MYSTICAL: The Murder of Charles Walton

Exploring otherworldly occurrences takes research, time, and requires following all the loose ends.

But exploring your new So Supernatural merch store, we're making it easy.

Search the different options we hand-picked just for you: tote bags, t-shirts, and so much more.

Visit the So Supernatural shop at sosupernaturalpodcast.com backslash merch to get our brand new merch today.

I'm gonna put you on, nephew.

All right, um welcome to McDonald's.

Can I take your order?

Miss, I've been hitting up McDonald's for years.

Now it's back.

We need snack wraps.

What's a snack wrap?

It's the return of something great.

Snack wrap is back.

When murder cases go unsolved, it's typically because there's no suspect, no leads, no motive.

It's not usually because of superstition.

But that's exactly what happened in a tiny farming village in the heart of England.

In 1945, an elderly man was murdered in broad daylight just a stone's throw from the main road.

The town was so small and quiet, it should have been easy to find the killer, especially for one of Scotland Yard's greatest detectives.

But the more the detective learned about this village, the more he realized its people didn't want to talk because they harbored some very dark secrets.

And a lot of them had to do with witchcraft.

This is Supernatural.

I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.

This week's episode is about the Charles Walton murder.

75 years later, the case is still unsolved, but it's possible this entire town was responsible, and their motive could be more gruesome than anyone ever imagined.

We'll explore the mystery coming up.

Stay with us.

At the University of Arizona, we believe that everyone is born with wonder.

That thing that says, I will not accept this world that is.

While it drives us to create what could be,

that world can't wait to see what you'll do.

Where will your wonder take you?

And what will it make you?

The University of Arizona.

Wonder makes you.

Start your journey at wonder.arizona.edu.

I'm going to put you on, nephew.

All right, huh?

Welcome to McDonald's.

Can I take your order?

Miss, I've been hitting up McDonald's for years.

Now it's back.

We need snack wraps.

What's a snack wrap?

It's the return of something great.

Snack rap is back.

The last morning of Charles Walton's life was just like any other.

Quiet, predictable, ordinary.

In February of 1945, England was in the final stages of World War II.

But in the sleepy farm community of Lower Quinton, the clock may as well have stopped in the 16th century.

Lower Quinton was and still is a picturesque village of thatched roof cottages and green fields with stone walls.

It's in an area of England called the Cotswolds, which is thought to be the prettiest part of the country.

Basically what you think of when you read a Jane Austen novel.

Rolling hills, sheep grazing, you get the idea.

Charles had lived in Lower Quinton all his life.

He had no children, but he and his late wife had adopted their niece, Edith.

And now that Charles was a widower, Edith looked after him.

At 74, he was starting to have bad arthritis and needed help walking, but he was still in good enough shape to make a living by trimming hedges at a local farm.

So on the morning of February 14th, 1945, Charles woke up as usual.

He dressed in multiple layers to ward off the chill, and as always, he attached a white metal pocket watch to a chain on his waistcoat.

Edith made him breakfast and packed him a piece of cake for lunch.

At 8.30, she watched as Charles left the house with his two walking sticks and cut through a nearby churchyard on his way to work.

He was always home by four o'clock.

But when Edith came home at six, this day, Charles wasn't there.

This didn't sit right with Edith.

But first, she decided to check with their neighbor, a man named Harry Beasley.

Maybe Charles had just gone next door, but Harry hadn't seen Charles either.

So the two of them set off into the dark with flashlights.

Their destination was the farm where Charles worked, a place called the Furs.

The Furs was owned by a man named Alfred Potter, and it was situated at the base of Meon Hill, one of the oldest settled places in the Kotzwalds.

Archaeologists have found what look like forts made during the Iron Age on top of Meon Hill.

And according to legend, it was once the home of the devil himself, who then threw a rock at a local church.

Other stories have it as the wandering place of ghostly dogs and horses.

The whole town of Lower Quinton is basically in the shadow of this hill, and it's understood that you don't go up there unless you want to be creeped out.

But Edith and Harry don't really have a choice.

They finally make it to the firs and they're wandering around in the dark calling Charles's name, but he doesn't answer, so they decide to go to the main house.

Alfred Potter is just about to sit down to dinner, but when he hears his employee is missing, he leads Edith and Harry out into the field where he last saw Charles.

They're shining their flashlights everywhere until finally they look over one of the hedges and there's a shape on the ground.

It's Charles.

He's lying curled up on his left side just a few feet away from the hedge and he's surrounded by a pool of blood.

But that's not even the most gruesome part because Charles's bill hook, which is this basically curved trimming tool, is literally sticking out of his neck.

Now, this is obviously terrifying.

