Some extracts from Murder in the Red Barn, by Peter Maggs, published by Mirli Books, 2015, ISBN 978-0-9562870-2-1
Introduction...
In 1972 I was living in Wivenhoe, an attractive village on the river Colne, a short distance from Essex University where I was a post-graduate student. If Wivenhoe is known to the world at large, it is probably because of John Constable’s beautiful picture, Wivenhoe Park, which is in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Wivenhoe Park is now the home of Essex University.
One of my house-mates, Sarah, had been helping in a house clearance. She came across an old book which she thought I might be interested in. The book, “An Authentic History of Maria Marten or The Red Barn”, had no accredited author.[1] I dipped into it and was interested, not the least reason for which was that the murder, for murder it was, had been committed in Polstead, Suffolk, where my academic supervisor lived. But more than that, the murderer, William Corder, had been arrested in Brentford, next door to Ealing in West London. I grew up in Ealing and went to school in Brentford; I must have passed the place where he was arrested a thousand times.
The murder in the Red Barn captured the public imagination. The story had all the elements of a gothic novel; the victim was a comely maid, daughter of the village mole-catcher, seduced by William Corder, the dissolute son of a prosperous local farmer. She went to rendezvous with him in the Red Barn dressed in men’s clothes to avoid being identified, prior to them both going to Ipswich, ostensibly to be married. In the barn he shot her, possibly stabbing her also, and buried her body under the floor. Corder then told her father that they were happily married and Maria was unable to write to him because of a bad hand. He, meanwhile, moved to London where he advertised for a wife, married a lady, and settled down in a girls’ school run by his new wife in Brentford. The deed was discovered after Maria’s stepmother dreamed that Maria had been murdered and buried in the Red Barn. Her father probed the floor with his mole-spike, and found the body.
From the time that Maria’s body was discovered, in April 1828, until the August, when William Corder was hanged for her murder, the story was a sensation. The press had blanket coverage; there were peep shows, puppet shows and broadsheets, and a non-conformist minister preached a sermon at the Red Barn attended by thousands. Stage dramas were written and produced – latterly in films and on television – and the story of Maria Martin has continued to be written about until the present day.
But there remain many perplexing questions regarding Maria’s murder and the subsequent discovery of her body. The most intriguing of these is the way the body was discovered – after Maria’s stepmother dreamed that she had been done to death and buried in the Red Barn. At the time, this explanation was accepted largely without question, and after William Corder was hanged, The Times ran a story recounting another ‘astounding case’ where a person had dreamed of an event that was subsequently found to be true. These days such an occurrence would be regarded with profound suspicion.
Several surgeons concluded that Maria had not only been shot, but stabbed in several places with a sharp instrument and possibly strangled. Yet Corder in his confession, hours before his execution, admitted that although he did indeed shoot Maria and bury her body, he denied vehemently ever having stabbed her.
Having spent some years researching and writing up two relatively unknown series of court cases from the mid-nineteenth century, I found myself drawn back to the tale of Maria Martin. The story of the Red Barn murder has been recounted on numerous occasions. Many accounts can be found in compendia of true-life crime as well as books entirely devoted to the subject. Of the latter, six have been published since 1949, and I fully expected to find very little remaining to be said about the affair. In fact much of what has been written about the actual events seems only to succeed in confusing established fact with hearsay, old wives’ tales, fantasy and, it must be said, deliberate falsehood. One account makes the most sensational allegations about the murder, claiming that it was a conspiracy involving several people. Such of those claims that can be checked, have found to be impossible to verify and several have been proven to be false. Another author confuses, apparently deliberately, what is documented fact, with a fictional account published soon after the event. There is, in my view, a pressing need to set the record straight.
There is another reason why a new account of the murder is justified now. Over the last five to ten years the number of resources available to the social historian has grown at an astonishing rate due mainly to the burgeoning quantity – and quality – of historical records that can be interrogated via the Internet. It is now possible to do word-searches on several million pages of nineteenth-century newspapers and journals and detect information that otherwise would have been virtually impossible to find. The Mormon Church has produced a peerless set of records, made freely available to everyone, providing wider than ever coverage of births, marriages and deaths from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and earlier. A number of commercial websites have exploited the enormous upsurge in interest in genealogy and made available prodigious amounts of information, all searchable via the Internet. It is, therefore, possible that some new facts may be gleaned to add to the small number of primary sources of information on the Red Barn murder. Several authors have taken as read, so-called facts reproduced in previous accounts, some of which have taken great liberties with the historical record. It is appropriate, therefore, to construct a narrative based strictly on what is known from primary sources, and try to understand what really happened on that late spring day nearly two hundred years ago in Polstead.
[1] It was bootlegged copy of the celebrated book on the case by J Curtis
William Corder advertises for a wife...
The Morning Herald was a London newspaper which William would have been unlikely to have seen in Polstead. Perhaps it was coincidence, but the very day he arrived in London, 19 September, the newspaper printed two advertisements for wives at the top of its front page. Both were modest and unassuming; in each case, a middle-aged man with a small income was seeking a companion who possessed a similar financial independence. Three more similar advertisements for wives appeared in October, and on 13 November 1827, despite a notice the previous week: ‘ADVERTISING for a WIFE, an admired Comic song, sung by Mrs. Fitzwilliam’, the Morning Herald published the following, reproduced in full, exactly as printed:
Matrimony. – A Private Gentleman, aged 24, entirely Independent, whose disposition is not to be exceeded, has lately lost chief [sic] of his family by the hand of PROVIDENCE, which has occasioned discord amongst the remainder, under circumstances most disagreeable to relate. To any female of respectability, who would study for domestic comforts, and willing to confide her future happiness to one in every way qualified to render the marriage state desirable, as the advertiser is in affluence the Lady must have the power of some property, which may remain in her own possession. Many very happy marriages have taken place through means similar to this now resorted to, and it is hoped no one will answer this through impertinent curiosity, but should this meet the eye of any agreeable lady who feels desirous of meeting with a sociable, tender, kind, and sympathising companion, they will find this advertisement worthy of notice. Honour and secresy [sic] may be relied on. As some little security against idle applications, it is requisite that letters may be addressed (post paid) A.Z., care of Mr. Foster, stationer, 68 Leadenhall-street, with real name and address, which will meet with most respectful attention.
