Madness, Melancholy, or Murder: An Ancient English Farm’s 50-Year-Old Mystery
March 06, 2025 at 03:30PM
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Andrew Chamings | Longreads | March 6, 2025 | 6,498 words (23 minutes)
Devon is a truly beautiful swath of land. Bordered by the Bristol Channel to the north and the English Channel to the south, the sandy beaches full of surfers and tourists—or “grockles” as we used to call them—soon turn to rolling green farmland. The cascading hills and woods are punctuated by two barren and bleak moors, Dartmoor and Exmoor, where my parents would take us on long Sunday drives to see the rutting stags. Between the moors, hundreds of hamlets, villages, and church spires dot the land. The soil is so fertile here that grass grows through the asphalt down the county’s ancient lanes; tracks so narrow, with hedgerows so high, some corners never see the sun.
The farm where I grew up sits on a hill, many miles from any city, near a place called St. Giles-in-the-Wood. The village dates back to the early 1300s and is named after St. Giles the Hermit, an antisocial monk who lived alone in the woods and suckled milk from a young deer—or so the tale goes.
The wind on our hill barrels in from the Atlantic Ocean so relentlessly that the copper beech in our garden bends away from the west in a futile attempt to escape its blast. From my bedroom window, the view past that magnificent, windswept tree reveals combes, hedgerows, and woodland folding over each other as far as the eye can see, ending at the purple-gray rise of Dartmoor. On one of those hidden hillsides sits the village of Winkleigh.
I don’t remember who first told me about the killings. It may have been my dad, one day when we were out counting the cows or mending a fence. It was around harvest time, 1975, when a butcher visited a small dairy farm, about eight miles south of ours, and saw what he thought was a scarecrow lying in the yard. It turned out to be a body; a man in pajamas and Wellington boots, with the top of his head blown off. Two more bodies were found in the orchard behind the 400-year-old farmhouse, among some rotten cider apples, also killed by shotgun blasts. Two brothers and a sister: Alan Luxton, 54; Robbie Luxton, 64; and Frances Luxton, 67. Frances was found on all fours with her nightgown pulled up around her waist. They thought she had been praying.
I remember the tales, told in whispers on the school playground. It was said that the siblings worked the old family farm with horses, Victorian plows, and no electricity; a century out of step with modern life. There were mutterings of betrayal and madness. One version said that the youngest, Alan, executed his controlling brother and sister in a revenge-fueled frenzy in the garden, before turning the shotgun on himself. Another suggested a three-way suicide pact after Alan lost his mind on learning Frances and Robert were locked in an incestuous relationship. Their ghosts walk the fields and cobblestone farmyard to this day—or so the tale goes.
Frances was found on all fours with her nightgown pulled up around her waist. They thought she had been praying.
“I remember vague mentions about this terrible thing that had happened at Winkleigh when I was growing up,” Oliver Balaam, a distant relative to the Luxtons, recently told me. “In the village, everyone says ‘I’ve heard the story,’ but with a degree of separation from reality, as if it were a ghost story. It’s like folklore.”
I always knew, of course, that a real, grim truth lay at the heart of all the muddled fiction surrounding the Luxtons. Still, I didn’t look more closely at the case until decades later, by which point I had moved thousands of miles away—from Devon to California, where I became a journalist.
There’s a scruffy romanticism to working as a journalist in San Francisco. I write in the same newsroom where the Zodiac ciphers were sent over half a century ago and pass Herb Caen’s typewriter down the hall. In the last decade, I’ve reported on several prominent crimes on the West Coast: murders, kidnappings, and disappearances. A world away from rural Devon. When I lived on the farm, I heard police sirens maybe once or twice—no doubt on their way to investigate a stolen chainsaw, perhaps a sheep rustling.
