ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 1, 1996 TAG: 9612020071
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: KEEN MOUNTAIN
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
In winter, Keen Mountain Correctional Center is especially depressing - the barbed wire and concrete apex of a desolate craggy rock in the middle of miles of snowy wilderness.
It has been Jens Soering's home for the past 12 months, and he may spend the rest of his life here.
Eleven years ago, the German native was a shy, awkward Jefferson scholar at the University of Virginia dating an older, beautiful girl of aristocratic stock. He also was a murder suspect.
In 1990, after a year abroad fleeing capture and then four more years fighting extradition, Soering was tried for the murders of Elizabeth Haysom's parents, Derek and Nancy, and given a double life sentence. Elizabeth Haysom was convicted of accessory to murder and is serving a 90-year sentence at Goochland Correctional Center for Women.
Soering, now 30, doesn't look that much different now than he did at his trial. A little thinner, he wears a scraggly goatee. But his eyes are still magnified behind his Coke-bottle-thick glasses. His face doesn't betray the harshness of a decade spent behind bars. He still looks like a college student, albeit one in blue prison coveralls.
The arrogance and thinly veiled contempt he showed for prosecutors and police on the witness stand is muted, but he's still just as quick to provide explanations for why he says he didn't kill the Haysoms. He says Elizabeth - and accomplices unknown to him - did.
Soering is hoping to be able to bring up some of the points at an appeals hearing Dec. 9 in Bedford County Circuit Court.
"I'm just hoping that this is the first step at least in finally bringing out the truth and resolving the open questions and clearing my name and, hopefully, finding out who really did kill the Haysoms," he said.
Until last week, it was still uncertain whether Soering would attend the hearing. He was granted permission by the court, but Keen Mountain's warden has refused to guarantee that Soering can return to the prison's protective custody unit if he goes to Bedford. Soering has decided to take the risk, however, and a court order was entered that will guarantee his return to Bedford.
Soering was jailed in European prisons until 1990, when he was transferred to the Bedford County Jail and was sent to Mecklenberg Correctional Center after his conviction. At Mecklenberg, he was the prison law librarian, and was put into protective custody because of the high-profile nature of his trial.
At Keen Mountain, he shares a double cell the size of a walk-in closet with a sex offender in a cell block with 42 other double cells.
When he's not locked up, he can go outside on a basketball court for an hour, where he jogs, or he can sit in a common room with six tables and a TV. He usually prefers sitting alone in his cell, exercising or listening to classic rock tapes.
At Keen Mountain, he's also the librarian, looking over four carts of "inadequate" books. He reads a lot, including some German literature and "Spenser for Hire" mystery novels.
He said he used to read existentialist authors and could quote whole passages from his favorite novel, Albert Camus' "The Stranger." When it was pointed out to him that the book was a first-person account of a remorseless killer, he said he was wrong, it was Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus" that had been his favorite.
Soering said he has spent a lot of his time in prison writing; first, his autobiography, "Mortal Thoughts," which was posted on the Internet, then a short story, and most recently his own fictional mystery novel about a series of crimes committed at the University of Virginia, each based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.
Discovering Christianity while in jail, he does a Bible study every morning and corresponds frequently with the minister of a church in Lynchburg. He has also written an article that was published in St. Joseph's Messenger, a New Jersey-based Christian magazine.
More often, he spends time dwelling on his mistakes and hoping for his freedom.
"I'm not being falsely accused. I accused myself," said Soering, who contends that he falsely confessed to the murders to save his onetime girlfriend, and then himself, from the death penalty. "I'm the one who committed this monumental idiocy. It was my stupidity that put me in here."
Soering said he knows many people are convinced he's guilty, but he wants them to look at the evidence. "It doesn't matter whether I'm a son of a bor not. It doesn't matter whether or not I'm arrogant, and it doesn't matter whether Elizabeth was a femme fatale or if she was just sick, which is what I think.
"Nothing matters but the facts, and whether or not the correct verdict was reached."
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) Soering. color.by CNB