The advertisement was repeated, minus the comment about the lady’s property, and with one extra full stop, in the Sunday Times of 25 November, albeit with entirely spelled Intirely, and honour spelled honor. A.Z. was William Corder, and some insights into his background, character and motives are illuminated by this curious notice. It is quite clear that he had lifted a number of key phrases from elsewhere, joining them together with little understanding of sentence structure or punctuation. His limited education was quite effectively demonstrated, a fact which should have been obvious to anyone reading the item. His comments regarding discord within his family provided a convenient smokescreen to prevent embarrassing enquiries about his life and connections in Polstead. William stated that he was in affluence in order to allay any suspicion that he was a fortune-hunter; he may even have deluded himself that he really was well off, although as was to become clear within a few months, his rate of spending in his new life outstripped by many times any income he could expect from the farm. Very probably he did understand his precarious financial position. It seems likely that his motivation for finding a wife with property was to provide him with the income that he needed; evidently the lady from Yorkshire was just not rich enough. The position and size of the advertisement in the newspaper – at the top of the front page, almost in the centre and more than three times larger than most of the adjacent notices – must have made it very expensive; possibly it was a deliberate act in order to demonstrate his ‘affluence’. The insertion in the Sunday Times was right in the centre of the first page. It is interesting to note that the Leicester Chronicle published a story about a similar notice that had been placed in the Morning Herald only a few months previously. Some of the identical phrases were used:
willing to confide her future happiness to one in every way qualified to render the marriage state desirable … Many very happy marriages have taken place through means similar to this now resorted to
The gentleman who had placed the advertisement was mocked: ‘how modest! ... How winning! … How disinterested! … how knowing!’ The story ended with the prophetic warning:
We never heard of more than one marriage that was produced by means of this description, and in that instance the advertiser, as it may be well supposed, was an impostor, who deceived his unfortunate dupe, and most likely himself too, for the marriage was altogether an unhappy one.
William Corder must have seen the earlier advertisement – and would not have seen the piece in the Leicester Chronicle. He decided that he liked some of the phrasing; perhaps he visited the offices of the Morning Herald and perused some back numbers looking for inspiration. It seems likely that the approximately one hundred women who responded to his two advertisements had likewise not seen the earlier story.
Marten or Martin?
At this point mention should be made of the spelling of Maria Martin’s name, which in all published literature about the affair, until quite recently, is given as Marten. The parish records of her father’s birth, his two marriages, Maria’s birth, that of her brother and sisters, the births of Maria’s children, and the registration of her burial all state, without exception, that the surname was Martin. The extensive Prosecution Brief for William Corder’s trial spelled Maria’s surname, and that of her family, Martin, and when Maria’s father was recorded in the 1851 census at the age of 80, his name was given as Thomas Martin.
How did the mistake arise? The original story broke on 23 April, St George’s Day, 1828. The story in The Times, repeated word for word in The Standard, recorded Maria’s name correctly as Martin. On the same day the Suffolk Herald, reported the murder, spelling Maria’s name Marten. The following day, The Times ran a story, ‘Murder at Polstead’, where again her name was given as Maria Martin and the Morning Chronicle reproducing the story from the Suffolk Herald, quoted her name as Marten. On Saturday 26 April, The Times ran a two column story on the case referring to both Maria Marten and Maria Martin in the same piece. Thereafter, she was referred to consistently as Maria Marten.
The error may have been compounded by the coroner’s court. During the hearing on 25 April when many newspaper reporters were present, the coroner told them that they were not allowed to take notes during the proceedings, fearing that publication of the evidence before the presumed trial could prejudice the outcome. Possibly the misspelling was a piece of sensationalist journalism. Martin is a common name; Marten is quite rare. Perhaps a newspaperman, keen to generate some cachet to the story, either accidentally or deliberately spelled the name Marten and it stuck.
One further note: Maria’s first name would have been pronounced in the old English way, “Mar-eye-a”, as in ‘Black Maria’, not as in romance languages “Mar-ee-a”.[i]
[i] Oxford English Dictionary, OED. The phonetic spelling of Maria is ‘mə’rʌiə’.
The Whore of Polstead?
Maria Martin was no blushing virgin, but was she really the ‘whore of Polstead’ as implied by one of the witness statements and repeated by at least one subsequent commentator? It is impossible to assess with any confidence the level of ‘illicit’ sexual activity in a rural village in the 1820s, but there is one indicator that cannot lie. Between 1813 and 1837 the Polstead baptismal register recorded 798 baptisms, of which thirty-five were illegitimate births. Of course there is not a direct correlation between recorded extramarital births and extramarital sex, but one thing is clear, the former cannot happen without the latter. Maria Martin’s name appears twice in these records[1], but of the thirty-five such births recorded, Sara Porley also had two children, Elizabeth Deaves and Elizabeth Humphrey each had three, and Sarah Stow produced no less than four. Thus Maria was barely a runner-up in the illegitimate children stakes.
[1] The child she had with William Corder was never baptized
The Red Barn...
Different sources attribute the origin of the name, ’Red Barn’, variously to its actual colour[i], the red tiles used to roof one of its bays[ii] and the ‘reddish hue it had on the evening of a splendid sunset’.[iii] Curtis [J Curtis, who wrote the well-known contemporary account of the case] observed sniffily that
one of the ephemeral publications which arose out of this transaction, gravely informs us, that “it seems to have taken its name from the tiles that cover part of it;” and, “because a chaff-house which is a lean to against it, and a wagon shed, at some little distance from it, are covered with tiles.”
