IN VIRGINIA ELIZABETH WAS GIVING THE IMPRESSION OF cooperating to the utmost. In England Jens had taken a contrary stance; he was fighting extradition as energetically as he and his battery of lawyers could.
At that time Elizabeth’s legal team consisted of two court-appointed lawyers. Jens’s team, however, included one court-appointed lawyer in London, one or more additional London lawyers hired by his father, and a team of German lawyers acting behind the scenes as consultants. His father also had hired a lawyer in Detroit, a well-known prosecutorturned-defender who eventually would add two Virginia lawyers to the payroll as well. No doubt about it, it was a formidable array of legal talent.
Jens had good reason to want to fight extradition. If he were returned to Virginia, he would be tried for capital murder. If convicted, he could be sentenced to death by electrocution. Alternatively, he could be extradited to Germany, which has no death penalty. As a very long shot he hoped he could remain in the United Kingdom. His main interest, though, was going back to Germany. Even though Jens had not lived there since he was eleven, and then for only three years, he still maintained his German citizenship and was demanding that his case be considered under German law, which guaranteed every German citizen the right to be tried by a German court no matter where the crime was committed. Since he was only eighteen at the time of the murders, he would, if tried in Germany, be recognized as a juvenile, and the penalty upon conviction would be less severe: a maximum of fifteen years in prison. In Virginia, he would be tried as an adult. Furthermore, in Germany he could use a psychiatric defense, a maneuver that would be denied him in
Virginia unless he came up with something other than diminished capacity.
In August 1986, two months after Jens confessed to Beever, Wright, and Gardner, the United States formally asked for his return to stand trial in Virginia. But that was only the beginning. One obstacle after another arose. The first revolved around Updike’s insistence that Jens be tried on a capital murder charge and that the death penalty be , sought. The British chapter of Amnesty International, a well-known civil rights group widely recognized for its opposition to the death penalty, said it would fight the extradition as long as Jens’s possible execution was a factor. As a possible solution to the dilemma, the British government asked the United States for assurances that Jens would not face the possibility of being executed even if he were to be convicted. Such assurances could come only from Updike, who refused to give in. Updike wanted the death penalty for Jens Soering.
This impasse was doubly interesting because there were issues simmering in the background that went far beyond Jens’s case. While the British government also had qualms about the death penalty, it was at the same time eager to extradite Jens. That was not because of Jens, and it had nothing to do with the death penalty. The Home Office wanted him sent back across the Atlantic because that gave the British the best chance of securing an IRA terrorist who was being held in a U.S. jail. It was a case of tit for tat that both parties understood.
MONTHS AFTER THE DEATH PENALTY DEBATE STARTED, Updike grudgingly made a minor concession. He reluctantly agreed that if he could bring Jens back and try him for capital murder, he would tell the judge at the time of sentencing—if Jens were convicted on that charge and the jury sentenced him to die—that it was the British wish “that the death penalty should not be imposed or carried out.”
That was good enough to break the impasse; it represented a face-saving alternative all around. It satisfied the
British because it let them make their point. It satisfied Updike because it did not require any promises on his part; he could still fight for the death penalty, and the judge would be under no obligation to go along with the British request. But while that proposal was being studied, Jens intensified his efforts to be sent to Germany.
By then, though, several dramas were being played out. While the Home Office and U.S. officials were trying to work out a compromise and Jens was fighting to go to Germany, there was another battle being fought in a London appeals court. In June 1987, while Elizabeth was sitting in the Bedford County Jail waiting for her proceedings to start, Jens, who had completed his one-year sentence for check fraud, went into the Bow Street Magistrate’s Court to determine if there were grounds for the British to continue holding him pending a decision on the U.S. extradition request. The court took one look at the evidence against him and ordered his incarceration continued. Jens’s lawyers appealed that decision on grounds that the court did not take Jens’s psychiatric condition into consideration. It was a smokescreen, and a British appeals court, seeing through it, quickly rejected the claim. That, however, did not mean the issue was settled. Not by a long shot.
