Original subtitles

When a murder is committed,

it's always a race against time to find the truth,

to separate fact from fiction, to catch the killer

and to make sure that justice is served.

But what happens when the truth vanishes with the victim?

I'm Dr Richard Shepherd and I've spent my career

as a forensic pathologist, performing nearly 23,000 autopsies,

including on some of the most high-profile cases of recent times.

I've learnt that the dead don't hide the truth and they never lie.

Through me you'll be hearing directly from the victim.

From a state-of-the-art laboratory with groundbreaking technology

that uses digitally scanned sampled bodies

I'll be investigating a series of intriguing murders

where, from the victim's bodies,

I'll be revealing to you the truth behind those horrific crimes.

(camera clicks)

'Maids Moreton, on the outskirts of Buckingham,

has a population of less than 1,000.'

'It's not the kind of place you'd expect to find on the front pages'.

But this sleepy, tiny village

would become the centre of a murder investigation so complex

that it could only be solved from beyond the grave.

Peter Farquhar, 69-year-old retired school teacher,

had requested to be buried in the churchyard,

laid to eternal rest, never to be disturbed.

'But did Peter's body have any secrets it needed to tell?'

'It was late October 2015

and Peter Farquhar was in good spirits.'

'After being plagued by a mystery illness, he phoned a friend

to say he was feeling better than he had in months.'

'But within days he was dead.'

'So it's Monday morning and Peter's cleaner enters the lounge.'

On the right-hand side of the sofa is Peter.

'He's slumped over, lolling over to the right.'

It's clear that's he's died.

'The cleaner dialled 999.'

'Then she phoned a young man called Ben Field,

who had been living with Peter.'

Ben Field, he was Peter's lodger,

a student in Peter's classes at the University of Buckingham.

He had moved into Peter's home and they'd become quite close.

Ben in fact turned up within a few minutes.

He was there before the emergency services arrived.

So when the paramedics came, Ben was able to tell them

that Peter had been having problems with drinking,

he was drinking heavily.

The account that Ben gave of him drinking seemed to fit the scene.

There was a small table beside Peter

and there was a bottle of whisky on it, two-thirds empty,

a glass knocked over on the floor.

So that seemed to fit the idea that he maybe drunk himself to death.

There were no suspicions about Peter's death at all.

No-one raised any concerns about it.

It was what it appeared to be on the surface,

and no-one had any doubts that that was the cause of Peter's death.

'But the truth of what happened to Peter Farquhar

and how he really died could only be found in one place, his body.'

So when someone dies and if there are suspicious circumstances

or the cause of death can't be certified by a doctor,

a postmortem is performed.

In circumstances where there isn't any worry about it being a murder,

then a routine postmortem is performed

by a hospital pathologist, usually.

And I can show you on this digital table, using the sample body.

When we do a postmortem like this, we start by making an incision

from the base of the neck through to the pubic bone,

and then we remove the skin and we look at the muscles underneath.

I make an incision right down the front of the abdomen

and if someone is a heavy drinker,

there's an immediate strong smell of alcohol

as the bowel and the intestines are exposed.

We'll look at the contents of the abdomen,

the contents of the chest.

There's the liver, the bowel, the heart, the lungs.

We'll look at those to see if there's any injuries or any disease.

We then look at the top of the skull and we take off the top of the skull

and we look at the brain to see what's going on inside the head,

and the brain itself is examined too.

So all of the areas of the body are fully examined

in a routine postmortem.

And often standard toxicological tests are performed as well,

to see whether there's any alcohol.

Now, in the case of Peter Farquhar,

it was said that he was an alcoholic.

It was said that he was found collapsed on the settee

with a half-empty bottle of whisky next to him,

and so the coroner ordered a test for alcohol to be performed.

Not the full screening test that can be done,

but just looking at alcohol.

And this showed his alcohol was three times the limit for driving.

That was sufficient for them to conclude

that he had died from acute alcohol poisoning.

