Regarding the grandmother---I don't believe J. ever had any such 'plan'. E. may have somehow brought it up as a joking fantasy to play around with; sometimes gradually building to some sort of hilarious absurdity, such as stealing a giant golden Buddha. You have to be very careful with what E. says. She presented J. as a sexual psychopath when it suited her to dial up her ongoing psychopathic delusion of being one of the World's Victims and disguise what she knows she did to him. She would say anything about anybody. Englade, at the beginning of Chapter 19, page 126, has got some things wrong, including 'demands', 'porn freak', magazines etc. J. was not a sexual psychopath. He wrote that lovely thing about her, waking up together. (And she was slobbering.)
And there was: "My great love."
God, it must have hurt to learn that these things were said after what he had done for her. His "sacrifice." A Liebestod. Like Kleist. Except J. did a couple of families, including his own.
E. loved the idea of weird sex, and from early on Jens began responding to her. He's interested, too, but both are writers, and any topic is fair game and can be sort of fun. Except that at that time I think that her interest in sex that is cruel, humiliating, even violent, was very much a part of her imagination and is a sign of the BPD.
Remember she told Dr. Showalter that her career choices would be either to become an academic at Cambridge or a career criminal.
Preparing a post on this, but here's the nutshell: Of course we're dependent for much of this information on Elizabeth, and she has some credibility problems. However, these have been greatly exaggerated by Söring's decades-long campaign against her. There are indicators she wasn't exaggerating, such as:
1. Söring *personally murdered two people in cold blood by stabbing them to death*. Frankly, do we need to go any further?
2. Söring has had a lifelong obsession with money, and specifically his grandmother's inheritance.
3. Both of them were desperate for cash to survive life on the run. With a large sum, they could have bought convincing new identities, bought a place to live, etc.
4. Söring's obsession with violence appears in his letters, and also in the fact that the cops found copies of Soldier of Fortune in his papers -- just like Elizabeth said they would. They also found sketches of bombs, phantom weapons which could be smuggled onto airplanes, etc. in Söring's hand.
5. Haysom said that Söring had cased Ricky Gardner's house in Bedford and described its frontage to Gardner himself, and Gardner saw that the description was accurate.
6. Haysom spoke extensively of Söring's violent tendencies to the psychiatrists who evaluated her. They found what she said on this point to be credible and it played a role in their report and testimony at her trial. If they thought she was exaggerating, they had no incentive to conceal this fact, since it would obviously be important for their diagnoses -- and their sworn testimony in court.
So all in all, we can never know for sure, bla bla blah, but I believe this. After he murdered the Haysoms, Söring felt like a sort of Nietzschean superman unbound my morality and, while on the run under an assumed name, he had nothing more to lose. Even in June 1986, just after he was caught, he had plans to tell his story to the world -- the story of a guilty murderer -- and profit from it.
I'm convinced Elizabeth has BPD. And Jens, on the other hand, is a classic psychopath. According to studies, these two often find each other in relationships; borderlines and psychopaths.
After reading ALL his letters into evidence and interviewing many fellow scholars/dorm mates, I believe he would say something like that - and exaggerate or invent the facts - to keep up with Elizabeth’s own talk of inheriting a London mansion and her parents supposedly vast estate. Her statements were of course false. Well, she was no doubt among the Hsysom’s many heirs (they had about five kids between them). She perpetuated a false impression that I bet he wanted to live into.
I’d be surprised if his grandmother would leave her estate only to him. His brother Kai may not be her favorite, but by no means could he have been intimera le enough that she’d write him out. Her own children could have a more complicated relationship with her…but not relatively young grandchildren.
I call on the German journalists investigating the case to search probate records and discover the truth. Was he her sole beneficiary? What was the amount inherited?
Honestly, it would be logical to write a prison lifer out of her will, even one she favored.
Also intended to make clear that Elizabeth’s exaggerated claims of her parents’ vast wealth are refuted by their relately modest estate, divided at least five ways.
