‘He’s an evil man. He’d try it again’: Ben Field duped dozens and murdered Peter Farquhar after pretending to fall in love with him, drugging him and getting him to change his will. Now, we reveal why he could be released in just weeks

Moments after his arrest for fraud and murder, Ben Field was recorded in a police van bragging about how he would ‘get away with most of it’.

For several years the then 27-year-old church warden had preyed upon the elderly, among them 69-year-old former English teacher, university lecturer and author Peter Farquhar, who died in 2015 after ingesting 60 per cent proof whisky and sleeping pills.

Field was later convicted of murdering Peter at his home in the Buckinghamshire village of Maids Moreton after pretending to fall in love with him, drugging him and getting him to change his will.

Jailed for life at Oxford Crown Court in 2019, the self-confessed ‘snake talker’, who showed not a flicker of remorse, was told he would spend at least 36 years behind bars for the killing as well as other sick frauds he readily admitted, all committed against the lonely and vulnerable pensioners he singled out for attention.

But earlier this month, in a shock move which, as we shall see, has horrified his victims’ families, the Baptist minister’s son was back in court, appearing via video link from Category A prison HMP Frankland in Durham in an attempt to convince an appeal judge that his conviction is ‘unsafe’ and that he is in prison for a murder which he ‘simply didn’t do’.

While Court of Appeal judges will give their decision at a later date, the hearing raises the prospect that a man described by psychiatrists as being both ‘narcissistic’ and ‘psychopathic’ could be released in a matter of weeks.

‘If he did come out on to our streets, you’ve essentially got a psychopath walking around,’ says a source with knowledge of the investigation into Field’s crimes.

‘He didn’t ever show any remorse for ­anything. No regret. No remorse. It’s all about Ben Field.’

Field’s fresh bid for freedom has also ­sickened his victims’ relatives, and will no doubt stun the millions of viewers who watched the BBC’s award-winning 2023 drama, The Sixth Commandment, in which actor Timothy Spall delivered a heart-­rending portrayal of Peter’s treatment in Field’s hands.

But while readily admitting at his original trial that he was a ‘well-­practised liar’ who had ‘deceived absolutely everybody that I have any kind of relationship with’ including Peter, defiant Field has always maintained that he did not kill the older man.

This is despite the gruesome notebooks discovered by police in which he described in precise detail how he was deceiving and drugging the pensioner, as well as his elderly spinster neighbour, 83-year-old retired head teacher Ann Moore-Martin.

He wrote down a timeline which concluded: ‘2015 end Peter.’ Next to his name he drew a picture of a grave and captioned it ‘hole’s the goal’. He also listed ‘ending speeches’, thought to be what he planned to say to Peter as he was dying. They included ‘I hated you all along’ and ‘This is my house/the future’.

But, as Field’s lawyers argued at the Court of Appeal earlier this month, planning someone’s death is not the same as actually carrying it out. They claim that the original trial judge, Mr Justice Sweeney, did not ask the jury to decide whether Field had actually caused Peter to drink the strong whisky and swallow Dalmane sleeping pills which, combined together, killed him.

Relying, as we shall see, on a legal technicality relating to a change in case law, his barrister, David Jeremy KC, claimed that, even if Field supplied the whisky and sleeping pills, the prosecution at Field’s trial had provided no evidence to show that swallowing the substances which killed Peter had been anything other than a ‘voluntary’ act by the deceased.

‘To have caused Mr Farquhar to have ingested whisky and/or ­Dalmane, Field would have had to have forced or threatened Mr Farquhar to have done so or to have deceived him as to what he was ingesting,’ he said.

‘Was there evidence that, on that night, Field caused him to ingest whisky and/or Dalmane and that it wasn’t voluntary? The answer to that question is “no”.’

In short, said the lawyer – while Field watched via a video screen from prison and made notes – the 2019 conviction was unsafe.

Field admitted two counts of burglary and three of fraud before he went on trial for murder in 2019 and accepted that he had ‘psychologically manipulated’ both Peter and Ann. The son of another elderly couple targeted by Field also told the Daily Mail this week that he was amazed Field’s case had even been referred back to Appeal Court judges.

Elaine and Harold Meakin lived next door to Peter Farquhar in Maids Moreton. Elaine died, aged 88, at home after an apparent heart attack in February 2015. ­Harold died, aged 89, in June 2016 after falling down the stairs. After their deaths, Field burgled their home using the key they had entrusted to their other neighbour, Ann Moore-Martin. Bizarrely, he stole a bottle of Drambuie.

‘Field is an evil man,’ their 70-year-old son Howard, a retired solicitor, told the Daily Mail. ‘I think he’s got something seriously wrong with him and I can only imagine he’d try to do this again. I do think he would go back to his old hunting ground as far as lonely, elderly people are concerned. If he’s served time in prison for what he was given for the fraud and the murder conviction is quashed then he will walk free.’

