I had been avoiding my friend Jens Söring for months. Whenever his emails arrived, I’d open a reply window and stare with dread at the blinking cursor. I no longer knew what to say to him, this man who had spent 33 years in prison for a double homicide he swore he didn’t commit.
Jens had been convicted of murder in 1990. I had been convicted of murder nearly 20 years later. But the parallels between our cases were striking. While studying abroad in Italy in 2007, I had been accused of killing my roommate Meredith Kercher with the help of a man I’d been dating for just a week. Jens, too, had been studying abroad—he was a German citizen attending the University of Virginia—and he, too, had been accused of a brutal killing, allegedly with the help of his girlfriend, Elizabeth Haysom. The murder weapon in both cases was a knife. Elizabeth had been portrayed in the media as a psychologically disturbed femme fatale; I’d been called “Luciferina” in the courtroom and “Foxy Knoxy” in the tabloids. Both of our cases involved a confession obtained without legal counsel present. And in both of our cases, biological evidence played an important role. I was freed only after independent experts debunked the supposed DNA evidence linking me to the crime. DNA analysis wasn’t available when Jens was tried—but applied decades later, it could be interpreted to support his claim of innocence. For a long time, I believed the major difference between Jens’s case and mine was this: I eventually got justice.
In 2015, eight years after being arrested, I was definitively acquitted of the murder of Meredith Kercher by Italy’s highest court per non aver commesso il fatto—“for not having committed the act.” A man named Rudy Guede had already been identified as the killer, and had been convicted. I spoke with Jens for the first time a few years later, in 2019, through the prison phone system at Buckingham Correctional Center, in rural Virginia. By then, as a writer and podcaster, I had become an advocate for the wrongly convicted. Jens had already been imprisoned for 33 years—longer than I’d been alive. He would die in prison, if the Commonwealth of Virginia had its way.
After talking with lawyers and advocates, impartial experts, and Jens himself, I had come to believe that Jens was innocent of murder, though he had admittedly, and foolishly, helped cover up murders in their aftermath. I publicly advocated for his release. And I offered him advice and served as a bridge to the community of wrongly convicted people in the United States and abroad, a community that had been essential to my own mental health. In our many exchanges, Jens came across as intelligent, bookish, and quick to laugh, but with a deep melancholy beneath the surface, an emotion I knew all too well. Listening to his voice, I often felt as if I were peering through a looking glass into another, sadder dimension. He seemed to me like a tragic version of myself. Our bond was more than a friendship; it was a kind of kinship.
[Amanda Knox: Who owns Amanda Knox?]
But now, armed with new information, I believed there was a strong possibility that Jens had been lying to me from the very beginning. I wrote the email, explaining the doubts I had. Jens was angry. “Let me say this quite bluntly,” he replied, in what would prove to be our last communication. “There is way more DNA evidence incriminating you than there is me … I mean, Amanda, WTF.”
Derek and Nancy Haysom were murdered in their home outside Lynchburg, Virginia, on March 30, 1985. The Haysoms were wealthy—Nancy was an artist whose family was related to the Astors; Derek, who was born in South Africa and eventually moved to Canada, had made money in steel and finance. A Bedford County detective named Chuck Reid described the crime scene as a “slaughterhouse.” Derek, in particular, had put up a fight, and had been stabbed 36 times. Both he and Nancy had had their throats cut so deeply that they were nearly decapitated. The crime shocked the local community and quickly became a media sensation. The investigators wondered at first whether this had been a Manson Family–style “thrill kill,” but eventually came to the view that the excessive violence suggested someone with a personal motive. This aligned with evidence that the killer was someone whom the Haysoms had welcomed into their home. They had been eating dinner, and their plates were still on the table. Nancy was wearing a housecoat. There were no signs of forced entry. Nothing had been stolen. Detectives interviewed roughly 100 people in the months following the murders, and only in the fall did they become suspicious of the Haysoms’ daughter, Elizabeth, and her boyfriend, Jens Söring.
Both were promising young students at UVA. Jens, the son of a German diplomat, was a Jefferson Scholar. Elizabeth had been educated at boarding schools in Europe. Their relationship had begun the previous fall. Jens and Elizabeth hardly seemed like the kind of people who would commit a double homicide. In any case, the pair had an alibi—they’d been in Washington, D.C., on the weekend of the murders. They had hotel receipts and movie-ticket stubs to prove it, along with a rental-car agreement.
But a Bedford County investigator named Ricky Gardner took a closer look at that last item, and noticed a discrepancy in the mileage—429 miles beyond the distance from Charlottesville, where the car had been rented, to D.C. and back. Those excess miles would account for an additional round trip between Washington and the Haysom residence. Elizabeth and Jens offered an explanation for the excess mileage—getting lost—but its vagueness and implausibility invited further scrutiny; the drive from Charlottesville to D.C. is a straight shot on U.S. Route 29. Finally, in late September, the detectives asked Elizabeth to submit fingerprints, footprints, and blood samples, which she provided. A few weeks later, facing the same request, Jens declined. Not long after, both fled the country, on separate flights.
