Ep. 42 - Murder at the Red Barn

Murder is a ghastly matter. At the hands of a loved one, it truly becomes heinous. Most murder victims are murdered by someone they know and a high percentage are killed by either a lover or spouse. This is not a new statistic. History proves that to be a fact. Polstead, Suffolk, England was not a place where one would expect a murder to occur, particularly in 1827. But a crime of passion did take place here and a young woman was left dead. The horrifying murder was nicknamed the "Red Barn Murder" because of the location of the murder. The paranormal takes center stage in the solving of this case as the victim's stepmother was visited by her spirit at night, three times. And then there is the cursed skull of the murderer and his spirit.

Thomas Marten was a molecatcher in Suffolk, England. While molecatching doesn't sound very glamorous, it was a lucrative business at the time, making more money than a teacher and about the same as a police officer, and it took a very skilled professional. So Thomas was a valued member of society. He had two daughters, Ann and Maria. Maria was a beautiful girl and she caught the eye of many men in the town. And she didn't mind catching the eye of the boys. Maria embraced the attention and also her sexuality. She ended up pregnant twice, by two different men, before she turned twenty-four. This would be pretty scandalous in our era, but imagine around the Victorian era. One of those children died as an infant. His father was the brother of a man named William Corder and this would be the man to bring Maria to her end.

William Corder was a twenty-two-year-old man who was the never-do-well son of a farmer. He was a thief and a fraudster and he embarrassed his father when he made a fraudulent sale of his father's pigs. His father sent him away to London in disgrace. Tragically, shortly thereafter, William lost two brothers and his father. And then another brother named Thomas died while crossing a frozen pond. All four deaths happened in an 18 month span. There was no one left to run the family farm, so William returned to Polstead, where Maria was living with her father. The two met and hit it off. And, Maria was pregnant for her third time and eventually gave birth to William's child. As most girls dream, she saw a future in which she and William would be married. But William wasn't interested in marrying Maria. And there was only one way he saw to rid himself of the woman. 

William devised an evil plan. He told Maria that it would be best if they eloped and that they would have to travel to Ipswich to do that. He also informed Maria that he had heard rumors that the authorities were looking for her in order to charge her for having so many bastard children. William suggested that they have a clandestine meeting, so that they could run off together. He chose a location they both knew, perhaps a place were they had carried on their love affair, and that place was the red barn on Barnfield Hill. He instructed Maria to disguise herself as a man, so the authorities would not catch her. Maria did as William instructed and she met him at the red barn on May 18, 1827. She was never seen alive again. William was nowhere to be found either right after that. Initially, no one was panicked be cause Maria had told her stepmother that the couple was planning to elope. So that's what everyone thought. And then William began showing up in Polstead again. 

William visited the Martens and told them that the couple at settled on the Isle of Wight. He then explained that Maria had not accompanied him because she feared the judgement of family and friends. William left and returned a couple more times, always without Maria, and he would have some excuse as to why she couldn't join him on the visit. When asked why she didn't write, William claimed that she had hurt her hand. When asked again about the writing on another visit, he would act befuddled and say that Maria had written, so the letter must have gone astray. William's last visit came at the end of harvest and then he didn't return anymore. The pressure mounting on him to produce Maria probably was the key factor in him not returning.

Eleven months had passed since Maria was last seen and her stepmother began telling people that Maria was dead and that she had been murdered. When people asked how she knew that, she would answer that her daughter's ghost had been visiting her in her dreams. Based on descriptions, no one is sure whether Maria's stepmother was just dreaming and getting visitations in the dream or whether she was having actual nightly visitations by her ghost. Whatever was the case, both seem to be paranormal in essence and there were three visits. In those visits, Maria told her stepmother that she had been murdered by William. And Maria told her that she had been buried at the red barn in the corner of the building in a grain storage bin. After the third dream, the stepmother implored her husband Thomas to go to the red barn and look for Maria's body. He did go, but he didn't believe that he would actually find his daughter. But he did. 

