Jens Soering continues to insist he’s innocent of the 1985 murders of his girlfriend’s wealthy Bedford County parents, Derek and Nancy Haysom, one of the most publicized crimes in modern Virginia history.
Now, seven years after Soering was freed on parole, his legal team says new evidence — combined with older evidence, some never submitted at his trial — supports his nearly four-decade effort to clear his name and erase his two convictions for first-degree murder and his two life sentences.
If Soering and his new evidence are correct, he did not commit the savage slayings of the Haysoms, who were stabbed multiple times in their blood-covered home. The evidence comes mainly from new DNA analysis of blood samples taken at the gory murder scene. They identify two males, neither of whom is Soering, as participating in the killings.
The decision is up to the Court of Appeals of Virginia, which is expected to rule sometime in the next several months. It could take longer if the justices order an evidentiary hearing by the Bedford County Circuit Court, where Soering’s trial took place in 1990, one of the first in the nation to be televised gavel-to-gavel.
Asked by Cardinal News if he is investigating the possibility of two killers on the loose from the grisly Haysom murders, Bedford County Sheriff Mike Miller said in a voicemail, “I can tell you, and all the readers, that the Bedford County Sheriff’s office will continue to keep this county as safe as possible; but I cannot comment on any open cases or evidence in them.”
A rarely won legal action
Soering spent 33 years in prison and is now 59.
He has employed a rarely won legal procedure called a petition for a writ of actual innocence. The writs were created more than 20 years ago to allow those who claimed to be wrongly convicted to prove their innocence with new evidence after traditional appeals expired. Prior to 2020, just a handful of these writs were granted because the convicted had to prove their case by “clear and convincing” evidence that no rational trier of fact would have found them guilty. That was a high bar.
In 2020, the state legislature eased the legal hurdle by lowering the bar to proof by a “preponderance of the evidence”; the standard, which is also used in civil trials, requires the petitioner to prove that there is a greater than 50% chance that the claim is true.
The legislature also allowed for multiple filings instead of just one if important new evidence emerged. Additionally, it permitted those who had pleaded guilty to file a writ, recognizing that people occasionally plead guilty for reasons other than guilt.
Despite the lessening of the burden of proof, the writs remain difficult to win. During the last three years, the Court of Appeals has reviewed 84 writs. Two writs were issued, and the convictions vacated. The rest were dismissed, most summarily.
The Haysom murders and Soering’s efforts to win his exoneration or release have continued to draw national and international media attention, including television documentaries, such as Netflix’s 2023 four-part series “Till Murder Do Us Part: Soering vs. Haysom.”
Soering also gained public support from celebrities who believe he was wrongly convicted. Among them is movie and television actor Martin Sheen and popular crime novelist John Grisham, both of whom called on the state of Virginia to grant Soering release from prison. Even former German Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly came to Soering’s aid, calling for him to be transferred to Germany, his home country, where it was thought he would quickly be released.
Despite all the attention Soering’s case has gotten for nearly four decades, efforts by convicted people to clear their names are not unusual.
Since 1989, 3,819 wrongfully convicted people have been exonerated in the United States, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. The registry lists 73 exonerations in Virginia since 1989, and just five before that.
The year 1989 was the beginning of what the registry calls the Exoneration Era and marks the year of the first exoneration from a DNA examination. Such testing in criminal cases spread nationwide as it was perfected in the following years, allowing many to prove they were wrongfully convicted.
DNA tests are a scientific technique for examining bodily fluids or parts. The tests can provide detailed information on a person’s genetic makeup, helping identify everything from a person’s risk of hereditary disease to their ancestry and paternity — to their possible involvement in a crime.
Soering said in an April 22 video interview from Germany that he initially pleaded guilty to killing the Haysoms only to protect his girlfriend, their daughter Elizabeth Haysom, then 20, who he said admitted to him that she had stabbed her parents to death. “I was scared to death that she would be executed. … It was puppy love. She was my first girlfriend.” He was just 18 at the time of the murders.
Armed with the new evidence, Soering’s Charlottesville attorney, Elliott Harding, filed the petition for a writ of actual innocence in February. Most of the evidence came last year when Sheena Haysom, Elizabeth’s niece and the Haysoms’ granddaughter, voluntarily provided DNA tests of her blood. When compared with samples of blood found at the scene of the murders, it revealed that two members of Sheena’s family “cannot be excluded as sources of male blood found at the scene,” according to the petition. In addition, the petition argues, Soering’s DNA did not show up anywhere at the scene and no reliable forensic evidence points at him.
Those blood samples were analyzed for the first time for DNA in 2009 after the state decided to test archived crime evidence to correct wrongful convictions from before newer technology allowed for detailed testing of blood and other samples.