So at the end of the examination, they hadn't found any disease,

they'd found the presence of alcohol.

So they managed to establish a cause of death,

but possibly not the cause of death.

'After that initial postmortem,

Peter's body was released back to his family.'

'Peter was deeply religious

and had asked to be buried at Stowe Parish Church,

where he was a popular member of the congregation.'

Peter's funeral was a huge affair at Stowe Church.

There were so many people that they couldn't all get into the building.

'Peter's young lodger, Ben Field,

who had been closest to him in his final moments,

took a leading role in the service.'

Ben read a eulogy to him, which was kind of in keeping

with his apparent relationship with Peter.

It was full of puns and wordplay

and obviously made Ben seem very clever.

People generally had goodwill towards him,

they thought that he really looked after Peter in his declining times,

because he'd been ill for a while.

And he just seemed to be a... you know, a young decent man.

There was a lot of discussion of what caused Peter's death.

I asked Ben if he could tell me

and he said that it was confidential,

that the family didn't want people to know,

but he had died from alcohol poisoning.

And he told me a story

of how all the alcohol in the house had been taken out,

but he had accidentally left a bottle of very good malt whisky,

which he'd intended to give as a present to someone else.

And Peter must have found it when sleepwalking

and had drank most of it, and that had caused his death.

Ben was very lucky. Peter had made him the beneficiary of his estate.

And in fact Peter's house ended up being sold,

and Ben received half of the proceeds,

which enabled him to buy a home in Towcester, a small flat.

He did very well out of Peter's death.

'And that might have been the end of it,

until it was discovered that months earlier,

while Peter was still alive,

one of his elderly neighbours had also become very close

to none other than Ben Field.'

Ann Moore-Martin, Peter's neighbour, she lived three doors up,

she was a retired primary school head teacher.

By this time she's in her early 80s.

She's never married, she has no children and she's comfortably off.

She meets Ben and Ben starts wooing her, becoming friendly with her,

and Ann in return was completely love struck by Ben.

He gave her a photograph of himself

and he captioned it, beneath the photograph, "I am always with you."

She created a kind of shrine in her home.

By degrees, Ann became separated from her family.

Ben, I think, encouraged her

to reduce her contact with her family

and so she became isolated from them.

'A year after Peter had died,

Ben was now poised to inherit Ann's house as well.'

Ann was very religious. She believed very profoundly in God.

And she'd starting receiving these apparent miracle messages

on her mirrors in her home.

They said things like, "God loves you," "Take care of Ben,"

"God will reward you."

And really the messages seemed to be saying to Ann,

"Make Ben a beneficiary of your will."

Ann decided to change her will in his favour.

She made contact with a local solicitor.

Unfortunately for Ben,

it was the same solicitor that Peter had also gone to

when he was changing his will in Ben's favour,

and obviously the solicitor was suspicious.

'The solicitor raised concerns with Ann,

but in December of that year she went ahead

and changed her will to benefit Ben.'

'Less than two months later, Ann ended up in hospital

and the true nature of her relationship with Ben

finally came to light.'

Eventually Ann had a stroke, a minor stroke,

and was admitted to hospital.

And her niece,

who was already concerned about Ben's role in her life,

contacted the police.

The police started talking to Ann

and she began telling them what had been going on.

She'd also spoken to a friend about Ben having white powder

and that made the police suspicious as well.

'With the alarm now raised,

Ben Field was arrested for fraud in March 2017.'

'And once he was under police investigation,

detectives started to realise

that Ben Field's relationship with Peter Farquhar

may also not have been what it seemed.'

Peter and Ann didn't know each other well.

They were neighbours but weren't close.

They were both single, they'd never married,

they didn't have any children, didn't have a very close family,

and they were both very vulnerable.

So Ann died eventually of natural causes. She died of a huge stroke.

There was nothing suspicious about her death.

But that didn't stop some of her family

and some of the people who knew her

believing that Ben must have been involved somehow in her death.

The police started looking at Ben's behaviour and his conduct.