Maria's body was already badly decomposed, as it had been nearly a year since she was murdered. There was a green handkerchief wrapped around her neck that was thought to have belonged to William and she had been shot. An initial post-mortem found that she had been shot through one of her eyes and then she was buried, but not for long. The authorities thought the autopsy had been done too hastily and so Maria was disinterred and it was found that she had two stab wounds as well, one between the ribs and one in the heart. And it was thought that the green handkerchief around her neck had been used to strangle her. So no one was really sure exactly how Maria came to her end, but it was clear that someone wanted to make sure that she was dead dead. And that person was William Corder.

William had moved on at this point and was attempting to live a new life. He was running the Everley Grove Boarding House in Brentford with a woman, who was his wife. He came by this wife by actually placing advertisements in the Morning Herald and the Sunday Times. (Pg. 47) He received more than 93 replies. The constable in Polstead found out the address for the boarding house and handed it over to a London police officer named James Lea. This officer would later work on the Spring Heel Jack case. Officer Lea went to the boarding house under the pretext that he was looking for a place where his daughter could stay. William was sitting at breakfast with his family and Lea took him aside and told him that he was being arrested for the murder of Maria. William pretended that he did not know Maria, but plenty of evidence was found at the boarding house. Maria's reticule was there - that was a small handbag - so clearly he knew her. There were also a pair of pistols found and a sword, which was later to have been found sharpened at Corder's request just before the murder.

William was tried at Shire Hall. Tickets had to be issued because so many people wanted to attend the trial. The judge even had a hard time getting into the courtroom due to the crowds. Women were barred from the courtroom and so many of them carried ladders to the courthouse and climbed on the roof so they could catch a glimpse of the murderer. Their numbers on the roof threatened to cave it in and so they were allowed to come into the courtroom. Corder pleaded not guilty and was charged with murder committed using both a pistol and a sword. As I said before, Maria could have been strangled as well, but since no clear cause of death could be ruled upon, the prosecution went with the pistol and sword. Corder for his part claimed that he did indeed, meet Maria at the red barn, but that when he left her, she was very much alive. He claimed that he heard a gunshot as he walked away. Corder said he ran back and saw Maria with a self-inflicted gunshot wound from one of his guns that she had brought with her. She was devastated over losing him and she was pregnant, yet again, and ashamed. The fact that she already had three illegitimate children made the idea that she was ashamed preposterous. Corder said he buried her body because he knew nobody would believe him. He claimed the stab wounds were just shovel injuries from her being disinterred. 

William was found guilty after the jury deliberated for only 35 minutes and sentenced to death. And an interesting snippet was added to the sentence: William was to be dissected after his execution. He was unable to stand for his execution and so he was given support. Newspapers reported that he looked wildly around. Some records claim that as many as 20,000 people came to witness the execution. He was hanged just before noon and his body was taken to Shire Hall where it was slit open and put on display. People filed by for hours. Cambridge University conducted the dissection before a group of students. A book bound in his skin is on display Moyses Hall Museum in Bury St. Edmunds. This museum contains many grim reminders of the Red Barn Murder, including Corder's death mask. The Hunterian Museum put his skeleton out for display and there it remained until 2004, when the bones were cremated. The Hunterian Museum is known for its morbid displays and considered a very creepy place to visit. 

The Victorians had different sensibilities when it came to murder. While our modern era is clearly fascinated with true crime, the idea of a "Jon Benet, the Musical" is abhorrent to most of us. This wasn't the case for the Victorians. They not only wandered through crime scenes and snatched up souvenirs, many big crimes were written as plays and Penny Dreadfuls. The Red Barn Murder was one of them. Judith Flanders details this in her book "The Invention of Murder, How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime." She describes some kind of camera obscura demonstration that was going around. (Pg. 50) Gaffs were inexpensive productions for the working class in small theaters. (Pg. 57)

