James Morton recalls how a top Scotland Yard detective tackled a gruesome Valentine's Day murder and how claims of witchcraft cast a sinister shadow over his investigation.


The middle of last month put me in the mind, quite naturally, of Valentine’s Day murders. The most famous was, of course, in Chicago, but there have been notable contenders in Montreal and London that were every bit as violent. In the London killing, one of the victims was reciting the Lord’s Prayer before he was executed and when he came to the words, ‘Thy will be done,’ one of the men allegedly involved said, ‘It will, son, it will’.

But one of the most intriguing of unsolved killings was a much more domestic matter on 14 February 1945 in Lower Quinton, Warwickshire. For years it was billed as the result of witchcraft. Even if the explanation is probably a good deal more prosaic, to use the common cliché someone ‘got away with murder’.


Charles Walton, a 74-year-old labourer, was found pinned to the ground with his own pitchfork. His face had been slashed and the two cuts on his chest were in the shape of a cross. His slash-hook was embedded in the chest wounds. His arms had marks of defence wounds and a bloodstained walking stick was found nearby. An old tin watch was missing.


Ever since the death of Teddy Haskell and the acquittal of his mother in a case in which all the physical evidence had been literally wiped out, it had been the practice for some 40 years for local police to call in Scotland Yard’s murder squad. It was a time when the press and public swallowed every word the great detectives had to say at their press conferences and there was no one greater than Robert Fabian – ‘Fabian of the Yard’ – whose exploits would go on to make a highly successful television series.


It was Fabian who was sent to investigate in Lower Quinton and not for the first time – nor the last – would a Yard detective find that locals were not at all pleased to be questioned by outsiders. Four years later, another who failed was Reginald Spooner, who went to Cardiff to investigate the killing of Ernest Melville, beaten to death on the docks. No one would talk and he believed the local community was sheltering the killer. He wrote to his wife that ‘apparently they have never cleared up a murder down here, so this may be another one!’ And it was.


The village of Lower Quinton itself had around 500 inhabitants, but there was a prisoner-of-war camp two miles away with another 1,500 men. It was potentially far easier to blame a foreigner, particularly in such a savage killing. The local vicar helpfully narrowed it down to being an Italian-style killing, and indeed an Italian prisoner was seen to have been wiping fresh blood from his hands and scrubbing blood from his coat.


However, the forensic evidence showed it was rabbit blood – the man had been poaching to supplement the camp diet. A metal detector made a positive sounding but it was not the watch, but rather a rabbit snare.


The local community was steeped in witchcraft legend. In 1875 a young man, John Heywood, had killed an old woman, whom he believed to be a witch, with a hayfork. He had gone on to say he would kill all the remaining 16 witches in Long Compton. (Witches were apparently best killed by sticking spikes into them.)


The old Anglo-Saxon term was stacund, and the belief was in line with driving the stake through the heart of a suicide victim or suspected vampire.


The second local superstition was more recent. A man had seen a black dog on Meon Hill outside the village. The dog had metamorphosed into a headless woman in a silk dress. The next day the man’s sister had died. The man was Charles Walton.


As a result he was believed to have been involved with witchcraft and was credited with magical powers.


The investigation did not start well and things got worse. Londoners were not liked and Mr Fabian wrote: ‘Cottage doors were shut in our faces and even the most innocent witnesses seemed unable to meet our eyes.’


Then, unfortunately, a police car ran over a dog and when, the next day, a heifer unexpectedly died, that was the effective end of the investigation. The village shut its collective face to the intruders. Some 4,000 statements were taken and 29 samples of hair and clothing were examined, but it all came to nothing. Mr Fabian returned to London defeated. The villagers remained convinced that given the combination of the sacred and the secular, the day of his death was particularly significant. Mr Walton had died because of his involvement in witchcraft.


The probable explanation is much more prosaic. Mr Walton was a money lender and one of his clients was Albert Potter, both his employer and church sidesman. Mr Potter, a keen racing man, was known to have a bad temper in drink and to be in Walton’s debt.


The debts were due for repayment and Mr Potter could not come up with the money. There was some supporting evidence. Mr Potter had located the body in the dark and his accounts of seeing Mr Walton during the day were inconsistent.


James Morton is a former criminal law specialist solicitor and now a freelance journalist