He continued,
The truth is, that no part of the barn, of which we have given a faithful representation, is covered with tiles – its entire roof being of thatch.
And this is a little confusing, because his ‘faithful representation’ clearly shows an apparent lean-to quite obviously roofed with tiles. Nevertheless, Curtis insisted that the name derived from the fact that the barn was originally coloured red, and a conservation leaflet published by the St Edmundsbury Borough Council states:
Up to the late 17th century, barns were generally plastered. An alternative covering from that time until the present day was clapboarding, often in elm, which was either left natural or painted red.[iv]
The paint was probably linseed oil with red ochre added to inhibit the growth of mould and moss. The ‘reddish hue at sunset’ explanation, since it seems to derive from McCormick, can probably be discounted; the Red Barn was called as such because it was, or had been, painted red.
[i] Curtis, op. cit., 70 et seq.
[ii] Sunday Times, 10 August, 1828, which may have referenced one of Curtis’s ‘ephemeral publications’.
[iii] McCormick, Donald, The Red Barn Mystery, Some new evidence on an old murder (London, John Long, 1967) 30.
[iv] Colours and Finishes for Historic Buildings, (Bury St Edmunds, St Edmundsbury Borough Council, November 2007).
The Trial...
A man was to be tried for his life, but the proceedings outside the court on that rainy Thursday morning descended into chaos. The assize hearings had started on Monday and had been accompanied by ‘dense crowds’ unsure of when the Corder trial would start. But for the day of the trial, according to Curtis, Baron Alexander [the trial judge] had issued a strict instruction that none of the public, under pain of dire consequences, was to be allowed into the court until he had taken his seat. This stricture was repeated in The Times.[i] The Standard reported that one of the counsel, incensed by the rudeness of the ‘javelin-men’ enforcing the order, went to speak to the Lord Chief Baron at the Sheriff’s house. He, ‘with some indignation, disclaimed having given any such order’. The Standard report went on:
[The Lord Chief Baron] had expressed a wish that the people should be let in by degrees. It was especially his wish that counsel should be admitted the moment they presented themselves.[ii]
The effect of the ruling, as enforced by the javelin men, was that the crowds were even denser than normal outside the court on that day. Various reports stated that the entrances to the court had been besieged since as early as five o’clock in the morning notwithstanding the wet weather. The Times reported that the barristers were attempting to force their way to the door, ‘sweating and struggling against … the crowd’. According to Curtis, two of the counsel had their wigs ‘hooked off’ and one was ‘disgowned’. At around twenty minutes before nine, Mr Orridge, the prison governor, appeared at a window and asked for newspaper reporters and persons there ‘for literary purposes’ to come forward and present their tickets of entry, but it was impossible to get near the door. Contrary cries went up; ‘No preference – a court of justice is free and open to all’ was countered by ‘Let the gentlemen pass, or, as we shall not get in unless they do, we shall know nothing about it’. Of the counsel, magistrates and jurors attempting to gain entrance,
some lost their hats, some their pocket-books, and others their money – and not a few the lappets of their coats.
Some enterprising aspirants, had
[raised ladders] ... and numbers, (ladies among the rest) actually mounted the tiling of a house, from whence they could obtain an indistinct view of the prisoner
Orders had been given to exclude ladies from the court, but those who had been unable to gain entry were unperturbed:
a number of them … stood at the risk of their lives, on the stone ledges and basements of the windows of the court … there was a dreadful thunder-storm [which] could not damp the curiosity of those beautiful spectators … Several of the side windows were broken, from the pressure of the throng
Other people had managed to climb on to the roof of the court building, and ‘lying flat on the joists’ were able to peer down over a circular skylight into the courtroom. Curtis said they looked like ‘bodiless and wingless angels’. Mr Orridge directed them to withdraw or risk the ceiling coming down with dreadful consequences for all. A guard was posted to prevent a recurrence. Curtis noted that despite the exclusion order on ‘females’, exceptions were made for the wives of the sheriff and chaplain, and ‘two others, who found their way to the bench’.[iii]
Corder had arrived with Mr Orridge around half-past eight, and was taken to a cell in the court building. The Lord Chief Baron’s entrance was delayed for twenty minutes while the javelin men attempted to force a way through for him; The Times reported that he was ‘carried off his legs’ at one point by the crowd. There was some sentencing of prisoners to be done first, and then the jurors for the trial were called. According to the Morning Chronicle, there was an hour’s delay in finding them; because of the press of the crowd outside, they had to be ‘brought over the heads of the crowd’. They arrived some having lost shoes, some coats, ‘and nearly fainting’. The correspondent had never witnessed anything like it; the scene, he said, ‘beggars all description’.[iv]
[i] Times, 8 August 1828.
[ii] Standard, 8 August 1828.
[iii] Curtis, op. cit., 109, 178 & 179.
[iv] Morning Chronicle, 8 August 1828.
What follows is some material included in the book that has been published at various times on the blog page (with some minor editing)...
Donald McCormick...
In reviewing the existing literature on the subject of the murder in the Red Barn, I have found that with a few exceptions it leaves much to be desired. The most readable text is The Red Barn Mystery, Some new evidence on an old murder, by Donald McCormick, published in 1967. McCormick was a journalist and prolific writer. He wrote dozens of books, specializing under the pseudonym Richard Deacon in factual stories about the spying business. He also wrote about the Hell Fire Club, the identity of Jack the Ripper and the ‘mysterious’ death of Lord Kitchener. His book on the Red Barn murder makes sensational reading. He offers astonishing explanations for the two great mysteries concerned with the affair: how did Maria’s mother come to dream that she had been murdered and buried in the Red Barn? And why was it that although Maria’s body showed clear signs of stab-wounds, William Corder denied absolutely that he ever stabbed her, even after he admitted shooting and burying her?