There were rumors that William's skull, which had been added to a collection of Red Barn memorabilia, was cursed. There was a man who lived in Suffolk, England who enjoyed collecting the macabre and things related to the paranormal named Gregory Aspach. This was much to the chagrin of his housekeeper, Mrs. Milne. A grave digger named Dan Sykes came to his door in 1957 seeking to sell him an object in a battered metal box that clearly seemed to have been buried in dirt for a long time. Sykes told Gregory that he had unearthed the box at St. Giles Cemetery. The box was opened revealing a large skull that had its lower jaw wired to the upper and this was a clear indication that the skull had been in the hands of a medical school at one time. A small handwritten note on the inside read, "Leave well be, it will summon the dead." Gregory paid the gravedigger 5 pounds for the skull and sent him on his way. He then placed the skull on his desk to examine more closely the next day. That evening at 1 am, Mrs. Milne banged on his door and reported that she heard someone down in his study. Gregory grabbed a gun and the two went to the closed door and they could hear the shuffling of feet and some mumbling on the other side of the door. The two burst the door open and Mrs. Milne screamed as the beam of their flashlight hit a skull on the desk. There was no one in the room and Gregory got Mrs. Milne to calm down after explaining he had acquired the skull that afternoon. She had already called the police, so they showed up and took a look around and also found no one.

The next day, Gregory began to wonder if this skull he had, could possibly belong to a murderer he had heard stories about from many decades before. He pulled a book from a shelf by Robert Thurston Hopkins titled "Adventures with Phantoms." He turned to the section on the hanging of William Corder at the Old Bury Gaol. The story went that a Dr. Kilner worked at the West Suffolk Hospital where Corder's skull had ended up and he decided to take it, replacing it with another skull. Shortly after getting the skull home, Dr. Kilner started seeing the ghost of Corder who demanded that his skull be returned. One of Kilner's maids saw the spirit as well and she said he looked like a real person in old fashioned clothes. Then Dr. Kilner started experiencing a bunch of bad luck and he decided to rid himself of the skull. He was told he needed to bury the skull near where Corder had been executed and that was the old churchyard at St. Giles. He had a friend help him give the skull a Christian burial and never experienced anything bad again after that.

Rather than being scared of the skull, Gregory was intrigued by the idea that this skull could actually belong to William Corder. A few days later he had a bit of bad luck. An electrical company he owned shares in had a huge loss. That same evening, Gregory heard footsteps pacing outside his bedroom and when he opened the door and peered out with a flashlight, there was no one there. Gregory decided to invite a London physicist who was interested in the paranormal to come stay at his house and investigate the skull. This was Professor Wilkins and after he examined the skull, he asked Gregory why he thought it was Corder's. Gregory explained that clearly this was an anatomical skull because of the wiring, that it had come in a japanned metal box that matched a description in a book and that the skull definitely seemed to belong to a man in his 20s, which would match William Corder. The Professor said that he thought Gregory was probably right. Gregory told the Professor that if he could sit all night with the skull, that he could have it.

The professor set himself up in the study with the skull that night and Gregory went to bed. Around 1 am, Gregory couldn't sleep so he went to the study and found the professor in what appeared to be a hypnotic state. just before he shook the professor, he heard a crash of books behind him. He spun around and saw a man in period clothing with a beaver skin hat making his way out of the study and into the hallway. The figure seemed to have a mist around it. Gregory followed it and watched it disappear. Right after that. Professor Wilkins seemed to come back to his senses. He explained to Gregory that he had been looking st the skull's eye sockets when they started to glow. He thought that only a few minutes had passed, but when he looked at his watch, he had lost several hours. The Professor declared the skull evil and told Gregory he needed to get rid of it. He also said that he had a vision of Corder's execution and he could fell the young man's wrath. As he explained this, Gregory watched a mark around the Professor's neck get darker. He told the Professor to look at his neck and the man was astonished to see the mark that was getting redder. They decided they needed to put the skull back in its box and return it to the cemetery. And they apparently did that, but the legendary story ends with the police visiting Mrs. Milne to inform her that her employer had been found hanging in the St. Giles churchyard with another man wrapped around his waist who seemed to have had a heart attack from fear.

Now this might just be a fanciful story, but Dr. Kilner did apparently have a friend help him to get rid of the skull the first time, so the possibility that this happened again is plausible. But could a ghost, specifically the ghost of William Corder, killed these two men? And did Maria Marten appear to he step-mother to let her know that she had died and where she was buried? That is for you to decide.