IT WAS ONE OF THOSE COINCIDENCES THAT A PERSON IS not likely to forget. Not ever. The way Lynchburg attorney Hugh Jones recalled it, he was sitting in a Sunday school class several years ago and the group was discussing evil, whether it existed and whether there were truly evil people in the world. Since this was in Lynchburg and the brutal murders of Derek and Nancy Haysom were on everyone’s mind—and since everyone present had heard the rumors about the murders being cult-connected-the talk had focused on speculation about the killer. Had the Haysoms been murdered by an “evil” person? Somehow, Jones remembered, probably because there were several lawyers in the group, the talk got around to attorneys and how they were bound by their oaths to work with all kinds of people, evil or not. In the middle of the debate, a thought flashed through Jones’ mind: Wouldn’t it be something if I got that case?
He did.
A towering man weighing more than two hundred pounds, Jones came south in the early 1960s because he wanted “to try something different.” He enrolled at the Virginia Military Institute and signed up for football. He played both offensive and defensive tackle for the Keydets for four years. After he graduated, he went to law school at Washington & Lee and then enlisted in the Army, where he worked exclusively in criminal law. When he got out in 1974, after having spent four years of his five-year tour in Germany, he went back to Virginia and opened a general practice law firm in Lynchburg. As a general practitioner, he did a lot of real estate law, handled bankruptcy cases, and took enough criminal work to keep his hand in. Unlike
a lot of lawyers Jones enjoyed criminal cases. They weren’t lucrative, but they helped make life interesting.
When Elizabeth asked Judge Sweeney for court-appointed counsel, he picked up the list of available lawyers and the name Jones jumped out at him. But since Sweeney was a cautious man and he did not want to take even the smallest chance that the case could be bounced back on appeal, he decided to name a second lawyer as well. That was not unusual for him; in serious cases he almost always named two defense lawyers. As someone to pair up with Jones, he picked R. Andrew “Drew” Davis, a trim and athletic-looking thirty-one-year-old, who fancied a neatly clipped mustache and short dark hair without sideburns. Davis’s father was a circuit court judge in Franklin County, which adjoined Bedford on the southwest, so he had grown up with the law. A graduate of the University of Richmond law school, Davis worked for three years as prosecutor Jim Updike’s assistant before going into private practice. He left the commonwealth attorney’s office six months before the Haysoms were murdered.
WHEN HE AND DAVIS VISITED ELIZABETH FOR THE FIRST time in late May 1987, Jones was surprised by how emaciated she looked, how tense and scared she seemed. But her physical appearance had nothing to do with her mental state. From the beginning she let them know that she had made up her mind. Still bitter about the run-around she had received from her lawyer in London, who she felt was kowtowing to Jens and had little interest in her, she told Jones and Davis from the first that she wanted to decide her own fate. “I want to plead guilty” were practically the first words out of her mouth.
Jones and Davis urged her not to make a snap decision. “At least let us investigate other possibilities,” Jones urged. But no matter how hard they tried to talk her out of it, she refused to budge.
Whether she could be released on bond was never an issue; no matter how small an amount would have been set by
the court, Elizabeth would not have been able to raise it. She was penniless and unable to turn to her well-heeled siblings for help, who had ceased communicating with her. So she stayed in the jail, in a cell by herself, and spent her spare time poring over documents relating to her defense, reading books brought in by a few friends, and, as usual, writing letter after letter.
Over the next two and a half months Jones and Davis met dozens of times with Elizabeth in a tiny eight-foot-square consultation room at the Bedford County Jail. For long into the night, fueled by hot coffee and stale sandwiches, they went over every aspect of the case time and again. Why was she inconsistent with investigators? they wanted to know. Why did she contradict herself so often? What had she said to Jens? What had he said to her? What did they do? Whom did they know?