Hi Frank, thank you for your posting. I totally agree with you. I think Showalter and Bullard had made a clear diagnosis on Elizabeth Haysom. Pathological lying was also confirmed by her family members and even in court, Updike was desperated by asking Elizabeth what version to believe her, as she had told so many lies before (So hard job for the jury, easy job for cherrypickers). This is one of the most popular sentences in her trial and not an invention of "Team Soering". The adding of her diagnosed Borderline disorder will complete her profile in being emotional very impulsive and also having dillusions. So a person with a close relationship could be the most lovely one in one moment and in the next moment it will turn out into the devil. So with her parents, so with Soering.
The problem is to analyze what is real for her and what is not. Feelings, emotions, recalls, thoughts and what will she do by manipulation to achieve her clear obligations. She had admitted a lot on trial and Andrew should know it. If hee would do a list the first time in claiming to be an expert he would realize that there was not some issues with her credibility - but there had been a lot.
But if Andrew put all the details concerning Elizabeth on the bright side or ignore them the truth will not come out. This has only something to do with finding out the truth and not battleling versus "Team Soering"
If I read Andrew Hammel's answers to Frank's comment I can see no nutshell!
1. Are you sure?!?
2. Well, Soering was in a proper financial condition. He was also able to buy a new Scirocco and had the creditcard from his father as backup. So a golden boy. If you want greed to be his motive for killing then show us a proof for his related plans to achieve by more money!
On her trial Haysom told the jury that Soering want to talk with her parents about her bad financial situation. So we know she was manipulating him telling how wealthy her family is and that she owns a flat, a book contract and blahblahblah
So her demand of being independed over money was *much bigger*!!
3. The credit card of Klaus Soering was blocked on their run. No job, no money. What will you tell us here???
4. Are you kidding. Ok we have "crush", "yet to kill", "bizarre sexual phantasies"
and some scribbles of bombs and cars.....wow. A part of her psychological statements in her diagnosis was dealing about her needs for Soering emotionally and sexually. Do you think Haysom had a fetish for brutal sex if that should really belong to Soering's habits? You could ask his actual girlfrind, now 🤦
5. Wow, what does it prove? Haysom knows where Gardner lives. The rest is what she says, factually.
6. Could you please prove this. I guess you might have Bullards dignosis of her in original text form. If I unstand them correctly they a said that Soering had lost his reality during the murders delluted and manipulated by Haysom and diagnosed as a "Folie a Deux" in which Haysom took the active part and Soering the passive one.
"As for 6. Could you please prove this. I guess you might have Bullards dignosis of her in original text form. If I unstand them correctly they a said that Soering had lost his reality during the murders delluted and manipulated by Haysom and diagnosed as a "Folie a Deux" in which Haysom took the active part and Soering the passive one."
Dear Andrew, to make a short story not too long. It is impossible to manipulate s.o. without lying. Showalter states out her manipulation. The weakness of Showalters testimony is, that he wasn't firm about the case. He couldn't recall any affidavits that he had received concerning the case. He just went through an isolated clinical path. In his opinion the guilt of Haysom concerning the murder ended up in her head game or phantasy which is obviously Haysom's acting out quality for minimize her guilt in her plea. Well if he don't recall her sentence to Soering "we can get rid off them now or we can wait until...." what Showalter couldn't know is that Haysom will be much more concerned about a Soering having failed the killings, three years later. Showalter's coworkers had only contact to Veryan and Chetah Haysom. But they didn't share much time in the development of Haysom's life.
So what do you not unstand in the testimony of her closer brother Howard
" She has lied to me in the past
and, frankly, continues to lie."
...does this match the definition of pathological lying?
Also Haysom said to Showalter that she had done of a lot of harm to her own body according to her BPD.
If you can cut your own body with a knife and sticking pins through your feet as she had described it to Showalter, than other things are not too far.
