gaps which she would normally find troubling.

Two of Söring’s techniques are especially effective here: self-deprecation and displaced remorse.

Söring inoculates Diana against skepticism by highlighting problems with his story himself: I was so stupid to show the detectives the scars on my hand and pretend they were from the murders; I was so naive to believe Elizabeth’s story about going to pick up drugs; I must have been the dumbest person in the world to believe she actually loved me; I wasn’t thinking straight when I left the USA so quickly; I really screwed up on the witness stand, etc.

The second technique is displaced remorse. Söring looks Diana straight in the eye and adopts a somber and troubled expression. “I have brought terrible guilt upon myself. I have caused enormous suffering that has damaged two families. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about the harm I have caused, which I can never hope to make up.” Just when you think he’s going to confess to the murders, he pulls the bait-and-switch: “I bear full responsibility for the terrible wrongdoing I engaged in…when I lied to the police. I should never have done that. It haunts me to this day.”

In retrospect, now that so much is known about the case, these techniques seem like shallow tricks which would fool only people of…modest reasoning abilities. But they worked on plenty of smart people, including Marcus Vetter, who notoriously called Söring a “fundamentally honest person” (!) who “hides nothing” (!!) I wonder what he’d say now.

Step 2: Ad hominem

Before 2017, Söring hardly needed to think about how to defend his story against critical scrutiny. But then things changed, and Söring realized there were people out there who were challenging his narrative with fearsome facts, lethal logic, and damning documents. Sooner or later, Söring knows, Diana is going to encounter some of these arguments, whether on Söring’s Wikipedia page, Soering Guilty as Charged, or here.

Söring’s next move is to go ad hominem. The point is to distract Diana from what these critics are actually saying and shift the focus to who they are and why they’re saying the things they’re saying. He professes to be “completely mystified” about why “these people” are suddenly “attacking him” even though he’s never done anything to them. Conspiracy theories abound. Holdsworth is really Terry Wright — or vice versa. “Terry Wright” is an invented fiction. I am Holdsworth. Terry Wright is Holdsworth. I don’t exist.

I am Terry Wright. I am both Holdsworth and Terry Wright. Terry Wright is both Holdsworth and me — I am an invented persona. Terry Wright, Holdsworth, and I are all invented personas created by Elizab*tch Haysom. It’s a crazy mixed-up funhouse world where nothing is as it seems. Everything in this universe may be a simulation. What is reality?!

That only holds off questions for a few days or weeks, since I and other skeptics actually do exist in this dimensional plane and are in fact who we say we are. So now Team Söring turns to phase 2: What is our real motivation? Surely nobody would be willing to write a 450-page report or book simply to establish the truth about one of the most highly-publicized criminal cases in modern American and German history. Who could possibly be interested in a tale of love, sex, murder, and betrayal featuring two attractive, young, gifted students and an international flight from the law? Yawnsville. I mean, you might as well write about the history of double-entry accounting.

So somebody must be paying us. But who? Elizabeth Haysom? The Haysom family? Bedford County? The Trilateral Commission? The CIA? This guy?

Maybe he planted the bloody sockprint.

How far up does the conspiracy go? To the very top?!

Phase 3: Motte and Bailey

The ad hominem strategy can only hold off an intelligent, inquisitive person for so long (although many dunderheads remain stuck in this phase).

We’ll assume Diana is intelligent and inquisitive. After the smokescreens have dissipated, Söring must reluctantly concede that his skeptics exist. Diana has read the Wikipedia entry or some of my articles on the case. She now understands that many of the things Söring told her about the case don’t seem to be accurate or consistent. Now she faces painful cognitive dissonance: Is this person she likes — this man who survived decades in American prisons — lying to her?

She is extremely reluctant to reach this conclusion, and Söring knows this. So now he employs the motte and bailey technique of argumentation.

“A motte and bailey doctrine for arguments goes like this: someone is usually making an argument from a big and comfortable courtyard of ideas, being very liberal with their terms, accusations, and implications. But when someone attacks their argumentative ‘bailey’, they retreat to a ‘motte’ of strict terms and/or rigorous reasoning.”

Here are a few examples:

Söring (bailey): “A fake expert used junk science to say I left the bloody sockprint.”

Diana: “But this article shows Hallett was never qualified by the court as an expert and was not allowed to testify you left the sockprint, only that it was ‘consistent’ with your foot, which you admit yourself.”

Söring (motte): “Well yes, but Hallett was allowed to testify that he was an impression examiner and he used all these little red arrows to compare my foot to the sockprint, so it’s basically the same thing — he looked like an expert!”

Söring (bailey): “Elizabeth killed her parents because her mother sexually abused her. This accounts for the rage-overkill.”

Diana: “But Derek Haysom was injured far more severely than Nancy Haysom was.”

Söring (motte): “Well yes, but that’s just because she was angry at him for not stopping the abuse.”

Söring (bailey): “The police denied me access to a lawyer for four days during my interrogation.”

Diana: “But wait, this article says you agreed to speak to police without a lawyer and posts documents with your signature agreeing to do just that.”

Söring (motte): “Well yes, those documents do exist, but you have to understand, I was only 19 years old at the time and here were three grown-up police officers basically telling me I had to sign these forms full of complicated legalese. Also [Söring bailey 2] I wanted to save Elizabeth by confessing!”

Diana: But if you intended to confess all along, then why is it important whether you had a lawyer or not?

Söring (motte 2): “Uh, because my lawyer could have helped me to uh…confess better or something. Are you really going to take some random blogger from Texas who may not even exist seriously? Also — "

And so it goes, potentially forever. At this point, at the very latest, Hammel’s maxim takes hold: Every bogus true-crime narrative ultimately becomes a test of logical reasoning. Those who fail the test remain stuck at either Phase 2 or Phase 3, and never escape. Because they don’t want to escape.

Can the members of Team Söring 2.0 escape? Only time will tell.