LIVE AT THE WITCH TRIALS

A BLOODY SHROUD & A CORPSE IN A CAR

"Essentially it was a witchcraft trial. Let's make no bones about it - excuse the pun. You've only got to look at the evidence to realise that.

David Farrant, 1996

"He's absolutely charming to live with, I promise you, but on the bench a different character seems to come over him" Mrs. Michael Argyle on her husband, 1971.

Things looked far from promising for Mr. Farrant. His application for bail was heard by the very Judge, Purcell, he'd stood before in the "Vampire Hunter" trial of 1970, who was doubtless heartily sick of him. Trim opposed bail on the grounds that anonymous "witnesses" - these later were shown to constitute John Pope, and John Pope alone - were terrified of him, and, obscurely, "because the girl [Martine] in the photograph was naked". Martine was hardly the first person to pose nude in Highgate Cemetery.Veronika Carlson had been photographed sans apparel there by way of promoting The Satanic Rites of Dracula in 68/69 without Hammer Films ever having to be brought to Court. Bail was refused. Later, in court once the damage was done, Trim could find it within himself to conceed "If I was wrong in this, I apologise".

While on remand in Brixton Prison, Mr. Farrant was warned by an ex-con of manifold connections either side of the law to "watch himself" as the police were really out to get him while, as recently recorded by Farrant in his Dark Secrets (BPOS, 2001), Trim had cheerfully informed him at the preliminary hearing that this time there would be no "getting away with it".

In recent years, Mr. Manchester has also remarked that, following the Monken Hadley case, the police had consoled him with a promise to the effect that they'd get him eventually, and "they did". If Mr. Pope is to be believed, two of the officers involved - one of whom, he is adamant, was later "dismissed for corruption" - made what can most charitably be described as an attempt to tamper with a chief witness.

"Reid and Westmore were detailed to make sure I turned up. They took me down the pub and tried to get me drunk. I got a bit pissed but gave nothing away. They got a bollocking over it" (John Pope, The Black Magic Trial, Suspended In Dusk #6, 2000).

All this, and then there was the Judge assigned to his case, Michael Argyle.

Justice Michael Argyle, Q.C., lived in the village of Fiskerton, Nottingham, in a house named 'Truncheons'. A darling of the Tory right, he favoured life-sentances for burglary, bemoaned the passing of capital punishment, and, following his retirement from the bench in 1988, became president of the British Campaign to Restore the Death Penalty. His handling of the infamous Oz obscenity trials during the summer of 1971 had earned him the rebuke of several M.P.'s and was even railed against as an instance of 'Judicial barbarity' by what was a largely right-wing press. Hippies burnt him in effigy by the court house steps. The custodial sentances served on the three accused were overturned by Lord Widgery in November of that same year, who ruled "Because of the serious and substantial misdirection of the Jury by Michael Argyle, QC, we consider the verdits unsafe and we quash the convictions under the Obscene Publications Act".

And now here was another long hair to try his patience.

THE QUEEN against DAVID ROBERT FARRANT

CENTRAL CRIMINAL COURT

DAVID ROBERT FARRANT is charged with the following offences

FIRST COUNT DAMAGING A MEMORIAL OF THE DEAD, contrary to section 39 of the Malicious Damage Act, 1861.

David Robert Farrant, on the 7th day of October, 1971 within the jurisdiction of the Central Criminal Court, unlawfully and maliciously damaged a memorial of the dead, namely the vault of the Cory-Wright family situated in consecrated ground at Highgate Cemetery.

SECOND COUNT CONSPIRACY TO DAMAGE PROPERTY

David Robert Farrant on days between the 14th day of October 1971 and the 31st day of December 1973, without lawful excuse conspired with other persons to damage property belonging to United Cemeteries Limited in Highgate Cemetery intending to damage property.

THIRD COUNT UNLAWFULLY ENTERING A PLACE OF INTERMENT AND INTERFERING WITH A BODY THEREIN.

David Robert Farrant on a day between the 1st day of January 1971 and the 31st day of December 1973 within the juristiction of the Central Criminal Court unlawfully, maliciously and indecently broke open and entered a catacomb in consecrated ground at Highgate Cemetery and therein interfered with and offered indignities to the remains of a body to the great scandal and disgrace of religion, decency and morality.

