DCI Mark Glover reveals how he managed to bring ‘evil and cruel’ Ben Field to justice

He is portrayed by Jonathan Aris in The Sixth Commandment

9 months ago

In 2018, DCI Mark Glover and Thames Valley Police closed in on Ben Field, whose crimes are the focus of BBC One’s true crime drama The Sixth Commandment.

Ben Field struck up a relationship with two elderly people, Peter Farquhar and Ann Moore-Martin, in an attempt to defraud them and have himself written into their wills. Field gaslit and used their religious faiths against them before poisoning and killing Peter Farquhar.

DCI Mark Glover helped bring Field to justice, which saw the churchwarden jailed for 36 years in 2019. Mark Glover noted that Field “could identify vulnerabilities in people” and was able to use that “to his advantage”.

“After his arrest he tried that with the interviewing officers. He was always courteous and polite but he was looking for a weakness he could exploit so he could take control. He is a skilled manipulator,” he told The Sun.

via BBC

The DCI worked in the police force for 30 years before retiring in May 2018, as seen in the TV series, which saw him return as a civilian investigator.

It was Ann Moore-Martin’s niece who flagged Field’s behaviour with the police, which led to an investigation being launched.

“In March 2017 the CID arrested Field and [Martyn] Smith and a lot of property was recovered in the house searches, then Peter’s name came up, as he lived a couple of doors down,” Glover explained.

“When we started to research Peter, there were a lot of similarities about his decline in healthcare towards the end of his life — and then we found that Field was the beneficiary in both of their wills and the alarm bells really started ringing.”

When Field was arrested again in 2018, the police discovered notebooks filled with fantasies about murdering 50 people and three of Peter’s missing journals, which detailed his decline in health and Field’s treatment of him.

Mark Glover said: “By then we had more of an idea what we were looking for but we didn’t realise Field had been documenting everything he’d done.

“It was chilling but it was a massive breakthrough for us because we thought we knew what had happened, but we didn’t have the evidence to support our theory.

“Incredibly he had documented the quantities of drugs he had covertly given Peter, which is something many poisoners do, to record the amount and the effect it has. But Field actually enjoyed what he was doing and unfortunately he got satisfaction from seeing the results.”

“Ben Field is an evil, cruel, controlling, manipulative man. He is a terrible person,” Mark added.

The Sixth Commandment is available to watch on BBC iPlayer now.