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**Ally** · 02-17-2008, 12:37 AM

Graham
Superintendent Join Date: Jul 2006
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Hi Granger.

I'm damned if I can find my copy of 'Supernatural Murders' in this hell-hole I call a home, but I read your link and it tallies with what I understand regarding the discovery of the watch. And of course it was Spooner and not Fabian who re-visited Lower Quinton year after year. It goes without saying that the date of the murder, February 14th or St Valentine's Day, has all manner of connotation regarding re-birth and that kind of thing. Even so, I'm not convinced that Walton's murder was anything but totally prosaic.

A funny thing about black dogs, though, with a nod at the tales surrounding Lower Quinton. About 15 years ago I stayed for a couple of nights (on business) in a pub near Wells-Next-The-Sea in North Norfolk. As a resident, it was drinkies until the gaffer decided to call it a night, and at about 1.00 am this young bloke came in and he looked like he'd just had a stroke. He was a local, and there was some concern as to his health, but the gaffer took him into the back room and that was the end of that. Next morning at breakfast I asked the gaffer if the young bloke was all right. The gaffer was not a local; he came from Essex I think. He said that the young bloke was known locally as a bit of a tearway but the night before he'd walked home (probably half-sloshed) from Wells and he'd seen a black dog. It didn't matter that this was about 1990 - the sight of a black dog was an omen of immense evil and it was very obvious that it was taken extremely seriously.

Cheers,

Graham

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19th January 2007, 01:39 AM
pearlypoll
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Very bizarre case!

Hard to believe that such superstitions (black dogs and witchcraft) still exist in the 21st century.

I thought it was only we Americans who were so provincial!!
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19th January 2007, 11:41 PM
Graham
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Hiya Pearly Poll!

Don't think that the Lower Quinton case had anything to do, in reality, with witchcraft. I think that whoever killed poor old Walton did it in such a way as to try to convince the locals that it actually was a witchcraft sacrifice to Mother Earth.

There are plenty of UK websites dedicated to Black Dogs, the belief in which does seem to linger on. I've never seen one, and never want to, thank you very much. Enter 'black dogs' into your search-engine, and see what comes up.

I can assure you that I didn't make up my story in my last post on the subject - as they say, I was there. The best-known tale of Black Dogs concerns Bungay, Suffolk, in which during the 17th century a hell-hound was supposed to have entered the church during a service and killed at least one of the congregation. Then of course there is the Hound of The Baskervilles, by Conan-Doyle, who said he based that story on East Anglian legends, although I don't know why he should have transferred them to Devon.

Cheers,

Graham

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20th January 2007, 11:55 AM
granger
Inspector Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Somerset, UK
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Graham
Hiya Pearly Poll!

Don't think that the Lower Quinton case had anything to do, in reality, with witchcraft. I think that whoever killed poor old Walton did it in such a way as to try to convince the locals that it actually was a witchcraft sacrifice to Mother Earth.

There are plenty of UK websites dedicated to Black Dogs, the belief in which does seem to linger on. I've never seen one, and never want to, thank you very much. Enter 'black dogs' into your search-engine, and see what comes up.

I can assure you that I didn't make up my story in my last post on the subject - as they say, I was there. The best-known tale of Black Dogs concerns Bungay, Suffolk, in which during the 17th century a hell-hound was supposed to have entered the church during a service and killed at least one of the congregation. Then of course there is the Hound of The Baskervilles, by Conan-Doyle, who said he based that story on East Anglian legends, although I don't know why he should have transferred them to Devon.

Cheers,

Graham

I absolutely agree with Graham, that witchcraft had absolutely nothing to do with the murder. I believe Arthur Potter was responsible for 'putting it around' that this was the case to keep suspicion from himself. However there is no doubt about it that either Fabian, or Spooner, did see a running black dog whilst out on the case in Quinton, and I have also read that the remains of a black dog was found hanging from a tree during the investigation, but my own view is that the latter was just a black bird (quite common practice in the Warwickshire countryside), which over the years has been exagerated into a dog!! I am sure it is quite feasible that Potter could have been responsible for these events.

From what I have read it was never proved that the boy Charles Walton referred to in a 19th century book on occult, was THE murdered Charles Walton.

I am a little surprised that the police have not ressurrected this crime whilst there is still some hope that proof could be found that Potter was the murderer. I think it would be great if the UK police could in fact form an elite crew of retired officers to reinvestigate some of these more infamous unsolved crimes. (just like the UK TV series 'New Tricks'). I am sure with their expertise, and their access to files which we amateur researchers are always denied, some further evidence could be found.