And they became suspicious of him

and began to wonder if Peter and Ann might have been murdered.

It was no longer now a fraud case. It was a murder inquiry.

'When 69-year-old Peter Farquhar died in 2015,

it was not treated as suspicious.'

'His body did, however, hold secrets which had not yet been discovered.'

But after his death, police had no reason to suspect

that his lodger, Ben Field, was lying about his alcohol problem,

or that there was anything untoward

about Ben inheriting money from Peter's will.

'As Peter struggled with his declining health,

Ben had been there at his side,

so no-one had really asked how a young man,

more than 40 years his junior,

had come to be living with Peter in the first place.'

When he first met Ben, Peter was in his mid to late 60s.

He was a retired English teacher at two prominent public schools.

He'd been a senior teacher at Manchester Grammar School,

and then he'd moved down south

to take up the Head of English at Stowe Public School.

He was focused on his work as a school master,

a very effective teacher.

He was focused on his faith, as a Christian.

And he also entertained dreams of becoming a published novelist.

He had written novels and none of them had been published.

But he was quite content. He had a comfortable life.

He also had a great sense of humour and was very good company.

He was very interested in all aspects

of culture, music, and art, and architecture,

and liked travel.

'As an inspiring novelist, Peter was a prolific writer.'

For very many years, back to the '90s,

Peter had been writing daily journals.

I think it was something like 62 books,

each one of about 200 pages, closely handwritten.

He would record everything that happened.

They were quite microscopic accounts of Peter's daily life.

'His journals revealed that Peter was a man in turmoil.'

Peter came from a very religious family

and he himself was extremely religious

and what you might call High Church.

He was a member, an active member of the church at Stowe.

He was also gay, he was homosexual,

but he found that absolutely incompatible with his faith

and he couldn't reconcile those two parts of himself.

It was really very sad.

I'm sure that Peter was lonely in his retirement.

He did share with me his own feelings of guilt

at having fantasies and desires

that he felt should not become reality.

It was a sort of secret sexuality.

He believed that it was not wrong to have homosexual feelings,

but that it was, for him, as a Christian,

wrong to live them out.

I think undoubtedly

the fact that Peter was kind of tormented by his sexuality

made him vulnerable to anyone with a predatory intent.

'In retirement Peter took up the position

as a part-time English lecturer,

and this is where he first met Ben Field.'

So in April 2011, Peter notices Ben Field,

who is then just 20,

a young man sitting in the class that he's teaching.

He seemed to like him and seems to be impressed by his intelligence.

The first time I'd heard about Ben

was when Peter was describing a class

that he was teaching at Buckingham University.

And it was not very responsive, the class,

but there was one bright student and that was Ben Field.

By the sound of it he was very clever, very vocal in class.

He liked to contribute.

Ben came from a normal, quite respectable family,

quite a comfortable upbringing.

His mother was a parish councillor,

his father was a Baptist minister at a popular local church.

It seemed that after a while Ben was visiting him at home

and he said, "Ben comes and chats and is very pleasant company,

seems to like to come and talk to me."

'Ben appeared to share Peter's love of literature

and their relationship developed quickly.'

They spent a lot of time talking about books and writing.

That was the great passion for both of them.

I think they had quite competitive conservations,

trying to outwit each other with their clever wordplay.

Peter was attracted to Ben

because they exchanged ideas about literature.

Ben was full of his own approaches to literature

and ready to discuss and argue

and Peter was very happy to engage in that,

and he found him pleasant company.

'Before long, this attraction became a serious commitment.'

Things progressed between Ben and Peter.

'Two-and-a-half years after they first met,

they took a walking holiday together.'

It's the first time they share a bed in a hotel room,

which Peter's journals reveal he found... finds very exciting,

being close to Ben's body.

Then, on this particular day, they take a walk up a hill

and at the top Ben declares his love for Peter.

He produces two knives that he's bought especially for the occasion.

They are, you know, the equivalent of wedding rings.