But when I was back on the farm last summer visiting my parents, I passed by the narrow lane that leads to West Chapple Farm and remembered the extraordinary mystery that had happened just a few miles from my childhood home. This story is deeply rooted in my upbringing, and not just through proximity: I’ve seen the solitude in the hills of Devon up close. I’ve stared for hours at the stark rise of Dartmoor. I’ve fired shotguns in the fields. I’ve walked the muddy hills at night in the unrelenting wind.
Poring through old newspaper archives on the case, it was clear the journalists—and even some of the detectives flown in from the city—didn’t know Devon. The countryside where I grew up was painted as another sinister character in the story. Writers breathlessly described Devon’s lonely and isolated farms as a land of tyrannical puritanism. Dispatches from London told of cursed families and the slow, backward way of life in the villages. Those raised in the cities have had this fear of the deepest corners of England’s countryside. In culture, this can be seen in films like Straw Dogs, The Wicker Man, or even Withnail and I; the wayward belief that the parochial reaches and darkest corners of Britain are walked by unearthly souls and miserly locals. As Sherlock Holmes once told his confidant, “It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”
But for me as a child, this land was a comfort, it was the city that scared me. I slept while the sound of wind rustled through the trees and cows lowed in the field. I couldn’t fathom the teeming life and density of a place like London. In one of my earliest memories, I’m in an airport hotel near Heathrow, staring at the traffic on the motorway outside, wondering where all those people were going and where they came from.
My memories of Devon are not of the quiet, foggy gloom of the moors, or desolate farmers wandering the hills. I remember going to Hatherleigh cattle market with my dad to sell a cow—the same market the Luxtons used—where hundreds of farmers were gathered, eating pasties, and hollering as the auctioneer rattled off the numbers. I remember late summer nights with friends staring at the Atlantic Ocean from the Pebble Ridge at Westward Ho! I remember drinking cheap beers and playing music with my friends in a barn. I remember the Devon County Show, where children would chase piglets around a pen and we’d eat strawberries and cream as spitfire planes flew by. I remember waking up at 6 a.m. on the morning of the May Day carnival and heading into town to eat a “champagne breakfast” with my friends before a day of revelry.
I am sure the Luxtons also loved this beautiful place—their home. The reporters who helicoptered in to write about the ghoulish siblings had no understanding of the realities of their plight. I know this land is far from sinister, I know it is appreciated by those who live here, but I also see that the life of a dairy farmer is often a hard, unforgiving existence. And no family saw that solitude and struggle more than the Luxtons.
Like many dairy farming families in Devon—my own included—the Luxton siblings were part of a centuries-long lineage. Their ancestry dates back to Robert Luggesdon, who worked a homestead near Winkleigh in the 14th century. Over the centuries, the family name, and land, spread across Devon to over 100 farms, with some branches reaching aristocracy; and by the 19th century a Robert George Luxton was living at a manor named Brushford Barton complete with a foxhunting stable, 2,000 acres, and 10 servants.
But in the late 1800s, British farming fell into a depression, largely due to the rise of steamships and the influx of cheap American grain. These economic woes—and Robert George Luxton’s fondness for gambling—meant the Luxton family’s large county footprint was decimated. Entire branches of the family left Devon, and much of the land was sold off. Around 200 fertile acres, however, in the same valley as Luggesdon’s original 14th century homestead, stayed in the family: West Chapple Farm.
After World War II and the death of their puritanical father, Robert John, and mother, Wilmot, Frances, Robert, and Alan remained at the West Chapple farmhouse. The three siblings lived a simple farming life: a dairy herd grazed in the fields, sheep were reared for wool, and clotted cream and cider were made in the outhouses surrounding the cobbled farmyard.
None of the siblings ever lived elsewhere, married, or had children. The stories about the Luxtons often portrayed three recluses hidden away in their derelict farmhouse, living in fear of the outside world as madness descended upon them. But while seclusion and paranoia did grow toward the Luxtons’s final, fateful days, talking to people who remember them, I learned they weren’t always hideaways. In fact, in their younger years, the Luxtons were much like my family and countless others, spending time in the village and enjoying the social side of the farming community.
