She told me she had killed her parents. I want my parents out of my life. Was he her pawn . I had a choice whether he killed my importants reporter did he kill for love or just confess to it . One of them is lying. Reporter now a few anymore and new evidence tonight, claiming he is innocent. Reporter you say that jens confessed to a crime he didnt commit out of love, loyalty, lust for Elizabeth Haysom. You have a guy who has been with one woman in his life, and she is the devil. Reporter if he didnt do it, who did . We know two guys did it. Somebody watching this show right now knows them. They walk among us. Good evening. Im david muir. And im elizabeth vargas, and this is 20 20. Reporter los angeles, california, the laemmle royal theater. Its opening night. The movie . Right up hollywoods alley. Two obsessed lovers, a grizzly murder, sex and betrayal. My parents died because jens and i were obsessed with each other. Reporter but it turns out, in the genre of you cant make this up, hollywood didnt. The movie, killing for love is actually a documentary in theaters now. A deep dive into the reallife case of jens soering, behind bars for nearly 32 years for a brutal crime he says he did not commit. Its a natural Human Emotion to want somebody to blame. Reporter and jens multidecade crusade for freedom has now attracted a dream team of alist supporters. Thats screen legend martin sheen leading the q a at that l. A. Showing. He could not possibly have been at the scene. Reporter theres also music mogul jason flom the man responsible for launching katy perrys career. Reporter and a founding board member of the innocence project. He is somebody who could have and should have known better, and he was blinded by love. Reporter even german chancellor Angela Merkle has advocated for jens release. But his two strongest advocates, ironically, arent highprofile celebrities or hotshot defense attorneys. Theyre police officers. As far as him physically killing these people, no, i dont think he did. Reporter one is an investigator who originally worked on the case. Show me. Reporter the other, a current sheriff now reinvestigating it. If you break it down and look at what the evidence truly is, i dont feel like it would support a conviction if he was tried today. Reporter jens story begins in 1984 at the university of virginia. He is 18 years old, the son of a german diplomat, a freshman and a jefferson scholar with a full scholarship to uva. We were in the same Echols Scholars Program. The Echols Scholars Program pulls the top 6 of each entering class. Reporter amy lemley wrote an extensive investigative Magazine Article about the case. What was jens like . He had the physique more of a boy than a man. Kind of baby fat. He had big, thick glasses that covered about half of his face. They said that most people really couldnt stand to be in a conversation with him, because he just loved to argue. Reporter he was intellectually arrogant . I would say so. Reporter he was also, by his own admission, sexually inexperienced. Sexually not only inexperienced, but a virgin, right . Reporter uhhuh. And he meets a girl, Elizabeth Haysom, who is one of the hottest girls on campus. She was apparently very bright, as well. Came from a very good family. And he falls head over heels in love with her. Reporter elizabeth is two years older than jens. Her father, derek haysom, was a canadian steel mogul and her mother, nancy, the goddaughter of lady astor, a wealthy aristocrat, and the first woman to take a seat in the british parliament. But this power family seem to have no power over their wild child daughter. Elizabeth ran away from boarding school in england and spent five months in europe using drugs. Nevertheless, she presented well to her classmates at uva. She had this great shock of blonde hair hanging down, and she was the opposite of who you think might end up with jens soering. Reporter people must have been taken aback by her selection of him. Yes. Very few people understood what was going on between those two. Reporter one thing apparently going on between the virginal freshman and his unlikely alluring companion . A series of xrated, handwritten letters they exchanged over several months. When you see and you read those love letters, you can sort of feel that there was a lot of sexual tension. Reporter these are just some of the ones we can actually read on television. Dear liz, i love you. Je taime. I love you selfishly, and i love you with pain. How do you feel about a couple of drings back at my place . I want to be with you, around you, through you. Reporter but only months into their relationship in march 1985, tragedy strikes. Derek w. R. Haysom and his wife, nancy, were stabbed to death in their home. Reporter elizabeths parents are found brutally murdered inside their rural retirement home in boonsboro, virginia. It sort of sits on the border, right there, of lynchburg and Bedford County. Just a very nice, quiet, wealthy