Guilty as charged is authorized by Terry Wright, isn't it?
3. The credit card of Klaus Soering was blocked on their run. No job, no money. What will you tell us here???
I'm pretty sure everyone understood my point but you, my dear fellow. But let me spell it out: JS and EH were on the run, and believed (wrongly) that they were being tracked by Interpol. Of course they couldn't use Klaus Söring's credit card, duh. But let's say they visit Söring's grandmother in Bremen, and they convince her to fork over, say, 50,000 DM in cash. With *that* kind of money, you can buy an excellent fake identity that will convince anyone -- since this is, of course, long before the computer era and bank accounts were much easier to start. Together, JS and EH could then perhaps buy a small business and put a down-payment on an apartment, showing their full bank account as proof of reliability.
But wait, what if grandmother was unwilling, or had already heard they were fugitives. I leave you to figure the rest out as an exercise.
5. Wow, what does it prove? Haysom knows where Gardner lives. The rest is what she says, factually.
Again, dear fellow, you're not putting the dots together. Ricky Gardner lived in the town of Bedford, not Boonsboro or Lynchburg. EH had no idea where his house was located. But Söring apparently *followed Gardner home* after the 6 October interview (or may have found out his address otherwise), and scoped out the house. Alone, on his own, since EH did not accompany him to the October 6 interview, to my knowledge. Söring then returns to Charlottesville and describes Ricky Gardners *house*, which EH has obviously never seen, to Elizabeth. Then, in 1987, Elizabeth, without prompting, describes Ricky Gardner's house **to Ricky Gardner**, and Gardner sees that the description was accurate.
This corroborates EH's claim that Söring had at least contemplated doing something to Gardner.
Lol, I have never reading you being so creative in inventing theories and versions. Why don't you do this with all the evidence and contradictions on the crime scene. I have never read a proper answer to this except "this was all discussed at the trial" - wrong. Or the obvious mistakes Wright is reporting.
Well concerning grandma Soering. As you know Klaus Soering was informed by the letter and by the use of his credit card that his son had left university. What do you think his mother will do with this information. Still being generous to his grandson? Why don't ask Lady Astor instead for real British pounds. I bet that story had resulted in a Perversion of Truth.
Could you die for the fact that Haysom didn't ask Howard, who could know about Gardners address? Any other source for Gardner's adress with access for Haysom without the need of following to his home??!! Then she only need to ask one of her admirer and take a ride.
Regarding Source 1 / the grandmother's Gutenberg Bible: It is only a guess, but in view of the many indications that greed, if not the main motive, plays a certain role in Jens Söring's life, the mention of the Gutenberg Bible to Gardner seems to me personally like a revealing Freudian slip. Possibly Jens Söring wanted to rule out greed as HIS motive at the time by boasting and referring to his grandiose inheritance (in the same clumsy way that he often exposes himself) - after all, he apparently thought at the time that the Haysoms' fortune was far greater than it ultimately was at under a million dollars. In Söring's mind at that time, investigators could well "follow the money" and regard greed as a motive, so Söring, grossly overestimating the Haysoms' wealth, wanted to rule himself out as a suspect by "cleverly and with foresight" dropping the information that a multi million-dollar inheritance awaited him.
From today's perspective, his reference to his grandmother's supposed inheritance could be interpreted as a Freudian slip, indicating that he might have thought that greed was a motive from a police point of view - and this idea of his could stem from the fact that he himself very much considered greed to be indeed one of HIS motives.
I wasn't saying that JS wasn't capable of great violence. But in re Oma--or Nana-- she lived in a very handsome villa outside of Bremen and was from what I was told a formidable person. Jens would have been wary of her. My guess is that she employed at least three persons, a gardener (part time, maybe), a cook, and a butler/chauffeur/general attendant who directed the cleaning people when they came and polished the silver etc. Again, that is my guess, but this was a rich woman who had been through a bad war and was intent on enjoying life. Oma would never have let EH into that house. She knew too much about her by then. If she had allowed Jens to visit I think that he might have found a lawyer waiting for him in the drawing room with her with papers ready to expedite his surrender right then and there while he was safely in Germany. I don't think EH would even have let Jens go see his grandmother. She would have thought that he might never come back. She had the psychopath's insight into the people they focus on.