And as the three of them inch forward, they can see that Charles's throat has been slashed at least three different times.

It's done in such a savage way that all the main arteries of his neck have been cut.

In other words, he's almost been decapitated.

And that's not all.

Someone has plunged a pitchfork deep into Charles' face.

The handle looks like it's been forced down and sort of like wedged under the bottom of the hedge.

It's as if the killer wanted to pin Charles' head to the ground, even though he was already dead.

Edith starts to scream so loudly that a farm worker hears her from the other side of the hedge.

Potter yells at him to go call the police.

Meanwhile, Harry escorts Edith home, leaving Potter alone with the body.

A few minutes later, a constable by the name of Michael Lomazny arrives on the scene.

When he sees Charles' face and neck, he knows he's looking at a murder.

He also notices that Charles is wearing his pocket watch chain, but there's no pocket watch on the end of it.

And his clothes are unbuttoned and disheveled, as though someone rifled through everything to try and find something.

The constable doesn't know what to make of any of this, so he asks Potter the last time he saw Charles alive.

Potter answers that it was around 12, 10, maybe 12, 15 that afternoon when Charles was in the fields trimming the hedges.

Then, Lomazny shines a flashlight around the surrounding area and sees one of Charles' walking sticks.

One end is covered with blood and hair, so it's clear that it was used as a weapon.

He picks it up and shows it to Potter.

And that's when Potter's expression changes.

He stares at it like he's about to be sick.

Potter seems to get even more uncomfortable as more policemen show up, until finally he makes the excuse that he's cold and hungry and heads home.

Which is pretty suspicious behavior.

Like, Potter should want to know more about what happened to his his employee and whether there's a murderer on his property.

In any case, the police let him go and they call in a pathologist to examine the body.

The pathologist gets there around 11.30 that night and he tries to remove the pitchfork from Charles's face, but the tines have been pushed in so deeply it's almost impossible to pull them out.

He also discovers several bruises on Charles' scalp, along with some broken ribs on his left side.

And the backs of Charles's hands are covered in these strange cuts.

None of this makes sense, but everyone agrees this is overkill.

Like whoever did this must have wanted to destroy Charles Walton.

But why?

The next day, the cops canvassed the village asking if Charles had been at odds with anyone.

But everyone says the same thing.

He was a nice guy, maybe a little eccentric, but not the kind of person to have enemies.

By evening, the cops realize they're going to need some help.

They've combed the entire crime scene and found nothing, so they decide to wire Scotland Yard.

15 minutes later, they get a response.

A detective will be on the first train in the morning.

His name is Robert Fabian, and he's the best they've got.

Coming up, Detective Fabian begins his investigation.

At the University of Arizona, we believe that everyone is born with wonder.

That thing that says, I will not accept this world that is.

While it drives us to create what could be,

that world can't wait to see what you'll do.

Where will your wonder take you?

And what will it make you?

The University of Arizona.

Wonder makes you.

Start your journey at wonder.arisona.edu.

Now back to the story.

When Robert Fabian arrives in Lower Quinton, he is at the peak of his career.

At 44, Fabian's been on London's police force for almost half his life, and he's earned an impressive reputation for solving crimes.

His specialty is the criminal underworld of London.

Brothels, gambling dens, jewel thieves.

I mean, this guy has seen and done it all.

So when Fabian gets to this quaint farming village just two days after the murder, he thinks that this is going to be easy.

There's less than 500 people in the entire town.

It's so quiet you can hear a pin drop.

And Charles died less than half a mile from the main road in the middle of the day.

According to the coroner, it was sometime between one and two in the afternoon.

In a town this small, someone has to know something.

So Fabian and his associate, Detective Sergeant Albert Webb, decide they're going to interview everyone in the village, starting, of course, with Alfred Potter.

Fabian goes straight to Potter's house and sits down at his kitchen table.

He gently asks Potter to go through the events of the day one more time.

But Potter's story is slightly different from the one he told officers the night of the murder.

Again, it was 12.10 in the afternoon when he saw Charles, but this time, Potter reveals that he was heading to a field to feed some sheep.

When he got there, he saw Charles in the next field over.

But now, it was about 12.20, and Potter says he was too busy to go over and speak to Charles.

He claims one of his heifers had died in a ditch the day before, and he needed to get it out.

Fabian asks Potter if he's positive that the man he saw was Charles.

And Potter says, well, no, he can't be positive, but that he's, quote, almost certain, unquote.

Then, out of nowhere, he brings up a POW camp a couple of miles outside of town.

Over a thousand prisoners of war are being being held there and it's known that security is lax.

POWs are able to come and go as they please, so they're often spotted around the village and surrounding fields.

