Several years ago, while visiting family in the Cotswolds, I had a drink in a pub outside Evesham. A friendly gentleman at the bar, upon learning I write books on crime and history, suggested I 'do one on the Lower Quinton murder.' He summarized the case for me: On Valentine’s Day 1945, 74-year-old farm labourer Charles Walton was found on the lower slopes of Meon Hill with a pitchfork plunged through his chest and a trouncing hook buried in his throat. Numerous crosses were carved into his flesh. Scotland Yard dispatched their best man, Chief Inspector Robert Fabian, who was stymied by superstitious villagers: they claimed Walton was a warlock who could converse with animals. Out of fear, they refused to cooperate with police. The case was never solved.
This immediately piqued my interest. I read numerous articles, all of which played up the witchcraft angle: Walton was found beneath a willow tree, he was killed in the middle of a stone circle once used for Black Magic rituals, he bred large toads he used to curse local crops, he was clairvoyant, he could communicate with birds, as a boy he was haunted by a headless woman and a black spectral hound. I paid several visits to Lower Quinton, but was warned villagers did not take kindly to questions about the 'Pitchfork Murder'.
For research, I went straight to the source: the Scotland Yard case files and the detailed reports and notes kept by Fabian. What I found intrigued me. Rumour and myth had overshadowed the facts of the case and, because of retellings in books and newspapers over the years, had been accepted as the truth. Charles Walton’s murder was bloody and grotesque—but there were no crosses carved into his flesh. He was not murdered in the middle of a stone circle, nor did villagers—who spoke with investigators—believe the man to be a practitioner of Black Magic. Indeed, the witchcraft angle seems to be a device hatched by reporters and authors—including Fabian, himself, who references the case in two volumes of memoirs.
That’s not to say the case isn’t strange, for it very much is. The residents of Lower Quinton did not seem at all alarmed by the vicious murder in their backyard. In a village of 493 people, not one person could shed any light on the subject. Although locals answered Fabian’s questions, they never volunteered information. The seasoned detective thought they were hiding something and believed 'some local history' unknown to the police played a part in the murder. There is a definite element of the creepy in Charles Walton’s killing.
As to the murderer, the circumstantial evidence points heavily to one man—a man Fabian believed for the rest of his life to be the killer and whose family operates a successful Cotswolds pub to this day. But any concrete solution to the case has forever been lost to history. Perhaps this is why the story of what many believe to be Britain’s last ritual witchcraft killing continues to fascinate.
Simon Read is the author of The Case that Foiled Fabian which lays out for the first time what actually happened and distills the truth from the many myths about this case that are today mistaken for facts.