Greyscott

Greyscott is a sheep farm remembered as the setting of John’s killing of Matheson in the early 1970s. In John’s account, the farm’s isolation and its owner’s distress made the visit more than a routine veterinary call; after Matheson’s death, concern that farmland might soon be developed shaped John’s decision to bury him away from the farm.

Setting and Circumstances

John placed Greyscott roughly ten miles from where he later recounted the events, among the sheep farms that had once been common in the area. He associated the visit with the beginning of his veterinary work, which he thought had started around 1967, though he said Penny would remember the date more accurately. He had known Matheson for some time and visited the farm now and again.

The farm appears in John’s recollection as a bleak and lonely place. Matheson had no family, no one to help him on the farm, and was running out of money. John was usually in a hurry, but on this visit Matheson did not want him to leave. The setting matters not as a picturesque rural retreat but as a place of isolation, where a farmer’s suffering could go unseen and unassisted.

The Visit and Matheson’s Death

The immediate reason for John’s visit was an animal in distress. A mare had given birth, but the foal had died; the mare was in severe pain, and Matheson did not want to shoot her. John gave her an injection instead. Afterward, Matheson made him tea, and the two men talked.

John later described Matheson’s distress by comparing it to the mare’s: he believed that, if Matheson had been an animal, he would have been screaming. He offered Matheson what he presented as a flu shot to see him through the winter, then gave him the same injection he had just used on the mare. John understood his act then, and still understood it when he confessed, as ending Matheson’s pain. But the injection was pentobarbital, and its use left John with a practical problem: he feared that an investigation or post-mortem would expose the death.

From Farm to Concealed Burial

John said he would have buried Matheson at Greyscott, but feared that builders might soon dig him up. Farmland in the area was being bought up and houses were being built, making the farm an insecure place to hide a body. That concern redirected the story from the farm to a cemetery John knew from visiting Gordon Playfair. He considered the convent cemetery safer because it was not farmland, he thought no one would buy a convent, and he knew the grounds were quiet and rarely visited.

A couple of days after Matheson’s death, John drove to the cemetery at night with his lights off, took a spade, and buried him. Greyscott thus became the starting point of a secret that endured for decades, while the anticipated threat of development explains why Matheson’s remains were hidden elsewhere. John recalled the burial lasting undisturbed until, forty years later, he saw an advertisement for Coopers Chase.