FOURTH COUNT UNLAWFULLY ENTERING A PLACE OF INTERMENT AND INTERFERING WITH A BODY THEREIN.

David Robert Farrant on a day between the 1st day of September and the 31st day of December 1973 within the juristiction of the Central Criminal Court unlawfully, maliciously and indecently broke open a vault known as the Pazzi family vault on consecrated ground at Highgate Cemetery and therein interfered with and offered indignities to the remains of a body to the great scandal and disgrace of religion, decency and morality.

FIFTH COUNT. UNLAWFULLY ENTERING A PLACE OF INTERMENT AND INTERFERING WITH A BODY THEREIN.

David Robert Farrant on a day between the 1st and 13th days of January 1974 within the juristiction of the Central Criminal Court unlawfully, maliciously and indecently broke open and entered a vault known as the Pazzi vault on consecrated ground at Highgate Cemetery and therein interfered with and offered indignities to the remains of a body to the great scandal and disgrace of religion, decency and morality.

These were merely the charges relating to the cemetery. Once this one was out of the way, he still had to face a further trial in connection with the voodoo dolls, and yet a third involving the theft of bedlinen from Barnet General Hospital. Further to this, he'd pleaded guilty to possessing an unlicenced firearm and a round of ammunition found in his flat.

DAVID FARRANT The Judge said at the beginning of the proceedings, before we'd even heard the evidence through, that he was not going to allow it to turn into a platform to propogate my beliefs. He was as good as reprimanding me, which I found completely extraordinary. My answer to that was, quite simply, I wasn't prepared to allow the prosecution to put over all their beliefs, which were, basically, that Witchcraft was another name for Satanism and black magic, lumping them all in together. Let's bear in mind that Argyle was a devout Christian, so to him, reading such facts on record, well, it must have freaked him out. None of it - the "vampire-hunter" trial, the voodoo dolls, the arrest with Pope, the Ghost hunting - went down very well with him.

He was adamant. He'd decided that it was all to do with witchcraft, and now he wasn't allowing me to mention it. I was standing in the dock, the police had made all these allegations against me, and there was the Judge saying "You're not allowed to mention your involvement with witchcraft".

If it was unreasonable to expect Farrant to provide an account of his every movement between the dates of January 1 1971 to January 13 1974, he could at least provide an alibi for the night when the body was snatched and bundled into Mr.Windsor's vehicle. "I repeatedly told the police during my interview where I was on the night the corpse was taken, but they were not interested. On that evening Miss Batsford called for me and we went for a drink in "The Angel" Public House and we returned to my flat round about 11.30. I took her home about 12.30. I then went back to my flat and spent the rest of the night with the Scotch girl , Miss Pamela Wright."

Inspector Trim disputed that the accused had made him a party to this information, but both Julia Batsford and Susan Cross - who'd regularly visited Farrant in Brixton Prison and saw him in the company of Miss Batsford in "The Red Lion & Sun" that same evening as they made their way back to 251 - came forward and vouched for the truth of what Farrant had told the court. If Miss Wright were to testify on his behalf, the alibi would have been watertight, and the prosecutions case would almost certainly have been quashed, but in the interim the girl had quit her job and fled to Jersey, beyond the jurisdiction of the court, and refused to return to give evidence. The trial continued.

DAVID FARRANT One of the photographs the police removed from my flat portrayed me kneeling over a white object which appeared to be stained with blood. Inspector Trim put this photograph on his desk and asked me what it was. This was at a late stage in the interview by which time I realised what he was up to, and I refused to say anything about it. Throughout the interview I just kept asking him to contact my solicitor.

When Trim prepared his statement he admitted to showing me the photograph and I was supposed to have said to him, "Oh yes, that was the one of the corpse outside the vault". As I said, I didn't give any information - not for fear of incriminating myself, quite the opposite - because I didn't want it to be misrepresented.

