Soering served 33 years in US jails for the murder of girlfriend Elizabeth Haysom's parents — a crime he claims he didn't commit
Freedom feels different to different people, but to Jens Soering it is the awkward ridges in a concrete pavement. Prison floors are incredibly smooth, he says, and anyone who has spent as long inside as he has — 33 years — forgets they need to lift their feet off the ground. It is just one of the things he has had to adjust to in the two years since he was released from the Virginia state prison system, where he was serving two life sentences.
He has felt rain drench his skin for the first time since he was a teenager — prisoners are ushered inside the moment drops begin to fall — and he has swapped soap for body wash, something he hadn't heard of in 1986, when he was last a free man. You actually can forget how to ride a bike, he tells me when we meet at a hotel in Hamburg. "I had forgotten that when you stop, you have to shift your weight slightly and stick your foot out. So I stopped and immediately fell over. It was very embarrassing," he laughs.
Soering, 55, wanted to use a riff on this for the title of his new book about his days of freedom, but his German publishers opted for Returned to Life. It is the story of a man who confessed to a crime he claims he didn't commit at the age of 18, and three decades later tried to build a life again on the outside. But it doesn't have quite the happy ending he'd hoped for; Soering has been freed but he has not been acquitted. "Legally I am a double murderer and that is hard to live with," he says.
The story begins in 1984 when Soering, the 17-year-old son of a mid-ranking German diplomat posted at a consulate in Atlanta, won a prestigious Jefferson scholarship to the University of Virginia. On his first night there he was introduced to a fellow scholar, Elizabeth Haysom. Both were outsiders in the Southern university town; Haysom, the daughter of a Canadian steel executive, had been educated at boarding schools in Switzerland and England, including Wycombe Abbey in Buckinghamshire. But the similarities ended there. Haysom, who was two years older and distantly related to the aristocratic Astor family on her mother's side, was worldly and wild. She had planned to go to Trinity College, Cambridge, but instead embarked on a drug-fuelled tour around Europe with her girlfriend, getting hooked on heroin along the way.
Her parents had brought her home and persuaded her to enrol at the University of Virginia. Soering, a bookish, sheltered teenager, was captivated by her and even more stunned a few months later when she told him she was in love with him. Their relationship had all the intensity of any undergraduate affair. They wrote explicit love letters, experimented with high-minded literary techniques and booted room-mates out of their dorm rooms in order to spend hours in bed. In reality Soering was out of his depth. "I was socially and emotionally underdeveloped and immature," he says. "I'd never had a girlfriend before and here was this beautiful, much desired older woman. I thought I'd won the lottery."
But there was a darker side. Haysom confided that she had been raped at school in Switzerland. She had a fractious relationship with her controlling parents, in particular her mother, whom Haysom has claimed sexually abused her. The honeymoon period came to an abrupt end on April 3, 1985, when Elizabeth's parents, Derek and Nancy Haysom, were found dead at their retirement home in Lynchburg, at the toe of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Derek had been stabbed 36 times and was nearly decapitated. The murders were so brutal that police initially suspected a gang must be to blame.
In the months that followed investigators turned their attention to Elizabeth. She told them she had been in Washington with Jens on the weekend of the murders — they had cinema ticket stubs and receipts from the hotel to prove it. However, the police noticed that the Chevrolet Chevette they had rented had clocked up close to 700 miles. The return trip to Washington was only about 250 miles, but the extra mileage could be explained by an additional trip — from Washington to the Haysoms' house and back. Elizabeth simply claimed they had got lost on the way to Washington.
Months later Elizabeth was questioned again. A bloody print from the scene appeared to have been made by a woman's tennis shoe. She agreed to provide foot and fingerprints, then Jens was called in. He gave the same account of their trip but initially refused to provide fingerprints, then said he would come back a few days later. Instead the couple fled. They travelled through Europe and into Thailand, hitchhiking and committing petty frauds to keep afloat. On April 30, 1986, they were finally caught in London, writing fraudulent cheques in a Marks & Spencer store.