Fabian hears this, thanks him, and leaves.

He can't get a read on Potter yet, but he's definitely intrigued by this information.

And sure enough, later that day, police find what appear to be Army boot footprints along the border of the field where Charles died.

It looks like they go over a fence and head straight into the woods on Meon Hill, and then they just disappear.

It's a promising enough lead that Fabian arranges to have all 1,000 POWs interviewed, but he's skeptical that a prisoner is responsible.

For one, most people are murdered by someone they know, and Fabian still can't figure out a motive.

Obviously, this has all the earmarks of a robbery gone bad.

The disheveled clothes, the missing watch.

Maybe someone thought Charles was carrying money.

But why kill him so brutally?

In Fabian's mind, this has got to be some sort of vendetta.

Meanwhile, Michael Lomazny, the first officer on the scene that night, has a funny feeling about Potter.

So he decides to go back and talk to the farmer himself.

This time, Potter is acting really agitated, and eventually it comes out why.

He tells Lomazny that he had touched the handle of the slashing hook in Charles' neck on the night the body was found.

Apparently, he's concerned that his fingerprints will incriminate him.

Lomazny takes this info back to Detective Fabian, who immediately has Potter come into the police department for further questioning.

He asks Potter point-blank about the slashing hook, and Potter says that Charles' neighbor, Harry Beasley, asked him to touch it.

Allegedly, Harry wanted him to make sure Charles Charles was dead.

Of course, Harry denies this, and Fabian's starting to think that Potter is the guilty one, but he still doesn't have enough evidence to make an arrest.

He just keeps hoping the next villager he talks to will give him some sort of lead.

But so far, his interviews are going nowhere.

Which, if you think about it, is pretty bizarre.

This is a small town.

It seems weird that no one would have a clue, or at least think they had one.

But the folks of Lower Quinton don't even seem curious.

And not only that, they're acting sort of unwelcoming.

Like one day, Fabian knocks on someone's door and he's greeted by an older man.

Fabian says he's there to ask questions about Charles Walton and the local replies, quote, he's been dead and buried a month now.

What are you worrying about?

End quote.

Then he slams the door in Fabian's face.

It's definitely a strange way to behave when one of your neighbors has been literally murdered.

But as the days go by, Fabian gets the sense that the villagers all want him to leave the whole thing alone.

He even says as much in one of his letters to Scotland Yard.

Fabian writes that the natives of Upper and Lower Quinton have a, quote, secretive disposition, end quote.

He even remarks that there may be sort of a local history attached to Charles or the villagers that could explain the murder, which sounds like wishful thinking, but it's actually pretty intuitive because Fabian's about to stumble upon some of that local history all on his own.

One afternoon during the investigation, Detective Fabian takes a walk up Meon Hill.

He stands at the top, looks down at the adorable village below, and wonders whether these people are hiding something.

Then, Suddenly, he gets the sense that he's being watched.

He turns around and he spies a black dog.

It's sitting on top of a stone wall staring at him.

Finally, it jumps down into the field and walks past Fabian.

A few minutes pass, then a little boy comes over the wall.

Fabian asks him if he's looking for his dog, but the boy's confused.

He asks, what dog?

Fabian says, that black dog.

But before he can finish his sentence, the little boy turns completely pale.

Without saying a word, he turns and runs down the hill.

The whole thing is unsettling.

So when Fabian gets back to the village, he decides to look at this little book that was given to him by the head of the local police, a guy named Alex Spooner.

Spooner thought the book might help him understand the community better.

It's called Folklore, Old Customs, and Superstitions in Shakespeareland.

And as soon as he begins reading it, Fabian understands why the villagers might be acting so weird.

It turns out he stepped into the most superstitious, occult-obsessed area in all of England.

Apparently, ancient beliefs about the devil, black magic, and ghosts are still going strong in the Cotswolds.

And this whole region has more than its fair share of hauntings and weird occurrences.

Some people think it has something to do with a circle of ancient stones that are just 12 miles away from the village of Lower Quinton.

They're called the Rollwright Stones, and they're widely thought to be the site of pagan rituals back in the Neolithic era.

Later on, they become popular for witch rituals, and in the 1940s, at the time of Charles Walton's murder, those rituals were apparently still going on.

One of these superstitions centers around black dogs.

For as long as anyone can remember, these animals have been thought of as an omen of death or a symbol of the devil.

To see one is bad luck, and one dog in particular has been known to actually kill people.

It's called Black Shuck from the Anglo-Saxon word suka, which means demon.

According to the legend, this dog once walked into a local church in the Cotswold town of Bungie in 1577.

and it went ballistic.