Hopefully I have managed to paste a smaller pic of Charles Walton's body as found.

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Last edited by granger : 20th January 2007 at 12:05 PM.

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Yesterday, 03:24 PM
Appleby
Police Constable Join Date: May 2007
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On the sixty-third anniversary of Charles Walton�s death, it seems appropriate to reflect upon two aspects of his murder that do not seem to have been recorded elsewhere.

First, of the three people who discovered his body, at least two were related to him. One of these, Edith Walton, the daughter of Charles�s brother, George Henry Walton, is well known as having been adopted by Charles some time after her birth in 1904. However, Harry Beasley, the neighbouring farmer to whom Edie (Edith) ran when she found that Charles had not come home from work, was also a relative.

Beasley�s father, Edmund Beasley, had no less than fifteen children, twelve of whom were by his first wife, Mary Ann Waters. Mary Ann�s brother, Charles, was the father of Joseph Waters who married Harriett Walton � Charles Walton�s sister. In other words, Harry�s father�s first wife was the aunt of Harriett Walton�s husband. This does not make Beasley a close relative of Charles Walton, his own mother being Edmund Beasley�s second wife, Ellen Cowley. Nevertheless, it is an interesting sidelight on the case and prompted me to wonder if it emerged during the investigation.

Second, Charles Walton�s great-grandparents were Thomas Walton and Ann Smith. This last name, possibly one of the commonest female names at that time, is the same as the maiden name of Ann Tennant � the woman killed as a witch in Long Compton in 1875. The murdered Ann Smith / Tennant was born in 1794 and so it is feasible that it was she who married Thomas Walton on 2 January 1812 in Ebrington, Gloucestershire � she would have been 17 or 18 at the time. (Ebrington, incidentally, is only four or five miles south of Lower Quinton.) She could have given birth to William Walton, the victim�s grandfather, in 1814 and then, assuming that some ill had befallen her husband, could have married John Tennant in April 1819 in Long Compton. If this tenuous possibility is true, Ann Tennant was Charles Walton�s great-grandmother!

Is this the fact that prompted a Daily Mirror reporter to state in 1954 that there was a link between the two murders known to the police that he had pledged not to reveal? If not, does anyone know what that link might have been?

**Ally** · 02-17-2008, 12:37 AM

Yesterday, 10:19 PM
auspirograph
Inspector Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Australia
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Appleby
Is this the fact that prompted a Daily Mirror reporter to state in 1954 that there was a link between the two murders known to the police that he had pledged not to reveal? If not, does anyone know what that link might have been?

Hi Appleby,

Thanks for these interesting details on this curious case, especially on Harry Bearsley and his family connections with Walton. Ann Tennant/Smith may have been related to him but the alleged witch seems to be an Ann Turner who had been murdered in nearby Long Compton in 1875. These reports could well be the source for the legends and in a remote medieval village in Warwickshire, close family neighbours would not have been unexpected.

However, the Daily Mirror report and a tabloid newspaper in the 1950’s, has likely garnered their story with fact and fiction in reporting the story. A family connection with the victim Charles Walton would have added to the sensational appearance of the case already glossed with local traditions of witchcraft and supernatural ‘black dogs’. A story had been documented as recently in 1930 with Harry Bloom’s Folk Lore, Old Customs and Superstitions in Shakespeare Land. Bloom mentioned another Charles Walton who as a plough lad had seen a mysterious headless woman in silk dress pass by him and of a dog. On the next day his sister died.

Ann Turner in 1875 had also been murdered as Charles Walton was with a pitchfork through the neck and crosses engraved on the victims with a slash-hook. This was one of many legends of the area that could have been accessible to the killer.

There is no reason why Scotland Yard would not have considered family connections with the victim in seeking a motive. Before he died in 1978, Detective Superintendent Robert Fabian disclosed to crime historian and Ripper author Richard Whittington-Egan his opinion that Alfred Potter on whose land Walton’s body was found, was responsible for the murder. Potter who had died in 1974 had apparently borrowed a large sum of money from Walton.
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Appleby
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Hi Auspirograph
Sorry to contradict a fellow Aussie but the murdered woman was definitely named Ann Tennant. Indeed, if you follow this link you will find an account of her death by her great-great-great grandson, Ron Jeavons http://www.rootsweb.com/~engcbanb/fa.../jeavons01.htm

Second, there is not a shred of evidence that she was killed in the same way as Charles Walton. The only similarity is that a pitchfork was used in each case. Ann was stabbed several times with the pitchfork in broad daylight and in front of several witnesses. The idea that she was slashed with a billhook is a later invention designed to draw a parallel between the two murders. None of the contemporary accounts mentions a weapon other than the pitchfork. Her murderer, James Hayward (or Heywood), was later tried and declared to be insane. And although it has been suggested that he was confined in Warwick Gaol and died there a few months later, he appears in the 1881 Census as an inmate of Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, and is recorded as dying there, at the age of 59, in the first half of 1890.