They're symbols of brotherhood and commitment.

This is the culmination of everything

that Peter might have secretly hoped for his whole life.

Ben now moves into Peter's home.

They've agreed to the outside world Ben will be the lodger,

but it's a very poignant detail

that, for the first time in his life,

Peter goes out and buys a double bed,

clearly, you know, planning to share that bed with Ben.

No-one really knows whether or not Ben and Peter ever had sex.

I think that Peter used a phrase in his journal,

words to the effect of,

"Total physical and emotional satisfaction before God."

That might be an interpretation of the fact they were having sex,

but it's just impossible to know.

Peter sent me an email telling me that Ben was moving in

and that they were forming a partnership

and that this was not to be official,

no-one was to know about it.

Neither of them felt it necessary to tell anybody else.

Peter was thanking God for this God-given relationship.

He was sure that it was blessed.

'Five months later, they made a serious commitment.'

So things moved quite quickly for Ben and Peter now

and in March 2014 they go through a ceremony of betrothal.

There's a gay vicar in London, at Abbey Road,

in Kilburn, St Mary's Church,

and he conducts a small ceremony for them.

It's just the three of them.

As far as I know, I'm the only person that Peter spoke to

about this blessing that their relationship received.

'Although their personal relationship stayed private,

their relationship with God was shared very publicly.'

'Ben quickly established himself

as a trusted member of Peter's congregation.'

Ben starts accompanying Peter to his church, Stowe Church,

and Ben is charming and willing.

He becomes a deputy church warden.

He's essentially inveigling himself into the life of the church.

The congregation, like everyone else who met Ben,

found him very charming, plausible, very clever.

Quite incredibly, he decided that he would seek to be ordained.

He was quite close to actually being ordained as a vicar.

Ben Field did arguably groom those around Peter

in the local community.

It seemed that he was trying to create the conditions

to smooth the way into Peter's life

and to gain acceptance so people wouldn't ask too many questions.

And he seemed to be presenting a persona

of somebody who was very religious

and educated and caring.

Very much at variance with the truth.

'Ben was soon a core member of Peter's social circle.'

Peter had an active social life.

He liked having people round, went to other people's houses.

The incredible thing about Ben is that people really liked him

and people perceived that he was really good for Peter

and was looking after him.

They understood that Peter was quite lonely and Ben was filling a void.

'But there were people who had their doubts.'

I do remember the occasion when we met here

and I went into the kitchen and Ben followed me in and chatted

and admired various objects in the house.

And then he said, "This is the sort of thing I like,"

and he took out a flick knife.

And suddenly the blade was flashed at me.

I was a bit taken aback, a bit surprised at this,

but I don't think I showed any reaction.

But it was, in retrospect, a rather sinister moment.

'It was a moment that revealed

the inner workings of Ben Field's psyche.'

Narcissism is a term that's used to describe a pattern of behaviour

that centres upon an individual's belief in their own superiority.

Being superior to other people, in their own minds,

they're entitled to manipulate and exploit other people.

They do typically demand attention as well.

They seek opportunities to demonstrate

their supposed superiority.

So it's not just a sort of casual charm,

which sometimes they present towards the world, all the time.

Sometimes they can be vicious and vindictive as well.

'Despite the tell-tale signs,

throughout their relationship and even after Peter's death,

no-one raised any concerns about Ben Field.'

'It was only a year-and-a-half later,

when Ann Moore-Martin had also changed her will

to benefit Ben Field, that Ben was arrested for fraud.'

'The police started asking serious questions.'

They had started looking at all the huge amount of material

that they recovered from their searches of Ben's homes

and they decided there was enough there to suggest

that if they examined Peter's body in more detail,

they may find fresh evidence.

So the police eventually decided

that they needed to exhume Peter's body from the cemetery at Stowe.

It's not an everyday occurrence

for the police to exhume the bodies of people who have died.

It's very rare.

I don't think the police wanted to alert the community

and also the potential suspect to the fact

that they were essentially carrying out a covert murder enquiry.