Seven months passed before a young couple, Christopher and Tara Lucy Noe, were detained in London at a Marks & Spencer department store, on suspicion of fraud. An in-house detective had witnessed them entering together with shopping bags, acting as if they didn’t know each other while inside, returning merchandise for cash, buying more clothes with checks at different registers, and then meeting up again out front. A call was made to Scotland Yard. Detectives Kenneth Beever and Terry Wright questioned the couple and obtained permission to search their apartment, which yielded evidence of a sophisticated check-fraud operation, together with wigs and other disguises. Authentic passports revealed the couple’s true identities: Jens Söring and Elizabeth Haysom. Detectives also found a large cache of letters the couple had written to each other and a joint travel diary that the pair had been keeping, which indicated that Jens and Elizabeth had been scamming their way across the globe, from Luxembourg to Thailand to the United Kingdom, using false IDs. More intriguing were references to a possible murder and the wiping of fingerprints. There was also a mention of “officers Reid and Gardner” in a place called Bedford.
When asked about this, Jens at first claimed that the diary entries were ideas for a crime novel he was writing. But after a painstaking search of the many American towns named Bedford—this was in the pre-internet era—Detective Wright located Ricky Gardner in Virginia, and learned that Jens and Elizabeth were wanted in connection with the murders of Derek and Nancy Haysom. Shortly thereafter, Jens confessed to the murders in multiple official interviews over the course of four days, giving a detailed account of how he had killed Elizabeth’s parents. The information relayed in his confessions corresponded with many aspects of the crime scene.
Elizabeth confessed separately to participation in the murder scheme, admitting that she harbored a deep animosity toward her parents because of their controlling behavior and their disapproval of Jens. She said that she had planned the murders with him. According to her story, she had stayed in a hotel in Washington to help Jens fake an alibi, and he had driven to Lynchburg, killed the Haysoms, and then returned to the hotel. “It was my will that made him kill my parents,” she told the detectives, “and he wouldn’t have done it, I’m sure, if he hadn’t loved me so much and I he.”
Elizabeth did not fight extradition, and in 1987, charged with two counts of accessory before the fact to capital murder, she pleaded guilty, forgoing a trial. During her sentencing hearing, Elizabeth condemned Jens as the killer and downplayed her own role in planning the crime. Any talk of killing her parents, she testified, had been merely “grotesque, childish fantasies”; she had failed to realize that Jens was taking the idea far more seriously. This claim was inconsistent with Elizabeth’s prior statements during interviews with detectives in London. Prosecutor James Updike’s cross-examination dug into this inconsistency, and by citing passages from her letters, he was able to damage her credibility, arguing that her original statements were truthful and that this new gloss was an attempt to lessen her culpability. Ultimately, Elizabeth was given two consecutive 45-year prison sentences for her role in the murder of her parents.
Jens fought extradition, leading to a determination by the European Court of Human Rights, in 1989, that the potentially lengthy process of awaiting execution in the United States, were Jens to be convicted and sentenced to death, would violate Article III of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits inhumane and degrading treatment. Jens was extradited to Virginia only after the state agreed that it would not seek the death penalty.
Jens stood trial in 1990, and to everyone’s surprise he pleaded not guilty. Hadn’t he already confessed? Yes, he said, but only because he had been trying to save Elizabeth from the death penalty by taking the blame himself—hoping that his status as a diplomat’s son would yield a relatively brief sentence as a youth offender in Germany. It was Elizabeth who had committed the murders, he now maintained. He had stayed behind in the hotel, thinking he was providing her with an alibi while she delivered a shipment of drugs—a long story involving a debt she supposedly owed to some dealers. Only later, he said, did he learn that she had killed her parents.
In Jens’s telling, he was noble but naive, willing to risk prison time to save Elizabeth’s life. Could he really have been so in love that he’d help cover up a murder, lie to the police, flee the country, and then confess in her stead? His story was supported by the diagnoses of two psychiatrists who’d examined both Jens and Elizabeth while the pair were in custody in London. Elizabeth was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder; Jens was diagnosed with what his psychiatrists called folie à deux, now commonly known as shared psychosis, a rare disorder in which delusional beliefs are transferred from one person to another in a close relationship. And Elizabeth was the older and more sophisticated of the two.
Updike, the prosecutor, made a case against Jens based on many pieces of evidence: the excess rental-car mileage; those diary entries and especially the letters, which revealed a deep hatred of the Haysoms, fantasies about their deaths, and hopes for an inheritance; Elizabeth’s testimony against Jens; and, of course, Jens’s multiple confessions.
