UNDER THE SHADOW OF MEON HILL THE LOWER QUINTON & HAGLEY WOOD MURDERS By PAUL NEWMAN Who d kill a gnarled old man going about his daily toil in the late evening of his life? The murder was an outrage that seemed to run counter to the decorum of natural law. Within a few years, the shadows would have claimed him as their own and the earth taken him in gently. So why this violent intrusion, this flagrant disruption of the natural course, so that a person who had lived so humbly and inconspicuously, in apparent harmony with birds and nature, should meet a blood-spattered fate that more befitted a doomed tyrannical king in a Greek tragedy On February 14th, 1945, Charles Walton, aged 74, a hedger and ditcher of Lower Quinton, Warwickshire was found dead on Meon Hill. A pitchfork had been thrust through his neck, pinning him to the ground, and what looked like the sign of a cross slashed across his chest. Classing it as a major murder enquiry, the police selected the most famous detective of the day, Inspector Robert Fabian of Scotland Yard, to investigate. Employing modern techniques, Fabian combed the crime scene and surrounding area, using surveillance aircraft and metal detectors to search for clues. He interviewed locals, POWs from the camp at nearby Long Marston and individual soldiers, but found no convincing leads. Neither did Fabian find the locals especially confiding. Doors were closed in his face; people refused to talk and the atmosphere turned hostile. Abruptly the investigation took an unexpected twist after one of the detectives drew Fabian s attention to a work on folklore that suggested Walton had been killed in the way that witches once were stanged or pierced with a pitchfork on a sacrificial date. Eventually the enquiry turned devilish, bizarre and tortuous. Black dogs, bizarre coincidences and macabre threats were overwhelming the detective work. Years later, incredibly Aleister Crowley s mistress was cited as organising the crime. Academics and experts on witchcraft were invited to give their views, including the famous anthropologist, Dr Margaret Murray, and psychics held s ances to contact Walton s disembodied spirit. What started out as a hard-headed investigation dissolved into a disturbing occult morass. Making use of Fabian s original papers, the whole story is now set down for the first time in Paul Newman s bone-chilling account of this historically significant and gruesome enquiry. The second case highlighted in Under the Shadow of Meon Hill is the killing of Bella in Hagley Wood, near Birmingham, commonly twinned with the Walton Murder. Taking place two years earlier (1943), a group of country children, playing around the Clent Hills, came across the rotted body of a young woman stuffed in a tree trunk. Her hand had been cut off and she had formerly been pregnant. This hapless corpse was nicknamed Bella but who was she? A gypsy? A witch? A prostitute? A German spy? The investigation stoked up tales of vengeful magic, espionage and conspiracy. Who put Bella in the Wych Elm became a catch-cry. However, despite the thoroughness of the investigation, no one was able to identify Bella, and the case remains open.