“They came to the shops in the village. They came to the church. The harvest service,” retired glassworker Andrew Ware, who was 21 at the time of the deaths, told me.
The youngest brother, Alan, was an active member of the Young Farmers’s Club in the village and would often lead speeches at social gatherings—dances, cattle contests, and the like. Some remember him as the “life and soul” of these shindigs.
Robbie, the oldest brother, is often remembered as controlling, with a streak of his father’s Puritanism, but others recall a kind man. The last time a neighbor saw Robbie alive, he was donating a pound note to the church.
Frances was an austere woman, but she was also a common presence at village events. “She would bring in her nice silver teapot and serve tea at the harvest service,” Ware told me. “They were quite well-to-do people.” Piles of Frances’s Home Notes magazine, a monthly women’s publication full of recipes and decorating ideas, were later found in a shed—something denied to her by her strict father in her youth. She even traveled the world, visiting Italy, Israel, and America, unusual for a Devon farmer at the time. (My grandad, a dairy farmer and bell ringer in North Devon, didn’t once leave England his entire life.)
Frances did have what some saw as a ghoulish habit: spending hours at the cemetery near her forefather’s manor at Brushford Barton, writing down details from the dozen or more Luxton gravestones there. But I see her as curious, proud of her heritage, and even ahead of her time. Like the three-and-a-half million subscribers to Ancestry.com, I have also spent days tracking my family tree.
Though none of the Luxtons married or had children, it wasn’t necessarily for lack of trying. In her youth, Frances would “go courting,” wandering the meadows and country lanes with potential suitors from the village (though her father had a habit of following her at a distance on a pony). But it was Alan who came closest to marriage.
The Young Farmers, a nationwide society of rural youth in the UK, was a lively scene in the mid-20th century. My parents, who both grew up on dairy farms in North Devon, met on a Young Farmers’s trip and soon married and settled on the farm where my dad was born, where they still live and work today. Just like my dad, in 1946, Alan Luxton met the woman he wanted to marry through the club. Her name was Myrtle Standbury, a girl from nearby Hatherleigh.
Frances took Alan to the city of Exeter to buy an engagement ring for Myrtle. He hoped to take out his share in the farm business, some £6,000, and buy a smallholding with his new wife, away from West Chapple. But it was not to be. The three siblings were the last tendril of a farming history dating back to the Middle Ages, and with money tight, Robbie was not prepared to let either Alan—or the funds—go.
Fred Lyne, a farmhand at West Chapple who worked there from 1950 to the tragedy in 1975, told reporters that the brothers would argue night after night over Alan’s plans to marry Myrtle. Alan pleaded to be freed from the farm with the cash he was owed, Robbie refused to entertain it, and Frances often mediated. The arguments even came to late-night fistfights. “Alan wanted to get married, but they wouldn’t let him do that,” Andrew Ware remembered. “He had to break off the engagement.”
Myrtle moved on, eventually moving to Exeter and marrying another man. Alan Luxton would never be the same.
Money had always played a large part in the Luxton siblings’s struggles. Born from a lineage of farmers who barely held on to the land, Robbie—referred to as “the mister” by Alan and Frances—was a frugal man. One retired farmworker, who asked not to be named, said that he often worked out at the farm during harvest time, but was warned off from ever working any overtime, as Robbie wouldn’t pay it. Robbie kept meticulous ledgers and notes on the farm’s finances, showing he paid some workers in cider. This threadbare life may seem stark, but it wasn’t unusual. In good years an abundant harvest and healthy herd of cattle could provide profit at the market, but in hard years, particularly after the ravages and rationing of World War II, many farms made just enough to feed themselves.
