On February 14th, 1945, Charles Walton, aged 74, a hedger and ditcher of Lower Quinton, Warwickshire was found dead on Meon Hill in Warwickshire. He had been subject to the most brutal attack. A pitchfork had been thrust through his neck, pinning him to the soil and what looked like the sign of a cross slashed across his chest. The police classed it as a major murder enquiry and called up the most famous detective of the day, Inspector Robert Fabian of Scotland Yard, to investigate. Employing the most modern techniques, Fabian combed the crime scene and surrounding area, using surveillance aircraft and metal detectors in a search of clues. He interviewed locals, POWs from the camp at nearby Long Marston and individual soldiers, but found no convincing leads. 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. Suddenly the whole enquiry turned bizarre and tortuous, with the appearance of threatening apparitions of black dogs, bizarre coincidences and macabre threats. Famous people were brought to give their views like the anthropologist, Dr Margaret Murray, and psychics held séances to discover the killer and the young mistress of Aleister Crowley was traced to Cornwall after allegations that the murder had been an 'outside' job by a Black Magic group. Hence what started as a hard-headed investigation trailed off into an extraordinary and 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.

"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?"