Prior to that, the blood samples from the murder scene had only been tested for blood type. A few drops of type O blood, a type that Soering shares with more than 40% of the U.S. population, were found at the scene. That, a bloody sock print supposedly matching Soering’s foot, testimony of his co-defendant, Elizabeth, naming him as the murderer and his own recanted confession resulted in his trial conviction.
About the writ
The petition for the writ contends that all of that trial evidence is without merit because:
- Soering’s initial confession was “not recorded in any way” and was given to protect Elizabeth “during four days of interrogation … without counsel.” Also, “scientific scholarship on confessions” reveals that false guilty pleas are not uncommon. That’s especially true among young defendants who are known to do so to protect someone.
- The bloody sock print “comparison is now recognized as junk science.”
- Elizabeth’s testimony was tainted by lies; her admission to committing perjury at trial “about the central motive for the murders.” In addition, she “admitted on the stand that she frequently lied with the specific goal of gaining advantage for herself.” And much of her testimony doesn’t match the facts.
- Soering’s DNA tests on the blood samples excluded him, including from two samples of Type O blood, indicating that the Type O blood samples were from someone else. In addition, comparisons of those blood samples with Sheena Haysom’s samples revealed that two male relatives “cannot be excluded as sources of male blood found at the scene.”
The petition also says that even at the time of Soering’s initial confession on June 8, 1986, investigators “should have realized that the confession was questionable at the very least” because Soering gave many wrong descriptions of the murder scene.
Among those were:
- Soering claimed he committed the killings alone. But blood samples from the scene showed four blood types “suggesting that at least two (not one) perpetrators were injured during the commission of the crime.”
- Soering made no mention of taking a shower after the killings. But tests “showed that the perpetrators washed off a great deal of blood in the shower.”
- Soering “described Nancy as wearing jeans, but in fact she was discovered in a flowery housecoat or robe.”
- Soering drew a sketch of where Derek Haysom’s body fell, but it “was turned in a direction that did not match the actual position at the crime scene.”
- Soering claimed that Derek Haysom “shouted ‘You must be crazy, man,’ after Jens had cut his throat — a physical impossibility.”
- Soering said he bled heavily in a rental car as he returned from the murders. But tests “showed there was no trace of blood in the car.”
The state attorney general’s office has not filed an official response to Soering’s petition for a writ of actual innocence. Communications director Rae Pickett said the office is waiting for the appeals court to ask for a response.
Christopher Dolen, acting commonwealth’s attorney for Bedford County, also said he had no immediate comment on the writ petition, except to say “we definitely are cooperating” and “would make our files available.” Asked about the petition’s contention that two killers escaped prosecution in the Haysom murders, Dolen said, “I don’t want to talk hypotheticals.’
Retired Bedford County Circuit Court Judge James Updike, who served as the county’s commonwealth’s attorney in 1990 and prosecuted Soering, said through the court’s clerk that he does not comment on active cases.
Ricky Gardner, the now-retired Bedford sheriff’s detective who led the investigation of Soering, could not be reached for comment.
The murders
In the fall of 1984, Soering, the 18-year-old son of a midlevel German diplomat stationed in the United States, and Elizabeth Haysom, 20, enrolled at the University of Virginia. Both were honor students on scholarships. They began dating later that year. For Soering, a nerdy intellectual, Elizabeth was his first love, and he fell deeply.
The murders occurred on the evening of March 30, 1985, at the Haysoms’ home in Boonsboro, a rural, higher-income Blue Ridge foothills section of Bedford County west of Lynchburg. Derek William Reginald Haysom, 71, was a retired Canadian steel executive, and Nancy Astor Benedict Haysom, 53, was an artist with family connections to British aristocracy. Their blood-soaked bodies were discovered a few days later when friends showed up for a game of bridge. They had been stabbed multiple times, and their necks slit ear to ear.
Soering and Elizabeth rented a car the weekend of the murders and drove to the Washington, D.C., area, ostensibly for a weekend getaway. The stories they gave of what followed began to diverge dramatically.
Elizabeth claimed that after arriving in Washington, Soering took the rental car, drove to Boonsboro, stabbed her parents to death and returned covered with blood. The supposed motive was because they disapproved of his relationship with Elizabeth and wanted it ended.
Soering told Cardinal News that the trip to Washington was their first chance to be alone together that spring because they both had roommates at the university. They went to a record store, a tie-dye place, movies — “tourist stuff.” But then, he said, “She told me she was using drugs and had a debt to pay.”
Soering said she claimed her drug dealer was a fellow college student who had offered to reduce her debt if she would carry some drugs from Washington back to Charlottesville. Soering offered to go with her, but she refused and drove off by herself.