If she was rich enough for all that (staff, etc.) given the cost of living in Germany, then the $500,000 he mentions is a pittance, and therefore unrealistic. To whom did she leave the rest of it? I call on the German journalists to get the records on this. They may catch him in a lie, which would be telling though not incriminating.
Inheritance documents are protected by strict German privacy laws, so it is impossible to get access to them. Also, German inheritance law operates on totally different lines than in the US or the UK -- the law makes it almost impossible to disinherit your children; they are all automatically entitled to a "compulsory" portion of your estate no matter what your relationship was like. Söring's mother died in 1997, his grandmother in 1999. So his grandmother's inheritance would have automatically skipped a generation to the children of Söring's mother, him and his brother, with some share going to her daughter's husband, possibly (I am no expert!)
As we've seen, Söring has only made vague comments about what happened during this time, implying that his father and brother created some sort of trust for Söring's portion but then perhaps used that trust to pay off some of the hundreds of thousands they had spent hiring lawyers for Söring. It's all very unclear, and German privacy law makes it completely impossible to research further.
Hilarious that he says he would never just walk up and ring the doorbell considering that is what he is alleged to have done at the start of this series of events.
Following Jens Söring´s story for many years this question always came to my mind.
You are doing a great job, putting your finger on the point.
Thank you.
Regarding the grandmother---I don't believe J. ever had any such 'plan'. E. may have somehow brought it up as a joking fantasy to play around with; sometimes gradually building to some sort of hilarious absurdity, such as stealing a giant golden Buddha. You have to be very careful with what E. says. She presented J. as a sexual psychopath when it suited her to dial up her ongoing psychopathic delusion of being one of the World's Victims and disguise what she knows she did to him. She would say anything about anybody. Englade, at the beginning of Chapter 19, page 126, has got some things wrong, including 'demands', 'porn freak', magazines etc. J. was not a sexual psychopath. He wrote that lovely thing about her, waking up together. (And she was slobbering.)
And there was: "My great love."
God, it must have hurt to learn that these things were said after what he had done for her. His "sacrifice." A Liebestod. Like Kleist. Except J. did a couple of families, including his own.
E. loved the idea of weird sex, and from early on Jens began responding to her. He's interested, too, but both are writers, and any topic is fair game and can be sort of fun. Except that at that time I think that her interest in sex that is cruel, humiliating, even violent, was very much a part of her imagination and is a sign of the BPD.
Remember she told Dr. Showalter that her career choices would be either to become an academic at Cambridge or a career criminal.
Preparing a post on this, but here's the nutshell: Of course we're dependent for much of this information on Elizabeth, and she has some credibility problems. However, these have been greatly exaggerated by Söring's decades-long campaign against her. There are indicators she wasn't exaggerating, such as:
1. Söring *personally murdered two people in cold blood by stabbing them to death*. Frankly, do we need to go any further?
2. Söring has had a lifelong obsession with money, and specifically his grandmother's inheritance.
3. Both of them were desperate for cash to survive life on the run. With a large sum, they could have bought convincing new identities, bought a place to live, etc.
4. Söring's obsession with violence appears in his letters, and also in the fact that the cops found copies of Soldier of Fortune in his papers -- just like Elizabeth said they would. They also found sketches of bombs, phantom weapons which could be smuggled onto airplanes, etc. in Söring's hand.
5. Haysom said that Söring had cased Ricky Gardner's house in Bedford and described its frontage to Gardner himself, and Gardner saw that the description was accurate.