The police found references to their "little nasty" in the travel diaries they had kept since they fled Virginia, and contacted the authorities there. What happened next set the course for the rest of Jens Soering's life. Over four days of interrogation in London he confessed to the killings — even demonstrating how he severed the main artery in each of the victims' necks. When Elizabeth Haysom was interrogated she corroborated the story, saying that Soering had carried out the crime at her behest. She waived extradition, returned to the US and pleaded guilty as an accessory to murder in 1987. She was sentenced to 90 years in prison.
Soering spent the next four years in the UK fighting extradition at the European Court of Human Rights, which made the precedent-setting decision that he could not be extradited while the Virginia authorities were seeking the death penalty. They agreed not to and Soering's trial in the US began in 1990.
By then Soering had changed his story. He now claimed that it was Elizabeth who had killed her parents. He said he had confessed in London because he believed he was saving his girlfriend from the death penalty. As the son of a diplomat, Soering says he thought he would be protected from prosecution in the US and would serve a far shorter sentence in Germany at a young offender institution. His inspiration was Sydney Carton, Dickens's hero in A Tale of Two Cities, whose love for Lucie Manette is so deep that he takes the place of her husband, Charles Darnay, on the guillotine.
"One of the things that really played a major role for me was wanting to play the hero, which is ego. It's pride. I wanted to be the one who saved my girlfriend's life," he claims. However, things didn't work out that way. "Normally I would have had diplomatic immunity. But there's a technicality in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which says that if you're stationed at the consulate general, only the diplomat has immunity and not his family," he says. "I didn't know that."
Haysom has always been consistent in saying Soering committed the killings. According to her it was Soering who drove the rental car to her parents' house. He had returned wrapped in a bloody sheet and told her he had killed them. But in Soering's new version of events it was Haysom who had left him in Washington, telling him she needed to deliver some drugs to her dealer, a fellow student, to settle a debt. She returned in the early hours of the morning, he claimed, and admitted to killing her parents while high on drugs.
The prosecution case rested on four things: a bloody sock print the prosecution said matched his foot size; a type O blood sample — his blood type, which was found on a door handle; his own confession; and Elizabeth's testimony. But there was no solid forensic evidence to place him at the scene.
It became a media spectacle — the second trial to be broadcast gavel to gavel on American television — but Soering never really believed the case against him would stick. The guilty verdict when it came "was a huge shock", he says. "That night I tried to kill myself, but I couldn't go through with it."
Knowing that everything that has happened to him was his own fault has been a blessing. "Many people did many bad things to me, but they could not have done those if I had just told the truth," he says. His goals ever since have been freedom and clearing his name — a cause that he says has allowed him to navigate the vast expanse of time behind bars.
Over the ensuing 30 years Soering has been in eight US institutions, including one of America's harshest "supermax" prisons. Today the puny youth from the newspaper cuttings is a middle-aged man, lean and muscular from daily prison workouts. He speaks with a Southern twang and when he drops his guard the profanities roll off his tongue. One of the most enjoyable aspects of freedom is food, he says; prisoners in Virginia are served "meat rock" — the tendons and connective tissue of a chicken — which helps them hit the budget of $2.10 a day for meals. However, material deprivations were not the hardest part. "You can get literally everything you can think of in prison, including female guards who prostituted themselves. There's nothing you can't get other than out," he says. "It is the pointlessness that kills people."
He has seen the same pattern unfold many times. "The first five years you're in shock; the next five years you're really, really angry. Then the next ten years your eyes open and you try to rehabilitate yourself, because the state or the prison won't do it for you."
In the early 2000s he found religion and became the head of the Catholic community in prison. He organised a prayer group for silent contemplation and led a t'ai chi class. He also started writing books. He has written seven to date, including "a fiscally conservative critique of the US prison system" called An Expensive Way to Make Bad People Worse, a title he says he stole from a British government white paper in the 1990s.