So they carried out the exhumation privately and quietly.

'Peter Farquhar had been dead and buried

in Stowe parish churchyard for a year and a half.'

'But his body still had secrets that had not yet been discovered.'

It's amazing how much information you can get

from a body that's been buried for a long time.

The changes of decomposition depends so much

on the type of soil that the body was buried in.

And in Peter's case,

in fact the preservation of his body was very good.

The skin in some small areas had been decomposed

and bits of the skeleton were exposed,

and the external surfaces, because of those changes,

would have lost some superficial evidence

that might have been present.

Now, Peter's organs had changed a bit,

returning, as is the normal process, through their cellular contents,

back to the earth, as we would expect.

The internal organs that were able to be seen present within the body

were pretty good and could be further examined.

But the key thing was,

in order to establish whether Peter had actually died

as a result of acute alcoholic intoxication,

there needed to be a much more detailed examination

of the whole of the body,

looking in greater detail for any injuries, any other findings,

and of course for much more toxicological examination.

'The secret of Peter had really died and been buried with him.'

'Now his own body would tell the true story

of what the killer really did to his victim.'

Critically, the most important piece of evidence

that sealed the case were the results of the exhumation

that had been carried out of Peter's body.

I don't think I've ever come across anything like it.

When Peter Farquhar was found dead in 2015,

next to a half-empty bottle of whisky,

no-one had doubted that he'd died from excessive drinking.

But now his body had been exhumed...

..and finally would be able to tell the truth about what had happened.

'Peter's body was examined in far more detail

during the second postmortem.'

'And his lodger, Ben Field, now also found himself

under much closer scrutiny.'

I think he put on a good show, a good act.

He was what my mother would've called a plausible young man.

He knew how to talk to people and please them.

'Back in 2013, after moving in with Peter,

Ben Field got a job at a local care home.'

He underwent training for how to look after the residents

and it seemed like a really kind,

religious, you know, type of thing to be doing,

to be looking after others.

I knew that he was putting himself forward for ordination

and I said, "Well, this is all good pastoral experience,

er, helping people."

And his reply surprised me.

"Yes, and it will help me look after Peter

in his dementia."

Which I found a shocking statement.

I was really very surprised.

'This was the first anyone had heard

that Peter might be suffering from dementia.'

So I think towards the end of 2014, the beginning of 2015,

that some of Peter's friends began to notice

some decline in his faculties.

He seemed a little slow sometimes, a little sleepy.

He seemed quite forgetful. Previously he was very sharp-witted.

He would sometimes say he was hearing voices.

Peter suffered quite severe hallucinations

and, you know, almost like sort of out-of-body experiences,

which he wrote about in his journal.

Seeing, you know, shards of light, and, you know, small creatures,

and really very disturbing things.

People were concerned.

It was at about the same time that Peter was telling me regularly

that Ben told him that he was sleepwalking,

and he was doing things that he couldn't remember having done.

Things like all the family photographs

that were in the living room

had moved up into his study upstairs.

He couldn't find his car keys.

He said, "Ben always finds these things."

"I've hidden them around the house."

"I don't know what I'm doing. I fear I'm losing my mind."

He was very distressed about this, as anyone would be.

One of the nastiest occasions was when Ben showed him, he told me,

a box of files which had become sodden with urine,

and Ben said, "You must have peed in it

when you were walking, sleepwalking."

So that was pretty shocking.

'And sometimes, while Peter was going through these frightening episodes,

Ben was filming him.'

They're, they're, they're, erm...

...exchanging...

...very substantial amounts of money

for, you know, a glass of whatever.

(Ben) Where is it that you think they are?

I'm not sure, myself.

So where is it that they're buying these glasses of water?

They probably aren't.

Ben Field's behaviour towards Peter Farquhar

does seem to have been extremely cold-blooded,

very calculated.

I think he did undoubtedly get gratification

from the hold that he had over Peter.

