Ex-church warden’s murder conviction quashed at Court of Appeal

A former church warden who was jailed for life for the murder of a university lecturer has had his conviction quashed at the Court of Appeal, but prosecutors could still take the case to the Supreme Court.

Benjamin Field was jailed for at least 36 years in 2019 after being found guilty of murdering 69-year-old Peter Farquhar in Maids Moreton, Buckinghamshire.

Prosecutors told Field’s trial that he had driven Mr Farquhar to think he was losing his mind in order to inherit his house and money, secretly giving the pensioner tranquiliser drugs and spiking his whisky in the hope that his death in 2015 would look like suicide or an accident.

The case was referred to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission last year, with Field’s lawyers telling a hearing in March that there was “no evidence” that Mr Farquhar was “forced or deceived” into taking the whisky or medication.

In a ruling on Thursday, three senior judges quashed the conviction and ordered a retrial.

Reading a summary of their ruling, Lord Justice Edis, sitting with Mr Justice Goose and Mr Justice Butcher, said the jurors at trial had “not been properly directed”, and the directions given to them on how to reach a verdict were “defective”.

He said: “The fact that the appellant secretly intended that Mr Farquhar should die did not change the act or, in law, mean that Mr Farquhar’s decision to drink whisky was not free, deliberate and informed.

“There was no evidence that the appellant had ‘administered’ the alcohol.”

He continued: “The directions effectively withdrew from the jury the question of whether Mr Farquhar’s decision to drink the whisky had been voluntary.”

Lord Justice Edis also said the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) could take the “unusual case” to the Supreme Court before any retrial.

The judge added that Field will remain in prison “for so long as the appeal (to the Supreme Court) is pending”.

Before his murder trial at Oxford Crown Court, Field admitted two counts of burglary and three of fraud after fraudulently being in relationships with both Mr Farquhar and his neighbour, fellow pensioner Ann Moore-Martin, as part of a plan to get them to change their wills.

Jurors heard Field underwent a “betrothal” ceremony with gay Mr Farquhar while also having a string of girlfriends and a relationship with Miss Moore-Martin.

The trial was told that the Baptist minister’s son had manipulated the deeply religious retired head teacher, who died from natural causes in May 2017, by writing messages on her mirrors purporting to be from God.

Field, of Wellingborough Road, Olney, Buckinghamshire, was later convicted of Mr Farquhar’s murder but cleared of conspiring or attempting to murder Miss Moore-Martin, and found not guilty of possession of an article for use in fraud.

Alongside his life sentence, he was given a concurrent 16-year jail term for the fraud and burglary offences.

The case was later turned into a BBC drama, The Sixth Commandment, starring Timothy Spall and Eanna Hardwicke.

Field lost an attempt to appeal against his conviction in 2021, but his lawyers told a hearing in London last month that the previous Court of Appeal decision wrongly applied the law due to “moral disapproval”.

David Jeremy KC, for Field, told the hearing that his client would have had to have caused Mr Farquhar to ingest the whisky or medication, as well as it being “less than fully voluntary”, to have caused the death.

He said that Mr Farquhar “knew what he was being given and knew who he was being given it by”, and that the situation was akin to “causing him to drive his car by handing him his car keys”.

The Crown Prosecution Service opposed the appeal, with KC David Perry claiming Field was “not a mere bystander or a mere spectator of Mr Farquhar’s death at his own hands”.

“He was, at all times, playing his part in causing the death both as a matter of common sense and as a matter of law,” the barrister said.