ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, November 26, 1996 TAG: 9611260111
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
State forensic experts reported Monday that no blood was found on a knife tested as a possible murder weapon in the slayings of Boonsboro couple Derek and Nancy Haysom.
Jens Soering, a former University of Virginia honor student and one-time boyfriend of the couple's daughter, is serving a double life sentence for their 1985 murders. He and his attorney had hoped the presence of the Haysoms' blood on the knife would have lent credence to his claims of innocence at an appeals hearing scheduled for Dec.9 in Bedford Circuit Court.
Soering's attorney, Gail Marshall, said the lack of blood was "not surprising," adding that if the knife had been used in a murder, it probably would have been cleaned.
"We had hoped there would be something more identifying," she said. But "if there's no blood, there's just no additional evidence one way or the other."
"It's disappointing, but it's clear from the crime scene that somebody washed off something in the sink," Soering said in a telephone interview from prison Monday.
Soering is seeking a new trial on the grounds that information about the knife was withheld from the defense.
A former Bedford County deputy, George Anderson of Montvale, says he stopped two hitchhikers on a highway near the Haysom home shortly after the Haysoms' bodies were discovered.
Anderson has told Soering's attorney that while he questioned the men, one of them hid a folding Buck knife in the back of his patrol car. Anderson later confiscated the knife and has had it in his possession for the past decade.
A day or so after Anderson stopped the drifters, on April 6, 1985, the two men stabbed to death a Roanoke vagrant. When the drifters were arrested on the murder charges, they had another large folding knife in their possession similar to the one Anderson said he had confiscated.
State medical examiners have said the knife that Anderson turned over to the court last month is consistent with the type of weapon that made many of the Haysoms' wounds.
The drifters' fingerprints were introduced into evidence at Soering's 1990 trial as prints that were compared to and eliminated as sources of unidentified prints found in the Haysom home. None of Soering's prints were found at the murder scene. Soering claims Elizabeth Haysom and accomplices unknown to him committed the murders.
Representatives of the Bedford County Sheriff's Office have said they had a record of Anderson stopping two men, but had no information or paperwork about a knife. The sheriff's office has said it turned over all materials it had to Soering's defense.
LENGTH: Medium: 53 linesby CNB