The fact that he was able to manipulate Peter into doing things,

it's as if this was just as important to him

as the financial gain, for example.

He asked people to pray for him.

I suppose he feared that he might have dementia

or that, you know, he might be suffering

some other kind of long-term illness that was creeping up on him.

So in the summer of 2015 Peter had this book launch

for a book called The White, White Sea.

That was one of his novels.

And he started feeling very ill and behaving very strangely,

and he would later write in his journal

what a terrible day it had been

and how he'd been having all these very odd sort of unreal experiences

during the whole event.

I was told that he felt very unwell indeed

and that he could hardly sign copies of his book.

I was not invited to it,

which I think might have been a calculation on Ben's part.

'Peter suffered a number of accidents, injuries

and public humiliations.'

'All of it, said Ben, evidence of dementia.'

(operator) "The reason for the call?" (Ben) "Mr Farquhar has fallen."

"His head struck a table on his way to the floor."

"OK, what I can do is offer an assessment for the head injury."

"And how did he manage to fall?"

"Was there a faint or a blackout before the fall? What happened?"

"He's prone to falls."

"He falls frequently because of something that's as yet undiagnosed,

but is probably a dementia."

But Peter didn't actually have dementia.

He'd been to see doctors, he'd even had an MRI scan,

and there was no neurological explanation

for the symptoms that he was displaying.

And they'd also come on far too suddenly.

Looking at the body on the digital table,

we can see what a normal brain looks like.

The surface of the brain is folded like mountains and valleys.

But in dementia, what happens, when the brain tissue is lost,

those valleys get bigger and broader.

When we cut across the brain,

the ventricles, the holes in the middle of the brain,

that normally contain clear cerebrospinal fluid,

those too get bigger and full of fluid.

And Peter, when his brain was examined,

showed none of these pathological signs of dementia.

So if Ben had been making up symptoms to try and lay the groundwork

to suggest that Peter was developing dementia,

if he was lying about that, what else could he be lying about?

The other issue that Ben started putting about

was that Peter was drinking too much.

People knew that Peter liked a drink,

but no-one really thought that he was drinking to excess.

But now Ben was telling them that, you know,

his excessive drinking was causing problems with his health.

Peter was a steady drinker.

He'd have a bit of gin and tonic in the summer,

or a whisky in the winter.

We'd share a bottle of wine over dinner.

It wasn't excessive.

He was... I never saw him drunk.

Peter's drinking habits were not indicative

of someone with an alcohol problem.

He didn't seem like somebody

who drank everything he could lay his hands on,

but he was quite a keen social drinker

and so it wasn't a very big step for people to believe

that he actually might be having problems with his drinking.

'And it was a problem

that Ben suggested was spiralling out of control.'

So one night Ben phoned the emergency services

and told them that Peter had just taken an overdose.

Ben said that he'd come home

and found Peter with a bottle of gin and some pills.

But then when he went to hospital there was no evidence, from tests,

that he drunk very much at all and no suggestion of an overdose.

'Ben had convinced everyone that Peter was an alcoholic.'

'But heavy drinking can leave its mark on the body.'

'Peter's exhumed remains were in remarkably good condition

and his organs told their own story.'

Peter was found in his front room, slumped over on the sofa,

and next to him was a half-full bottle

of really quite expensive and very strong whisky.

The first postmortem examination

had done a very narrow toxicological examination,

not really considering the wider forensic implications.

It had showed he'd got a significant amount of alcohol in his bloodstream.

The second postmortem examination

looked in somewhat more detail at his liver.

But it still didn't show any evidence of alcohol-related disease.

It's smooth, it's even, it's brown,

and that's what a normal liver looks like.

There was no evidence for the scarring and knobbly pallor

that you associate with cirrhosis and liver damage.

So was someone trying to construct a story here?

Telling tales about his life and his use of alcohol

that might suggest something else was going on?

And this was the crucial thing.

When there was a wider forensic examination of Peter,

could it be established that he necessarily would have died

from the amount of alcohol that was present in his blood?