community. The bodies were only discovered this afternoon at their home on holcomb rock road. It was a very shocking crime. Id never seen anything, anything like that before. Reporter thenrookie investigator, Ricky Gardner is one of the first to arrive on the scene. This is your first real homicide, right . Yes. Yes, maam. Early we were able to determine that this was not a burglary. Reporter nothing appears to be missing. There is even nancy haysoms purse with money still in it. The haysoms must have let whomever did this to them into the house because there was no sign of forced entry. But id never seen any human being that had been injured by another human being in that in that fashion. Reporter overkill . Overkill. It was up close and personal. To me it was like a slaughterhouse. Reporter chuck reid was a Bedford County investigator in 1985 and worked the case with gardner for a year before leaving the sheriffs office. He took me inside the crime scene. You opened the door when you first came here. The first thing i saw was derek haysoms body was lying here with his head up against basically up against the corner of this fireplace. Reporter this corner here . Yeah. Reporter derek haysom had been stabbed 36 times. Nancy, six. Her body was found in the kitchen. Both were stabbed in the heart. Both nearly decapitated. As you step over and come in, this area right here is where all the blood was reporter where . Just around in this area, what was smeared around in this area here. Reporter the first thing in your mind was what kinda gang came in here and did this . There was concern because of the smearing blood, initially, that there was some sort of cult involved. Rumors of witchcraft, voodoo, fueled curiosity and the demand for answers. Reporter whodunnit theories are rampant. Word that derek haysom upset workers in the steel business fuels rumors of mafiastyle hit. But a clue in a rental car agreement is about to change the direction of the case. You saw that and you thought thats when we got to thinking, well, wait a minute. Reporter stay with us. S. My healthy routine helps me feel my best. So i add activia yogurt to my day. With its billions of live and active probiotics, activia may help support my digestive health, so i can take on my day. Activia. Now in probiotic dailies. Theyd dominated for decades. Best team in the world. A machine. Robots. Hadnt lost a game in 20 years. They would score at will. You gotta remember, we were amateur players, college players. About to pull off the greatest upset in American Sports history. But we were more than american. I never realized we were from all over. 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She told us that her and her german boyfriend had rented a car on that friday and drove to washington to sightsee. And what do they do while theyre in washington, d. C. . According to her, they just played around, went out to eat, went to movies. Reporter the films were stranger than paradise and ironically witness. They had stayed at the washington marriott. And we was able to verify later that they, in fact, had. Found the receipt the hotel receipt where they had checked in on the 29th and gotten room service twice. Reporter one of those room service deliveries, food for two, was right around the time Police Believe elizabeths parents were murdered. What did she say about her relationship with her parents . She said that she loved her parents very deeply. And that she was very fond of them. Reporter but elizabeths uncle louis benedict, nancy haysoms younger brother, says the relationship between mother and daughter wasnt as rosy as elizabeth described it. Because of my sisters bullheadedness, i would say that they locked horns. Reporter and elizabeths parents didnt appear to be happy with their daughters new boyfriend, jens soering. They did not like the young man and did everything thought they could to try and separate them. Reporter as Police Continue their investigation into the haysoms double murder, they find the agreement for the rental car elizabeth says she and jens used that weekend. This is the rental car agreement . Yes. Show me where the mileage is. Right here is your mileage of 669 miles. You saw that, and you thought . Thats when we got to thinking, well, wait a minute. Reporter even though this is long before the days of waze youre all set. Drive safely. Reporter investigators know from uvas charlottesville campus to washington, d. C. , the round trip is only 240 miles. 