Mainly, though, he has been fighting to clear his name. Those who believe he is innocent point out that there is as much evidence to place Haysom at the scene as him; her blood type, the far rarer type B, was found on a wash rag in the kitchen near her mother's body. Her fingerprints were found on a vodka bottle in the liquor cabinet near her father. Cigarette butts from the brand she smoked were found outside the front door. They could of course have been left from earlier visits — she had been to the house the previous weekend to steal some of her mother's jewellery. His supporters also point to errors in his confession: he had said he thought Nancy Haysom was wearing jeans when he killed her, but he couldn't be sure. In fact she was wearing a nightgown and robe. He also got the position of Derek Haysom's body wrong. However, other details he gave about the murder scene were accurate.
There is also the issue of motive; after the murders the police found nude photographs of Haysom as a teenager that had been taken by her mother. Soering's trial lawyer, who was later disbarred and acknowledged he was suffering from a mental impairment during the trial, chose not to raise sexual abuse as a possible motive. During her trial Haysom denied that any abuse had occurred but has subsequently claimed that it did. She has also emerged as an unreliable witness. Psychiatrists in London diagnosed her as suffering from a borderline personality disorder and said that Soering was suffering from folie à deux: he was swept up in her delusion.
Over the years he built up an impressive support network that includes a former Virginia deputy attorney-general, the actor Martin Sheen and Angela Merkel, who as German chancellor had lobbied Barack Obama to allow a prisoner exchange to get Soering back to Germany. John Grisham, the writer and former attorney who is on the board of the Innocence Project, an organisation that campaigns against wrongful convictions, is a friend and has visited him in prison a number of times. Soering was a diligent pen pal, replying to every letter he received (and making carbon copies for his own records by pressing hard enough on his notebook to score two pages beneath).
Despite this, Soering's chances of getting out of prison were fleetingly slim. Virginia state grants parole to less than 4 per cent of violent offenders; but never for those serving double life sentences. Still, there were moments when it looked as though his efforts might be paying off. In 2010 the Virginia governor Tim Kaine, a Democrat, granted his request to be transferred to a prison in Germany, only for his successor, Robert F McDonnell, a Republican, to rescind it a week later. The psychological collapse that followed was typical. It is at 20 years that you hit a wall, Soering says. "It dawns on you that you can't do anything. That's when you break." He lost his faith. "I could wrap my mind around the idea that a good God would send an innocent man to prison for 24 years. I could work with the idea that even though I'm suffering, this can be part of a good God's plan," he says. "The problem is that I didn't spend 24 years. I spent 25, 26, 27 …"
On the outside the case continued to be scrutinised. In 2009 the Virginia Department of Forensic Science (DFS) conducted DNA tests on evidence from the case as part of a broader post-conviction testing programme. Only 11 out of 42 samples were useable, and tests on these excluded both Soering and Haysom. In 2016 Soering's team compared the DNA results with the original blood group evidence from 1985 and excluded Soering as the source of the type O blood that was found. Later that year Soering and his lawyer hired experts to look at the DFS report, who concluded that another man, one with AB blood, must have been present at the Haysom house. Independent forensic experts have disputed this, however, saying that cross-contamination was very likely to have occurred and all the male DNA traces may simply have come from Derek Haysom.
However, the development lent credibility to a longstanding suspicion held by Chuck Reid, a policeman who had led the early stages of the case and had been put forward by the prosecution to testify but was never called to the witness stand. He had sprayed the inside of the rental car with luminol, which shows up blood long after it's cleaned away — covering every millimetre of the vehicle — and had found nothing. How could this fit with Haysom's account of Soering appearing in the car in a bloody sheet? What about the bloody footprints that led from the house to the spot in the driveway where the prosecution argued Soering's car had driven away?