McCormick claimed that Beauty Smith, Corder’s one-time accomplice in pig-thieving, was hiding in the Red Barn. Corder shot Maria, and thinking her dead, went to find a spade to bury her body. But she came to and Smith stabbed her to put her out of her misery. Maria’s step-mother, Ann Martin, knew she had been killed and buried in the barn, because Smith told her; they were having an affair…
Between the time of Maria’s death and Corder’s arrest for her murder, Beauty Smith had been convicted for animal-stealing, and sentenced to be transported for life. According to McCormick, while Smith was in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), he met Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, a well-known writer, forger and putative poisoner, who had also been transported for life. Wainewright had allegedly been acquainted with Corder in London and Beauty Smith confessed to him that he had stabbed Maria in the Red Barn after Corder shot her. Apparently, Wainwright told this story to Mrs Hampson of Sydney, a friend of an English actress Caroline Palmer, who had played Maria in stage adaptations of the murder and became interested in the case. In addition to this, Corder’s sister, Mary Borham, ‘years after the execution of her brother’, found some old diaries of his in which he referred to his acquaintance with Wainwright in London. Mary Borham became friends with Caroline Palmer and corresponded with her ‘for a few years’.
This is absolutely fascinating stuff except for two problems: Mary Borham, William Corder’s sister, was buried in Polstead, on 5th January 1829, less than six months after her brother's execution, and Beauty Smith was transported not to Van Diemen’s Land, but to the Sydney area. Since both he and Wainewright were transported for life, even if either had got a Ticket of Leave (a type of parole), which both did, this would have precluded travel outside of their local area. Thus it would have been impossible for them ever to have met up in Australia.
There are a number of lesser ‘errors’ in McCormick’s book. He reports that Corder’s wife Mary gave birth prematurely in Lavenham, and that she and the child died within hours of each other. Yet several newspapers reported that she gave birth on 16th November in Polstead where the birth was registered. Subsequent investigation shows that she lived for many years after that, and that the child, John Corder, had a largely successful career as a newspaper and book-seller in Colchester, and died in 1892. McCormick cites a newspaper or journal, Settlers’ Sentinel, Sydney, 21 July 1859, in his references. The National Library of Australia have no record of such a publication ever having existed, nor was there any newspaper or journal with the words ‘Settler’ or ‘Sentinel’ in the title extant in Sydney in 1859.
Needless to say, all attempts at finding any record of the existence of the actress ‘Caroline Palmer’, which was allegedly the stage name of Mrs E T Kemp, have failed, as have attempts to identify Mrs Hampson of Sydney. Similarly, no record exists that can be found of their correspondence.
Clearly, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but all of these facts taken together point to only one conclusion: either Donald McCormick was fed spurious information by his network of international contacts, resulting from his years spent as foreign manager for the Sunday Times, or he deliberately manufactured evidence in order to make a good story.
A search of the internet will reveal that Jeremy Duns, an active writer and journalist, and Melvin Harris, a writer now deceased, both charge Donald McCormick with manufacturing evidence for use in his books. Harris claimed that McCormick invented evidence in respect of two of his books, The Mystery of Lord Kitchener’s Death, and The Identity of Jack the Ripper. Details can be seen here: http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/maybrick_diary/mb-mc.html
Jeremy Duns claims that McCormick’s The Life of Ian Fleming also contains manufactured evidence. Duns’ material can be seen here:
www.jeremy-duns.com/blog/2018/1/17/licence-to-hoax?rq=mccormick
All of this means that Donald McCormick’s book on the Red Barn murder is effectively worthless as an account of historical fact.
The book by Peter Haining...
Maria Marten, the Murder in the Red Barn, by Peter Haining, 1992, is very disappointing. The book calls itself ‘a reinvestigation of the famous Victorian crime’. Mr Haining’s editor and Haining himself might have failed to notice that the Victorian era did not commence until ten years after the Red Barn murder, but that is to quibble.
More importantly, for a book apparently written with the intention of clarifying what happened, Haining succeeds only in confusing fact with fiction, myth and legend, right from the start. He confuses, apparently deliberately, a fictional account of the murder by William Maginn, published shortly after the murder, with established fact. He relates ‘facts’ that cannot possibly be known: ‘…she did not actually give up her virginity until she was eighteen, and then to one Thomas Corder…’; ‘It was a bright morning as William [Corder] strolled past the Marten’s cottage…in the garden Maria was busy among the flowers…’ And so on.
Then Haining takes as verbatim a clear confusion in the trial report that appeared in The Times, where it talked about a spike being found in the body near the hip bone. He launches into half a page about vampirism, questioning the fact that no-one else had commented on this point, and embellished the paragraph with a photograph of the skeleton of a ‘suspected witch or vampire’. A comparison with reports in other newspapers makes it clear that the ‘spike’ mentioned was Thomas Martin’s mole-spike; The Times just got it wrong, and Haining failed to cross-check. There is a diagram of the layout of the Red Barn which is clearly incorrect, as can be seen by comparing it with pictures of the barn published in the same book, and the map of Polstead is poor and not to scale. (Actually, he misread, and misquoted in his book, a report of the trial in the Sunday Times).
Since Haining’s book also gives substantial space to the various fictional accounts of the Red Barn murder, including the film made in the 1930s, the reader interested in historical fact really struggles to separate out reality from everything else. As a study of a social phenomenon, the book might be interesting, but history it is not.
Those stab wounds...
There are many mysteries associated with the death of Maria Martin in the Red Barn in Polstead in 1827. Some of these follow from the actions of the man hanged for her murder, William Corder. Potentially, he had committed not one but three capital offences – he also stole a five pound note from Maria, and uttered a forged cheque for £93. But the major difficulty with Corder concerns his confession, signed twelve hours before he was executed. He admitted shooting Maria Martin in the Red Barn and burying her body there, but he always denied stabbing her:
…I declare to almighty God that I had no sharp instrument about me, and that no other wound than the one made by the pistol was inflicted by me.
