Reverend Stephen Wentworth is a character appearing in the episode Death's Shadow of the ITV crime drama Midsomer Murders.
It is revealed he spent more of his childhood in Heysham rather than Midsomer Norton and that his favourite county in England is his home county of Cheshire.
When he asked Barnaby why he and Joyce had chosen the church in Badger's Drift to retake their vows, Barnaby responded that the church caught his eye when he was investigating a murder there two years previously (The Killings at Badger's Drift).
Stephen than remembers the case and tells him that he knew Dennis Rainbird quite well due to his role as the undertaker.
It is revealed that he is utterly downtrodden by his wife, Angela, a woman of frustrated ambition, and that over thirty years previously he had an affair with a young woman,Jennifer Bryce. When she gave birth to a son, their discretion had been so great, no one tumbled to the affair despite her naming the boy Felix Stephen.
When Felix died at ten, followed quickly by Jennifer, Wentworth lost any will or ambition he had ever had and spent the rest of his life just going through the motions. Until the day a confession revealed that his son's death had not been suicide, but an accident brought about by four of his school mates. Wentworth set out to destroy the men who had caused him to lose all that had ever been important in his life.
When caught, he was completely unrepentant. He ran from Barnaby and Troy and climbed the church tower, kicking Troy down the stairs. Standing on the scaffolding, Troy implored him not to jump, he cheerfully replied of course he would jump, that he should have done it years ago. He called to his wife to get her attention, and threw himself to the ground in front of her, killing himself.
Victims[]
- Richard Bayly - decapitated with an Indian sword.
- David Whitely - locked inside his trailer while he was sleeping and burned alive after the trailer was set on fire.
- Simon Fletcher - shot in the back with an arrow.
- Ian Eastman - intended; was stopped.