It’s a fraught way of earning a living to this day. Under the constant threat of uncontrollable factors like the price of milk, the weather, and infectious diseases, profits can vary wildly from year to year. In the spring of 2001, when I returned to the farm after my first year at university, the foot-and-mouth outbreak—a highly infectious viral disease—had ravaged British farming communities. Looking out across the valley from our garden I saw a pyre of burning cows one hundred yards long, sending plumes of acrid black smoke into the heavy clouds. Due to a technicality, based on the location of the small river at the bottom of our hill, our dairy herd was spared from the government-mandated cull, but many neighbors were not so lucky. Six million livestock were slaughtered and burned in the UK that summer. Many farmers lost everything.
Stories of Alan’s behavior after his failed engagement veer between reclusiveness and madness. “He went off the rails,” Ware said. He was seen roaming around the farmland wearing nothing but a filthy burlap sack. Neighbors remember hearing him “shouting and groaning” in the yard. On his rare visits to the post office in Winkleigh, he barked obscenities at old friends.
It’s clear that while Alan may have once been a normal, even social, young man, by the 1970s he was a shell of his former self. He had a strange tendency to cut grass in the fields in the dead of night and disappear into his room through the days, sometimes peeking between the curtains when people came by. Meanwhile, Robbie and Frances became closer. As Fred Lyne told reporters at the time, the older siblings were “like hen and chicken, where she’d go, he’d go.”
During the last year on the farm, Robbie grew sick and lost weight, and his doctor told him to take time off from farm work. In the spring of 1975 Frances and Robbie explored a way out: A handshake agreement was made with a farmer and his son in Kent to buy the property in the autumn for £90,000. Frances and Robbie found a bungalow in the nearby town of Crediton where the three could retire. But, by that summer, it seemed fear had taken hold of the siblings. Two decades after he was told he couldn’t leave the farm, it was Alan who refused to move on from West Chapple. “He did a strange one-eighty,” Balaam said. “Alan is the one who then sticks his heels in and refuses to budge. He’s convinced that there’s no other place for him.”
Farmhand Fred Lyne also told reporters that in the last months on the farm, Alan would rarely appear beyond wandering the barns at night with a lantern and arguing with his brother about the farm sale. Robbie contracted a skin disease that made it painful to put his feet in his boots. Meanwhile, Frances seems to have fallen into almost a fugue state at times. Lyne said he would see her sitting on a bench for hours on end some days, or else pottering around the graveyard at Brushford Barton, scribbling down her notes. “They belonged in the past,” Lyne said. “Like some old tree, they just couldn’t survive being uprooted.”
Farmers in rural England are more susceptible to suicide than almost any other profession. Reliant on the weather, alone on the hills, the solitude and physical strain of dairy farming can take its toll. Alongside isolation, and a stigma around mental health issues, a recent government study listed the “lack of work-life balance” as a key factor contributing to the high suicide rate among farmers in England. But in rural Devon, where the wind howls and the rain sweeps in from the west, life is work. There’s both a purity and a burden to anchoring your entire being to the fields and livestock. For fifty years my dad woke before dawn and headed out with a dog over the damp hills to bring in 100 cows to be milked. At the end of the day, after dinner, he would head out again into the dark with a raincoat and torch to count the animals before bed. Some nights, he would head out over the fields after midnight to help a cow to calf her young—or otherwise wake to a stillborn and a loss of revenue.
While back on the farm reporting this story, I asked my parents why they thought depression appeared to be so common in the community. My dad believes modern technology led to much of the loneliness. “At harvest time we’d have gangs out in the fields,” he said, remembering a time before combine harvesters made threshing wheat a one-man job. We looked at a photo of my dad’s dad, Alfred Chamings, in the ʼ40s, taking a break during harvest. In the black and white photo, he is resting on a bale of hay, a friend beside him smoking a rolled-up cigarette. Across the picnic blanket sits my gran, Gwendoline Chamings, and another young woman.
