Church warden admits fraud but denies conspiring to murder church-going 83 year old

Ann Moore-Martin was “gushing” about Benjamin Field, then aged 26, and acted as if she was “hypnotised” by him.

Oxford Crown Court heard Benjamin Field began a relationship with Miss Moore-Martin as part of a “gaslighting” plot a few months after allegedly murdering her neighbour, Peter Farquhar, in the picturesque village of Maids Moreton, in Buckinghamshire.

Prosecutors allege Benjamin Field’s “project” was to befriend someone vulnerable, get them to change their will and then “make sure they died”.

Mr Field, the church warden, 28, the son of a Baptist minister, has admitted fraud by pretending to be in a relationship with the elderly spinster but denies conspiring with his friend Martyn Smith, 32, a magician, to murder her.

Oliver Saxby QC, prosecuting, told the jury that Miss Moore-Martin confided in her sister-in-law Gillian Moore-Martin that they were a couple.

“She said she loved him. She said they would sit together on the sofa and he would put his arm round her and fluff his eyelashes down her cheek,” he said.

“Ann Moore-Martin was gushing about Benjamin Field. She sounded like a lovestruck teenager. It was as if she was hypnotised by him.”

Field is accused alongside Smith of plotting to make the church-going pensioner’s death an accident, such as dying during sex, falling down the stairs and choking on her dentures, or suicide having got her to change her…