Charlotte Benfield

In the novel Hallowe'en Party, Charlotte Benfield was a sixteen-year-old shop assistant. She was found beaten to death with multiple head injuries on a footpath near Quarry Wood about eighteen months before the halloween party at Apple Trees. Peter Gordon and Thomas Hudd, two of her boyfriends, were questioned about the death but nothing could be proven against them.

Poirot was on the look out for "old sins which could cast long shadows". This was because Joyce Reynolds was killed at the Hallow'en party after boasting that she had seen a murder committed some years ago. Superintendent Spence mentioned as Charlotte's case as one of the possibilities. But Joyce had said that she had not reported it at the time because it did not occur to her that it was a murder. To Poirot if one saw a girl being bashed on the head by a man, one would think it was murder straight away.