Jens Soering freed in Germany after 33 years in Virginia prison.
Jens Soering stepped off a plane to become a free man in his native Germany on Tuesday, 33 years after he was locked up for a Virginia double murder that he insists he did not commit.
“This is the best day of my life,” he declared at a news conference that drew supporters and more than a half-dozen TV cameras to an airport in Frankfurt, according to German news broadcasts.
But Soering — a baby-faced diplomat’s son in oversized glasses when arrested, a middle-aged man in bifocals today — says he is not ready to put his ordeal completely behind him.
The quest that was his “full-time job” behind bars — proving his innocence to a state that agreed last month to parole but not pardon him — will carry into his life on the outside.
Soering, 53, kicked off his fresh start with a swirl of interviews in Germany, where he will live with a wealthy supporter in an undisclosed city. After the airport news conference, he was off to a television studio to do the “Dr. Phil” show via satellite.
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He has lawyers ready to renew his pardon petition to Gov. Ralph Northam (D). He plans to make his living giving speeches on how he survived three decades of incarceration.
He has two agents, one to handle media requests, the other for books and speaking gigs.
“I didn’t do this, okay?” Soering said, referring to the murders, during an interview last week at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Farmville.
He spoke on the condition that his remarks not be published until after he was deported to Germany — a condition for his release — for fear that his parole might be revoked. Plans to send him back to Germany 10 years ago abruptly collapsed, and Soering was on edge that something like that could happen again.
Virginia authorities granted Soering parole last month but refused his request for a pardon, finding his claims of wrongful conviction to be “without merit.”
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Soering said he still has hopes that Northam will agree to review his petition again and, ultimately, grant it.
Soering and his then-girlfriend, Elizabeth Haysom, were University of Virginia honors students in 1985 when her parents — Derek and Nancy Haysom — were found stabbed and nearly decapitated at their home in central Virginia.
Soering, then 18, and Haysom, 20, were not initially considered suspects. But they fled overseas months later as investigators closed in. They were eventually arrested in London, and Soering confessed, saying he killed the couple while Haysom waited for him at a hotel in Georgetown.
He later recanted, saying he was the one at the hotel while Haysom committed the murders to avenge sexual abuse by her mother. He said his initial confession was an effort to protect Haysom from the electric chair under the mistaken belief that his father’s position gave him diplomatic immunity. He was convicted and sentenced to two life terms in a sensational 1990 trial.
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Haysom, now 55, pleaded guilty to being an accessory before the fact, claiming she planned the murders but did not physically take part.
She also was paroled last month. In both cases, the state parole board said the release was “appropriate based on their youth at the time of the offenses, institutional adjustment and their length of incarceration.”
Haysom, a Canadian citizen, is awaiting deportation to that country. From an ICE detention facility in Georgia, she declined an interview request.
Soering won attention and believers over the years for writing books on his case, his conversion to Catholicism and prison reform. His supporters have long raised questions about the case that were never broached by his original lawyer, who was later disbarred and acknowledged suffering from a mental impairment during the trial.
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They noted that Soering got some key details of the crime scene wrong in his confession. And Haysom’s account — she said that Soering drove away from the murders wearing a blood-soaked sheet and that she cleaned the car with Coca-Cola — did not square with the rental car returned in sparkling condition. Finally, there was a bloody shoe print the size of a woman’s shoe, but prosecutors focused instead on a bloody sock print — evidence that Soering’s defenders dismiss as “junk” science.
In 2009, then-Gov. Tim Kaine (D) approved Soering’s transfer to a German prison, where he could have been released after two years. Amid an uproar, Kaine’s successor, Robert F. McDonnell (R), nixed the plan.
Support for Soering picked up steam in 2016, when a new analysis indicated that a man other than Soering was the source of the type O blood found at the Haysoms’ home.
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Soering is barred from returning to the United States or having contact with the victims’ family — including Haysom, whom he said he has no desire to see.
He is estranged from his father and brother, who live in Germany.
Soering said he plans to turn his ordeal into a motivational speech on resilience.
“I came through this pretty well, I think,” he said. “They didn’t break me. ... I was a free man who was imprisoned against his will, and I fought my way out.”
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