It even killed a couple of people inside the church as they were praying.

This legend is still strong even today.

Cotswold locals swear a huge black dog with green or red eyes will run across the road as they're driving, usually in the middle of the night.

So when word gets out that Fabian has seen a black dog on Meon Hill, people really start to shut down.

When he walks into a local pub, no one will even make eye contact.

Even Fabian begins to wonder if there's some truth to this legend, because later that same day, a black dog is hit and killed in the village by a police car.

And in the days following, another black dog dies.

Only this time, it's not a case of roadkill.

The dog is literally found hanging from a bush near the site of Charles's murder.

It's an ominous sign, but Fabian doesn't know what it means.

And as the weeks drag by, it's clear.

The villagers are never going to talk.

Fabian's just about to give up on the Charles Walton murder when he comes across a local story, one that really piques his interest.

As it turns out, this isn't the only time someone in the area has been killed this way.

Coming up, the first pitchfork murder.

At the University of Arizona, we believe that everyone is born with wonder.

That thing that says, I will not accept this world that is.

While it drives us to create what could be,

that world can't wait to see what you'll do.

Where will your wonder take you?

And what will it make you?

The University of Arizona.

Wonder makes you.

Start your journey at wonder.arisona.edu.

And now back to the story.

70 years before Charles Walton was murdered, on September 15th, 1875, an 80-year-old woman named Anne Tennett left her house in the Cotswolds to buy some bread.

On the way to the bakery, Anne encountered a neighbor of hers, a man named John Haywood.

Haywood was a farm laborer, and on this particular night, he carried a pitchfork.

It's unclear if the two had words, but what we do know is that Haywood fatally stabbed Anne in the head and on her legs multiple times with the pitchfork.

Some say he impaled her throat, then used a hook hook to carve the sign of a cross in her chest.

At any rate, Haywood was caught and sentenced, but when asked why he did it, he always said the same thing.

Anne Tennett was a witch.

According to Haywood, she'd placed a curse on his land or one of his animals using the evil eye.

And the use of his pitchfork was no accident.

It seems there's an old Anglo-Saxon tradition called sticking.

This is where you stab someone with a pin or a thorn and hope that the person bleeds enough to die.

The Anglo-Saxons believed this was the best way to kill a witch because she would bleed out all her evil powers.

Haywood said that Anne wasn't the only witch in the village.

He claimed there were at least 15 other witches, all of whom he'd planned to kill the same way.

Of course, he never got a chance.

Haywood was determined to be mentally ill and Anne died with zero proof that she was ever a witch.

Detective Fabian says he learned of this story as he was investigating the Charles Walton murder in February of 1945, but at the time, he didn't mention it.

At least not in any of his reports to Scotland Yard.

He's more focused on Alfred Potter, who he's pretty sure killed Charles, whether or not he was a witch.

For one, Fabian learns that Potter's parents owned the farm with him, and that Potter would sometimes keep the money they gave him to pay the workers.

There were weeks when Potter would supposedly forget about payday and pocket the cash.

But after taking 4,000 statements, Fabian has nothing to convict Potter of such a grisly murder, no proof of motive, no leads.

So after a full month of investigations, he quits.

He goes back to London at the end of March 1945, and to the disbelief of everyone at Scotland Yard, the Charles Walton case goes unsolved.

Robert Fabian retires four years later in 1949, and the next year he publishes his first memoir.

It's called Fabian of the Yard.

In it, he devotes an entire chapter to the Walton case, and for the first time, he publicly mentions witchcraft.

You could say he almost milks it.

Fabian talks about the secretiveness of the villagers and how they seem to be keeping something from him.

He talks about how the cult of satanic worship is alive and well in pockets of England, and he draws a connection between Charles's murder and Anne Tennett's some 70 years earlier.

And over time, people catch on.

They start to wonder whether Charles Walton was secretly a witch and if his death wasn't some sort of retribution.

Now, we can credit historian Donald McCormick for being the one who really got this theory going.

In 1968, some 20 years after Charles' murder, McCormick wrote the first book on the case.

It was called Murder by Witchcraft.

In it, McCormick claims to have spoken to a high priestess from the Cotswold area.

Allegedly, she said that Charles Walton wasn't a witch, but he did have an ability to talk to animals.

She called it a, quote, strange kind of psychic power which you get in some countrymen, end quote.

And apparently, birds were Charles' favorite, but he also had a strange power over dogs.

Now, another anonymous source in McCormick's book was a man who said he'd hired Walton several different times, and he claimed that Walton bred natterjacks, which is a type of toad that doesn't hop, it only runs.

