On the page, every story has an ending, but in life, which has a more expansive sense of humor, plots often carry beyond the last scene. Four years ago, in the magazine, I reported on a story that had already run far: a brutal double murder that took place at a house in the woods in 1985; the conviction of two brainy college lovers, one the daughter of the victims; and the efforts of these two people, long estranged and long in prison, to incriminate each other as puzzling new information about the murders emerged. Elizabeth Haysom and Jens Soering had met at the University of Virginia and, even after decades of not being in contact, seemed eerily linked. He had become a writer from prison; she had become a writer from prison. He was working to be repatriated to his native country, Germany; she held Canadian citizenship and hoped to be returned there. Their story entranced me in part because it seemed to prove something we know already: that our lives are formed by shared experience with other people, and that, even years after relationships fade, their influence cannot be molted off our forms. Together, the minds of Haysom and Soering comprise a complete knowledge of what really happened on the night of the murders—something that decades of investigation have failed to reveal with precision. That knot of truth and lies binds them like two entangled particles, which reflect each other’s presence even as they’re carried galaxies apart.
This week, the distance increased but the entanglement held, as Haysom and Soering’s shared story took an astonishing new turn. On November 25th, after rejecting fourteen parole requests from Soering and many other routes to extradition, the state of Virginia granted both him and Haysom parole, conditional on their respective deportations to Germany and Canada. On Monday night, Soering was loaded onto a jet, and on Tuesday he landed in Frankfurt, where he was greeted by German supporters and turned back into the world after more than thirty-three years behind bars. Soering was nineteen when he was incarcerated, having avoided the death penalty. Today, he is fifty-three.
As part of the conditions of his parole, Soering was forbidden from returning to the U.S. or approaching any members of the victims’ family, including Elizabeth Haysom. The paroles are a return to society, not a reassessment of the convictions. After initially confessing to the murders, Soering vociferously maintained his innocence in a series of books and public statements spanning three decades. Haysom pleaded guilty as an accomplice to a murder that, she and a Virginia jury agreed, Soering performed. He and his supporters have continually sought evidence that his trial was a miscarriage of justice; I wrote, in 2017, about his recent reëxamination of DNA analysis that was performed in 2009.
“My reaction in the room initially was disappointment, because I really wanted a conditional pardon at least, and hopefully a full pardon,” Soering told me recently, by phone, from the Farmville Detention Center, where he was being held while awaiting deportation. (Haysom, who has consistently sought to keep a lower press profile during the past thirty years—her conversations with me in 2015 were the first on-the-record interviews she’d given in decades—did not answer a request for comment, made through a friend.) “But I’ve had some time to think about it, and my view is that the only way to get me out of prison, politically, was through parole.”
The deportations came as a surprise, after decades of assiduous effort. On November 25th, Soering told me, he was called to the watch office in the Buckingham Correctional Center, where he had been transferred in 2009. In a meeting that lasted ten or fifteen minutes, the chair of the parole board, Adrianne Bennett, along with the board’s investigator and the prison warden, explained that he’d been granted parole with no pardon, subject to condition of his deportation. As a protective measure—parole status might make him a target for other prisoners—he was told to spend the night in the prison’s medical department. Then, the next morning, he was handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which took him to Farmville to await deportation.
Soering said that he wasn’t given a reason why—after thirty-three years, six months, twenty-five days—he and Haysom were suddenly paroled. Since 2014, a Capital News Service analysis found, Virginia has approved only six per cent of parole cases. In a statement, Bennett called Soering’s claims of innocence “without merit,” but noted that his and Haysom’s deportation would save taxpayer money and suit the circumstances. “Releasing Jens Soering and Elizabeth Haysom to their ICE deportation detainers is appropriate because of their youth at the time of the offenses, their institutional adjustment and the length of their incarceration,” she said.
Soering told me that he attributed the parole to a change in political opportunity. “In January, I was turned down for parole for the fourteenth time, because of the seriousness of the crime,” he said. “Ten months later, I get parole. The only thing that changed is that they had the midterm elections, and the Democrats flipped the Virginia General Assembly from Republican to Democrat.”
On arriving Tuesday, Soering entered the care of a German family; he has been estranged from his own since 2001. To shade him from the limelight, the family arranged to take him outside Germany for the holidays, and they have booked a psychiatrist who specializes in trauma to help him deal with the shock of reëntry—or, indeed, entry at all. Soering had spent only a few childhood years in Germany when he left, arriving in the United States in 1977 for school, and he says that, in his views and reference points, he feels more American than German. “Although the Germans expect me to be anti-American because of my experiences in this country, the exact opposite is true,” he told me. “It’s Americans who got me out of prison.” Over the decades, Soering has gained the attention of various supporters, including well-known figures such as John Grisham and Martin Sheen, and he thinks that their efforts helped to promote his cause. “Sometimes I joke about America: Y’all are batshit crazy, but you’re my kind of crazy.”
Jail and prison are, notoriously, black holes for human time and the continuum of culture which comes with it. When Haysom and Soering last moved through the world, people kept in touch by landline phone and letter, the first versions of Microsoft Windows and the Apple Macintosh had just been released, and Europe was divided by the Iron Curtain. (“I may be the last West German,” Soering joked to me.) Now the world is different, on the large scale and the small. The immigration-detention center where Soering awaited deportation had—stunningly to him—elliptical machines. “Of course, I’ve seen elliptical machines on television, but I’ve never been in direct contact with a room of them!” he told me, sounding dazed. He had never used a cell phone, let alone a smartphone; beyond a super-basic e-mail client that prisoners are allowed to use, he had never come into contact with the Internet, let alone the long shadow of social media. His first task will be earning money, and he has been led to believe that the best route is to trade on the peculiarity of his story. German publishers have approached him about his future books, he said, and there is interest from the German made-for-TV-movie industry. The show “Dr. Phil” taped a segment with Soering while he waited in Virginia for his deportation, and will tape more with him in Germany. “I talked with Dr. Phil on the phone, and he is very interested in wrongful convictions,” Soering said. A booking agent informed him that his thirty-three years behind bars would make him valuable as a teller of inspiring stories.
“What they want on the speaking circuit,” he said studiously, “is unique stories of resilience, and I have a really unique story of resilience. You know, it took me thirty-three years, but I fought my way off death row! And I fought my way out of prison! And I never gave up!” This kind of thing was new to him—he is used to producing restive texts arguing for his innocence—but he’d been told it was his best chance in this strange new world of influence and likes, so he was going to try to do his best. “Remember, a few years ago, there was that man in the United States who was on a hike and got trapped by a boulder and had to saw his own arm off, and then they made a movie about it?” Soering said. “He’s on the speaker’s circuit, and he is killing it.”