6. Haysom spoke extensively of Söring's violent tendencies to the psychiatrists who evaluated her. They found what she said on this point to be credible and it played a role in their report and testimony at her trial. If they thought she was exaggerating, they had no incentive to conceal this fact, since it would obviously be important for their diagnoses -- and their sworn testimony in court.
So all in all, we can never know for sure, bla bla blah, but I believe this. After he murdered the Haysoms, Söring felt like a sort of Nietzschean superman unbound my morality and, while on the run under an assumed name, he had nothing more to lose. Even in June 1986, just after he was caught, he had plans to tell his story to the world -- the story of a guilty murderer -- and profit from it.
I'm convinced Elizabeth has BPD. And Jens, on the other hand, is a classic psychopath. According to studies, these two often find each other in relationships; borderlines and psychopaths.
After reading ALL his letters into evidence and interviewing many fellow scholars/dorm mates, I believe he would say something like that - and exaggerate or invent the facts - to keep up with Elizabeth’s own talk of inheriting a London mansion and her parents supposedly vast estate. Her statements were of course false. Well, she was no doubt among the Hsysom’s many heirs (they had about five kids between them). She perpetuated a false impression that I bet he wanted to live into.
I’d be surprised if his grandmother would leave her estate only to him. His brother Kai may not be her favorite, but by no means could he have been intimera le enough that she’d write him out. Her own children could have a more complicated relationship with her…but not relatively young grandchildren.
I call on the German journalists investigating the case to search probate records and discover the truth. Was he her sole beneficiary? What was the amount inherited?
Honestly, it would be logical to write a prison lifer out of her will, even one she favored.
I meant “reading ALL letters entered into evidence.”
Also intended to make clear that Elizabeth’s exaggerated claims of her parents’ vast wealth are refuted by their relately modest estate, divided at least five ways.
Hi Frank, thank you for your posting. I totally agree with you. I think Showalter and Bullard had made a clear diagnosis on Elizabeth Haysom. Pathological lying was also confirmed by her family members and even in court, Updike was desperated by asking Elizabeth what version to believe her, as she had told so many lies before (So hard job for the jury, easy job for cherrypickers). This is one of the most popular sentences in her trial and not an invention of "Team Soering". The adding of her diagnosed Borderline disorder will complete her profile in being emotional very impulsive and also having dillusions. So a person with a close relationship could be the most lovely one in one moment and in the next moment it will turn out into the devil. So with her parents, so with Soering.
The problem is to analyze what is real for her and what is not. Feelings, emotions, recalls, thoughts and what will she do by manipulation to achieve her clear obligations. She had admitted a lot on trial and Andrew should know it. If hee would do a list the first time in claiming to be an expert he would realize that there was not some issues with her credibility - but there had been a lot.
But if Andrew put all the details concerning Elizabeth on the bright side or ignore them the truth will not come out. This has only something to do with finding out the truth and not battleling versus "Team Soering"
If I read Andrew Hammel's answers to Frank's comment I can see no nutshell!
1. Are you sure?!?
2. Well, Soering was in a proper financial condition. He was also able to buy a new Scirocco and had the creditcard from his father as backup. So a golden boy. If you want greed to be his motive for killing then show us a proof for his related plans to achieve by more money!
On her trial Haysom told the jury that Soering want to talk with her parents about her bad financial situation. So we know she was manipulating him telling how wealthy her family is and that she owns a flat, a book contract and blahblahblah
So her demand of being independed over money was *much bigger*!!
3. The credit card of Klaus Soering was blocked on their run. No job, no money. What will you tell us here???
4. Are you kidding. Ok we have "crush", "yet to kill", "bizarre sexual phantasies"
and some scribbles of bombs and cars.....wow. A part of her psychological statements in her diagnosis was dealing about her needs for Soering emotionally and sexually. Do you think Haysom had a fetish for brutal sex if that should really belong to Soering's habits? You could ask his actual girlfrind, now 🤦
5. Wow, what does it prove? Haysom knows where Gardner lives. The rest is what she says, factually.
6. Could you please prove this. I guess you might have Bullards dignosis of her in original text form. If I unstand them correctly they a said that Soering had lost his reality during the murders delluted and manipulated by Haysom and diagnosed as a "Folie a Deux" in which Haysom took the active part and Soering the passive one.