Allegedly, Charles would harness these toads to toy plows and let them run across a field, which sounds bonkers, but it's actually a practice known as blasting the land or making the soil unfertile.

It was believed to be a ritual that witches centuries ago would use to curse farmers.

Now, again, there's no proof that Charles actually did this outside of McCormick's anonymous sources.

And I should mention that McCormick had a tendency not to identify his witnesses, so it's possible this was all made up.

And if it's hard to believe Charles is a witch, it could be because Detective Fabian and McCormick were both looking for superstition in the wrong place.

Because as far as anyone knows, Charles Walton was just a regular old man.

The real occultists may have been the villagers of Lower Quinton.

Earlier this year, we did an episode called Who Put Bella in the Witch Elm.

Those of you who listened may remember a researcher named Margaret Murray.

She was one of the first highly regarded female scholars in England and a respected anthropologist and Egyptologist.

In the early 1920s, she became fascinated with witchcraft, which is why she was so interested in Bella's case.

Then, in 1950, 87-year-old Murray catches wind of Robert Fabian's new book and the Charles Walton murder, and she decides to travel to Lower Quintin herself.

But instead of showing up as a researcher, she pretends to be an artist.

Murray chats up the locals to see if any of them will finally talk about Charles's murder.

And they do.

After speaking to the Lower Quinton villagers and doing her own research, Murray gave an interview in which she said she was 95% certain that Charles Walton had been killed because of witchcraft.

Not because Charles himself was a witch, but as a blood sacrifice to improve the fertility of the soil.

Now, blood sacrifices are a known part of witchcraft, which has its roots in ancient beliefs about the earth, fertility, and the cycles of life and death.

Blood represents life and creation, and giving blood to the land is thought to improve its fertility.

And as we know, the whole town of Lower Quinton was steeped in superstitions.

Also, 1944, the year before Charles died, had been a bad year for farming.

The outlook for 1945 didn't bode well either.

Plus, England had been at war for years.

Food and luxuries were scarce.

Things were looking pretty bleak, which means people in the town may have been willing to try anything to ensure a profitable year, including killing one of their own.

To Murray, the way the pitchfork was lodged into Walton's face, pinning his head to the ground, was a dead giveaway.

It was almost as if whoever killed him wanted him to bleed into the ground as much as possible.

and as long as possible.

She even suggested that the date, February 14th, had been on purpose.

In an interview with the Birmingham Post, Murray said that the 14th was actually the first according to the original Roman calendar, and February 1st was a traditional day of pagan sacrifice.

If this is really the case, it would suggest that the entire town was in on Charles's murder, which would make a lot of sense considering how cagey they were during the entire investigation.

In fact, six years after Murray's investigation, this is 1956, a woman wrote to the Reynolds News, a UK newspaper.

She wouldn't give her name, but she said that for the past 12 years, she'd been in a satanic cult in the area.

And she confirmed that Charles Walton's murder was a ritual sacrifice, just as Margaret Murray had said.

She also said she knew exactly who did it and that the killer wasn't local.

They had come up from London and 13 people were present for the murder.

Allegedly, they danced around in Charles' blood.

Now, this part seems pretty hard to believe considering how quiet and insular the village was.

It's hard to imagine 13 people dancing in a field in the middle of the day.

And I should also mention that in the woman's account, the crime happened in the middle of the night, not the afternoon.

And without any evidence, it seems more likely that Alfred Potter was at fault.

He was near Charles just before he was killed, and he wasn't the world's best boss.

But even today, the people of Lower Quinton remain oddly tight-lipped about this murder.

Recently, a BBC reporter traveled to the town to interview some people about the Walton case, and they experienced what they called a community response.

It was as if people were following a script instead of actually saying what they knew.

One person even said, quote, in In cases like this, there's always someone that knows something.

But for the sake of relatives and not upsetting people, nobody will say.

End quote.

Whether that's the Potter family or the entire town, I'll let you decide.

Thanks for listening.

I'll be back next week with another episode.

To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all Audio Chuck originals.

At the University of Arizona, we believe that everyone is born with wonder.

That thing that says, I will not accept this world that is.

While it drives us to create what could be,

that world can't wait to see what you'll do.

Where will your wonder take you?

And what will it make you?

The University of Arizona.

Wonder makes you.

Start your journey at wonder.arisona.edu.

You ever wonder how far an EV can take you on one charge?

Well, most people drive about 40 miles a day, which means you can do all daily stuff no problem.

Go to work, grab the kids at school, get the groceries, and still have enough charge to visit your in-laws in the next county.

But they don't need to know that.

And the best part, you won't have to buy gas at all.

The way forward is electric.

Explore EVs that fit your life at electricforall.org.