Third, there is no evidence that the Charles Walton mentioned in Bloom’s book was one and the same as the murdered Charles Walton. The latter had three older sisters and two younger brothers. Between May / June 1885 and the same months in 1886, Charles would have been 15 – the age at which it is alleged the incident with the dog and the dead sister occurred. If the Charles Walton in the story was one and the same as the later murder victim, he would need to have had a sister who died during that 12-month timeframe. However, his sisters Mary Ann and Martha Walton both married in 1891 and lived for some years thereafter, while Harriett – in reality Charles’s step-sister - was still alive in 1901. Consequently, the story must have related to another Charles Walton unless Emma, his mother, gave birth to a fourth daughter between the April 1881 Census and the early summer of 1886.

The 1841 Census, taken on 7 June 1841, conveniently records Charles’s mother as being just 9 months old, implying that she was born around August or September 1840. In April 1881 she would have been almost 41 years old, without having given birth – at least to a living child – for some five or six years. I believe it is highly unlikely that she did so during the next five years, especially since a detailed study of the birth, marriage and death records held by the Office of National Statistics has failed to produce any likely children’s births or deaths being registered in the Shipston or Stratford-upon-Avon areas during that period.

There is a great deal of nonsense written about this case on the internet but, having researched it for the last few years, I believe the facts above are accurate.

**plang** · 02-24-2008, 08:44 AM

Blair Witch Project. Rented this thinking it was a documentary. Litterally had me on the edge of the couch. Untill that idiot with his overdramitization of tearing up the map and chucking it into the river. That just does not happen in real life situations. Other than that, it was a damn good viewing experience.

almost,
plang

**Appleby** · 02-25-2008, 02:58 PM

Plang

As you will see from the comments above, most people believe that the witchcraft element in this case was a blind, but a welcome one from the murderer's point of view because it offered a distraction that was hard to ignore; certainly Robert Fabian was increasingly hypnotised by the possibility that it was a ritual killing. Despite this, the likeliest explanation advanced so far is that Charles Walton was murdered by his employer on the day in question, Alfred Potter. There is evidence that Walton had lent him money and that the date for repayment had passed. Potter liked a punt on the horses, had a violent temper and possibly killed Walton when he asked for the return of his loan.

It is likely that the murderer entered the field with no thought of bloodshed on his mind but, as a result of an argument that then ensued, killed Walton with the weapons that came to hand. For this not to be true, we have to believe the murderer intended to kill Walton but trusted that the means to do this would be available. Faced with these alternatives, I prefer the first � that it was an unpremeditated attack. To approach even a rheumatic septuagenarian with murder on your mind but empty-handed, knowing that he had a pitchfork, a razor-sharp bill-hook and a stick at his disposal, would be fraught with danger.

So if the murder was unpremeditated, we have to look for someone who was at odds with Walton to the extent that, in the heat of the moment, he was prepared to kill him. On this analysis, only Potter is known to have had a motive. Although others in the village regarded him as an eccentric, no one else is known to have had sufficient reason to have wanted him dead. That is, unless you subscribe to the view that he was killed because the previous harvest had failed .........

**Granger** · 02-26-2008, 01:58 PM

Walton's body as found.

**plang** · 03-01-2008, 06:48 AM

Hi Appleby, your comments have been considered,thank you.

Bye,
Plang

**Graham** · 03-02-2008, 01:55 AM

Hi Appleby,

I think you've got it about right, to be honest. Potter was Spooner's favoured suspect, but the latter could never put together sufficient evidence to nail him.

Having said that, I've visited Meon Hill and its surroundings on several occasions, and there is no doubt that it really is a weird place. There is an other-worldliness about that part of Warwickshire, even in 2008; so what it must have been like in in 1945 is anyone's guess. The odd thing is that there are many websites describing 'black dogs', but none of them so much as mention Meon Hill.

Cheers,

Graham

**Granger** · 03-02-2008, 10:11 PM

Originally posted by Graham View Post

Hi Appleby,

I think you've got it about right, to be honest. Potter was Spooner's favoured suspect, but the latter could never put together sufficient evidence to nail him.

