Heidi Blake

news organizations, to preserve editorial independence.

Besides, the CCRC is an investigative agency.

My article named all the key witnesses they needed to talk to.

All they had to do was call them.

And so they're kind of saying that they couldn't really assess the merits of the new evidence that we uncovered because we didn't disclose our source material.

You might think, how about CCRC going to talk to the police officers who we spoke to, for example?

They have not done that, Natalie.

The CCRC hadn't spoken to any of the witnesses I quoted in my article.

Instead, they'd just dismissed the new evidence, piece by piece.

First, they'd addressed my findings involving that linchpin of the case, the silencer.

The CCRC said there was nothing about the way the silencer had been handled by Jeremy Bamber's relatives or the police that could undermine the conviction.

They'd considered the strange circumstances in which the silencer-shaped scratches had appeared on the mantle at the manor,

and the records indicating that blood found in the device matched both David Bowflower and his father, Robert, when the jury had been told it matched only Sheila.

But amazingly, the CCRC said none of that was, quote, relevant to the factual matrix in this case.

Even though David had admitted to me that he could have contaminated the silencer.

You know, when you were unscrewing it, could you have cut yourself?

Of course I could.

We never, no, that never ever came up.

The CCRC had just dismissed this out of hand.

They concluded that he just hadn't really meant what he'd said to me.