Some time in 1972 - I'll never forget it, it was a Sunday afternoon and at that time the cemetery was still open to the public - I'd gone to Highgate with Victoria Jervis to take photographs and ... just to see the state of any further desecration, that was about it, really. We found a sheet on the ground not far from the Cory-Wright mausoleum - in fact, that can be seen in the photograph itself. We didn't take that much notice of it at first, but what concerned me was it appeared to be bloodstained. So, we left the cemetery and called the police, because my name was ... not only in the public eye but in police records as having something to do with Vampires in Highgate Cemetery. Two officers arrived in one of the old Panda cars. I led them to the sheet. I said "Look, whatever's happened here, it's nothing to do with me I can assure you of that", because, I mean, so many peculiar things were happening in there at that time. I really thought it was possible that somebody had been wounded, murdered even. They told me not to take too much notice of it, as far as they were concerned they didn't think it was real blood. That was the end of the incident. The thing was, I'd reported it.

My solicitor subpoenaed Victoria Jervis, who I hadn't seen for two years. She came as a hostile witness but she nevertheless told the truth about the bloodied shroud and verified all this in court. Inspector Trim was in conversation with the Prosecution Counsel - quite a serious discussion. The case, I believe, was adjourned for an hour or so. We came back into court. Trim had "made enquiries" in the meantime and, perhaps conveniently for the police, could find no record of my ever having made any report about the "corpse" outside the vault, which is hardly surprising because ... (shrugs).

That is the truth, that is really what happened, and for Trim to have found a record that I'd called the police, led them to the sheet, would have been to admit he'd fabricated the statement I'd "confessed" to him. "I think they are the ones of a corpse that was outside a vault".

Unfortunately, when called upon to confirm that they had received, and duly acted upon Farrant's tip-off, those concerned either genuinely couldn't recall the incident, or fell prey to the nasty epidemic of selective amnesia which descended on the Old Bailey for the duration of the trial. Even Argyle noted it.

Victoria Jervis hadn't wished to attend court and she made little attempt to conceal her irritation at Farrant for subpoenaing her. If Law, the prosecution's witness, had, albeit unwittingly, actually given evidence of far greater benefit to Farrant than it was the police, now here he was repaying their generosity by presenting a person to testify on his behalf who would possibly sway the jury back against him. Ms. Jervis had not forgiven him for getting them both arrested at Monken Hadley.

"I have tried to put most of what happened out of my mind. The false letters I wrote to a local paper were to stimulate publicity for the accused. I saw him almost every weekend in the second half of 1972 and I went to Spain with him for a fortnight at the end of June that same year. I was arrested with him in Monken Hadley Churchyard. That incident upset me very much. Afterwards, my doctor prescribed tranquilisers for me.

The press were at Barnet Churchyard. The accused was mumbling something. We had whitewashed signs on the turf, but no damage was ever done to the gravestones".

Miss Jervis went on to say that there was no nudity at Monken Hadley but "You have photograhed me a number of times in your flat with no clothes on. One photograph was published in 1972 with a false caption claiming I was a member of your Society, which I never was." On another occasion, she recalled, she'd written psuedonymously to a local newspaper at Farrant's request "to stimulate publicity for the accused".

From this, I think, we can fairly deduce that Ms. Jervis was not going to go out of her way to do her former boyfriend any favours, yet on the matter of the shroud she was adamant that Farrant had certainly called the police, and she'd waited with him at the phonebox until they arrived before returning to the flat.

In his written testimony of March 8 1974, William Law, the Cemetery foreman, identified the vault to the rear of Farrant in the photograph as that of the Cory-Wrights. "It shows the entrance door, which was always locked, to be open. Farrant appears to be beside a shroud, but I have no knowledge of an incident involving a corpse from this vault."

Law went on to add that he'd checked his records and could find no mention of Farrant having reported the matter to cemetery staff. He cited the accused and Manchester as the chief instigators of the 'vampire stories' which had led to the television coverage and consequent mini-invasion of the Van Helsing Lager Corps in March 1970, as a result of which he'd banned the pair. This certainly makes a nonsense of Mr. Manchester's claim that, after he'd performed an 'exorcism' in the Columnbarium in August of that year, the vault in question had been sealed by cemetery employees with garlic impregnated cement on his "recommendation".