"As for 6. Could you please prove this. I guess you might have Bullards dignosis of her in original text form. If I unstand them correctly they a said that Soering had lost his reality during the murders delluted and manipulated by Haysom and diagnosed as a "Folie a Deux" in which Haysom took the active part and Soering the passive one."
I have already provided long excerpts of Showalter's testimony during EH's trial in which he directly addresses this point. You can also consult this blog entry, which quotes directly from the Warren/Showalter psychiatric report: https://soeringguiltyascharged.com/2018/02/22/mortal-thoughts-part-ii-mental-health-and-sexual-failure/
The proof's all there, the obvious conclusions are all there to be drawn, you just have to *want* to draw them.
Dear Andrew, to make a short story not too long. It is impossible to manipulate s.o. without lying. Showalter states out her manipulation. The weakness of Showalters testimony is, that he wasn't firm about the case. He couldn't recall any affidavits that he had received concerning the case. He just went through an isolated clinical path. In his opinion the guilt of Haysom concerning the murder ended up in her head game or phantasy which is obviously Haysom's acting out quality for minimize her guilt in her plea. Well if he don't recall her sentence to Soering "we can get rid off them now or we can wait until...." what Showalter couldn't know is that Haysom will be much more concerned about a Soering having failed the killings, three years later. Showalter's coworkers had only contact to Veryan and Chetah Haysom. But they didn't share much time in the development of Haysom's life.
So what do you not unstand in the testimony of her closer brother Howard
" She has lied to me in the past
and, frankly, continues to lie."
...does this match the definition of pathological lying?
Also Haysom said to Showalter that she had done of a lot of harm to her own body according to her BPD.
If you can cut your own body with a knife and sticking pins through your feet as she had described it to Showalter, than other things are not too far.
Guilty as charged is authorized by Terry Wright, isn't it?
3. The credit card of Klaus Soering was blocked on their run. No job, no money. What will you tell us here???
I'm pretty sure everyone understood my point but you, my dear fellow. But let me spell it out: JS and EH were on the run, and believed (wrongly) that they were being tracked by Interpol. Of course they couldn't use Klaus Söring's credit card, duh. But let's say they visit Söring's grandmother in Bremen, and they convince her to fork over, say, 50,000 DM in cash. With *that* kind of money, you can buy an excellent fake identity that will convince anyone -- since this is, of course, long before the computer era and bank accounts were much easier to start. Together, JS and EH could then perhaps buy a small business and put a down-payment on an apartment, showing their full bank account as proof of reliability.
But wait, what if grandmother was unwilling, or had already heard they were fugitives. I leave you to figure the rest out as an exercise.
5. Wow, what does it prove? Haysom knows where Gardner lives. The rest is what she says, factually.
Again, dear fellow, you're not putting the dots together. Ricky Gardner lived in the town of Bedford, not Boonsboro or Lynchburg. EH had no idea where his house was located. But Söring apparently *followed Gardner home* after the 6 October interview (or may have found out his address otherwise), and scoped out the house. Alone, on his own, since EH did not accompany him to the October 6 interview, to my knowledge. Söring then returns to Charlottesville and describes Ricky Gardners *house*, which EH has obviously never seen, to Elizabeth. Then, in 1987, Elizabeth, without prompting, describes Ricky Gardner's house **to Ricky Gardner**, and Gardner sees that the description was accurate.
This corroborates EH's claim that Söring had at least contemplated doing something to Gardner.