And Updike had something else. Although DNA analysis was not yet in use at the time, technicians had collected dozens of samples from bloodstains at the crime scene. Serology tests revealed that many of the samples tested as type A, a number of them tested as type AB, and two tested as type O. Derek Haysom had type A blood, and Nancy Haysom had type AB blood. Was it possible that the killer had been injured in the attack and left behind some of his or her own type O blood? The only suspect with type O blood was Jens Söring.
The defense countered that 45 percent of the population has type O blood, but neither that nor the folie à deux defense was enough to sway the jury. After only four hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Jens of two counts of first-degree murder. He was given two consecutive life sentences.
Left: Elizabeth Haysom, 1987.
Right: Jens Söring, 1990. (Dan Doughtie / AP; Sundance Selects)
Jens appealed his conviction multiple times between 1990 and 1998, and the state courts ruled against him every time. Jens then appealed in a federal court, claiming that he had received ineffective assistance of counsel and that crucial evidence had not been shared with him during his trial. In 2000, the federal court also ruled against him. Eventually Jens appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear his case.
With that, his routes to freedom were closed, save for a pardon or parole, both of which were unlikely. But alongside his legal efforts, Jens had also been making literary ones. In 1995, with the help of a friend on the outside, he self-published an ebook called Mortal Thoughts, laying out his version of events. In his telling, Elizabeth comes across as manipulative, sexually mature, and caught in the grip of drugs; he, by contrast, was a young and sober virgin, helpless against her charms. Over the next few years, he wrote dozens of articles and several more books, including volumes on prison reform and Christian meditation, gaining him a handful of supporters, including a Catholic bishop. He slowly expanded what he called his “circle of friends,” finding advocates in the U.S. and in Germany. Some of them were critics of the U.S. penal system; they saw Jens as a model prisoner who had clearly reformed, even if he might be guilty. Others believed his story—that he had provided an alibi for the killer, yes, but that he was no killer himself.
His big break came in 2007, when a German journalist, Karin Steinberger, wrote an article for the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung called “Forgotten Behind Bars,” portraying Jens as a victim of flawed and brutal American justice, and endorsing his claim that he had confessed only to protect Elizabeth. Jens’s circle of friends began to expand rapidly. Supporters organized a document archive, maintained a website, managed social-media profiles, and sent information to journalists to lay out their case. They noted, for instance, that the presence of type O blood was hardly conclusive, and they pointed to certain mistakes in Jens’s confessions. He’d gotten Nancy Haysom’s outfit wrong, for instance, and incorrectly described the position of the bodies. This could be seen as consistent with his claim that he had not been at the scene himself but was only repeating what Elizabeth had told him afterward.
The strongest argument that emerged in Jens’s favor appeared to come from DNA evidence. This was new, and it was ultimately what drew me into his corner. The DNA evidence arrived in two stages. The first came in 2009, when tests were conducted on 42 evidence swabs that had been collected at the crime scene in 1985. After more than two decades, many had degraded so badly that they yielded no information, but a significant number provided usable results. And none of those samples produced DNA that was consistent with Jens’s. That didn’t prove him innocent, but it gave heart to his supporters. In 2010, the outgoing Virginia governor, during his last days in office, agreed to transfer Jens to Germany, but the action was rescinded by his successor.
[From the June 2016 issue: The false promise of DNA testing]
In 2012, the president of the European Parliament advocated for Jens to be transferred to a prison back home. That was followed by a request for extradition from more than 100 members of the Bundestag. Then, in 2016, came the documentary Killing for Love, the work of the journalist Karin Steinberger and the filmmaker Marcus Vetter. It was nominated for a major documentary prize in Germany and picked up by Sundance. The following year, Christian Wulff, a former president of Germany, petitioned the Virginia parole board to transfer Jens to his native country. Angela Merkel, then the German chancellor, reportedly lobbied President Barack Obama on Jens’s behalf.
The Commonwealth of Virginia was unmoved, and Jens was repeatedly denied parole. But in 2016, Jens’s postconviction attorney, Steven Rosenfield, had an insight that pushed the DNA analysis to a second stage. The insight involved looking at the 2009 DNA test and the 1985 serology test side by side. The two blood swabs that had tested as type O in 1985 had both produced male DNA inconsistent with Jens’s. Two other swabs had tested as type AB—and were assumed to have come from Nancy Haysom—but analysis showed the presence of male DNA, and it was also inconsistent with Jens’s. Based on these facts, Rosenfield and two experts—Thomas McClintock, a forensic scientist at Liberty University, in Lynchburg, and Moses Schanfield, a forensic scientist at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C.—maintained that Jens could not have been the source of the type O blood (because the DNA from the samples was inconsistent with his) and that Nancy Haysom could not have been the source of the type AB blood (because the DNA from the samples was male). Rosenfield made the logical inference that the attack had been carried out by two unknown male suspects—one with type O blood and one with type AB blood. Presumably, both had suffered some sort of injury in the attack, enough to leave blood residue.