No matter what avenues they explored, they kept coming back to a guilty plea. It was what Elizabeth wanted. Since she was the client and since she would have to suffer the consequences, the lawyers acquiesced. The best they apparently could do was get her to gain sympathy when she entered her plea.
Elizabeth was charged with two counts of first degree murder, with each charge carrying a potential life sentence. She was ready to plead guilty as charged, but Jones and Davis convinced her to consider admitting instead to being an accessory before the fact. The punishment was the same, but there was a subtle difference. If Updike accepted that plea—which meant exactly what it said, accessory
before
the fact—he was in effect agreeing that Elizabeth was not at Loose Chippings when Nancy and Derek were murdered. This was an important point to the defense lawyers. They knew that members of a certain faction, including Elizabeth’s brother Howard and her mother’s friend Annie Massie, believed that she had been present when Derek and Nancy were killed.
Davis and Jones kept Elizabeth’s intentions secret. One reason for that was that the decision right up to the end
would be Elizabeth’s, and they could not speak for her. Until a defendant stood before a judge and said “guilty,” there was no way of being sure of what would happen. This was especially true with Elizabeth, who was capable of changing her mind in a flash or saying something completely unexpected if she thought it was to her advantage. A couple of days before the hearing at which Elizabeth was to plead, Davis and Jones hinted to Updike that they thought their client was going to plead guilty, but they stressed there was no guarantee. Updike, well aware of Elizabeth’s unpredictability, wasn’t depending on it. But when she appeared before Judge Sweeney on August 24, 1987, braced on one side by Jones and on the other by Davis, and pleaded guilty to two counts of being an accessory before the fact, Updike was not totally surprised. Just about everyone else was, though, including Judge Sweeney. When the soft-spoken jurist, a not unkindly looking, bony-faced man in his fifties with close-cropped gray hair, asked Updike if he would accept the pleas, he sounded amazed.
Unknown to the defense, Updike had long before rejected any plan to try to prove that Elizabeth had been at Loose Chippings on the night of the murders. As far as he was concerned, none of the evidence really substantiated such a claim, and in the end it made no difference anyway unless he could also prove that she had actually participated in the crime. He felt her presence or absence was irrelevant. When Sweeney asked him if he had any objection to the pleas, Updike replied that he did not since essentially a plea to a charge of accessory before the fact was the same as one to the original charge of first degree murder.
“So you’re saying it’s a different form of plea which carries the same punishment as the original offenses. Is that your position?” the judge asked Updike, pushing his heavy, dark-rimmed glasses back on his nose.
Updike agreed that it was.
After checking with Davis and Jones to make sure they interpreted the plea the same way, Sweeney turned to Elizabeth
and began questioning her to make sure she understood what she was doing.
“Has it been explained to you as to what the range of punishment under Virginia law is for these two offenses?”
“Yes, your Honor,” she answered softly.
“Do you realize that by pleading guilty as you have that you waive or give up the right to a jury trial?”
“Yes, your Honor.”
“Do you understand that a plea of guilty is a self-supplied conviction which for most purposes would deny or cut off a right of appeal?”
“Yes, your Honor.”
“All right,” Sweeney nodded. “And finally has it been explained to you that on a plea of guilty that I will be the one fixing your punishment?”
Elizabeth put her chin on her chest and mumbled that, yes, she understood.
Her plea did not end the proceeding. Even though she had admitted her guilt, Judge Sweeney still had to have some idea of the depth of her participation so he could determine her sentence. The way to do that was to let both sides present evidence just as though there were a trial. Witnesses would be called, arguments would be heard, and Elizabeth would take the stand to give her side of the story—and be cross-examined by Updike—just as if the conclusion were not preordained. The difference in this proceeding and a trial was that a jury would not determine her fate; she had waived that right. After all the evidence was presented, Judge Sweeney would pronounce the punishment.
