The newest BBC true crime drama takes its title from one of the gravest warnings of the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not kill.
It’s a piece of guidance that, despite outwardly portraying himself as a religious man, Ben Field failed to follow. In 2019, the Buckinghamshire resident was sentenced to 36 years in prison following the murder of an elderly man he duped into a relationship, before moving on to attempt the same crime with another older woman.
The horrifying events have now been dramatised into a four-part series by screenwriter Sarah Phelps, and The Sixth Commandment tells the story of how Ben Field (played by Éanna Hardwicke) preyed on these two vulnerable people: Peter Farquhar (Timothy Spall) and Ann Moore-Martin (Anne Reid).
As the official synopsis reads, it is “one of the most complex and confounding criminal cases in recent memory". So what happened, and where is Field now?
Peter Farquhar and Ann Moore-Martin both lived on the same road in the village of Maids Moreton, Buckinghamshire.
Farquhar, a 69-year-old Cambridge graduate teacher, went on to become a guest lecturer at Buckingham University, which is where he met Field, a 28-year-old church warden, in 2011. The pair became friends, and Field later moved into Farquhar’s house as a lodger, where he fooled the older man into a relationship.
Field was intent on Farquhar changing his will, and the pair even had a betrothal ceremony. But Farquhar was a devout Christian, and he struggled with their relationship, his sexuality and how it clashed with his religion. All the while, Field was manipulating and gaslighting him, causing him to believe he was having a mental breakdown, or suffering from dementia.
The murder
Field began drugging him, leading him to have accidents, fall over and become confused. In 2015, Farquhar was found dead in his home by a cleaner, and was believed to have overdosed on drink and drugs, and it was ruled as an accidental death. A later autopsy revealed he had been suffocated.
Field then moved on to Farquhar’s neighbour, Moore-Martin, a former headmistress 57 years his senior, and began the same campaign of abuse: telling her he was in love with her, gaslighting her and pretending there were messages sent from God to her on her mirror – she was also deeply religious – in a bid to confuse her and to defraud her of her money.
The drugging began again, and this led to Moore-Martin having to be admitted to hospital, where she mentioned that Field had given her a white powder.
How was he caught?
While Moore-Martin was in hospital, according to The Guardian: “She told her niece about her relationship with Field and the writing on the mirrors. The police then launched an investigation.”
Moore-Martin eventually realised what was happening and managed to extricate herself from the relationship and removed his name from her will. She survived, and lived until 2017, when she died of natural causes.
Also, as Sarah Phelps explains in the BBC press pack for the show: “It was Peter’s diaries that helped the police to crack the case and to identify Field as a killer. He wrote assiduously every day, right down to the smallest, seemingly ridiculous, most tiny detail. When he began to write about falling ill, he didn't know of course that he was writing about his own murder. This man spent so much of his time writing about how kind Ben was being to him, bringing him cups of tea - and how four hours later he fell down the stairs.”
In court in 2019, Field admitted to entering into fake relationships with Farquhar and Moore-Martin in order to defraud them, but denied killing or planning to kill them. While he was found guilty of murdering Farquhar, he was cleared of a charge of conspiracy to murder and also acquitted of attempted murder relating to Moore-Martin, and sentenced to 36 years in jail.
After Field was jailed, Thames Valley Police's senior investigating officer Mark Glover said Field fitted the profile of a psychopath: “Cruel, calculating, manipulative, deceitful. I don’t think evil is too strong a word for him.”
Where is Field now?
Field has appealed his conviction for killing Farquhar, but is currently still serving his sentence in jail.