The three surgeons consulted in the inquest and trial had asserted that as well as the gunshot wound to the head, the body showed evidence of a knife or sword thrust into the same wound. There were also stab wounds to the neck and between the ribs, puncturing the heart. In addition, a handkerchief was tied so tightly around the neck that strangulation might have occurred. Corder’s only comment on the handkerchief was that he might have dragged the body by it to the hole he had dug in the barn floor.
The surgeon who initially examined the body during the inquest, Mr Lawton, was not present several weeks later when Maria’s corpse was exhumed. A ‘Mr Glover’, whose involvement was never properly explained, but was probably a member of the jury and the ‘scientific gentleman’ referred to by another surgeon, had noticed a stab wound between the ribs that Lawton had not seen. Three surgeons and two separate examinations showed that Maria had been stabbed several times.
The authorities wished to tie up the loose ends. They had convicted Corder and he had subsequently confessed to the murder but absolutely denied that he had stabbed Maria… Was someone else involved? Could the evidence of the surgeons be trusted? That Lawton at least had failed to do his job properly, was evidenced by the necessity of digging up Maria’s remains for a second examination.
The Sunday Times, on 17th August 1828, the Sunday following the execution, ran a story to the effect that Mr Orridge, the prison governor at Bury who oversaw the execution, had conducted an investigation. He had concluded that the stab wounds on Maria's body were made by an overenthusiastic member of the inquest jury, who wished to probe ‘…how far decomposition had advanced…’ A few days later, Orridge had some correspondence with a J Curtis about the confession and Corder’s denial that he stabbed Maria. No mention was made of the involvement of a member of the inquest jury.
On Wednesday 20th August, the Bury and Suffolk Herald repeated the Sunday Times story as ‘…going the round of the London newspapers’, but denied that Orridge was involved. The story wanted the ‘corroboration of a living witness to attest to the “fact”…’
The newspaper also published a letter from one of the surgeons, John Charles Nairn, who was responding to questions raised about the veracity of their findings in the light of Corder’s denial of any stabbing. He said that the gunshot wound alone could not have killed Maria, and also questioned Corder’s statement about the heavy bleeding from the pistol shot, given the path of the bullet. He said that these conclusions were not just his but that he consulted ‘several respectable members of the profession.’ He went on to ‘prove’ how the mole-spade could not have made the wounds in the body when Thomas Martin was probing the ground looking for it, but failed to mention the possibility that the mole spike could have done it.
Two weeks later, Nairn had another letter published responding to the story about the enthusiastic juryman. He had been assured, he said, that none of the jurymen touched the body. Regarding the wound in the neck, he said that ‘…as soon as the handkerchiefs had been removed from the face and neck…one of the first things that attracted our attention, was the wound beneath them…’ But of course, he wasn’t there. Lawton was the only surgeon present. He, alone, had untied the handkerchief and observed the wound, and no word was forthcoming from him. He had failed to notice the thrust between the ribs, and for good measure he removed the head in order to investigate fully the track of the bullet. He thus ensured that no further evidence could be gained from the neck wound...
Click the button to read an article on William Corder's associate in animal thieving, 'Beauty Smith', published in Genealogists' Magazine in June 2014...
Introduction...
In 1972 I was living in Wivenhoe, an attractive village on the river Colne, a short distance from Essex University where I was a post-graduate student. If Wivenhoe is known to the world at large, it is probably because of John Constable’s beautiful picture, Wivenhoe Park, which is in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Wivenhoe Park is now the home of Essex University.
One of my house-mates, Sarah, had been helping in a house clearance. She came across an old book which she thought I might be interested in. The book, “An Authentic History of Maria Marten or The Red Barn”, had no accredited author.[1] I dipped into it and was interested, not the least reason for which was that the murder, for murder it was, had been committed in Polstead, Suffolk, where my academic supervisor lived. But more than that, the murderer, William Corder, had been arrested in Brentford, next door to Ealing in West London. I grew up in Ealing and went to school in Brentford; I must have passed the place where he was arrested a thousand times.
The murder in the Red Barn captured the public imagination. The story had all the elements of a gothic novel; the victim was a comely maid, daughter of the village mole-catcher, seduced by William Corder, the dissolute son of a prosperous local farmer. She went to rendezvous with him in the Red Barn dressed in men’s clothes to avoid being identified, prior to them both going to Ipswich, ostensibly to be married. In the barn he shot her, possibly stabbing her also, and buried her body under the floor. Corder then told her father that they were happily married and Maria was unable to write to him because of a bad hand. He, meanwhile, moved to London where he advertised for a wife, married a lady, and settled down in a girls’ school run by his new wife in Brentford. The deed was discovered after Maria’s stepmother dreamed that Maria had been murdered and buried in the Red Barn. Her father probed the floor with his mole-spike, and found the body.
From the time that Maria’s body was discovered, in April 1828, until the August, when William Corder was hanged for her murder, the story was a sensation. The press had blanket coverage; there were peep shows, puppet shows and broadsheets, and a non-conformist minister preached a sermon at the Red Barn attended by thousands. Stage dramas were written and produced – latterly in films and on television – and the story of Maria Martin has continued to be written about until the present day.
But there remain many perplexing questions regarding Maria’s murder and the subsequent discovery of her body. The most intriguing of these is the way the body was discovered – after Maria’s stepmother dreamed that she had been done to death and buried in the Red Barn. At the time, this explanation was accepted largely without question, and after William Corder was hanged, The Times ran a story recounting another ‘astounding case’ where a person had dreamed of an event that was subsequently found to be true. These days such an occurrence would be regarded with profound suspicion.
