Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - He Murders Old People - The Ben Field story

Episode Date: February 2, 2025

This is the story of Ben Field and the murder of Peter Farquhar

So this guy, he's just evil. Like, he's a psychopath. Let me show you. Now the psycho's name is Benjamin. He's 22, he's a college student, he lives in England, and one day this older writer comes to his university to give a guest lecture. His name's Peter, Peter 67.

Here's the thing about Peter. Peter's gay. He's also deeply religious. And he's single and extremely lonely, and Peter's getting to that age where he's terrified of dying alone, and he wants companionship. He wants someone to share his life with. So Benjamin, he sees Peter's lecture, and he befriends him,

and they hang out, and Benjamin starts visiting him at his home every day, and they're really hitting it off. And even though he's significantly younger than him, Peter thinks Benjamin is foin, and these two start dating, and pretty quickly Benjamin moves into Peter's place with him. And things go well, and later Benjamin even proposes to Peter,

and they have a betrothal ceremony, Which I guess is kind of like an engagement ceremony. I guess it's like a religious thing. But having a betrothal ceremony shows that Peter is really committed to this relationship. And why wouldn't he be? He finally found someone who cares about him. I mean he was super lonely before and now he has someone to spend his life with. Here's an actual photo of the two of them together. And here's another photo. And I gotta say, they look really happy together. I mean, they even go to church together every week and Ben Benjamin becomes a church warden.

In fact, Peter's so serious about this relationship, he changes his will to include Benjamin in it. However, here's where the story gets dark. Remember how I said Benjamin is a psychopath? Well, he isn't really in love with Peter. Benjamin sees Peter as an easy target, a lonely, gullible old man who's in love with him, a man who would believe whatever Benjamin tells him

because he's so desperate for companionship. companionship. And now that Benjamin's got Peter to put him in his will, he comes up with a plan to get rid of Peter for good. And first, he makes Peter think he's going crazy. He goes and he takes everyday items from around the house and he hides them. He also moves photographs around to different places and low-key deletes contacts from Peter's phone. So Peter starts to think his memories f***ed up. And Peter's like, what's happening? Am I crazy? Then Benjamin gets online and he orders a bunch of hallucinogens and sedatives. And he gets prescription drugs from a bunch of different places and he secretly starts putting them in Peter's food. He drugs him every day.

And poor Peter, he doesn't know any of this is going on. He just knows that he hasn't really been feeling like himself lately. And he starts reacting to the drugs. And he's getting confused and slurring his words all the time and hallucinating. So he's totally not himself. And when he goes around his friends, his friends are like, Why are you acting so weird, bro? And his friends and all the people around him

legitimately think he's losing his mind. And it's humiliating for him. While Benjamin, he's just loving that his plan is working. And he's such a weird guy that he'll record videos of Peter all drugged up and rambling. It's such a strange world, the whole thing, because on the one hand, I'm actually used to be sort of competent.

Of course. Of course. Um... And all this goes on for months. Peter acting strange and people think he's slowly going insane and no one suspects Benjamin is behind the whole thing. Until... One morning, Peter's housekeeper comes over like normal and she enters the house and bam there on the couch she spots him. Peter sitting there, unalived, and there's a half-empty bottle of whiskey beside him. Benjamin had apparently drugged him until he could no longer function,

and then he somehow filled him up with alcohol, and he potentially suffocated him with a pillow. The smothering him with a pillow part isn't actually 100% certain, that's just speculation. Regardless, the coroner examines Peter's body, and I guess they didn't do a really good job, because his death is wrongly ruled in accident by alcohol intoxication. Like he died from drinking too much. And so Benjamin, he gets to collect his money from Peter's estate.

And he gets paid and he uses this new bag to buy a little apartment for himself. And he's happy. Like, his plan worked. But he isn't done yet. There are still more older people to swindle. And in fact, he's already chosen his next victim. This woman, Anne. And Anne only lives a few houses down from where Peter lived.

And Anne is 81 and she's very religious. she's not married, no children, and most importantly, just like Peter, Anne is lonely. And she really wants some kind of romantic companionship. So Benjamin meets Anne and they become friends and he's 24 at this point, so there's a big age gap between them. Regardless, he tells her everything she wants to hear, he riszes her up, and they start dating and he writes her love notes and poems and shit, and he's all charming, and eventually they start smash. And pretty quickly, now that Benjamin is in a relationship with her and she trusts him,

he starts asking to borrow money. Like he gets her to give him 4,400 pounds because I guess he's going to buy himself a car. He then gets her to give him 27,000 pounds, or about 36,000 US dollars, because he tells her that his brother is sick and he really needs to buy him a kidney dialysis machine. Spoiler alert, he doesn't use the money to buy a dialysis machine for his brother. He spends it on himself because, of course, he does. Now, because Anne is very religious, Benjamin starts taking advantage of that. And he secretly starts writing messages on her bathroom mirror for her to find. Like here's an actual photo he took of the mirror after writing one of those messages.

And he tells Anne, not that he wrote them, he tells her that these mirror messages must be messages from her God. And she believes him. And these messages he writes will say, a lot of different things, but most importantly, some of them tell Anne to leave her house to Benjamin in her will. And I guess this works because eventually, Anne changes her will to include him. And if that isn't crazy enough, one day, out of nowhere, bam, Anne has a seizure. And she's rushed to the hospital. And while she's there at the hospital, Anne's niece comes to visit her.

And while she's lying there in the hospital bed, probably all medicated on pain meds, She tells niece all about her new lover, this 24-year-old stud named Benjamin. And he is so fine, and also she tells her how her God is somehow writing messages on her bathroom mirror. And of course, her niece is like, uh, what the fuck? So niece goes and reports all this to the police, and pretty quickly they start investigating Benjamin. And during this investigation, police learn about Peter's death, and that Benjamin used to date Peter and that he ended up. and that he ended up in his will.

And police get suspicious. And they start wondering if maybe Benjamin played a role in unaliving Peter. So 19 months after he passes, they exhumed Peter's body. And they do a second more thorough autopsy on him, and this time they find Peter had sedatives in his system while not having that much alcohol in his system. And that he may have been suffocated with a pillow. So then, pow, police arrest Benjamin.

Here's his mugshot. And the court ends up finding him guilty of murdering Peter and he gets sentenced to a minimum 36 years in prison. Good.