It was a compelling theory, and soon a host of other high-profile advocates came to Jens’s defense, including the novelist John Grisham, the actor Martin Sheen, and my friend Jason Flom, a founding board member of the Innocence Project. Even Chuck Reid, the Bedford County detective, expressed doubts about Jens’s conviction. Rosenfield filed a petition for an immediate and absolute pardon. The petition was denied.
It was around this time, in early 2019, that I first became aware of Jens Söring. In affiliation with SundanceTV, I had begun to host a podcast called The Truth About True Crime, which I co-produced and co-wrote with my husband, Christopher Robinson. Each season corresponded with a documentary on the Sundance channel, and for Season 3 we were asked to produce a series that tied in with Killing for Love, the German documentary about the Haysom murders. I had told my partners at Sundance that I would host the podcast only if I could form my own opinion about the various cases we covered, even if it contradicted the viewpoint of the associated documentaries. Sundance was fine with that. I went into the Haysom case with no preconceptions.
In preparing my podcast, I watched Steinberger and Vetter’s documentary. I also read Jens’s 2017 book, A Far, Far Better Thing. I grew sympathetic toward Jens, but the opinions of McClintock and Schanfield were what solidified my belief in his innocence. Their forensic credentials were solid, and both had written letters in support of Jens. I spoke with McClintock for the podcast. He was convinced that the type O blood couldn’t have come from Jens and that the DNA revealed the presence of two unknown men. Jens, he believed, was likely innocent. At the very least, if the DNA evidence had been available at his original trial, Jens almost certainly would not have been convicted.
For the podcast, I went on to speak with Andy Griffiths, a former detective from Sussex, England, and an expert on police interrogations. In a 2016 report written for Jens’s team, Griffiths had pointed out that Jens had been questioned without an attorney present, and that his statements to the police tracked a pattern in false confessions by young suspects: They often take the blame to protect others. While some saw Jens’s detailed knowledge of the crime scene as evidence of his guilt, Griffiths focused on inconsistencies that he believed the detectives should have pursued further. As Griffiths saw it, Jens, in his police interviews, was either looking for clues from the detectives as to what to say “or he has derived his crime-scene information from a third party.” He speculated that the “third party in this case would obviously be Elizabeth.”
The police had also dismissed a lead about two local “drifters,” as they were described, named William Shifflett and Robert Albright, who were later arrested for a separate murder that occurred in a neighboring county around the same time as the Haysom killings. Could they be the two unknown males suggested by Rosenfield and his team?
In my own mind, some of the most convincing evidence came in the form of Jens himself—that is, from the kind of person he seemed to be. I interviewed him many times in the course of producing the podcast, each tinny phone call limited to 20 minutes until the female voice of the prison phone system (“You have one minute remaining”) signaled the end of our time. Jens jokingly referred to that voice as “my girlfriend,” a rather dark bit of humor, given that the only real girlfriend he’d ever had was Elizabeth. Jens was educated and witty, like a professor you’d meet at a dinner party. He was also desperate, grasping for any hope of escape. I acutely understood how I, with my particular and very public history, offered him hope by way of example.
In the end, Chris and I produced an eight-part podcast for Sundance about the case. We even butted heads with the network when we refused to play by the typical rules of the whodunit genre—that is, holding back the reveal—and insisted on framing this story as a wrongful conviction from the very first beat.
Freedom finally came for Jens, but not the way he thought it would. In November 2019, I was in the baking aisle of a grocery store when my phone rang and a recorded voice announced a prepaid call from an inmate in the Virginia Department of Corrections. The first words Jens uttered had a muted jubilance I’d never heard from him before. “This is the last time I’ll ever call you from a prison phone,” he said.
Jens had not been pardoned. He had been granted parole. Apparently, political pressure had finally worked. Elizabeth had been granted parole too: The authorities could not release a convicted double murderer while refusing to release someone who had pleaded guilty to accessory charges. The board’s official reasoning was based on the youth of the pair at the time of the offense, their “institutional adjustment” while behind bars, and the amount of time served. Both were to be permanently expelled from the country. Elizabeth, then 55, was deported to Canada, where she held citizenship. Jens, then 53, was deported to Germany. In legal terms, he was still a convicted double murderer. But he was free.
Chris and I were eager to meet Jens in person. When I first arrived home from Italy, after four years in prison, what I’d needed, more than words or letters or welcome-home gifts, was hugs from my family and friends, who had been flattened into photographs and distant voices. I wanted to give Jens the longest hug. The pandemic, unfortunately, crushed any immediate hope of traveling to Germany.
Jens and I spoke often on the phone, and I became something of a mentor. It was a strange mentorship, given that he was so much older than me and had spent many more years in prison. But for the past decade, I’d been struggling to rebuild my life in freedom, and had had to do so under the eye of the media, a path on which Jens was just starting out. I gave him advice on interview requests, on therapy, on public speaking, on dating, on self-care, on taking his time. My own instinct had been to rush back into my life to make up for all the years I’d missed. That led me to trust the wrong people at times, and at other times to avoid seeking help. I didn’t want Jens to make the same mistakes.