Shown a photograph of "the head of a man inside a coffin which has been smashed open", Mr. Law opined "In my experience, this is a photograph taken shortly after the coffin had been opened, as the head is in good condition and would soon begin to go off when exposed to air". The photograph had been found amongst Mr. Farrant's collection and was, obviously, a vital piece of evidence against him in relation to counts 1, 3, 4 and 5. The police insisted it had been taken in September 1973.

Farrant disputed that the photograph was taken in Highgate Cemetery at all "This photograph was, in fact, taken in 1967. It was given to me, my Lord, by somebody whose second name, I believe, was Hill. The person who gave me the photograph was himself interested in Highgate Cemetery. He gave me two photographs, and also two I believe he had taken of my wife"

Mary, the defendents estranged wife, also gave evidence in support of his testimony. As she'd not seen him since leaving for her parents home in the autumn of 1969, her reminiscences covered the period immediatly prior to the whole 'Highgate Vampire' episode and, as such, certainly controverted the prosecution witness's claims - notably, those of the Cemetery employees - that much of the damage had occured post-1970.

Mary recalled that she and her husband had often visited Highgate Cemetery from 1966 through to 1968. There had been no 'witchcraft' or occult activity involved and they'd done no damage. It was, she said, "a silly sort of thing you'd do after the pubs shut. The cemetery was overgrown and falling to bits. The doors of the Catacombs were rotting and you could see the coffins inside. We'd frighten ourselves to death and come out again". Shown a selection of photographs, she put her hand to her mouth, shook her head and said "I'd rather you take them away" (in his summing up, Argyle described her as "close to fainting"). Mary recalled having already seen one of the gruesome exhibits, that depicting the pierced coffin and it's contents, in either 1966 or 1968. It had been shown her by a man named 'Tony' who said he'd taken it in Kensal Green. She'd no idea why 'Tony' had produced it, she'd found it most unsettling to look at, and she recalled Mr. Farrant had also seemed "surprised".

According to his statement of February 10th, Inspector Trim told the accused "I know that somebody broke open a coffin and took a corpse for some black magic ritual, and when they got outside the cemetery for some reason they put it in a parked car. It could have been the smell was too much. I just don't know". Other than Trim's other implication - that Farrant was a practising necrophilliac - only John Pope put forward any credible theory as to why Farrant, or indeed, anyone would wish to steal a corpse.

"Farrant told me he had a mummified head, but the Satanists had a better head which he wanted because it could be useful to him. I asked him where his head was and he told me it was somewhere quite safe, and he wouldn't say where he got it from" .Under cross-examination he maintained "I attended a meeting in Highgate Wood and several meetings in your house. At none of these meetings were parts of bodies used. You told me you had a varnished skull on the Altar in your Temple at Barnet. That is different. A mummified head has flesh on it, it is not a skull, and I am not mistaken in saying you told me you had a mummified head".

Pope was full of his pet theories - he offered that Farrant might have kept the revolver to "kill the vampire"- but, fortunately for the defendant, Judge Argyle was not disposed to value his contribution to the proceedings overmuch. Perhaps it offended his lordship's sensibilities that, as had Marty Feldman at the Oz trial, Pope, on being sworn in, had stated that he was anti-Christian and therefore had no desire to touch the Bible. He was affirmed. Whatever, at one point during his summing up, Argyle addressed the Jury as follows "Also, I make no bones about saying it, there is Mr. Pope's strange appearance and his somewhat strange manner. I made some notes during Mr. Pope's evidence when he came into the Witness Box, as I always do, especially in long cases. I fill notebooks with my little descriptions. If you do not agree with what I've written, that is up to you, members of the jury.

"I wrote against Mr. Pope, small man, bearded, and I put very dim. I do not know whether you agree with that or not, but he seemed to me to be not quite with it somehow. He was wearing a blazer with a key on the breast pocket, and on looking at it more closely it was a large male organ with inside it, as far as I could see, a number of smaller penises. There he is, members of the Jury, and I advise you to approach his evidence with care"

If Judge Argyle had his reservations about Pope's validity as a Prosecution witness, he was even less taken with Mr. Anthony Field, the "surprise" package unleashed by the defence. Mr Field's volunteered evidence was to throw the whole case into turmoil. Field had just begun a ten year sentence for a number of armed robberies, with 42 other offences of the same nature taken into consideration.

