ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 3, 1995 TAG: 9512040049
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SHARYN McCRUMB
IS JENS SOERING'S autobiography, "Mortal Thoughts," worth downloading from the Internet? We asked award-winning mystery writer Sharyn McCrumb of Shawsville to read it. Here's her review:
Jens Soering, University of Virginia Jefferson scholar and son of a German diplomat, was convicted in 1990 in Bedford County of the murders of Derek and Nancy Haysom, the parents of Soering's girlfriend and fellow student, Elizabeth Roxanne Haysom. The case gained notoriety because the victims were people of privilege and because of the film noir quality of the events following the murders.
The beautiful socialite and her European lover escape to England and spend months on the run, leaving a trail of credit cards and travelers checks through Yugoslavia, Turkey, Thailand and Singapore before they are arrested for check fraud in London and linked to the slayings in Bedford. Soering confesses, and his extradition is appealed all the way to the World Court.
Soering compares the couple to Macbeth and his lady, but I kept picturing Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in "Double Indemnity."
At the time of his arrest, Jens Soering confessed to the murders; now he maintains that he did so only to save Elizabeth Haysom from the electric chair. He stayed in Washington, he says, while Elizabeth drove to her parents' home in Lynchburg and killed them.
This new version of the Soering and Haysom story has been published via the Internet, a cyberbook composed by Soering, now an inmate at Keen Mountain Correctional Center in Buchanan County. The autobiography, consisting of 12 chapters that print out to about 110 pages, is part memoir of young love, part travelogue, part legal thriller.
The narrative begins with the couple's first meeting at a UVa orientation lecture for honors students. Succeeding passages describe Jens' fascination with the lovely and sophisticated young woman. "In the black night, she told of her past," he says in Chapter 1. " ... her birth in Salisbury, Rhodesia ... her family's ties to English aristocracy and the Astors; her education at exclusive Swiss and English boarding schools; her vacations at her parents' estate in Nova Scotia ... the prize-winning plays and novels she had written, the plaudits she had earned as an actress at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London ... the skiing medals and field hockey championships she had won before her knee injury; the piano and saxophone and cello recitals she has mastered; and, of course, her academic scholarship to Trinity, the most exclusive of Cambridge University's colleges."
Instead of laughing at this display of braggadocio, or fleeing from the ego that would subject new acquaintances to such a pretentious recital, Jens apparently was enthralled. When, weeks later, Elizabeth seduced him, his captivity was complete. Later, he would realize that Elizabeth Haysom told lies to gain the admiration and sympathy of others. But for a long time - too long - he believed her stories of parental abuse and her professions of love for him.
When they first met, Elizabeth Haysom told Soering she was a lesbian. But suddenly she declared her undying love for wimpy, virginal, naive Jens - and he believed her. It would be funny, if the outcome had not been so tragic.
In one of Haysom's letters, quoted in "Mortal Thoughts," she says: "I had always believed that I made men fall in love with me so that I could take out all the hatred I felt for them by humiliating them. ... And in the end I would make them hate themselves for loving me and the torture I inflicted."
Jens is serving two life sentences for murder. He can't say he wasn't warned.
Chapter 4 recalls the events on the weekend of the murders. In it, Soering claims Elizabeth asked him to give her an alibi while she made a narcotics pickup for a dealer in Lynchburg. He buys movie tickets, orders two dinners, and then - when Haysom returns late that night, she confesses to having killed her parents.
The curious feature of this narrative is that while most of "Mortal Thoughts" is written in the past tense, the scene of Jens' learning of the murders is written in the present tense. It sounds like a synopsis of a movie script. It sounds as if it is being described from imagination rather than memory.
From there, Soering comments briefly on the poor performance of Bedford County law enforcement, in his opinion. He was ready to confess to the crime, he insists, to save Elizabeth, but, hey, they just didn't ask the right questions.
From there, the book turns into a mildly interesting travelogue of eastern Europe and the Far East, coupled with instructions on how to acquire fake passports and finance your trip with bank fraud. The couple makes no serious attempt to earn an honest living and exhibits no remorse about the crime or their subsequent lifestyle of fraud.
The personality of the narrator keeps jarring this jaunt: England is shabby; he meets "backwoods people" in Switzerland; Paris is too expensive. One suspects he is not the ideal travel companion.
Soering has much to say about the bloody sock print at the murder scene, a key feature in the case against him. It could have been Elizabeth's, he says. He discusses his ongoing appeals and claims that one of his attorneys was dishonest and perhaps incompetent.
Still, there is little feeling in the memoir. The legal wrangles are tedious, and there is little description given of his current life in prison. Soering maintains that prison life is impossible to describe to those on the outside, but in a series of articles in The Roanoke Times in September, convicted killer and death-row inmate Dennis Stockton wrote a compelling account of his prison existence.
Based on the two narratives, Stockton was the better writer.
What people really want to know about Jens Soering's cyberbook is: Can we believe this version of the events?
The one enduring quote from the Soering trial is a phrase Jens used in a letter to Elizabeth: "That will fool those yokels in Virginia." Is this another attempt at fooling the yokels in Virginia, or is Jens Soering in denial for reasons of his own?
It's difficult to say what motivated this revisionist tale, but it doesn't ring true.
Why would Elizabeth Haysom go to the trouble of captivating this nebbishy young man, and then commit the murder herself without his knowledge? Surely she was looking for a pawn; she certainly found one.
In the investigator's notes of Soering's 1986 interrogations, Soering is quoted as saying: "I fell in love with a girl. We talked about killing her parents. I didn't want to do it, but I drove to their house and killed them."
Why would he do it? Because Elizabeth Haysom convinced him that she would go to the electric chair for murder, but that he, a diplomat's son, would receive a light sentence in Germany as a youthful offender.
In Chapter 10, Soering says: "Going to the electric chair had not been part of my promise to save Elizabeth! Five years in a German youth prison, this was to be the extent of my `sacrifice.'''
One phrase in Chapter 1 has nothing to do with the murders, but I think it has everything to do with the psychology of the case, with deciding who did the planning and who did the dirty work. When you ask yourselves who actually stabbed Derek and Nancy Haysom, consider this statement of Soering's about their first months of dormitory life at UVa:
"When Elizabeth began writing a book about her travels in Europe, some of her dorm mates were allowed to type a few chapters, since such mundane tasks were beneath her."
Indeed.
Sharyn McCrumb is the author of 12 novels and has received numerous awards for her mystery writing. In October, mystery readers voted at their world convention in Britain to award her the 1995 Anthony Award for "She Walks These Hills." She says she followed Soering's trial religiously.
LENGTH: Long : 138 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Author Sharyn McCrumb: Soering's book "sounds like aby CNBsynopsis of a movie script."