[Read: Amanda Knox and the 21st-century witch hunt]
Jens was particularly concerned about a man named Andrew Hammel, whom he described as a persistent troll. He’s trying to destroy my life, Jens told me. He keeps writing article after article saying I’m guilty. I’d experienced attacks like these. To this day, there is a devoted community of Amanda Knox “guilters” who run websites arguing that I’m a murderer. In the past decade and a half, I’ve been subjected to sensational treatment in the press in all its variety: in the tabloids, in books, in documentaries, in made-for-TV movies. Not long ago, I wrote an article for this magazine, “Who Owns Amanda Knox?,” reflecting on how the film Stillwater—a loose interpretation of my own story, made without my consent—reinforced an image of me as guilty. The stigma of a murder conviction never goes away, even after you’ve been exonerated. I told Jens to ignore Hammel; the people who mattered were those who believed in his innocence. I told him to enjoy his freedom and not be consumed by the battle to prove every last skeptic wrong. I’d had to accept this myself.
In November 2021, as the pandemic abated, Chris and I flew to Hamburg with our four-month-old daughter to meet Jens and do a follow-up interview with him for our new podcast, Labyrinths, which told stories of people who’d felt lost or trapped and how they’d found their way again. It was an emotional few days. We strolled together through Hamburg, and Jens showed us his first-ever apartment and the decor he had carefully chosen; after three decades in the ugliness of prison, he’d embraced the chance to make his own space beautiful. He reflected on the years and opportunities he’d lost, and teared up while holding my infant daughter in his arms.
While in Germany, I also sat for an interview with Charlotte Theile, a German reporter, to talk about my case. She was familiar with Labyrinths, and through correspondence, I’d grown to trust her acumen and thoroughness. A few months later, she reached out and said that she had listened to the new Labyrinths episode we’d put out, “The Ultimate Putz,” in which Jens reflected on how unwise he had been to try to take the blame for Elizabeth’s actions. Theile had then gone back and listened to the full season about Jens that we’d made for the Truth About True Crime podcast, which she said she’d enjoyed.
But, she went on, she had then decided to listen to a new German podcast, Das System Söring (released in English as The Soering System in late 2023). The podcast, produced by Alice Brauner and Johanna Behre, featured interviews with Andrew Hammel, the man Jens had warned me about, and with Terry Wright, the British detective who’d taken Jens’s confessions in London. The “system” of the title referred to the way Jens had cultivated a perception of innocence and a network of supporters. Theile told me that she had approached the podcast with skepticism but ultimately had come away believing that Jens was very likely guilty.
She urged me to read the Wright Report, a 454-page document compiled by Wright and officially titled A True Report on the Facts of the Investigation of the Murders of Derek and Nancy Haysom. It had been made available in January 2020, after my original podcast devoted to Jens’s case came out, on the website of the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, where it appeared alongside an article by Hammel. This was the first I’d heard about it.
“I know that Jens Söring is a friend of yours,” Theile wrote. “But for me it just doesn’t feel right that you linked your case so closely to Jens Söring. He is not a version of you that got to spend more time in prison. His case is completely different from yours. He lived in London as a criminal, wearing fake beards and stealing from banks”—this last being a reference to the check-fraud scheme that had ultimately led to his arrest. “He had lots of criminal energy. And from what I can see, he is still trying to manipulate people.”
I did not dig into the Wright Report immediately. I was raising a child and working on other projects. Jens was already paroled and living as a free man in Germany. Looking further into his case would have meant less time advocating for potentially innocent people still in prison. In the meantime, Jens was telling me to avoid Hammel at all costs. Beware, he may try to reach out to you. Don’t respond. Hammel, he said, was an obsessive troll, a crackpot conspiracy theorist. I had grown to trust Jens, so I took his word for it.
But eventually, I did confront the Wright Report, prepared to encounter what I was certain would be half-truths and mischaracterizations. That isn’t what I found.
When Terry Wright learned, in 2016, that none of Jens’s DNA had been found at the crime scene, and that the DNA that had been recovered seemed to indicate the presence of two unknown males, he was curious about the findings and open to revising his opinion. He began reviewing the 30-year-old case, thinking that if the evidence really did support Jens’s innocence, he would write a letter to the governor of Virginia, urging him to issue a pardon. But what Wright found only further convinced him of Jens’s guilt. His report goes into every element of the case, with a particular focus on Jens’s confessions as well as on the DNA.
Wright argued that the DNA results were not exonerating after all. Specifically, they did not indicate the presence of two unknown males, which Jens’s defenders had come to accept as a basic premise. Wright made three fundamental points.
First, the evidence samples in the Haysom case were not vials of blood, like you’d find in a hospital lab. They were cotton swabs that had been rubbed on bloodstained surfaces, and the swabs would have picked up other material, such as skin cells, saliva, and sweat. The testing done on these swabs in 2009 could not indicate where the DNA had come from, only the fact of its presence. The DNA from the blood may have been too degraded to capture.
