Jeremy Bamber, who has served more than 40 years in prison for murdering five members of his family, has been banned from communicating with the media.<\/p>\n
Bamber was convicted in 1986 by a 10-2 majority of shooting his adoptive mother and father, his sister and her six-year-old twins at the parents\u2019 family farmhouse in Essex<\/a> a year earlier. He has always protested his innocence.<\/p>\n The 65-year-old has long relied on telephone interviews and exchanges of letters with journalists as a way to draw attention to his case. But his campaign group has told the Guardian he is no longer allowed to send letters to journalists, nor receive them, nor is he allowed to talk to reporters by phone. He was last granted a face-to-face interview with a journalist in 2010.<\/p>\n Without giving a specific explanation for the decision in Bamber\u2019s case, the prison service cited \u201cthe need to protect victims from serious distress and maintain confidence in the justice system\u201d as the basis for such restrictions in general.<\/p>\n The ban comes at a time when the case has received prominent media coverage. Last October, the New Yorker magazine released Blood Relatives<\/a>, a six-part podcast series questioning the safety of the convictions.<\/p>\n Initial newspaper reports of the massacre called it a murder-suicide, stating that his sister, Sheila Caffell, who was also adopted and had recently been hospitalised with schizophrenia, had killed her family members and then herself.<\/p>\n Bamber became a suspect a month later after his former girlfriend Julie Mugford gave a statement to Essex police soon after he had ended their relationship stating he had told her he was planning the murders. It emerged later that Mugford had agreed to sell her story to the News of the World for \u00a325,000 if Bamber was convicted.<\/p>\n This February, Prof Jason Payne-James, a specialist in forensic and legal medicine, told the Guardian<\/a> he did not believe a silencer had been used in the shootings, a finding that appears to undermine a central tenet of the prosecution\u2019s case. At the trial, Justice Drake told the jury that if they believed the silencer was used it would be sufficient ground to convict Bamber because Caffell\u2019s arms were not long enough to shoot herself in the throat with the extension added to the rifle.<\/p>\n His campaign group told the Guardian that Bamber, who is in the high-security category A prison HMP Wakefield, believes the ban on him communicating with the media is unlawful.<\/p>\n