Martyr or Murderer: Jens Soering, the Media, and the Truth

In 1990, Jens Soering, a German honors student at the University of Virginia, was sentenced to life after a spectacular televised trial for the 1985 murders of his girlfriend’s parents, Derek and Nancy Haysom. From his Virginia prison cell, Soering deployed his charm to create his own personal innocence project, recruiting celebrities such as Martin Sheen, John Grisham, and the President of Germany.

Soering was paroled and deported to Germany in 2019. Soering sold the rights to his story and launched a media campaign which portrayed him as a victim of America’s cruel and arbitrary courts. The campaign has now culminated in a Netflix documentary series. Yet skeptics have questioned Soering’s claims, and he is now locked in a pitched battle to define his place in history.

Andrew Hammel, a bilingual German/English criminal lawyer and investigative journalist, traces the entire story, beginning with the bizarre romance which led to two gruesome killings. Drawing on five years of research and confidential sources with fresh revelations, Hammel takes the reader behind the scenes of one of the most extraordinary true-crime cases in modern history – and its equally gripping aftermath.