Second, although the DNA from the swabs was degraded and partial, the results that were usable appeared to be consistent with one another. Which meant that although the various swabs held different blood types, the DNA on them appeared to come from a single male.
Third, the consistent male-DNA profile was highly likely to belong to Derek Haysom. A formal DNA sample had never been collected from Haysom—this was 1985—but that conclusion made sense. The killings had taken place in his house, and his skin cells, saliva, sweat, and other nonblood DNA would have been everywhere, and picked up by the swabs wherever they were rubbed.
If Wright’s argument was correct—that the DNA on the swabs hadn’t necessarily come from the blood on the swabs—it meant that the type O blood could still very well have come from Jens. Crucially, it also meant that there was no evidence to support the idea that two unknown males had been present at the crime scene.
I was not equipped to assess whether Wright’s theory was plausible, and even if it was, it didn’t prove that Jens was guilty. But the very idea of an alternate interpretation of the DNA shook my confidence.
I should have known better than to give the original interpretation such weight, because of the lessons from my own case. Once the prosecution claimed that it had DNA proof of my guilt—my DNA on the handle of a knife, Meredith’s DNA on the blade—every piece of exonerating evidence was cast aside by the jury and the media as irrelevant: DNA doesn’t lie. Well, it did when it came to the accusations against me. Independent experts eventually determined that the supposed DNA evidence was the result of lab contamination. Without it, the evidence in my favor was overwhelming.
Yet I had made a similar mistake in Jens’s case, albeit in reverse. Once I’d learned that the DNA excluded Jens as a source of the type O blood—and then, more important, that forensic evidence pointed to a pair of unknown men as the killers—I’d found reasons to discount every piece of evidence pointing to his guilt. I’ve long been aware of how cognitive bias affects one’s thinking. We all bring preconceptions to the information we encounter. That’s why it’s best if a fingerprint analyst isn’t told that a suspect has confessed, and why a medical examiner should not be made aware of witness testimony or DNA evidence. I’ve advocated for practices such as these, but I failed to heed similar precautions. The supposed DNA exoneration of Jens Söring, which had been my starting point, became my sole point of reference. If the DNA evidence proved his innocence, then logic dictated that everything else, no matter how circumstantially damning, had to have some rational explanation. But now, reading the Wright Report—and with DNA findings removed from consideration—I was seeing all of that evidence with fresh eyes.
From the very first moment, there were signs pointing to Jens, not Elizabeth, as the actual killer. When the detectives had initially asked Elizabeth and Jens for fingerprints, footprints, and blood samples, Elizabeth had complied. Jens had stalled, offering a rambling excuse about his diplomatic status, and how being involved in a homicide investigation could compromise his scholarship and lead to deportation. Then, a few days later, after wiping all the fingerprints from his car and apartment and emptying his bank account, he’d fled the country.
The confessions were particularly troubling. Though it was true that Jens had not had an attorney present—as Andy Griffiths noted—he had repeatedly been given British and American legal warnings, and he’d explicitly waived his right to an attorney both verbally and in written statements. (When Jens claimed on appeal that he’d been denied access to a lawyer, the court determined that there was “clear and convincing evidence” to the contrary.) Jens had confessed to the murders many times and on multiple days, often speaking to the detectives at his own request. He had done so in front of British detectives, American investigators, and a German prosecutor. The story he told was highly specific. He explained how Derek and Nancy had let him into their home and offered him a drink; how he’d confronted them about their disapproval of his relationship with Elizabeth; and how he’d snapped and killed them, even demonstrating how he’d come up behind Derek to slit his throat. He described how he’d fled the scene and hit a dog with the car as he sped away; how he’d thrown away his bloody clothes; how he’d returned to the Washington, D.C., hotel. He even told the detectives that hotel security-camera footage should be able to confirm this last point. (As it happened, the hotel cameras provided only live feeds and did not save a backup record.) Jens knew who had been sitting where at the dinner table, what the Haysoms had been eating and drinking, and how they’d been killed. He even showed the detectives a scar on his hand from a wound he said he’d suffered during the attack.
I felt particularly sick recalling that detail. At his trial, prosecutors had produced eyewitness testimony that Jens wore a bandage on one hand at the Haysoms’ funeral, corroborating that bit of his confession. In his defense, Jens had unspooled a counter-narrative—that he’d injured his hand in a car accident. Believing that the DNA findings exonerated Jens, I took this explanation as fact. In other ways, too, I had been predisposed to dismiss potential evidence of Jens’s guilt, especially his confessions. A false confession had helped seal my own guilty verdict, and a part of me had felt vindicated to find further evidence that confessions were not a gold standard. But without the exculpatory DNA, I began to see how many reasons there were to believe that Jens’s confessions were genuine.
