Söring Wanted to Become a Famous Murderer in 1986

The third episode of the podcast “Das System Söring” (g) drops tomorrow. If you haven’t subscribed yet, check it out on your favorite podcast app, it’s on all of them.

I’m working on an English translation of the recent in-depth article in Übermedien (g) about the German media’s reception of Jens Söring.

However, I thought one remarkable fact in that report deserves to be more widely-known. Terry Wright, the London detective who dealt extensively with Söring in June 1986, recounts that in June 1986, just days after confessing in detail to the murders of Derek and Nancy Haysom, Söring was already then planning to try to make money from selling his story.

That is, he wanted to sell his story and become famous as a guilty double-murderer.

Here is my translation, with the German original below:

Back then, Wright led the first questioning and heard Söring’s first confession. In the podcast, Wright recounts that Söring, shortly after the confessions, could get a copy of the diary he had kept with this then-girlfriend [i.e., the travel diary Söring and Haysom kept during their flight from the law, which had been seized by the police]. According to Wright, Söring justified his request for the diary because

“he wanted to write a story which he could sell. He wrote that he was thinking of using the story commercially. And that there might be millions of readers or viewers who would pay for the story. (…) Only days after he had confessed, he was already thinking of how he could profit from what he had done. And (…) the story which he wanted to sell in 1986, was that he had murdered the Haysoms. It wasn’t a story of false confessions and things like that which he would later tell.”

Im Original:

Wright führte damals die ersten Verhöre und hörte das erste Geständnis von Söring. Im Podcast erzählt er, dass Söring ihn schon kurz danach fragte, ob er eine Kopie des Tagebuchs bekommen könne, das er gemeinsam mit seiner damaligen Freundin geführt hatte. Er habe das damit begründet, so Wright, dass er

„eine Geschichte schreiben wollte, die er verkaufen konnte. Er schrieb, dass er an eine kommerzielle Verwendung dachte. Und dass es womöglich Millionen Leser oder Zuschauer gebe, die für diese Geschichte zahlen würden. (…) Nur Tage, nachdem er gestanden hatte, dachte er schon darüber nach, wie er Profit machen könnte mit dem, was er getan hatte. Und (…) die Geschichte, die er im Juni 1986 verkaufen wollte, war, dass er die Haysoms ermordet hat. Es war keine Geschichte über falsche Geständnisse und Dinge, die er später erzählt hat.“