I asked my parents if they had known any farmers who had taken their own lives. My mum quietly started to list the names, starting with a childhood friend who lived on the farm next door to hers. She started counting more names on her fingers and put her cup of tea down to use her second hand.
West Chapple Farm is even more remote than ours. It sits at the dead end of a narrow lane so rarely used that the grass is taking it over. Alan escaped from the pressure of his controlling brother and his lonesome existence down that lane through walks across the fields to the village pub and his Young Farmers gatherings. But when that went away, and the walls closed in, he made a final decision all too common in the rural West Country.
The inquest into what happened on September 23rd, 1975, is gone. “The records for this particular case have unfortunately not survived,” someone at the South West Heritage Trust told me over email. “The case was dealt with by a regional office that only existed for a few years, and it seems that the records were not retained—they were certainly never deposited with us.” The only information we have left of the inquest comes from the handful of journalists and writers who attended in person. There are also no police records, forensic records, autopsy results, or crime scene photographs. “There’s nothing,” Oliver Balaam, who has been researching the case for an upcoming documentary, informed me. “I was told that there is one notebook which belonged to Proven Sharpe, the lead detective, which described his first impressions of the crime scene.” If that notebook exists, it is not available to journalists, or the public.
My mum quietly started to list the names, starting with a childhood friend who lived on the farm next door to hers. She started counting more names on her fingers and put her cup of tea down to use her second hand.
In Devon villages, gossip moves faster than the wind, and this dearth of surviving evidence led to many rumors circulating on how that morning of the deaths played out. Here’s what we know for sure: Alan woke early, picked up the farm’s old French shotgun, which hung from a beam in the kitchen, and walked into the farmyard wearing untied boots, blue and white pajama trousers, and a burlap sack around his top. He took the gun to an elevated part of the farmyard, right in front of the bedroom windows. Some have suggested he chose this spot, not some distant woods or barn, to make a show of what he was about to do.
“He seems to have been aiming for visibility right in front of their bedroom windows on this raised section of land,” Balaam said. Former neighbor Andrew Ware implied a similar motivation in our conversation. “He got his own back,” Ware said.
On that raised spot, Alan positioned the gun at a similar angle to how you may hold a golf putter, pointing it at his head. He held a stick with a forked end in his right hand and used it to depress the trigger. This stick was later found by Alan’s body. His scalp was blown off from below his eyes and parts of his brain matter were found across the yard.
As head of the Devon & Cornwall police, Sharpe had come across numerous farm shotgun suicides in his career, and was not particularly surprised at what the evidence showed, referring to the use of a forked stick to fire the gun as “quite common.”
Shotguns are part of farming life in Devon. At our farm, we had four or five long-barreled guns and a sackful of cartridges under the stairs in a locked metal cabinet. At age 13, I would take a lightweight .410 bore gun out over the fields alone, to shoot starlings that could damage the crops. A boy at school was doing the same on a frosty day, slipped on the ice, and blew his leg off with a double-barrelled shotgun. He returned to class a month later with a cage screwed into his femur and shin bones, and life carried on.
At the farmhouse, the front door was locked from the inside. Police broke in and crept through the building, into the orchard behind the kitchen. There they found the bodies of Robbie and Frances. Next to Robbie’s body, the double-barreled shotgun and another forked stick. The gun contained a spent cartridge and one live one; another spent cartridge was found in Robbie’s pocket. “The blood which had been discharged from the skull had obviously been quickly absorbed into the soft earth,” Sharpe is reported to have said at the inquest.
Many of the peculiarities around the case involve Frances. She was found wearing only a nightgown, and no shoes. From the location of the gunshot wound and the position of her body, Sharpe concluded that she did not kill herself. She had been shot in the center of her forehead “at very close range” and was found with her nightgown pulled up around her midriff, her knees drawn under her. Every door in the house was locked from the inside, and every window closed except for Frances’ bedroom, which was open, swinging on its hinges. One hushed rumor surrounding the case, relayed to me by two people, is that Frances was found with a broken leg, implying some kind of struggle, or a jump from height, in her last moments. “This apparently came from the mouth of Proven Sharpe himself,” Balaam told me. With Sharpe dead and no surviving autopsy or inquest, outside of exhumation this curious detail will forever remain speculation.