Several surgeons concluded that Maria had not only been shot, but stabbed in several places with a sharp instrument and possibly strangled. Yet Corder in his confession, hours before his execution, admitted that although he did indeed shoot Maria and bury her body, he denied vehemently ever having stabbed her.
Having spent some years researching and writing up two relatively unknown series of court cases from the mid-nineteenth century, I found myself drawn back to the tale of Maria Martin. The story of the Red Barn murder has been recounted on numerous occasions. Many accounts can be found in compendia of true-life crime as well as books entirely devoted to the subject. Of the latter, six have been published since 1949, and I fully expected to find very little remaining to be said about the affair. In fact much of what has been written about the actual events seems only to succeed in confusing established fact with hearsay, old wives’ tales, fantasy and, it must be said, deliberate falsehood. One account makes the most sensational allegations about the murder, claiming that it was a conspiracy involving several people. Such of those claims that can be checked, have found to be impossible to verify and several have been proven to be false. Another author confuses, apparently deliberately, what is documented fact, with a fictional account published soon after the event. There is, in my view, a pressing need to set the record straight.
There is another reason why a new account of the murder is justified now. Over the last five to ten years the number of resources available to the social historian has grown at an astonishing rate due mainly to the burgeoning quantity – and quality – of historical records that can be interrogated via the Internet. It is now possible to do word-searches on several million pages of nineteenth-century newspapers and journals and detect information that otherwise would have been virtually impossible to find. The Mormon Church has produced a peerless set of records, made freely available to everyone, providing wider than ever coverage of births, marriages and deaths from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and earlier. A number of commercial websites have exploited the enormous upsurge in interest in genealogy and made available prodigious amounts of information, all searchable via the Internet. It is, therefore, possible that some new facts may be gleaned to add to the small number of primary sources of information on the Red Barn murder. Several authors have taken as read, so-called facts reproduced in previous accounts, some of which have taken great liberties with the historical record. It is appropriate, therefore, to construct a narrative based strictly on what is known from primary sources, and try to understand what really happened on that late spring day nearly two hundred years ago in Polstead.
[1] It was bootlegged copy of the celebrated book on the case by J Curtis
William Corder advertises for a wife...
The Morning Herald was a London newspaper which William would have been unlikely to have seen in Polstead. Perhaps it was coincidence, but the very day he arrived in London, 19 September, the newspaper printed two advertisements for wives at the top of its front page. Both were modest and unassuming; in each case, a middle-aged man with a small income was seeking a companion who possessed a similar financial independence. Three more similar advertisements for wives appeared in October, and on 13 November 1827, despite a notice the previous week: ‘ADVERTISING for a WIFE, an admired Comic song, sung by Mrs. Fitzwilliam’, the Morning Herald published the following, reproduced in full, exactly as printed:
Matrimony. – A Private Gentleman, aged 24, entirely Independent, whose disposition is not to be exceeded, has lately lost chief [sic] of his family by the hand of PROVIDENCE, which has occasioned discord amongst the remainder, under circumstances most disagreeable to relate. To any female of respectability, who would study for domestic comforts, and willing to confide her future happiness to one in every way qualified to render the marriage state desirable, as the advertiser is in affluence the Lady must have the power of some property, which may remain in her own possession. Many very happy marriages have taken place through means similar to this now resorted to, and it is hoped no one will answer this through impertinent curiosity, but should this meet the eye of any agreeable lady who feels desirous of meeting with a sociable, tender, kind, and sympathising companion, they will find this advertisement worthy of notice. Honour and secresy [sic] may be relied on. As some little security against idle applications, it is requisite that letters may be addressed (post paid) A.Z., care of Mr. Foster, stationer, 68 Leadenhall-street, with real name and address, which will meet with most respectful attention.
The advertisement was repeated, minus the comment about the lady’s property, and with one extra full stop, in the Sunday Times of 25 November, albeit with entirely spelled Intirely, and honour spelled honor. A.Z. was William Corder, and some insights into his background, character and motives are illuminated by this curious notice. It is quite clear that he had lifted a number of key phrases from elsewhere, joining them together with little understanding of sentence structure or punctuation. His limited education was quite effectively demonstrated, a fact which should have been obvious to anyone reading the item. His comments regarding discord within his family provided a convenient smokescreen to prevent embarrassing enquiries about his life and connections in Polstead. William stated that he was in affluence in order to allay any suspicion that he was a fortune-hunter; he may even have deluded himself that he really was well off, although as was to become clear within a few months, his rate of spending in his new life outstripped by many times any income he could expect from the farm. Very probably he did understand his precarious financial position. It seems likely that his motivation for finding a wife with property was to provide him with the income that he needed; evidently the lady from Yorkshire was just not rich enough. The position and size of the advertisement in the newspaper – at the top of the front page, almost in the centre and more than three times larger than most of the adjacent notices – must have made it very expensive; possibly it was a deliberate act in order to demonstrate his ‘affluence’. The insertion in the Sunday Times was right in the centre of the first page. It is interesting to note that the Leicester Chronicle published a story about a similar notice that had been placed in the Morning Herald only a few months previously. Some of the identical phrases were used:
willing to confide her future happiness to one in every way qualified to render the marriage state desirable … Many very happy marriages have taken place through means similar to this now resorted to
The gentleman who had placed the advertisement was mocked: ‘how modest! ... How winning! … How disinterested! … how knowing!’ The story ended with the prophetic warning:
We never heard of more than one marriage that was produced by means of this description, and in that instance the advertiser, as it may be well supposed, was an impostor, who deceived his unfortunate dupe, and most likely himself too, for the marriage was altogether an unhappy one.
William Corder must have seen the earlier advertisement – and would not have seen the piece in the Leicester Chronicle. He decided that he liked some of the phrasing; perhaps he visited the offices of the Morning Herald and perused some back numbers looking for inspiration. It seems likely that the approximately one hundred women who responded to his two advertisements had likewise not seen the earlier story.
Marten or Martin?