Jens did not recant his confession immediately, the way I had recanted my false confession hours after I was released from the interrogation room. He kept to his story for four years, until 1990, when his trial was set to begin. Explaining away the confessions had been a huge challenge for his defense. In pretrial hearings, Jens accused Detective Beever, in London, of threatening to harm Elizabeth if he didn’t confess. That story wasn’t supported by evidence, so Jens pivoted, finally landing on the story he has kept to ever since: that he lied to save Elizabeth from the death penalty. In light of all this, the minor errors he’d made—Nancy Haysom’s outfit (he got the right color but the wrong type of garment), the position of the bodies (he got the right rooms and positions but the wrong orientations)—were likely attributable to simple memory lapses in recalling the event more than a year later.
The love letters and diary entries highlighted in the Wright Report were also damning. I am by nature wary of such evidence. My own accusers pointed to a short story I’d written in college as proof that I harbored rape fantasies. But the letters and diary entries weren’t creative-writing assignments. In letters written before the murders, Jens had written comments such as “My God, I’ve got the dinner scene planned out.” And this: “I can see myself depriving people of their property quite easily—your dad, for instance. Even more easily can I see myself depriving many souls (if they exist) of their physical bodies (which might not exist, either) in the course of fulfilling my many, many excessively bizarre sexual fantasies.” Jens speculated that he and Elizabeth could use a spate of local burglaries for cover: “That there have been many burglaries in the area opens the possibility for another one with the same general circumstances, only this time the unfortunate owners …”
I had not seen these letters and diary entries until reading the Wright Report. Believing that the DNA evidence exonerated Jens, I’d found no reason to dig through circumstantial evidence like this. Now I couldn’t look away.
Perhaps most frightening of all was this passage: “I’ve felt this, I’m feeling it now inside me, this need to plant one’s foot in somebody’s face, to always crush … I have not explored the side of me that wishes to crush to any real extent—I have yet to kill, possibly the ultimate act of crushing.”
As I read those words, Jens’s face flashed in my mind, his gentle smile, his eyes looking down at my infant daughter in his arms.
My inquiries led me next to Jens’s biggest critic, Andrew Hammel. I had at first assumed that Hammel must be part of the niche online movement of “innocence fraud” activists. I had a personal window into this community, a loose cluster of podcasters and YouTubers who seem to believe that Innocence Project lawyers and advocates are working to free killers because they’re hopelessly deluded. “You, of all people, should be distrustful of reporters,” Jens had written in our final email exchange. “And you, of all people, should be distrustful of reports and documents produced by people who are strongly motivated to prove a defendant’s guilt.”
But when I actually read Hammel’s writing, including his book Martyr or Murderer: Jens Soering, the Media, and the Truth, he didn’t come across as the troll I was expecting. He was more of a provocateur. Of course, that didn’t mean his arguments were correct. But he seemed to be a logical thinker and a thorough researcher who engaged with evidence in good faith. I asked if I could interview him for Labyrinths.
Jens Söring in Germany after his parole and extradition, 2019 (Daniel Roland / Getty)
Hammel, I learned, was a lawyer who had done death-penalty defense work for a decade before turning to academia and journalism. He was intimately aware of the efforts of the Innocence Project. He told me that, in his view, debunking fraudulent innocence claims was essential to the work of exonerating people who really were innocent: It provided a record of hard-edged credibility.
Hammel made a compelling case for Jens’s guilt, his arguments mostly tracking those in the Wright Report. He also provided important context for the DNA testing. The analysis done in 2009 had been ordered by Virginia as part of a review of thousands of cases. It had not been requested by Jens or his defense counsel. In fact, Jens had refused to file the petition necessary to do more DNA testing in his case. As Hammel saw it, that is what you would expect from someone who worries that DNA testing would be incriminating rather than exonerating.
Hammel also told me about the work of two journalists in Charlottesville, Courteney Stuart and Rachel Ryan. They had made a podcast, released after mine, called Small Town, Big Crime. Through records requests, they had obtained DNA profiles from the supposed alternate suspects in the Haysom murders, Shifflett and Albright. They had then asked Jens’s own expert, Tom McClintock, to compare their DNA to the DNA recovered from the Haysom scene. He did, and found the samples to be inconsistent. That ruled out Shifflett and Albright. “I was bummed out, I’m telling you,” McClintock acknowledged on the Small Town, Big Crime podcast. Those specific findings about Shifflett and Albright lent weight to Terry Wright’s broader evaluation of the DNA evidence—that it failed to substantiate any two-unknown-males theory.
Hammel gave me one more lead, and it involved someone Jens had never mentioned: Dan E. Krane, a forensic scientist and biology professor at Wright State University, in Ohio. Krane was a DNA expert who in 2018 had participated in a special segment about Jens’s case on 20/20—a segment that leaned in favor of Jens. He had confirmed on the program that none of Jens’s DNA had been found at the scene, a simple statement of fact. But Krane’s expert views, Hammel told me, aligned with those of Terry Wright on one key point. I decided I needed to speak with Krane.