Having said that, I've visited Meon Hill and its surroundings on several occasions, and there is no doubt that it really is a weird place. There is an other-worldliness about that part of Warwickshire, even in 2008; so what it must have been like in in 1945 is anyone's guess. The odd thing is that there are many websites describing 'black dogs', but none of them so much as mention Meon Hill.

Cheers,

Graham

I was born at Shipston On Stour, which is very near to the murder site, and was actually alive at the time. At one time an Italian POW was interviewed regarding the murder. There was a camp near Lower Quinton, and POW's were allowed out to help local tradesmen, including my father who was a grocer.

When I last went into the pub at Lower Quinton c 1970's, I brought up the subject of Walton's murder, and it is true, no one still will talk about it. Considering Potter was so unliked, it is strange that all the locals did everything they could NOT to help the police.

It was, maybe still is, to see dead crows strung up in trees to deter other birds......or humans!!

There used to be a great museum of witchcraft at Bourton On The Water.

**Appleby** · 03-07-2008, 08:54 AM

Hi Granger

Thank you for posting the photograph of the dead Charles Walton again. This has a number of points of interest, the greatest of which is, to me, the fact that he is wearing a jacket.

During the investigation it emerged that Alfred Potter claimed to have seen Walton in the early afternoon working on his hedges � or at least saw a man whom he assumed to be Walton. However, he described Charles as wearing shirtsleeves whereas, when the body was found, he was wearing a sleeveless shirt underneath his jacket.

In my view this is critical evidence. If Potter was the murderer, he had to implicate a third person, and so deflect suspicion from himself. And that third person obviously had to have been present at the time the murder took place. Consequently, Potter needed to think of some way in which the man he claimed to have seen could have been mistaken for Walton, but also subsequently proved not to have been him.

Potter had to make a plausible misidentification because what self-respecting farmer would allow strangers to wander around his fields unchallenged? He said that the man he saw was wearing shirtsleeves when Walton had none. So his story was possibly designed to imply that he witnessed the murder without realising what he was actually seeing. In other words, so that the Police would conclude that the man Potter believed was Walton, in the rolled down shirtsleeves, was in fact the murderer. And what Potter took to be Walton slashing the hedge was in reality the murderer beating Walton over the head.

There is a further aspect to Potter�s evidence. Walton was wearing a jacket when he was murdered, as the photograph shows, and, if Potter killed him and that was the first time he had seen him that day, he may actually have believed he had long shirtsleeves.

As regards local reactions to Potter, it was interesting to me to find that he was a Sidesman at the local parish church. So possibly not entirely the despised loner that he has been painted. This said, it is difficult to find out too much about him. Was he married and did he have children? I know that he did not die until 1974. Does anyone have any more information about him?

**Miffy-Moo** · 09-11-2008, 04:55 PM

Lower Quinton "witchcraft murder"

Dear All,

I lived in Lower Quinton until I was 25 (11 years ago ago), in fact my bedroom window overlooked Meon Hill.

As a general rule, I don't think the villagers are purposefully keeping quiet on the subject I believe that since so much time has passed memories fade etc. etc.

I remember asking my aunt about it when I was little and she suggested that Alfred Potter was the murderer and witchcraft played no part in it.

My grandad provided an alibi for a farmhand who was under suspision at the time.

I think it's one of those mysteries that will never be solved. but good hunting and keep me informed !

**Graham** · 09-14-2008, 11:09 PM

Hi Miffy-Moo,

By an absolutely amazing coincidence I drove close by Lower Quinton last week, and recalled the old threads on this weird case. I never thought it had anything to do with witchcraft, wicca, call it what-you-will. From what I've read about it, Potter killed Walton purely out of angst over an unpaid debt, and Potter had something of a violent reputation.

What's your take on the sightings of black dogs around Meon Hill? Nonsense, or not?

Lovely part of the world, and I'd happily live there if it could be guaranteed no-one would nail dead bats to my door during the night...

Cheers,

Graham

**Jeff Leahy** · 09-15-2008, 02:31 AM

I dont suppose either of you saw a large Black Dog on your travels?

**Graham** · 09-19-2008, 10:39 PM

I smell troll....

Graham

**Miffy-Moo** · 09-26-2008, 01:35 PM

Reply to Graham

Hi Graham,

Sorry for the late reply, I've been on holiday

Lots of people have black dogs and during my time in Lower Quinton (20+ years) I can't say that I ever encountered a strange/vicious one (thankfully). However, I walked up Meon Hill several times (mostly as a child or teenager) and have to say that there was a strange stillness about the place.

Lower Quinton itself is a lovely place to live and I wish sometimes that I was living back there again (I had to relocate to Wiltshire due to a job). Maybe I will retire there eventually......

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