So You Think You Know It All: A compendium of extremely interesting and slightly strange true stories. The Show One
Edie. There were quite a few people who believed he practised witchcraft and that he kept natterjack toads as familiars,’ says local historian Dave Matthews. (Familiars are pets owned by witches and warlocks, and commanded to do their bidding.) Dave continues:
On the night of his murder, two eyewitnesses saw him pass through the churchyard and on up to Hillground field on the slopes of Meon Hill. He’d been working for Alfred Potter of Firs farm and Potter reported seeing him at midday repairing the hedgerows. The alarm was first raised at 6 p.m., when Walton failed to return home. Just after nightfall Edie Walton, Alfred Potter and a friend went looking for him and found him dead a short distance from the field.
The local constabulary was called to the murder scene. The Metropolitan Police report of the investigation – MEPO 3/2290, held in the National Archives at Kew – records that the first police officer at the scene was PC Michael James Lomasney. ‘He arrived at 7.05 p.m. Detectives of Stratford-upon-Avon CID arrived later in the evening and Professor James M. Webster, of the West Midlands Forensic Laboratory, arrived at 11.30 p.m. The body was removed at 1.30 a.m.’
Locally, the gruesome murder and the way it had been executed sparked rumours of ritual sacrifice. Some recounted to the almost salivating tabloid reporters the tale of Ann Tennant who, 70 years earlier, had been accused of being a witch and was murdered with a pitchfork near to where Walton was found.
Others cited another report, from the late nineteenth century, about a young boy from the village, whose name just also happened to be Charles Walton. He had encountered a giant black dog on Meon Hill and then returned home to discover his sister had died. (Black dogs in English folklore are a portent of death – The Hound of the Baskevilles, published in 1902, takes its cue from that belief.)
In fact, Ann Tennant was murdered in front of witnesses by a certifiable lunatic – there was nothing ritualistic about it. And there is no evidence linking the Charles Walton of 1885 to the murdered Charles Walton.
When Fabian arrived, he immediately focused on the fact that Walton’s tin watch and his money belt were missing. Walton always kept both items about his person, so robbery seemed a good motive – and finding that watch could be key to finding the murderer. But Fabian didn’t discount witchcraft as a second line of enquiry.
By mid-afternoon the next day, Detective Inspector Fabian had brought the twentieth century to the village of Lower Quinton. An RAF surveillance plane shot across the countryside, providing high-resolution photographs of the surrounding area. The image was so detailed it even picked out the bloodstains and the trampled grass. Fabian’s detectives began to plot the movements over the previous 24 hours of every last resident in the surrounding area.
But this was where cutting-edge technology was brought to its knees by a village determined to keep a secret.
By the end of the week Fabian had interviewed all 493 villagers. He was troubled by their reluctance to talk about anything other than the failure of that year’s harvest. There were whispers that Walton, a bitter piece of work with no love for his fellow villagers, was to blame for this; that he had let his natterjack toad familiars hop through the fields to blast (ie destroy) the crops. Accordingly, his blood was spilt by the murderer, or even murderers, in order to bring the land back to fertility.
Fabian wrote, ‘The natives of Lower Quinton are of a secretive disposition and do not take easily to strangers… Many could not make eye contact and some even became physically ill after questioning.’
On another occasion, he wrote, he and his team were met by a collective silence when they entered the local pub.
Seventy years later, people are still talking about why Fabian was stonewalled by the entire village. Graham Saunders is a former police officer, who grew up in Lower Quinton, and Fabian’s arrival and investigation is still a vivid childhood memory. ‘I remember groups of men going from house to house in the village with clipboards, wearing long dark overcoats and trilby hats.’ Graham believes the village stayed quiet because ‘… Quinton people are very proud and they didn’t like to think that this could happen in the village and I think that is the reason why they just shut up. After they had left, no one talked about the murder while I was growing up at all.’
Graham’s own instinct is that the murder was committed by an outsider:
You have to remember that this was during the war. Enemy paratroopers had been popping up all over the countryside and there were POW camps in the area. Back then villagers had good cause to be wary of strangers. And as for the wall of silence, it’s likely that no one knew anything about the murder. I don’t think it was a cover-up. It was splashed across all the papers and was a disgrace to Lower Quinton. That’s why everyone is keen to forget the story.
The ritual aspect Walton’s murder is a good story, but as Graham points out, it’s not the story.
They were a superstitious bunch back then. I once brought back a snake in a bucket with some friends and my grandmother was horrified that it would affect the fertility of the crops. Such old wives’ tales must have seemed absurd to Fabian and his men from the city. But there was never any proof at all to substantiate any of the bizarre rumours which have persisted over the years. The most likely motive was robbery. There was talk of Walton receiving £300 that month from gambling, which was completely illegal in those days, so it was a practice which attracted a dangerous crowd. Fabian strongly suspected Alfred Potter, Walton’s employer, for contaminating the murder scene and leaving his fingerprints on the murder weapon, but this was purely speculation. I doubt we’ll ever find out the truth.
In the end Fabian took 4,000 statements and traced gypsies, tinkers and tramps who had passed through the village. But the murderer was never found. In his final interview, one suspect replied, ‘He’s been dead and buried a month now, what are you worried about?’
The land surrounding Lower Quinton has long been home to sacred sites and stone circles, but one stone that no longer stands is Walton’s gravestone. It disappeared from the churchyard, removed by an upset relative who was fed up with the media interest.
To this day Charles Walton’s murder remains the oldest unsolved crime in Warwickshire Police history. Fabian remained convinced that the village knew the answer and was guarding a secret.
In his report on the case, there is no mention of witchcraft as an official, or indeed any, line of enquiry. His memoir suggests he believed – at least for literary effect – otherwise. He wrote:
I advise anybody who is tempted at any time to venture into Black Magic, witchcraft, Shamanism – call it what you will – to remember Charles Walton and to think of his death, which was clearly the ghastly climax of a pagan rite. There is no stronger argument for keeping as far away as possible from the villains with their swords, incense and mumbo-jumbo. It is prudence on which your future peace of mind and even your life could depend.
There is a weird coda to Fabian’s telling of the case. Preparing to leave Lower Quinton, he took a last walk around the village and surrounding fields. At the foot of Meon Hill he was nearly knocked off his feet by a large black dog that appeared as if from nowhere and came haring across the grass directly towards him. Seconds later a small boy came down the same hill. ‘Was that your dog?’ asked the stunned detective. ‘What dog?’ the boy replied.
Of the actual case, Fabian signed off his memoirs with the following: ‘Maybe one day, someone will talk, but not to me, a stranger from London. But in the office of the Warwickshire Constabulary, I happen to know, this case is not yet closed.’
DON’T TELL HIM, PIKE!
Cliff Twemlow may not be a household name but, to fans of the more esoteric end of the cult entertainment spectrum in the early 1970s and beyond, he is a giant of stage, screen, incidental music, literature – and bodybuilding. Indeed, to many in his hometown of Manchester he’s a legend who sits comfortably on the same pedestal as that city’s great actors, writers and musicians.
Cliff