Or was there something more sinister going on?

'Back in 2015, in Maids Moreton,

Peter was so concerned about his failing health

that he moves into a care home, where he saw a dramatic change.'

He's away from Ben, obviously,

and miraculously he starts to feel so much better.

He feels much better in himself.

He starts phoning friends, telling them how well he's feeling.

'One of the friends he called was Robert Wilson.'

He told me then that he'd been in a care home for a week,

during which he said he did not sleepwalk at all.

That stayed with me.

I realised that I never really put two and two together

to see that he never actually sleepwalked at all.

'Peter seemed relieved that his mysterious symptoms had disappeared,

but his moment of happiness was all too brief.'

He goes home, he goes to his church,

and he tells the congregation that he's feeling much better.

Everyone is really pleased.

And it's the next day that he's found dead by his cleaner.

When Peter Farquhar died in 2015, foul play wasn't suspected

and it wasn't investigated any further.

'But then a shock discovery led to the exhumation of his body

and the chance for it to reveal the truth.'

'It was discovered that Peter's lodger, Ben Field,

has also convinced 82-year-old Ann Moore-Martin

to change her will in his favour,

setting off a chain of events that would prove to be his downfall.'

As it would turn out, of course, Ben shot himself in the foot

when he was trying to gaslight Ann and get into her will,

because he pushed her to make contact with a solicitor.

And she contacted the very solicitor

who already knew what he had done with Peter, getting into his will.

'Ben Field was arrested for fraud,

and as part of the investigation detectives searched Ben's home.'

'That's when they found his diaries.'

All these notebooks of Ben's, in which he'd written effectively

what he planned to do, what he'd done.

One of the mysteries of the case is Ben knew the police were after him,

but he didn't destroy those notebooks,

which would have made it much harder to build a case.

He left everything there.

'But police still didn't have enough evidence

to charge Ben Field with murder.'

'They needed to prove he intended to kill Peter.'

It took the police so long to get to grips with this case.

It was so difficult to read all this spidery writing,

but eventually they started realising what he'd done.

And not only that,

but realising that he'd written down what he'd done.

So in January 2018 he was arrested,

and this time he was arrested for murder.

There was an overwhelming amount of evidence from Ben's own hand

that he always intended that Peter would die.

He'd written a little... he'd drawn this little illustration of a grave

and beside it he'd written "The hole is the goal,"

and he was referring to Peter.

He'd written about attacking him,

he'd written down how he wanted to hit him with a hammer.

2015, he'd written "End Peter."

And of course that's what happened.

'The notebooks revealed the mind of a killer.'

I think the extensive and detailed note keeping,

it might be seen as him adopting a professional approach

to what he was doing.

It's as if he prided himself on his meticulousness

and attention to detail.

I think there were over 50 instances

in which Ben had written that he had given Peter sedatives,

benzodiazepines in various forms.

The police also discovered

that Ben had been stealing drugs from the care home where he worked,

which enabled him to do that.

And they also saw

that when Peter was suffering these out-of-body experiences,

he'd been given psychedelic drugs, a drug called BK-2C-B.

That was why he'd been having these terrible reactions.

'But although he had written about drugging and killing Peter,

it wasn't proof that he'd actually carried it out.'

'Only the truths revealed by Peter's body during the second postmortem

could provide the proof.'

'It had been established

that there was no evidence of alcoholism or dementia,

as Ben had claimed.'

'But was the body holding more secrets?'

In Peter's exhumation, they recovered samples of his hair

for toxicological examination.

Now, the hair doesn't decompose very quickly after death,

and that's because it's composed of keratin,

the material that makes your nails,

and I can show you pictures of it on the digital table here.

We know hair grows in life at about one centimetre per month in an adult.

In Peter's case there was about six centimetres of hair,

meaning the toxicologist could look at the drugs he had taken,

or was administered, over the six months of his life.

And when they did so, they could see that there were benzodiazepine drugs

present throughout the samples that were analysed.

