When I was at the University of Virginia, whispers about this story floated around: a student, 20 years before, had fled the country, then confessed to murdering his girlfriend’s parents, then recanted the confession—and now was publishing books from an American jail.
I heard this in particular because I was in the same scholarship program that had brought Jens Soering, the student in question, to UVA. The Jefferson Scholarship program accepts around 35 students per year, a crop of undergrads so decorously and straightforwardly ambitious that my postgraduate plans (the Peace Corps) seemed extremely slackerish. Bad behavior among scholarship recipients became lasting gossip, and this was a story that no one could forget, much less believe. He didn’t actually do it, one of my friends once told me, and then I graduated and forgot about it. And then read this incredibly absorbing Nathan Heller story about the Soering/Haysom case in The New Yorker last month.
The facts surrounding the murder are still a mystery. But the case certainly involves Jens Soering, high-achieving son of a German diplomat, and his college girlfriend Elizabeth Haysom, a heroin-dabbling boarding school drifter. Haysom’s parents, who lived in Central Virginia, were found dead on April 3, 1985:
The house revealed no indication of forced entry. On the dining-room table were place settings and the remnants of a meal. No weapon could be found, but there were footprints in the blood. One looked to have been made by a tennis shoe, and two more by a sock. Forensic study showed that the Haysoms had blood-alcohol levels of .22—exceedingly high. A vodka bottle nearby carried fingerprints, as did a shot glass. Four blood types were in evidence: the Haysoms’ A and AB, a bit of B blood on a damp rag, and, on the screen door and in the master suite, spots of O.
DNA analysis was largely unavailable in 1985, but, from these samples, it was possible to reconstruct a sequence of events. At some point between March 29th and 31st, the killer or killers had arrived at Loose Chippings, probably during a meal. Someone, it seemed, had sat down at the table with the Haysoms to eat. A trail of blood suggested that Derek Haysom was attacked there, and stumbled across the dining room as he bled. A bloody palm print on a side chair showed where he’d put a hand down, as if struggling to stay upright; his killer had pursued him. Derek Haysom’s jugular and carotid were cut, and he had been stabbed thirty-six times. Then the murderer, with great presence of mind, seemed to have got up, wiped down much of the scene, and washed up in the bathroom.
Though the FBI identified the suspect profile as “female who knows the family,” Haysom—who is ostensibly still the primary suspect here—as well as Soering dodged suspicion for a few months. They fled to Europe just as the police turned their sights on the two of them seriously.