240 miles. And you had 669 miles . Exactly. So once we put pen to paper, we sat down and we looked. And if you went from charlottesville to d. C. , d. C. Back to lynchburg, lynchburg back to washington, and then back to charlottesville, thats pretty close to bein 669 miles. Reporter ts quite a coincidence so Police Question elizabeth again. We asked her about that miles. And she said that they had gotten lost. Thats pretty lost . Yeah, pretty lost. That ring true to you . Well, i mean, were talking college kids. Didnt put a lot of stock in that. Reporter plus elizabeth is cooperating with police and agrees to give her fingerprints and blood. But its a path of bloody of footprints in the hay some haysoms front yard thats gotten the investigators attention. The prints were revealed by luminol, a chemical that tests for the presence of blood. You have a set of prints that walk up to the driveway and end here at the driveway as if someone got in a car. Just stop . They just stop. Clearly they got into something . Reporter but when investigator reid examines jens and elizabeths rental car, he comes up empty. When you sprayed the luminol inside the inside of elizabeth and jenss rental car i got no reaction. Reporter remember its 1985, and dna testing is not yet in use in criminal courts. So without a hit on the car, investigators are looking for a match to the type o blood found at the crime scene. It wasnt the victims so they assumed it must be the killers. There was several droplets minute droplets of o blood found on the screen door and there was two small spots found in the master bedroom. Reporter investigators are flummoxed again, because elizabeth has type b blood. Her fingerprints did show up on a vodka bottle at her parents home, but thats not surprising, she visited often. But then someone from elizabeths own family, points a finger of suspicion at her. It was from dr. Howard haysom, who is elizabeths half brother. He thought his sister had something to do with his parents death. Reporter thats a pretty unbelievable pretty shocking thick thing to say. Exactly. But it just happened to come at the time when you had nothing in this case except for this strange rental car. Right. Agreement. And of course, he didnt like jens. He didnt think much of jens, either. Reporter remember, elizabeth said she and jens spent the weekend of the murders together in washington, d. C. So investigators interview him next. He stepped in, it was like, i think to myself, i cant see this little kid doin somethin like that. That kinda damage i dont know if hes ever been in a fight in his life. Reporter audio tapes from that First Police Interview with jens reveal a confident College Freshman fending off suspicion, telling investigators hes the son of a german diplomat. What i thought i could do in coming down here this week and speaking with you people is give you an impression of who i am and what i know. What was your impression . He was very sure of himself. Im willing to talk to you again if you want me to so that you will feel confident and secure in the knowledge that you dont have to bug me anymore. You and detective reid sort of played good cop, bad cop with him. We did. You were the bad cop . I was. When we asked him to give us his blood and his fingerprints, he wassed a ma adamant. He said, i cant do that. Why not . His explanation was that if it got back to our state department, that a german diplomats son was a person of interest . Person of interest in a homicide or suspect in a homicide case that he would his whole family would be deported. I said, look, jens, i said, im 99 sure youre innocent of this thing, but i said, i just need that 1 to convince me that you are totally innocent. And thats when he decided, he said, okay, ill call you all next week. Reporter as investigators wait to meet with jens, the phone rings, but its not who they expect. Dr. Howard haysom called us. And i never will forget that phone call. 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There have been no arrests, but the haysoms youngest daughter Elizabeth Haysom and her german boyfriend jens soering are under suspicion. With limited evidence, police are left to wait for jens to voluntarily give his fingerprints and blood. Reporter jens says hell go think about it. Calls a few days later and says he will, in fact, submit . He said, ive been busy with a paper, ill do it next wednesday. I cant do it this week. Reporter but before the set appointment with jens, a shocking setback. Dr. Howard haysom called us. And i will never forget that phone call. He was upset. And he said, youve you know, youve let em get away. And so they vanished. Reporter into thin air . Into thin air. I said, well, apparently theyre both guilty of somethin. Otherwise, why would they leave . Reporter unbeknownst to virginia investigators, the couple is 4,000 miles away in europe on their way in a jetsetting globetrotting journey across the world, keeping a journal of their exploits, along with maps and receipts for their International Ports of call. This is when they were traveling. Reporter heres something from stuttgart. Something from luxembourg. Shilling. Reporter oh, this is bangkok. This is a map of bangkok. They had quite the journey on hey sure did. t they . Lets picture these two young lovers going on this romantic, tense, crazy adventure to england. Life on the lam in london. Yeah, under assumed names