Family, elected officials cry out after Kaine OKs Soering prison transfer

Bedford County officials and families of the victims objected strongly Friday when they learned that Gov. Timothy M. Kaine had approved a transfer for Jens Soering, convicted of the 1985 murders of Derek and Nancy Haysom, to a German prison.

“By God, if there’s anything I can do while I’m still alive, I want it stopped,” said Risque Benedict, brother of Nancy Haysom. “We are horrified by this.”

State Sen. Steve Newman, R-Lynchburg, called it “fairly devastating news to Bedford County” and said he and other officials were pursuing a strategy to see whether “this decision of Governor Kaine is revocable.”

Kaine leaves office today.

The transfer agreement, requested by Soering’s lawyers, requires that he serve two more years in prison before being paroled in Germany, said Kaine spokesman Gordon Hickey. Kaine’s action still must go through the U.S. Department of Justice for approval, Hickey said.

The arrangement was made under an international prisoner transfer treaty that also allows the United States to bring home U.S. citizens who are being held under adverse conditions in other countries, Hickey said.

Attorney general-elect Ken Cuccinelli said, “Jens Soering committed his crimes against the citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and he should serve his time in the penitentiaries of the commonwealth and subject to our parole system.

“We hope the Department of Justice will not approve the transfer and Soering will serve his sentence in the commonwealth,” said Cuccinelli, who takes office today.

Bob McDonnell, who will be inaugurated governor today, didn’t comment directly on the Soering case. His spokeswoman, Taylor Thornley, said, “The governor-elect was not consulted on this matter. This was a matter being handled by Governor Kaine’s office.”

Ricky Gardner, the lead investigator in the April 1985 murders in the Boonsboro area, said he always expected Soering to be paroled. Elizabeth Haysom, the Haysoms’ daughter and Soering’s girlfriend, also was convicted of the crime and is serving a 90-year sentence.

Gardner said he expects she, too, will be paroled eventually.

“It’s the timing of the thing that sort of upsets me, and how the family found out about it,” said Gardner, now the chief deputy in the Bedford County sheriff’s department.

“I knew it was going to happen sooner or later,” Gardner said.

Regarding Soering’s serving two more years before parole, Gardner asked, “Who’s going to monitor that?”

Benedict said someone in Virginia’s correctional system called him in Florida on Thursday to say that “apparently there is something going on, a scenario to try to get Jens Soering released from prison.”

Benedict called friends, family members and Gardner to tell them the man convicted of murdering his sister and her husband might be on the road to freedom.

“In the first place, the reason he was not executed for this crime was because he could not be transferred to Virginia from the United Kingdom” until Bedford County prosecutor Jim Updike agreed to not seek the death penalty, Benedict recalled.

“It was agreed that he would be sentenced to do all of his time in Virginia, and now we don’t know where this newfangled thing of going to Germany comes in,” Benedict said.

“We do know that he comes from a politically powerful family in Germany and that his father was in the foreign service and has been working very hard to get something of this type” arranged, Benedict said.

A neighbor discovered Derek and Nancy Haysom’s bodies on April 3, 1985, at their home on Holcomb Rock Road. They had been stabbed repeatedly.

Although police interviewed Soering and Elizabeth Haysom, both students at the University of Virginia at the time, the pair fled to Europe and were not arrested until British police picked them up on fraud charges a year later.

Haysom waived extradition in 1987 and was returned to Virginia, where she was convicted of being an accessory to murder and sentenced to 90 years. She is serving that sentence in a Goochland prison.

Soering fought extradition and didn’t stand trial until 1990. The case was a media sensation, one of the first to have cameras in the courtroom.

It also set precedents in international law, and one of the appeals went to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.

The Bedford jury’s guilty verdict hinged on Soering’s confession, given and then recanted, plus forensic evidence, which included a bloody sock print on the Haysoms’ kitchen floor that closely matched Soering’s footprint.

Soering was sentenced to life in prison. Now 42, he is incarcerated at Buckingham Correctional Center.

Elizabeth Haysom, left, and Jens Soering in 1987 and 1990, respectively