In advance of our conversation, conducted on Zoom, Krane forwarded to me a report he had written in 2017 that began by laying out his credentials. He had published more than 50 scholarly papers on subjects such as the use of DNA typing in forensic science. He had testified in more than 100 criminal proceedings that involved forensic DNA. He was the author of a widely used textbook on bioinformatics.
“Saliva is a remarkably good source of DNA,” Krane told me. “A milliliter of saliva will have 10 times as much DNA in it as a milliliter of blood. We’re transferring saliva DNA all over the place all the time. If Derek Haysom had sneezed at some point in the past year, before the crime occurred, I’d frankly be surprised if you didn’t find his DNA.” Krane noted that there is no possible test to determine whether the swabs in the Haysom case had picked up not only blood but other sources of DNA. Odds are, he said, that they would have. He went on: “Just because a sample tested positive for blood and you got DNA from that sample, that doesn’t mean that the DNA came from the blood that was in the sample.” Krane believed, as Wright had surmised, that the DNA recovered from the old crime-scene samples was likely Derek Haysom’s.
He gave no credence to the theory advanced by Jens and his experts—linking the DNA to the blood itself and pointing a finger at two unknown male contributors. To begin with, Krane didn’t have confidence in the original serology testing; there were discrepancies in some of the notes. But focus just on the DNA—on the fact that the parts that could be compared from the various recovered samples all matched up. The two-unknown-males theory, Krane said, requires a combination of virtually impossible events: Unknown male No. 1 (the supposed source of the type O blood) would have to have DNA consistent with that of unknown male No. 2 (the supposed source of the type AB blood), and both of their DNA profiles would also have to be consistent with that of Derek Haysom (the source of the type A blood). “That these three people would have the same combination of alleles—that’s just staggeringly unlikely,” Krane told me.
Could Elizabeth have committed the murders while Jens waited at the hotel, unawares—the scenario Jens had spun? That raised its own set of questions. If that’s what happened, then where did the type O blood come from? If it was from an accomplice, who was that person? And what possible reason could Elizabeth have to protect that person at her and Jens’s expense all these decades later?
Elizabeth. When I first started researching the Haysom case, I had identified with Elizabeth, up to a point. She had been cast by Jens and by the media as a manipulative seductress, as I had been portrayed. I recalled feeling disconcerted when I saw Elizabeth described that way in one of Jens’s books. She and Jens have not been in communication and have not seen each other since she testified at Jens’s trial—naming Jens as her parents’ killer and confessing that she had put him up to it. From prison, Elizabeth wrote a column for a local paper called “Glimpses From the Inside”—reflective, diary-like accounts about her own incarceration and life in general. I wanted to speak with Elizabeth, so I wrote her a letter in 2019. She responded from prison and seemed open to talking, but once I told her that I was also talking with Jens, she broke off communication. She has apparently been living in Canada since her release, and she appears to have changed her name. I have been unable to make contact. I wish I could speak with her now.
I had given Jens a large platform, and in advocating for his innocence, I had also advocated for Elizabeth’s guilt as the person who had wielded the knife. I had contributed to her vilification as a liar and as the actual killer. It was Elizabeth, after all, who pleaded guilty as an accessory to capital murder. She had begged forgiveness and expressed deep remorse. Her paternal half-siblings have forgiven her, according to a 2023 Netflix documentary about the case, Till Murder Do Us Part: Soering vs. Haysom. Reflecting on all of this, I realized that I owed Elizabeth an apology, and that I owed the families of Derek and Nancy Haysom, and my own audience, more transparency about how my thinking had evolved. In an episode of Labyrinths I released with Andrew Hammel in September 2023, I retracted my claims about Jens’s innocence and said frankly what I now believe: We may never know definitively whether Jens killed Derek and Nancy Haysom, but the evidence incriminating him is hard to rebut—his repeated official confessions; his own words, in letters and diaries; his bandaged hand at the funeral; Elizabeth’s testimony. Meanwhile, the exonerating evidence has evaporated.
Unsurprisingly, the release of my interview with Hammel caused strife among advocates who still support Jens. Some of them are unwilling to reexamine their beliefs about what the DNA evidence actually shows in this case. Some worry that I have damaged the innocence movement by giving critics a platform. And after 33 years in prison, hasn’t Jens been through enough? I do agree that paroling Jens and Elizabeth, now both close to 60, was the right decision: More than three decades in prison is serious punishment for a serious crime. But even if my friends in the innocence community never come around to my view of Jens and the Haysom murders, I hope that they will understand why I felt compelled to explain my position—and why innocence advocates need to be forthright when they believe that claims of innocence do not hold up.
My friendships with the wrongly convicted have been as important to me as my relationships with my own family. With Jens, my yearning for a connection had influenced my judgment. I am left with a disturbing question: Had Jens created a character he knew I couldn’t help but embrace? I fear I know the answer, but even now, I don’t want it to be true.
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