Next to Robbie’s body, the double-barreled shotgun and another forked stick. The gun contained a spent cartridge and one live one; another spent cartridge was found in Robbie’s pocket.
Another oddity found at the crime scene was a series of knife cuts on Robbie’s cheek. The body temperatures taken of the three bodies pointed toward an approximate four-hour window between Alan’s death and that of his siblings. What happened in those hours, between the gunshot at dawn waking Robbie and Frances and their final moment in the garden must have been pure hell. Maybe the two siblings sat at the kitchen table in their 400-year-old farmhouse, their younger brother’s mangled body on the raised yard outside, blood and flesh strewn across the cobbles. Robbie’s anguish, I suppose, made him cut his own face with an old kitchen knife. Maybe they fought, maybe they made a pact, maybe they prayed.
We will never know if Frances wanted to die that day, or was murdered. As Alan Mulcahy of the Winkleigh Historical Society told me plainly, “The story of the Luxton deaths at West Chapple may never be satisfactorily be known, as there were no witnesses.”
The idea that Frances let her brother shoot her is not unfathomable. According to Fred Lyne, during that last tortuous summer at West Chapple, he found her one day standing in the rain in just a light summer dress repeating the words, “We should die here. We were born on the farm and we should die here.”
In the days following the tragedy, numerous journalists drove west and poured into the small village of Winkleigh. Dispatches wired back to Fleet Street were sensational, with headlines like “Riddle of Deaths on Farm” and “Night of Horror at Winkleigh.” A police constable in the village told journalists that the case “had all the marks of an Agatha Christie thriller.”
In London, writer John Cornwell was alerted to the story by a friend, who mailed him a copy of an article in The Observer headlined, “Tragic Farm Where Time Stood Still.” The following day Cornwell made the long drive to the West Country.
Cornwell’s resulting book, Earth to Earth, contains some incredible on-the-ground reporting but also suffers from the outsider trait of fetishizing the trope of the quaint village with a dark underbelly. His evocative writing paints Devon as almost mythic. “The country here is secretive,” he wrote of his first impressions of the land. “Cut off by their hidden combes and valleys, and their traditional reserve towards all outsiders, the inhabitants are thrown to their own resources.”
One of the first villagers Cornwell met in Winkleigh had love and hate tattooed on his knuckles and told the curious London journalist about how much blood erupts from a chicken’s neck when you chop its head off. “One of them giggled darkly,” Cornwell wrote of the hostile young men. “He wore a denim waistcoat but no shirt.” The next man Cornwell met threatened him with “a boot in the face.”
An unnamed person the author met at a hospital while trying to track down evidence of Alan’s psychiatric treatment described the madness he’d seen in mid-Devon, exemplified by a man who rode his bike on the road near my farm and dragged his wife behind him by the neck. I asked my parents but they had never heard this story, or seen this man.
There are others that we do remember: One old man would walk miles every day, and into our farmyard, with ferrets in his trousers. Another lady, who lived on the road to Winkleigh, had no electricity and let her farm animals wander into her cottage with her. (We too, sometimes cared for animals in our family kitchen.) But these people were not sinister, the community thought of them warmly, just colorful threads in the rich fabric of Devon life. It’s a strange feeling reading about the place where I spent a carefree, joyous youth as though it were Joseph Conrad’s deadly banks of the Congo.
The Luxtons, particularly Alan, can be considered eccentrics by the end. But as a result of money worries, struggles to keep their way of life afloat, and mental health issues—not an intrinsic strangeness to the people of this land.