The lingering horror of Field’s crimes largely lies in the suffering he inflicted on his victims when they were still alive – something he has never denied.

Peter, a former English teacher at £45,000-a-year Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, who struggled to reconcile his religious faith with his attraction to men, believed Field, a student in his class at the University of Buckingham, was the answer to a lifetime of ­loneliness and prayers, not ­realising he had been fooled.

After meeting him in 2011, he wrote in his own diary of his ‘extreme charm’ and ‘youthful laddishness’, going on to describe him as ‘sympathetic, warm, ­amusing and appreciative’.

Within a couple of months he had given him a key to his home, writing: ‘I am so grateful to God for suddenly bringing Ben into my life.’ On another occasion, he ­tragically wrote: ‘Gone are the fears of dying alone.’ He had no idea that Field was sleeping with at least four women and prostituting himself to men via apps such as Grindr. Peter first changed his will in September 2013, leaving £2,000 and two ­paintings to Field.

In March, 2014, the pair undertook a private betrothal ceremony and in November that year, after Field had moved into his three-bedroom home, Peter changed his will again, this time leaving Field his house, £15,000 and a silver wine holder.

Just two weeks later, Peter’s health mysteriously began to deteriorate. He was found dead at home by his cleaner in October 2015 with a whisky bottle at his side. By then, Field had already turned his attention to his neighbour Ann Moore-Martin and recorded his plans to deceive her.

He embarked on a sexual relationship with Ann after wooing her with love letters and tricking her into thinking God was speaking to her via messages he scrawled on her mirrors telling her to change her will in his favour.

One of his notebooks contained a list of possible ways that Ann might die, including ‘heart attack – electrical device’, ‘stair’, ‘in the bath?’ and ‘sex?’.

Ann gave Field £4,000 for a car and £27,000 for a dialysis machine which he claimed his younger brother needed. She also changed her will in Field’s favour, but changed it back in 2017 after her niece raised the alarm and ­contacted police.

It was only then that Peter’s death was re-investigated. His body was exhumed and traces of the psychoactive drug believed to have contributed to his death were subsequently found in his hair. Ann died in 2017 before she could read and sign the statement she had given police about Field’s behaviour towards her. In her final days she agonised over the know­ledge that the love she thought he felt for her had never been real.

Her niece told Oxford Crown Court at Field’s trial in 2019: ‘She was tortured by it and found it very difficult to get her head around the betrayal.’

Less than a year after Peter’s death, Field also burgled the home of one of the elderly ­academic’s close friends – 83-year-old retired teacher and lifelong ­bachelor Jonathan Elliman who devoted much of his life to ­Christian charities.

Field stole three antique rifles and a bayonet said to be ‘of great sentimental value’ to Jonathan who died, aged 89, in March 2023.

This is the third time that Field, now 35, from Olney, Buckinghamshire, has tried to overturn his murder conviction by claiming that the original trial judge misdirected the jury on the issue of causation. His first bid, in March 2021, was dismissed after three Appeal Court judges ruled that the original judge had ‘captured the essence of the issue in a clear and admirably succinct manner’.

An attempt to re-open that appeal was turned down in 2022. But the Criminal Cases Review Commission ruled last year there was ‘a real possibility that the court would find Mr Field’s ­conviction of murder unsafe’.

At the hearing on March 5, prosecution lawyers argued that Field providing the drugs and whisky started a ‘chain of causation’ which ended in Peter’s death.

‘Mr Farquhar was in no sense acting autonomously,’ argued ­barrister David Perry KC. ‘He didn’t know that he was in fact participating in the very transaction that was intended to extinguish his life that very night.’

He added: ‘In every relevant sense, the appellant brought about the death.’

D escribing Field as a ‘weirdo’ this week, ­Howard Meakin, son of Harold and Elaine Meakin, said he suspected that the convicted killer had simply asked his lawyers: ‘Well, what else can we try?’

‘He’s got nothing to lose,’ added Mr Meakin.

The Daily Mail understands he has been a model prisoner at HMP Frankland. Last November, Field was praised at the Prison Reform Trust’s Hope and Fulfilment awards for his ‘outstanding work as a patient, inspiring and devoted maths tutor’.

Martyn Smith, another former University of Buckingham student who was Field’s co-defendant at his 2019 trial and eventually cleared of all charges, told The Times this week that he hoped his former friend ‘finds peace’ with the ongoing appeal.

The former magician from ­Cornwall, who now works as a ­hypnotist and ‘change catalyst’ charging up to £1,000 a month for ‘forgiveness healing’ said: ‘I want healing to prevail, not in a way that erases accountability, but in a way that transforms pain into an energy that prevents further harm and breaks any future cycles of trauma.’

Such words are unlikely, of course, to garner sympathy with the families of Field’s victims who are still struggling with the ­poisonous legacy left behind by his appalling deceit.

Additional reporting: Christine Challand