It also found evidence that he had taken, or been given,

an ecstasy type drug,

the type of drug that gives people bizarre hallucinations.

And that would explain perhaps

his really odd behaviour at his book launch.

'The hair proved that what Ben Field had written

in the pages of his journals about harming Peter

was not just fantasies.'

'It was evidence that he had actually done it.'

This is such an unusual case,

because it's all there, it's all written down.

So you had Ben describing in his notebooks that he's drugged Peter.

You had Peter in the next day's journal entry

describing how he felt, he felt so ill.

And then you have the forensic science,

you have the evidence of the hair samples from the exhumation

revealing that the whole time that Peter was being drugged.

Gaslighting is a behaviour that would be consistent

with some of what narcissists do,

because it really is concerned with undermining another person,

destroying their confidence,

and maybe getting the person to question their own beliefs,

they don't know what's real anymore, to make him feel depressed

over the fact that he seemed to be losing his faculties.

So although the police could never absolutely say with certainty

what happened at the moment of Peter's death,

how he had died at Ben's hand,

the evidence that Ben had killed Peter

and that he'd intended to kill him was overwhelming.

'Ben Field was charged with the murder of Peter Farquhar

and the attempted murder of Ann Moore-Martin.'

Ben's trial at Oxford Crown Court in the summer of 2019

was absolutely epic.

It lasted over three-and-a-half months, the whole summer.

Ben, you know, disclosed so many extraordinary things that he'd done.

He was giving evidence for well over two weeks

and he was in the witness box facing the jury

like he was delivering a lecture,

trying to play down what he'd really done.

But at the same time not being able to avoid showing people

how clever he was, how devious.

Seeking to represent yourself in court is rather unusual

and that is entirely consistent with his narcissistic tendencies.

Maybe he felt that he would be better than any mere lawyer,

that he'd be able to dazzle the jury with his brilliance,

and meanwhile receive a lot of attention in the courtroom.

So it would tick a lot of boxes for him, I'm sure.

Ben was deceiving everyone. He was living a completely unreal life.

It was extraordinary to hear it unfold in court.

His defence was that when he wrote those things down

he was just playing with ideas, he never really meant any of it.

And what else could he say? He'd written it all down.

He'd left it there for the police to find.

'Ben's notebooks also revealed a hit list

of over 100 people to manipulate, including his own parents.'

'There was little doubt that he would kill again.'

I was called to be a witness at the trial of Ben Field.

It was a very strange and rather frightening experience,

giving evidence.

During the court case,

the defence wanted me to know that I was on Ben's hit list.

He had a list of people who he might consider murdering in due course.

I think the fact that the police found a list of,

I think it was over 100 potential targets,

does give an indication

of just how planned and cold-blooded it really was.

He was fascinated by how clever he was.

And it felt like that when he was in the dock

talking to the jury about all his misdeeds,

that he was kind of proud of them in some way.

And, you know, you could see him almost rising,

he had this kind of grandiosity about him and the superiority.

A psychopath is usually described

as having a kind of superficial charm,

a sense of grandiosity, a sense of their own importance.

Is often quite glib

and rather dismissive of other people's points of view,

seem very confident regarding their own point of view.

There's a great willingness to use deceit to achieve their own ends.

'After the trial lasting 15 weeks,

Ben Field was found guilty of Peter Farquhar's murder,

but there wasn't enough evidence to convict him

of having played a part in the death of Ann Moore-Martin.'

Ben was given a life sentence.

He was convicted of murder, sentenced to life

and he received a 36-year tariff,

which means that he will serve 36 years

before he can be considered for release.

He may never be released,

but he won't be going anywhere for 36 years.

Peter Farquhar didn't survive the calculated cruelty of Ben Field.

A body never lies.

And Peter's body needed to be able to give the truth

of what had happened to him.

But thanks to his wish to be buried in holy ground,

in the churchyard that was so central to his life,

the evidence buried with him

helped ensure that Ben Field could never claim another victim.

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