Blood of Beelzebub

On Valentine's Day, 1945, the gruesome murder of a crippled hedgecutter, Charles Walton, shocked the townspeople of Stratford-upon-Avon. With its simmering links to Satanic ritual, the murder remains a mystery, one of Scotland Yard's rare cold cases, a crime as relevant today as it was eighty years ago.

On a cold, mist shrouded February evening, the 74-year-old Charles Walton was found on the slopes of Meon Hill in the rural parish of Upper Quinton, Warwickshire. He had been impaled to the h...