The Sixth Commandment - true crime drama has lessons for us all
Published by Professional Social Work magazine, 16 August 2023
It was one of the watercooler dramas of the summer… The Sixth Commandment told the true-crime tale of murder in Middle England.
Peter Farquhar, a 69-year-old retired teacher and novelist, was slowly poisoned by Benjamin Field, a church warden and PhD student in his twenties. Field wormed his way into Peter’s affections, moved into his home, began a romantic relationship with him, and then subjected him to gaslighting and horrific abuse.
He killed him in 2015, making it look like a descent into alcoholism, and financially gained from his death after persuading Peter to change his will. Field then moved on to Farquhar’s neighbour Ann Moore-Martin, who was 83.
But he was rumbled, and in 2019 was sentenced to 36 years for the murder of Farquhar. He was found to have a hitlist of more than 100 other potential victims.
The BBC drama is a stark, if extreme, reminder of the reality of elder abuse.
The government has decided to look again at powers of entry for social workers in England, who are often frustrated they can’t access people they suspect are being abused by those caring for them.
Such powers have existed in Scotland since 2009 but were rejected in England and Wales as part of a consultation on the draft Care and Support Bill in 2012.
The government’s Safe Care at Home Review heard of the challenges detecting, investigating and reporting abuse in care relationships.
Victims are often dependent on their abusive carer and vulnerable to “the manipulation they experience and the gradual and systematic grooming strategies which some perpetrators employ.”
Cases encountered in the profession rarely culminate in murder, but there are plenty of examples of carers blocking access to adults at risk.
And where older people are involved, society is all too quick to ignore their needs.
David Wilson, emeritus professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, makes some important points in A Plot to Kill about how British society marginalises older people.
The book examines the same case as The Sixth Commandment, but gives it a more thorough treatment, looking at it from the broader societal angle.
Wilson started researching his book after Benjamin Field was sent to prison in August 2019. The Coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, immediately underlining the vulnerability of older people.
He writes: “We don’t really know that much about the lives of the elderly…. Unless something dramatic happens to make them visible – like Covid-19 – the elderly are unseen and voiceless; they are the ‘walking dead’, all too often shut off in residential care homes to await the inevitable.”
Wilson points out that by June 2020, four out of five people who were dying of Covid were over 70.
Benjamin Field was just as silent and deadly a killer, known in criminology circles as ‘process-focused’. He planned a slow campaign of torture and gaslighting, taking his time with both Peter Farquhar and Ann Moore-Martin. He groomed them, but more than this: “he groomed the local community in which he lived, to enable him to get away with murder.”
Wilson is a resident of nearby Buckingham, living just up the road from where Field carried out his campaign of terror, and observes: “The victim and the perpetrator could easily have been my neighbours.”
After Peter died, there was silence, a “universal failure to acknowledge that this murder had taken place under our noses…”
And that, ultimately, is Wilson’s point. Peter and Ann could have been anyone’s neighbours, and yet our very British reticence got in the way. The bizarre chain of events that led a calculating young man to start a relationship with someone 40 years his senior was considered “Peter’s ‘business’.”
This backing off by people Farquhar knew, coupled with wider attitudes towards older people, meant that Field could carry out his meticulous campaign, undetected until poor Peter was dead and Ann Moore-Martin had similarly been duped and abused.
Had Field not been stopped, Wilson has no doubt that Buckingham would have been “dealing with a serial killer”.
And that chilling fact leads to the urgent need for institutional transformation, Wilson argues, on the part of the church, the university, and, perhaps, wider society.
Older people are the most targeted group by British serial killers. Is this fact surprising to social workers? Or is it sadly inevitable when we consider their vulnerability?
Peter Farquhar was an inspirational teacher, a friend to many, and a novelist. He had a rich and active social life, and his Christian faith was his bedrock.
What unites The Sixth Commandment and David Wilson’s A Plot to Kill is a commitment to honour Peter’s memory.
But the vibrancy of his life, before Benjamin Field came into it, was only really acknowledged after his shocking death. And that perhaps should give us pause for thought - as sons, daughters, neighbours and social workers.