The Meon Hill Pitchfork Murders

Killed on Valentine's Day in 1945, Charles Walton came to a bloody end at a farm in Lower Quinton, the Warwickshire village where he lived. The 74-year-old farm labourer was known to be a slightly unusual character, although he was well liked in the village, where he lived with his niece Edie.

On February 14 1945, he was trimming hedges on the farm where he worked, having walked to work that morning carrying a pitchfork and a slash hook - used for cutting branches. Edith returned home from work about 4pm and was surprised to find her uncle not at home. His habits were normally as regular as clockwork, and so after a while she asked her neighbour Harry Beasley if he would help search for him. They immediately went to the Firs and Alfred Potter, Waltons employer joined them as they walked to where Potter claimed to have last seen Charles cutting hedges sometime between 12.00 and 12.30 pm.

Mr Potter gave at least three separate times at which he claimed to have seen Walton, in ‘shirtsleeves’, working on the hedge-cutting as he walked home from the College Arms pub. Before long, the trio came upon the body of Charles Walton.

The old man had been brutally murdered. He had been beaten about the head and face with his own walking stick, and there were injuries to his hands and arms where he had tried to fend off these blows. Then his throat had been slashed open with his own slash-hook which had been buried in his throat with great force. Finally, a pitchfork had been thrust into his neck so powerfully that it completely pinned his body to the ground as if to keep his spirit from rising?

A large cross was also carved into his chest, leading villagers to suspect that witchcraft was somehow involved in the savage killing. His pocket-watch was missing, which was invariably about his person. Strangely, this watch was discovered at his former home 15 years later, despite an extensive search at the time. His trousers had been unfastened and his flies undone. His shirt too, had been unfastened, and many people have claimed subsequently that a cross had been cut into Walton’s chest, perhaps the source of the witchcraft theory as a motive. Despite Potter’s claims to have seen him with his shirt-sleeves rolled-up, Walton was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and was found with his jacket on. Whoever did the deed was possessed of an unnatural strength and violence, at least in those terrible final moments of Walton’s life.

There are strong indications that Potter was the culprit, It transpired that Potter claimed he was on his way to remove the body of a dead heifer from a ditch just before he allegedly saw Walton working on the hedges and he blamed the death on George.

Locals were so concerned by the evil events that Scotland Yard sent down an inspector, Robert Fabian, to work out why Charles had faced such a gory end.

Meon Hill, where Charles' body was found, had been the subject of strange tales for centuries, with reports of huge black dogs stalking the supposedly haunted hill which appeared from nowhere and had no obvious owner. Inspector Fabian encountered this mysterious dog near to the murder scene, before hearing the legends. He thought it must belong to a small boy who appeared soon afterwards – but as soon as Fabian mentioned the dog, the lad fled in terror. In 1885, another boy had seen the black dog on three consecutive nights before a death in his family; the dog was a sort of psycho-pomp. On the final occasion the dog was accompanied by the apparition of a headless woman. The boy’s name was Charles Walton. Sometime after Walton’s murder, the body of a black dog was found hanging in a tree nearby.

*

Walton was said to have a strange power over animals, especially horses and fierce dogs, but also birds, which flew straight into his outstretched hand. Meon Hill itself was It didn’t need Scotland Yard to divine that something very queer was going on in Lower Quinton.

During the investigation, an officer came across a book titled The book, Folklore, Old Customs and Superstitions in Shakespeareland. The book, penned by J. Harvey Bloom in 1929, featured a passage which mentioned the death of a Charles Walton in 1885, after seeing a foreboding ghost. Rumours soon spread that the recently-killed Charles Walton had somehow been connected to the man of the same name, who died a supernatural death 60 years previously.

Fabian sensationalised the ‘mystery’ and even went so far as to allege that Walton had been abducted by a coven, then taken 12 miles distant to the ‘Whispering Knights’ – one of the monuments which together comprise the Rollright Stones – and ritually sacrificed in a ‘Druid’ ceremony on the sacred day of Ash Wednesday, when a victim’s blood was shed onto the soil to ensure a fruitful harvest. Either Fabian was himself guilty of wicked misrepresentation and sensationalism, or he really did suspect that something extraordinary was going on at Meon Hill. He claimed that the local community had greeted his enquiries with a ‘wall of silence’.