At this point mention should be made of the spelling of Maria Martin’s name, which in all published literature about the affair, until quite recently, is given as Marten. The parish records of her father’s birth, his two marriages, Maria’s birth, that of her brother and sisters, the births of Maria’s children, and the registration of her burial all state, without exception, that the surname was Martin. The extensive Prosecution Brief for William Corder’s trial spelled Maria’s surname, and that of her family, Martin, and when Maria’s father was recorded in the 1851 census at the age of 80, his name was given as Thomas Martin.
How did the mistake arise? The original story broke on 23 April, St George’s Day, 1828. The story in The Times, repeated word for word in The Standard, recorded Maria’s name correctly as Martin. On the same day the Suffolk Herald, reported the murder, spelling Maria’s name Marten. The following day, The Times ran a story, ‘Murder at Polstead’, where again her name was given as Maria Martin and the Morning Chronicle reproducing the story from the Suffolk Herald, quoted her name as Marten. On Saturday 26 April, The Times ran a two column story on the case referring to both Maria Marten and Maria Martin in the same piece. Thereafter, she was referred to consistently as Maria Marten.
The error may have been compounded by the coroner’s court. During the hearing on 25 April when many newspaper reporters were present, the coroner told them that they were not allowed to take notes during the proceedings, fearing that publication of the evidence before the presumed trial could prejudice the outcome. Possibly the misspelling was a piece of sensationalist journalism. Martin is a common name; Marten is quite rare. Perhaps a newspaperman, keen to generate some cachet to the story, either accidentally or deliberately spelled the name Marten and it stuck.
One further note: Maria’s first name would have been pronounced in the old English way, “Mar-eye-a”, as in ‘Black Maria’, not as in romance languages “Mar-ee-a”.[i]
[i] Oxford English Dictionary, OED. The phonetic spelling of Maria is ‘mə’rʌiə’.
The Whore of Polstead?
Maria Martin was no blushing virgin, but was she really the ‘whore of Polstead’ as implied by one of the witness statements and repeated by at least one subsequent commentator? It is impossible to assess with any confidence the level of ‘illicit’ sexual activity in a rural village in the 1820s, but there is one indicator that cannot lie. Between 1813 and 1837 the Polstead baptismal register recorded 798 baptisms, of which thirty-five were illegitimate births. Of course there is not a direct correlation between recorded extramarital births and extramarital sex, but one thing is clear, the former cannot happen without the latter. Maria Martin’s name appears twice in these records[1], but of the thirty-five such births recorded, Sara Porley also had two children, Elizabeth Deaves and Elizabeth Humphrey each had three, and Sarah Stow produced no less than four. Thus Maria was barely a runner-up in the illegitimate children stakes.
[1] The child she had with William Corder was never baptized
The Red Barn...
Different sources attribute the origin of the name, ’Red Barn’, variously to its actual colour[i], the red tiles used to roof one of its bays[ii] and the ‘reddish hue it had on the evening of a splendid sunset’.[iii] Curtis [J Curtis, who wrote the well-known contemporary account of the case] observed sniffily that
one of the ephemeral publications which arose out of this transaction, gravely informs us, that “it seems to have taken its name from the tiles that cover part of it;” and, “because a chaff-house which is a lean to against it, and a wagon shed, at some little distance from it, are covered with tiles.”
He continued,
The truth is, that no part of the barn, of which we have given a faithful representation, is covered with tiles – its entire roof being of thatch.
And this is a little confusing, because his ‘faithful representation’ clearly shows an apparent lean-to quite obviously roofed with tiles. Nevertheless, Curtis insisted that the name derived from the fact that the barn was originally coloured red, and a conservation leaflet published by the St Edmundsbury Borough Council states:
Up to the late 17th century, barns were generally plastered. An alternative covering from that time until the present day was clapboarding, often in elm, which was either left natural or painted red.[iv]
The paint was probably linseed oil with red ochre added to inhibit the growth of mould and moss. The ‘reddish hue at sunset’ explanation, since it seems to derive from McCormick, can probably be discounted; the Red Barn was called as such because it was, or had been, painted red.
[i] Curtis, op. cit., 70 et seq.
[ii] Sunday Times, 10 August, 1828, which may have referenced one of Curtis’s ‘ephemeral publications’.
[iii] McCormick, Donald, The Red Barn Mystery, Some new evidence on an old murder (London, John Long, 1967) 30.
[iv] Colours and Finishes for Historic Buildings, (Bury St Edmunds, St Edmundsbury Borough Council, November 2007).
The Trial...
A man was to be tried for his life, but the proceedings outside the court on that rainy Thursday morning descended into chaos. The assize hearings had started on Monday and had been accompanied by ‘dense crowds’ unsure of when the Corder trial would start. But for the day of the trial, according to Curtis, Baron Alexander [the trial judge] had issued a strict instruction that none of the public, under pain of dire consequences, was to be allowed into the court until he had taken his seat. This stricture was repeated in The Times.[i] The Standard reported that one of the counsel, incensed by the rudeness of the ‘javelin-men’ enforcing the order, went to speak to the Lord Chief Baron at the Sheriff’s house. He, ‘with some indignation, disclaimed having given any such order’. The Standard report went on:
[The Lord Chief Baron] had expressed a wish that the people should be let in by degrees. It was especially his wish that counsel should be admitted the moment they presented themselves.[ii]
The effect of the ruling, as enforced by the javelin men, was that the crowds were even denser than normal outside the court on that day. Various reports stated that the entrances to the court had been besieged since as early as five o’clock in the morning notwithstanding the wet weather. The Times reported that the barristers were attempting to force their way to the door, ‘sweating and struggling against … the crowd’. According to Curtis, two of the counsel had their wigs ‘hooked off’ and one was ‘disgowned’. At around twenty minutes before nine, Mr Orridge, the prison governor, appeared at a window and asked for newspaper reporters and persons there ‘for literary purposes’ to come forward and present their tickets of entry, but it was impossible to get near the door. Contrary cries went up; ‘No preference – a court of justice is free and open to all’ was countered by ‘Let the gentlemen pass, or, as we shall not get in unless they do, we shall know nothing about it’. Of the counsel, magistrates and jurors attempting to gain entrance,
some lost their hats, some their pocket-books, and others their money – and not a few the lappets of their coats.