Lol, I have never reading you being so creative in inventing theories and versions. Why don't you do this with all the evidence and contradictions on the crime scene. I have never read a proper answer to this except "this was all discussed at the trial" - wrong. Or the obvious mistakes Wright is reporting.
Well concerning grandma Soering. As you know Klaus Soering was informed by the letter and by the use of his credit card that his son had left university. What do you think his mother will do with this information. Still being generous to his grandson? Why don't ask Lady Astor instead for real British pounds. I bet that story had resulted in a Perversion of Truth.
Could you die for the fact that Haysom didn't ask Howard, who could know about Gardners address? Any other source for Gardner's adress with access for Haysom without the need of following to his home??!! Then she only need to ask one of her admirer and take a ride.
Regarding Source 1 / the grandmother's Gutenberg Bible: It is only a guess, but in view of the many indications that greed, if not the main motive, plays a certain role in Jens Söring's life, the mention of the Gutenberg Bible to Gardner seems to me personally like a revealing Freudian slip. Possibly Jens Söring wanted to rule out greed as HIS motive at the time by boasting and referring to his grandiose inheritance (in the same clumsy way that he often exposes himself) - after all, he apparently thought at the time that the Haysoms' fortune was far greater than it ultimately was at under a million dollars. In Söring's mind at that time, investigators could well "follow the money" and regard greed as a motive, so Söring, grossly overestimating the Haysoms' wealth, wanted to rule himself out as a suspect by "cleverly and with foresight" dropping the information that a multi million-dollar inheritance awaited him.
From today's perspective, his reference to his grandmother's supposed inheritance could be interpreted as a Freudian slip, indicating that he might have thought that greed was a motive from a police point of view - and this idea of his could stem from the fact that he himself very much considered greed to be indeed one of HIS motives.
Andrew,
I wasn't saying that JS wasn't capable of great violence. But in re Oma--or Nana-- she lived in a very handsome villa outside of Bremen and was from what I was told a formidable person. Jens would have been wary of her. My guess is that she employed at least three persons, a gardener (part time, maybe), a cook, and a butler/chauffeur/general attendant who directed the cleaning people when they came and polished the silver etc. Again, that is my guess, but this was a rich woman who had been through a bad war and was intent on enjoying life. Oma would never have let EH into that house. She knew too much about her by then. If she had allowed Jens to visit I think that he might have found a lawyer waiting for him in the drawing room with her with papers ready to expedite his surrender right then and there while he was safely in Germany. I don't think EH would even have let Jens go see his grandmother. She would have thought that he might never come back. She had the psychopath's insight into the people they focus on.
If she was rich enough for all that (staff, etc.) given the cost of living in Germany, then the $500,000 he mentions is a pittance, and therefore unrealistic. To whom did she leave the rest of it? I call on the German journalists to get the records on this. They may catch him in a lie, which would be telling though not incriminating.
I may be misrembrting the $500k figure. Sorry. Can’t figure out how to edit my published comments.
Inheritance documents are protected by strict German privacy laws, so it is impossible to get access to them. Also, German inheritance law operates on totally different lines than in the US or the UK -- the law makes it almost impossible to disinherit your children; they are all automatically entitled to a "compulsory" portion of your estate no matter what your relationship was like. Söring's mother died in 1997, his grandmother in 1999. So his grandmother's inheritance would have automatically skipped a generation to the children of Söring's mother, him and his brother, with some share going to her daughter's husband, possibly (I am no expert!)
As we've seen, Söring has only made vague comments about what happened during this time, implying that his father and brother created some sort of trust for Söring's portion but then perhaps used that trust to pay off some of the hundreds of thousands they had spent hiring lawyers for Söring. It's all very unclear, and German privacy law makes it completely impossible to research further.
Thanks for clarifying all this! Makes much more sense why we cannot confirm details.
Hilarious that he says he would never just walk up and ring the doorbell considering that is what he is alleged to have done at the start of this series of events.