See our previous story on why Jens Soering’s new appeal is different from previous ones.
Jens Soering has taken a major new step toward his nearly four-decade effort to prove he is not guilty of the 1985 savage stabbing murders of Derek and Nancy Haysom, the parents of his girlfriend.
The step came Aug. 6 when the Court of Appeals of Virginia ordered the attorney general to file a response to Soering’s Feb. 17 petition for a writ of actual innocence in one of the most notorious crimes in modern Virginia history.
The appeals court gave the attorney general 60 days to file a response. The attorney general has essentially three choices: support Soering in his claim of innocence, abstain by taking no position or oppose by setting out why the murder conviction should stand.
Rae Pickett, communications director for the attorney general, said the office will file a response by the Oct. 5 filing date the appeals court set, but will not reveal the content until it is filed.
The odds that a convicted person will win a writ of actual innocence are small.
Those odds got better in 2020 when the state legislature lowered the bar of proof to a “preponderance of evidence.” Before that the standard of proof was by “clear and convincing” evidence.
Nevertheless, the writs remain difficult to win. The Appeals Court has reviewed 84 writs in the last three years. Two of those had their convictions vacated. The rest were dismissed, most summarily, thrown out by the court as without legal merit.
Soering was delighted by the court’s action. “I’m feeling very good about this,” he wrote in an email exchange with Cardinal News. “I am confident that the Attorney General and the court will grant me the justice I have been denied for so long.”
The gruesome murders occurred on the evening of March 30, 1985, in the Haysoms’ Boonsboro retirement home in the Blue Ridge foothills of Bedford County. The bodies of Derek Hayson, 71, and his wife, Nancy, 53, where discovered a few days later by a friend. They had been stabbed multiple times and their necks slit from ear-to-ear, blood flowed everywhere.
Bedford County Sheriff Department investigators initially were stumped but soon turned their attention to Soering and his girlfriend, Elizabeth Haysom, the Haysoms’ daughter. The two were honor students at the University of Virginia but had suddenly taken off on a trip overseas that ended up in London, where they ran out of money and were arrested April 30, 1986, on check fraud charges.
London police notified Bedford County authorities, who flew to London to interrogate Soering and Elizabeth Haysom. After several days, Soering confessed to the killings. But at his 1990 trial he pleaded not guilty, a position he has stuck with ever since.
The murders and Soering’s repeated efforts to win parole, pardon or exoneration have sparked continuous national and international media attention and television documentaries, including Netflix’s 2023 four-part series “Till Murder Do Us Part: Soering vs. Haysom.”
Soering told Cardinal News that he initially confessed only to save his girlfriend, Elizabeth Hayson, who had told him she committed the murders. He mistakenly thought, at the time, that because his father was a German diplomat he would be sent back there for trial where he would be treated leniently and serve far less time in prison because he was young, just 18 at the time of the murders.
Elizabeth Haysom contended that Soering committed the murders, coming back to her covered in blood. She pleaded guilty to being an accessory before the fact in 1987 and was sentenced to 90 years in prison. Soering was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to two life terms in prison.
Both Soering and Elizabeth Haysom were paroled in 2019 after 33 years in prison, and both were deported, Soering to Germany and Elizabeth to Canada.
Soering now supports himself with writings, speeches and online presentations, many true crime stories based on his experience behind bars.
He wrote in an Aug. 7 email to Cardinal News, “I’m grateful for the court’s decision, but not surprised.”
The two main pieces of evidence linking him to the crime scene were a bloody sock footprint that has since been characterized by experts as “junk science,” and type O blood samples, the same as Soering’s type. But when that sample and other blood found at the scene were reexamined recently with modern DNA tests, the type O sample did not match Soering’s and the tests indicated two other men, according to Soering’s writ petition.
Elliott Harding, Soering’s Charlottesville attorney, texted to Cardinal News that the appeals court’s order for a response from the attorney general is “a recognition that our case, as it stands, merits worthy of consideration; and, yes, should the AG’s office join us or abstain from opposition, I believe the court would strongly entertain granting the petition.”
Harding also texted, “We remain steadfast in our belief that Mr. Soering deserves this exoneration, and we will do all that is necessary to present newly discovered evidence to the Attorney General and the court in hopes that his petition is ultimately granted.”
