Elderly victims were tricked into doubting their sanity, jury told
PETER Farquhar and Ann MooreMartin were deliberately ‘gaslighted’ to make them change their wills, prosecutors said.
‘Gaslighting’ is a process of psychological manipulation, when a target is made to doubt their own sense of reality and gets its name from the 1938 play Gas Light.
In the play, a husband works to make his wife think she is losing her mind by hiding items and telling her she was responsible.
He instils further paranoia by denying the house’s gas-lamps are dimming – when in fact they are, in order to convince her she is losing her grip on reality.
The court was told that Ben Field and Martyn Smith went to efforts to convince Farquhar he was an alcoholic. In Miss Moore-Martin’s case, they left messages in white marker pen on mirrors in her house.
Oliver Saxby QC said: ‘These messages were biblical in nature and Miss Moore-Martin ended up believing they were from God.
‘Amongst other things, the messages were telling her to leave Ben Field her house, that if she did, she would be doing the will of the Lord - which is what she duly did.’
By this time, the prosecutor said, she ‘had started feeling very unwell and had started worrying about her own sanity’ after Field and Smith’s alleged efforts to ‘disorientate’ her. The pair had also hidden items around her house, ‘only then miraculously to find them for her, in obvious places where only someone losing their mind would not have seen them’, he said.
Field also pursued a sexual relationship with the 83-year-old and took a photograph of her on his phone performing a sex act. ‘Not that she was aware he had taken the photograph – he did it without her being able to see,’ said Mr Saxby. ‘Something to blackmail her with, w presumably, if the need arose’. Miss Moore-Martin was taken to hospital after she suffered a seizure in February 2017 and confided in her niece about what was happening, triggering the police probe.
By that time, Field had been considering s methods to kill her and make it look like an accident or suicide, it is alleged. ‘Heart attack – electrical device, dehydration, stair, sex? in the bath?...OD [overdose] on her prescriptions...church tower... sleep apnoea’, were some of the suggested ‘end games’ he noted.
There is no forensic evidence to suggest s she was regularly being drugged, d despite reporting hallucinations, the court heard.
However she did speak of Field giving her ‘some white powder to make her sleep better’.
‘Ben Field is an arrogant man; and it seems as though he derived satisfaction, enjoyment, even pride, from cataloguing much of what was going on’, Mr Saxby commented.
She died of natural causes two months after her niece raised the alarm.