When she returned to Washington that night, he said, she told him she had killed her parents and begged him to help her with an alibi that they were together in Washington when the murders occurred. She also told him, “If you really love me, you’ve got to do this for me.” (Soering’s allegation that Haysom killed her parents first came up in his 1990 trial; he appealed the conviction to the Virginia Supreme Court, which denied his appeal in 1998.)
Soering said he does not know what might have caused Elizabeth to kill her parents. “I knew she hated her parents … but there was no talk of killing anybody.” He said he did not know she was going to her parents’ home that night, but believes something happened and “things went sideways.”
He said all he could think of at the time was that he had to save Elizabeth from the electric chair. He decided that if it came to that, he planned to say that he alone had killed her parents. The two then spent the rest of that night in Washington rehearsing the scene of the murders so he could get the story straight.
Conviction, parole and then deportation
Soering said he knows now that had he not made that confession, he might not have been charged, much less convicted.
What exactly happened that night may never be known, but DNA “establishes the presence of at least two male contributors at the crime scene, neither of whom is Jens Soering,” according to the writ petition.
However, Soering said he could think of little but his consuming love for Elizabeth. “At the time, I didn’t realize … how naive I was back then and how inexperienced.”
In planning to claim that he had committed the murders, Soering mistakenly thought that with his father a diplomat, he would be sent back to Germany for trial. There, he reasoned, he would be treated more leniently because of his youth and would serve no more than a few or more years in prison.
The pair initially managed to avoid direct suspicion, and investigators hit a dead end. Then in October 1985, seven months after the murders, the focus turned to Soering and Elizabeth, who suddenly left separately for Europe and Southeast Asia, where they rejoined, traveled around and ran out of money.
On April 30, 1986, six months after leaving the country, they were arrested on check fraud charges in London.
Authorities in Bedford County flew to London to interrogate the two. On June 8, 1986, after four days of questioning, Soering, without counsel, gave his unrecorded confession in which he detailed how he committed the murders.
Elizabeth subsequently confessed. According to the writ petition, she initially told the Bedford County detective in charge of the investigation and British police that “I did it myself. … I got off on it.” One of the British officers “told her to stop being silly, and she replied that she was only being ‘facetious,’” the petition says.
Despite that statement, “not a single follow-up question was asked,” even though an FBI profiler had determined that the evidence and scene of the killings indicated “the crime was committed by a woman in a close relationship to the victims,” according to the petition. Other evidence at the scene also pointed to Elizabeth, including her fingerprint on a vodka bottle, butts from her brand of cigarettes outside the front and back doors, and type B blood — relatively rare and Elizabeth’s own type — found on a rag near her mother’s body.
Elizabeth initially was charged with two counts of first-degree murder, but at trial in August 1987, she pleaded guilty to two counts of being an accessory before the fact to the murders and was sentenced to 90 years in prison. She would be eligible for parole eight years later, in 1995. She also agreed to testify for the prosecution against Soering.
Soering soon recanted his confession, claimed innocence and named Elizabeth as the killer, a position he has argued ever since.
He remained jailed in London fighting extradition until January 1990, when he was sent back to Bedford County after Updike, the commonwealth’s attorney, agreed to reduce the charge against him from capital murder to first-degree murder. That removed the death penalty as a possible sentence, a requirement for him to be extradited from England. He was tried later that year, convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to two life terms.
Both Soering and Elizabeth were eventually paroled in November 2019 after each had served nearly 33 years in prison. Soering told Cardinal News that he did not want parole; he wanted a full pardon at that point. However, he said, a friend persuaded him to accept the parole and be free at last. He first became eligible for parole in 2003 and had been denied it 14 times.
Both were deported to their home countries, Elizabeth to Canada and Soering to Germany.
Never give up
Soering’s release did not stop his efforts to win exoneration. While in Germany, he filed his February petition for the writ of actual innocence after receiving new evidence. That evidence was revealed by professor J. Thomas McClintock of Liberty University, a DNA expert whom Soering’s team asked to investigate. McClintock, a forensic scientist who runs a DNA company, obtained permission to go to the Virginia Department of Forensic Science’s lab to examine the raw data in its 2009 DNA tests of blood samples from the murder scene.
After eight hours of reviewing the lab’s data on Aug. 1, 2022, he determined that the relevant samples had not been contaminated or mixed and that each was from an individual contributor. That removed lingering concern about the blood samples’ validity, according to the writ petition.
Later, in December 2025, McClintock and the Canadian DNA analyst who took Sheena Haysom’s blood samples determined that the DNA indicated that two unknown males cannot be excluded as the source of blood at the crime scene, the petition said.