BEFORE UPDIKE BEGAN HIS OPENING STATEMENT, OUTLINING the evidence he planned to present during the state’s part of the proceeding, there was one thing he wanted to clarify: that there had been no plea bargaining involved in Elizabeth’s decision to plead guilty. “There have been no negotiations on the part of me or my office with the defendant or her counsel,” he said for the record.
The state’s version of the murders was essentially the
same as the story that investigators had eventually wrung from Elizabeth with a few elaborations. Updike placed considerable emphasis on the viciousness of the murders, for example, and went into detail describing the wounds inflicted upon Derek and Nancy. Surprisingly, considering that the occult-connection theory eventually had been rejected by investigators, Updike thought it was important enough to give more than passing mention in his opening statement.
“I do not wish to sensationalize this, but on the other hand I do not wish to ignore it,” he said, directing his remarks at Judge Sweeney. “There is one photograph taken near Derek’s body which shows a vee mark of some sort with a figure drawn in it. The autopsy report reflects that there was an incision on the chin which was of a nature that could be categorized as a vee. There was a mousetrap, a rather commonplace kind of mousetrap, but it was rather odd at the time, that had a vee on it. There is a drawing which we will be introducing, and although I’m no art critic certainly, we think it can be categorized in bizarre fashion if not demonic, and the vee motif is throughout that. We’re not,” he emphasized, “arguing specifically the exact bearing of this on the murders themselves or stating whether or not that was just something left there for the purpose of leading police on. Again, as I stated, it should not be sensationalized or exaggerated or taken out of context, but based upon evidence we will be getting into, it should not be forgotten as well.”
There was one other thing he wanted to bring out that had not been touched upon by Elizabeth herself in her statements: her unusual behavior after the murders. When Annie Massie and her husband drove to Charlottesville to break the news to her, Elizabeth had reacted strangely. “Her response was one of being very quiet,” Updike said. “We do not think she displayed any tears or outward displays of emotion.”
In addition, he added, when she was interviewed by Gardner and Kirkland on the day after the memorial service,
her tone was almost light-hearted, and she laughed at several points in the discussion.
But what he really found unusual, he said, was Elizabeth’s insistence on cleaning up the blood at Loose Chippings even though other family members had agreed they would hire a commercial cleaning crew to take care of the gruesome task. Before the cleaners came in, however, Elizabeth went in and began the job.
“We have a witness who has been subpoenaed who would testify that Elizabeth was cleaning in the area of the fireplace, which the photographs show is the area where Mr. Haysom’s body was found, when she made some statement to the effect of, ‘Here are Pop’s brains,’ or something of that nature while she was wiping. She also saw one of the footprints that I have described there on the floor and upon removing her shoe, placed her foot in that impression to perform some type of comparison, I suppose. Dr. Howard Haysom would say that he considered that unusual and told her to stop it.”
The purpose of such testimony, he said, was to show that there was little if any remorse on Elizabeth’s part. “However,” he added, “we understand that she is indeed quite theatrical.”
He would prove, he promised, that Elizabeth had conspired with Jens to murder her parents and that as part of their plot, they had gone to Washington, D.C., the day before the killings. “Our evidence will establish that the purpose of them going there was that they had previously planned the murder of Derek Haysom and Nancy Haysom, that Miss Haysom was indeed an accessory before the fact in her planning, encouraging and entreating of Jens Soering to murder her parents, and that thereafter she assisted and abetted by providing an alibi.”
Elizabeth had rented the car, made reservations at the Washington hotel, and helped set up a series of incidents that made it appear that both she and Jens were in Washington while he, in fact, was in Boonsboro. After the murders she had tried to mislead police, but when she and Jens had
felt investigators were closing in, they fled the country and did not indicate they intended to return.
It was a dramatic presentation. When he finished, the courtroom was as quiet as an empty school. When Updike sat down, a low buzz started around the room. Sweeney rapped for silence with his gavel. “It’s a good time for a recess,” he said. “Let’s take ten minutes.”