DAVID FARRANT You know the old saying , 'Truth is stranger than fiction' , well, what I am about to tell you is the truth. I had nothing to do with that offence. I was thrown into jail and refused bail and, while I was in Pentonville, there were rumours flying around amongst the inmates - "We know who really did that. There's this guy in here called Field. It was him and his friends". I didn't take much notice because my arrest had been widely publicised and newspapers circulate around prison like wildfire because there's so little else to occupy you. Everyone knew about the case and I thought it was just somebody imitating what they'd read. But on occasion, even the screws were laughing and two or three of them actually admitted to me, "Yeah, we know you're not guilty because the guy who done it is already in here". And I heard all this some months before the case came to trial. I met Field only once. We weren't on the same block. I had to go to the Old Bailey for, I think, a bail application. He was being tried in a room downstairs. He came over to me and told me "We all know it wasn't you because it was me" .He went into detail about how he and some friends he didn't wish to name went to the cemetery late one night, drunk, larking about. They'd found this particular vault broken open. They removed the body - they hadn't opened the coffin by the way, that was already open - and he described to me how they'd taken it out, someone was even dancing with the skeleton, they'd put it in the car and left. He asked me to call him up. At that stage I wasn't going to because there was no way they'd believe me. At the Old Bailey When I saw how badly it was going, I told my solicitor what I've told you and said "We'd better call him up". (You have to remember, I was defending myself on this charge, I didn't have counsel but I had my solicitor). He said, "You won't be believed. Not with this Judge. He'll tear you to pieces" . I told him it was true, but his attitude was more or less that sometimes it doesn't pay to tell the truth. Well, I just took a gamble. I called Field to court and he admitted it. He went into so much detail, he gave all the circumstances. He said right from the beginning that, yes, he had convictions for bank robbery which didn't go down at all well, they took all that into account.

Field's version of events was as follows.

ON Friday January 11th 1973, he and some friends were returning from a West End nightclub when one bright spark decided it would be a good laugh to visit the cemetery. Consequently, they either ther climbed over the wall or the North Gate and went rampaging through the Terrace Catacombs. On finding one of the vaults broken open, Field reached in and dragged a corpse from a decrepit coffin. They made off with it. At one stage, one of the party was dancing with it. "We threw the body over the wall and then we all climbed over to the other side. One of the others picked up the corpse and took its head off, then bent its legs into a sltting position and placed it in a parked car outside the main gate".

The corpse had been covered in a bandaged material which had rotted.I believe one of the legs was missing".

Field claimed he kept the head on his mantlepiece for a few days until the smell became too unbearable.Tiring of the terrible relic, eventually "I put it in a brown carrier bag and dumped it in a wastepaper bin on a lamp-post outside a Bingo Hall in Essex Road, North London".

Argyle was having none of it. Given the extraordinary number of armed robberies this witness had admitted, its possible that the Judge thought he had a serial-confessor on his hands, as again he all but instructed, bullied even, the Jury into discounting the evidence of a leading witness.

"You may think that some of the details are really almost impossible to believe.You may think that, (looking at the photograph), the legs are not bendable, or what is left of the legs, the fact that, although there were other people associating with Mr.Field in and out of the flat, none of them apparently saw this head or smelt it and, rather like Mr.Farrant in some ways, Mr.Field absolutely refused to name anybody else associated with him in this entire enterprise in Highgate Cemetery".

"Mr.Field would need to be nine feet tall and of enormous strength to have done what he claimed to have done".

"Looking at that photograph, members of the Jury, if that right leg has been bent and that corpse has been sitting behind the steering wheel, if you believe that, I suggest you could believe any thing, but this is the evidence given on oath by Mr.Field. And where are the bandages around the body which he says were there ?"

However, the Jury found in favour of the defendant by a majority of 10-1 and Argyle was forced to conceed, " But Mr. Farrant did put forward a very substantial alibi which did not in any way depend on Mr. Field in relation to that, so of course, he is not guilty ".

DAVID FARRANT I think bearing all that in mind, along with the fact that I'd already virtually proved that the police were lying by all the fabricated admissions I was supposed to have made to them, the Jury believed it and they found me to be innocent of that charge. Sometimes it's almost enough to make you believe in fate.

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