Cornwell sat on his reporting for five years but was finally ready to publish in 1982. An advanced proof of the Earth to Earth manuscript made its way around the village. “There was a spectacular campaign to ban the book involving outlandish accusations, lawyers, the lot,” Cornwell told me. “All hell broke loose.”
The backlash came from locals who saw the London writer as an interloper sharing the village gossip. An official rebuttal to the book, signed by 13 people Cornwell had interviewed, was printed in The Times Literary Supplement. The letter pushed back on some villagers quoted in the book who pointed toward incest in the Luxton home. “Only speculation and rumor,” Cornwell told me. “Which I felt at the time to be somewhat malicious.” Nonetheless, one villager in his book remarked the talk was widespread through Winkleigh. “We have our own ideas about her and Robbie,” the neighbor said of the Luxtons. “You’ve never known so much intermarrying, one after the other marrying cousins and aunts and nephews and what have you, and carrying on with each other.”
Incest has always been a part of the rumor mill surrounding the Luxton case. It’s true that the marrying of two first cousins (although certainly not siblings) in rural England was not uncommon in the mid-20th century. But in the case of the Luxtons, outside of the village gossip about the weird folks down the lane, there is no evidence that Frances and Robbie’s relationship was sexual.
One of the first villagers Cornwell met in Winkleigh had love and hate tattooed on his knuckles and told the curious London journalist about how much blood erupts from a chicken’s neck when you chop its head off.
One surprising figure who told Cornwell not to publish his book was one of England’s most famed modern poets, and widower to Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes. Hughes owned a farm neighboring West Chapple and knew Robbie Luxton personally, going to the farm to use Robbie’s sheep dip. At first, Cornwell told me, Hughes was supportive of the book, but he later took a strange turn into some mystical thinking about the West Country, talking about a warning from the earth. Hughes saw Devon as a “troglodyte,” a sentient cave dweller with its own nervous system that shouldn’t be provoked. “He believed that when an outsider is odd or strange, the immune system of the troglodyte makes life uncomfortable for them and attacks them with killer cells,” Cornwell said. “And they either have a breakdown, get out, or something more catastrophic, like killing themselves.” Hughes warned Cornwell that publishing the book may lead to more bloodshed. “He put himself in this position too, that all the woes of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were due to this troglodyte of Devon,” Cornwell said of the poet.
On a recent visit to Winkleigh, red, white, and blue bunting criss-crossed the old village square. A family ducked into the Kings Arms pub to escape the summer rain, while across the street the butcher took a break from hacking a pig into gammon joints, to sell some sausages and eggs to a tattooed bricklayer. Beside the butcher shop a narrow alley leads to the graveyard of All Saints Church, built 600 years ago, around the time Robert Luggesdon worked his homestead over the hill.
Alan’s and Robert Luxton’s ashes are buried here, but with no gravestone to mark them. Instead, a small marble plinth added to their father’s grave years after they died simply states their names. Somewhat strangely, Frances Luxton’s grave is nowhere to be found in Winkleigh. It is, instead, three miles away at the Brushford Barton cemetery, where she spent so many of her days.
From the village, I drove out to West Chapple. It was one of those humid summer days in Devon that my mum calls “muggy,” where your clothes stick to you and any flashes of sunlight are soon shadowed by dark clouds rolling in from the west.
I drove in, parked on the old cobbled yard, and stepped out. The farmhouse and surrounding buildings have barely changed in the last half-century, though some scaffolding and tall ladders covered part of the house where it appeared a chimney had recently been fixed. The paint on the windowsills was peeling, and rusty tools were propped against the old walls. No curtains were drawn, but why would they be, the house is so sheltered that no other homes are within eyeshot in any direction. Like any farm in Devon, muddy Wellington boots sat by the front door. I knocked, hoping to speak with John Gledhill, the man who bought the farm after the killings, but if anyone was home, they didn’t answer, so I slipped a letter through the same door the police had broken through years before.