Reid visited Soering in prison and has publicly stated that he believes Soering would not be convicted today. Others disagree, including the Haysom family and Richard Gardner, the detective who took on the case from Reid. But the inconsistencies only made the case more interesting at a time when the public appetite for true crime stories was beginning to boom.
The case against Soering being the killer was the subject of a 2016 documentary called Killing for Love. It focused on Reid's claim that at the time of the murders an FBI profiler had concluded that the killer was female and knew her victims. Nancy Haysom had been very proper, he argued, and would not have entertained a male she did not know in her bathrobe. This profile was never submitted at Soering's trial and had disappeared. Now the documentary makers were able to track down the person who wrote it.
Most important for Soering, the film raised awareness of his campaign. He sees a karmic correctness in this. He blames the televised trial and intense media interest for his conviction: "It was five years before OJ Simpson. It made everybody act differently, everybody was looking for the cameras," he says. "That is why I have always spoken to the press. I knew if the press put me in here, the press is going to have to get me out again."
While Soering courted publicity, Elizabeth Haysom has stayed largely quiet. In 2015 she gave a rare interview to The New Yorker magazine from prison, in which she said: "I've chosen to do my time and to deal with it my way, and he's dealing with it in his."
She said that both she and Soering had inflated her drug use in the past, saying the only drug she'd ever used in the United States was marijuana.Soering, meanwhile, sensed that momentum was gathering and his legal team submitted a plea of innocence in August 2016. He was convinced they had the evidence they needed. "I cannot prove my innocence, but I can prove that I should never have been convicted, because there is more than reasonable doubt here," he says.
When a prison officer called him in to see the warden on November 25, 2019, he thought the moment had finally come. Instead he was told that his petition for absolute pardon had been rejected, but the state was granting him parole. He was free but he was still a guilty man. In the emotional chaos of that moment he thought about turning the offer down. "I did not do this stupid thing," he says, "but I did think about doing it because my heart was set on a pardon."
He has had a lot of time to consider why the state of Virginia decided to grant parole at that moment having refused it 14 times before. He believes they needed to find a solution whereby everyone got something but no one got everything. "Soering gets freedom but not a pardon. The Haysom family gets Elizabeth out but they have to accept that I get out," he says.
The chairwoman of the parole board, Adrianne Bennett, said Soering's claims of innocence were "without merit", but noted that his and Haysom's release would save taxpayer money, calling it "appropriate because of their youth at the time of the offences, their institutional adjustment and the length of their incarceration".
Soering was handed straight into the care of the immigration authorities to be deported to Germany, terrified that the lifeline would be whisked away again at any moment. He was allowed to walk without handcuffs and went to the lavatory with the door closed for the first time since he was 19 years old.
Even more surreal was his discovery that Haysom had been freed on parole as well — for being an accessory before the fact she had served just as much time in prison as he had — and was in the same deportation facility on her way back to Canada. He has had no contact with her.
His old support systems were long gone. His family did everything they could to help him in the years after his conviction. His father took hardship postings in Mauritania and Papua New Guinea to try to help with legal costs. But Soering fell out with his father ten years ago over an inheritance dispute and they are no longer on speaking terms. He was met off the plane in Frankfurt by a crowd of supporters and travelled from there to Hamburg, where he was taken in by a host family. One of them was studying forensic psychiatry at university and had stumbled on his case.
He was confronted with a choice. "Some of my supporters and friends said, 'You should just change your name, live anonymously and start over,' " he says. "I decided deliberately not to do that." If he had it would have left a black hole in his biography — "just the pure loss", he says. Instead he is hoping to turn his experiences into something positive. He has written the book, found a flat and has plans to build a career as a speaker, talking about the endurance and resilience he has developed to survive. "What I've lost I can't catch up, but I can enjoy what I've got now," he says.
But on that first night, sitting in his own bedroom for the first time, he listened to Bob Seger's Night Moves, a song about an older man reflecting on the foolishness of young love, and wept for the lifetime that he'd lost.
Written by: Rosie Kinchen
© The Times of London