Sheena Haysom signed an affidavit in support of Soering’s writ. In the Jan. 29, 2026, document, she says she went public with her new evidence and accusations after watching footage of the murder trial in the Netflix documentary “Till Murder Do Us Part: Soering vs. Haysom.”
“Viewing this documentary triggered a flood of memories from my early childhood — years marked by multiple traumatic experiences, including prolonged sexual abuse” by male relatives, she says in the affidavit. She names the relatives, but Cardinal News does not use the names of individuals not officially charged or classified as suspects. Sheena also says in the affidavit she believes two of the males who sexually abused her, and possibly other family members, “murdered my grandparents Derek and Nancy Haysom — not Jens.”
In a May 27 telephone interview from her home in Vancouver, Canada, Sheena said it took her years to understand what actually happened the night her grandparents were killed. She was just 6 years old at the time, and she was told they died in an accident. A couple of years later, her father told her they had been murdered. She said she vividly recalls him telling her that “Derek fought very hard with the poker stick.”
She wondered about that as she grew older, but whenever she would inquire about the murders, her parents would cut her off and refuse to talk about it, she said.
Elizabeth Haysom had also talked about being sexually abused as a child by her mother, according to the petition for the writ, but had denied it at both her sentencing and Soering’s trial. Then, according to the writ petition, Elizabeth was quoted in a 2016 Richmond Times-Dispatch interview saying that she had been sexually abused by her mother for eight years, “and this was the true motive for the murders.” But she still blamed Soering for the actual stabbings.
Efforts by Cardinal News to contact Elizabeth Haysom were unsuccessful.
Sheena said that over the last several years, she began to realize what she believes actually happened to her grandparents. “It angers me that Jens had so much taken from him by these people,” she said, adding that she sees him as an immature, childlike 18-year-old who unknowingly got trapped in an evil plot and confessed to murder in a juvenile effort to save the woman he thought he loved.
Sheena said she believes Elizabeth was present at the murders but did not participate in the killings. She also believes Elizabeth “was scared for her own life” and was intimidated by the others into involvement. Still, Sheena said, “You can’t take away the evil she has done to Jens.”
“I have complete empathy for Jens,” Sheena said. “So many lives destroyed by the greed of these people. … But what I really want is them to be brought to justice, all of them.”
Sheena’s contribution of her own DNA tests to be compared to DNA tests of blood samples from the crime scene, together with her contention that male family members were involved in the murders, gave Soering the new evidence needed to petition for the writ of actual innocence. Sheena also provided what she believes are the motives for the murders: simmering family issues, including covering up incest.
Harding, Soering’s attorney, says he got involved in filing the petition in part because his uncle, a former police detective and Albemarle County sheriff, has long believed that the evidence supports Soering’s innocence.
The uncle, Chip Harding, had been asked by one of Soering’s earlier lawyers to review the case file in another of the convicted murderer’s efforts to win his release. As a former sheriff and detective, Harding had extensive experience trying to exonerate the wrongly accused or convicted.
In a recent telephone interview, Chip Harding said that Soering’s confession was filled with many factual errors that should have made investigators immediately suspicious. But, he said, Bedford County investigators essentially quit looking for other possible suspects in the actual murders.
Chip Harding said his certainty that Soering is not guilty is all the firmer because of the latest DNA tests revealing other males at the scene and forensic evidence showing no valid indication of Soering. “I would absolutely grant a writ of actual innocence for Soering.”
He said he believes Bedford County needs to reopen the investigation. “I don’t think he did it, but I cannot prove it.”
Soering’s attorney, Elliott Harding, said the latest evidence from Sheena is “kind of like the cherry on top, and now we have to finish the dish.”
“We don’t have to find the killer,” he said. “At the end of the day, I don’t have to prove Jens is innocent … If someone’s trying the case today, you can’t say it’s Jens.”
Epilogue: Life after prison
Jens Soering said he hopes the writ of actual innocence will be the final chapter in his long road to clear his name of murder and find true freedom.
In an interview with Cardinal News, Soering reflected on his years in prison. The anger. The self-hatred. The giving up. Then, somehow, redemption through meditation, religion and prayer. He became a Catholic, then lost his faith in 2010 and says he’s still working to recover it. Along the way, he learned how to subdue loss, anger and fear.
Reading helped fill the prison void and find direction. Writing gave purpose.
Soering wrote six books while in prison. None blockbusters. Narrow-appeal works that draw on his experience in a world few on the outside can fathom. He managed to get published. Lantern Publishing & Media produced several of the books he wrote from prison.
He even made a little money, not much, but “you need money in prison,” Soering said.
He won a first-place award from the Catholic Press Association of North America in 2007 for his book “The Convict Christ: What the Gospel Says about Criminal Justice.”