I walked up to the elevated part of the yard where Alan killed himself. My macabre mind glanced down, but, of course, there was no decades-old bloodstain on the ground.
In the autumn of 1975, much of the talk in the village was the version that “mad” Alan had killed his brother and sister, and then himself, in a burst of bloody revenge. This assumption is still the leading memory of many Devonians today. Two people I asked about the case gave a pretty confident version of that narrative. Others have suggested that Robbie killed both his brother and sister. “So many details are in dispute,” Balaam told me. “There are rabbit holes in every direction.”
But Alan did not kill his siblings. He was driven to suicide by the struggles of farming life—the financial problems, the isolation, the loneliness, the lost love—like many Devon farmers before and after him. Despite all their sacrifices and hard work, the Luxtons were still about to lose their farm. Alan could not bear that. Neither could Robbie: As the last remaining head of the family, Robbie wanted nothing more than to keep the 600-year lineage alive, but without any children or the necessary finances, and facing the cruel realities of the modern world, he ended the last of the Luxtons, forever. The brothers were not drawn to death by some evil spirit under the Devon soil, they died by their own hands, alone at the end of that lane.
My macabre mind glanced down, but, of course, there was no decades-old bloodstain on the ground.
Perhaps Frances wanted to die. Perhaps she wanted to live. We can’t know. But her murder was not because of an incestuous affair with Robbie, as some have said. It was because her brother was desperate. As the coroner, Colonel D. F. Brown, concluded at the inquest, “In their depressed state of mind, Robert could have shot his sister with or without her consent.”
Of all the stories surrounding the Luxtons, it’s the image of Frances that haunts me, wandering the cemetery in the rain like Eleanor Rigby, staring out at the moors. “The tragedy was that they isolated themselves. And there’s an irony in it, they were isolating themselves in order to survive.” Cornwell told me. “But she is a truly tragic figure.”
After leaving West Chapple I had one more stop to make: the graveyard at Brushford Barton.
As I was nearing the old manor, once lived in by the aristocratic branch of the Luxton family and their 10 servants, I pulled over to check directions. In the field next to the road hundreds of stooks of wheat stood. These same wheat stooks, primarily now harvested for thatching houses, were used as an example of the Luxtons’ antiquated farming techniques by reporters back in 1975. But here they stood, 50 years later. My view of the harvest in that gateway near the graveyard would have looked almost identical—save for the odd telegraph pole dotting the landscape—100, even 200 years before. This timelessness in Devon is at the heart of its wonder.
Brushford Barton is just a speck on the landscape, the old manor, and just three other homes, lining the dead end road that leads to the little church and graveyard where Frances is buried, miles from her brothers’ remains. Her granite gravestone is more conspicuous than her brothers’ plinth back at Winkleigh. Her date of death is followed by two italicized words: At Rest.
I walked under the oak trees and through the thick grass in that small cemetery, as Frances used to every day. I thought about how she was considered mad when seen alone on that bench taking in the landscape for hours, and then thought about how much time I spent alone by the river in my youth, or climbing the hay bales in the field and staring across the land.
Before returning to America I looked out of my bedroom window at our farm one last time and tried to see what Ted Hughes saw: the county as a sentient being, a serpentine spine burrowing under its ancient farmland and church spires. As my dad mowed the lawn and mum prepared a roast duck downstairs, all I saw beyond the windswept copper beech was the country’s astounding beauty—what Samuel Coleridge called the “many-steepled tract, magnificent / Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea.” While outsiders who step onto this land may find it unwelcoming, it’s the enemy within that can pinch a nerve through the deep lanes and lonely hearts of Devon.
Andrew Chamings is a British writer in California. He is Editor-at-large at SFGate and has written for The Atlantic, Vice, McSweeney’s and many other places.
Editor: Carolyn Wells
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/03/06/madness-melancholy-or-murder-an-ancient-english-farms-50-year-old-mystery/
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