The U.S. this week deported a German man convicted in the high-profile killings of his girlfriend's parents 35 years ago, in a crime that stunned a Virginia community and prompted decades of media obsession.
Jens Soering, 53, flew from a Washington, D.C.-area airport to Frankfurt on Monday, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.
He served two life sentences for the first-degree murders in 1985 of Nancy and Derek Haysom, whose daughter Elizabeth attended the University of Virginia with Soering at the time. Both were found nearly decapitated in their Virginia home.
The young couple led police on an international chase after the killings and were arrested in London in 1986. Soering fought extradition on the grounds that the U.S. allowed for the death penalty in certain cases, but in 1990, capitulated to authorities.
Virginia authorities released him last month, on the condition that he be taken into immigration custody immediately.
Soering, the son of a German diplomat, told a reporter in 2011 that Elizabeth Haysom committed the double murder; but he "decided to lie and to cover (...) up" the crime by taking the blame, thinking that if he were returned to Germany, he would only spend a decade in prison at the most.
"I loved Elizabeth and I believed that the only way I could save her life from the electric chair was for me to take the blame, and that I personally really faced no more than a few years in a German prison," Soering testified at the time.
He was convicted of first-degree murder in 1990.
Elizabeth Haysom pleaded guilty to being an accessory in her parents' stabbing deaths. She remains in prison in Virginia and must be released by 2032, if she is not paroled before.
Motives given at varying times during the trial and in the years since included disapproval of the young couple's relationship by the Haysom family, and allegations of abuse against Elizabeth.