Some enterprising aspirants, had
[raised ladders] ... and numbers, (ladies among the rest) actually mounted the tiling of a house, from whence they could obtain an indistinct view of the prisoner
Orders had been given to exclude ladies from the court, but those who had been unable to gain entry were unperturbed:
a number of them … stood at the risk of their lives, on the stone ledges and basements of the windows of the court … there was a dreadful thunder-storm [which] could not damp the curiosity of those beautiful spectators … Several of the side windows were broken, from the pressure of the throng
Other people had managed to climb on to the roof of the court building, and ‘lying flat on the joists’ were able to peer down over a circular skylight into the courtroom. Curtis said they looked like ‘bodiless and wingless angels’. Mr Orridge directed them to withdraw or risk the ceiling coming down with dreadful consequences for all. A guard was posted to prevent a recurrence. Curtis noted that despite the exclusion order on ‘females’, exceptions were made for the wives of the sheriff and chaplain, and ‘two others, who found their way to the bench’.[iii]
Corder had arrived with Mr Orridge around half-past eight, and was taken to a cell in the court building. The Lord Chief Baron’s entrance was delayed for twenty minutes while the javelin men attempted to force a way through for him; The Times reported that he was ‘carried off his legs’ at one point by the crowd. There was some sentencing of prisoners to be done first, and then the jurors for the trial were called. According to the Morning Chronicle, there was an hour’s delay in finding them; because of the press of the crowd outside, they had to be ‘brought over the heads of the crowd’. They arrived some having lost shoes, some coats, ‘and nearly fainting’. The correspondent had never witnessed anything like it; the scene, he said, ‘beggars all description’.[iv]
[i] Times, 8 August 1828.
[ii] Standard, 8 August 1828.
[iii] Curtis, op. cit., 109, 178 & 179.
[iv] Morning Chronicle, 8 August 1828.
What follows is some material included in the book that has been published at various times on the blog page (with some minor editing)...
Donald McCormick...
In reviewing the existing literature on the subject of the murder in the Red Barn, I have found that with a few exceptions it leaves much to be desired. The most readable text is The Red Barn Mystery, Some new evidence on an old murder, by Donald McCormick, published in 1967. McCormick was a journalist and prolific writer. He wrote dozens of books, specializing under the pseudonym Richard Deacon in factual stories about the spying business. He also wrote about the Hell Fire Club, the identity of Jack the Ripper and the ‘mysterious’ death of Lord Kitchener. His book on the Red Barn murder makes sensational reading. He offers astonishing explanations for the two great mysteries concerned with the affair: how did Maria’s mother come to dream that she had been murdered and buried in the Red Barn? And why was it that although Maria’s body showed clear signs of stab-wounds, William Corder denied absolutely that he ever stabbed her, even after he admitted shooting and burying her?
McCormick claimed that Beauty Smith, Corder’s one-time accomplice in pig-thieving, was hiding in the Red Barn. Corder shot Maria, and thinking her dead, went to find a spade to bury her body. But she came to and Smith stabbed her to put her out of her misery. Maria’s step-mother, Ann Martin, knew she had been killed and buried in the barn, because Smith told her; they were having an affair…
Between the time of Maria’s death and Corder’s arrest for her murder, Beauty Smith had been convicted for animal-stealing, and sentenced to be transported for life. According to McCormick, while Smith was in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), he met Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, a well-known writer, forger and putative poisoner, who had also been transported for life. Wainewright had allegedly been acquainted with Corder in London and Beauty Smith confessed to him that he had stabbed Maria in the Red Barn after Corder shot her. Apparently, Wainwright told this story to Mrs Hampson of Sydney, a friend of an English actress Caroline Palmer, who had played Maria in stage adaptations of the murder and became interested in the case. In addition to this, Corder’s sister, Mary Borham, ‘years after the execution of her brother’, found some old diaries of his in which he referred to his acquaintance with Wainwright in London. Mary Borham became friends with Caroline Palmer and corresponded with her ‘for a few years’.
This is absolutely fascinating stuff except for two problems: Mary Borham, William Corder’s sister, was buried in Polstead, on 5th January 1829, less than six months after her brother's execution, and Beauty Smith was transported not to Van Diemen’s Land, but to the Sydney area. Since both he and Wainewright were transported for life, even if either had got a Ticket of Leave (a type of parole), which both did, this would have precluded travel outside of their local area. Thus it would have been impossible for them ever to have met up in Australia.
There are a number of lesser ‘errors’ in McCormick’s book. He reports that Corder’s wife Mary gave birth prematurely in Lavenham, and that she and the child died within hours of each other. Yet several newspapers reported that she gave birth on 16th November in Polstead where the birth was registered. Subsequent investigation shows that she lived for many years after that, and that the child, John Corder, had a largely successful career as a newspaper and book-seller in Colchester, and died in 1892. McCormick cites a newspaper or journal, Settlers’ Sentinel, Sydney, 21 July 1859, in his references. The National Library of Australia have no record of such a publication ever having existed, nor was there any newspaper or journal with the words ‘Settler’ or ‘Sentinel’ in the title extant in Sydney in 1859.
Needless to say, all attempts at finding any record of the existence of the actress ‘Caroline Palmer’, which was allegedly the stage name of Mrs E T Kemp, have failed, as have attempts to identify Mrs Hampson of Sydney. Similarly, no record exists that can be found of their correspondence.
Clearly, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but all of these facts taken together point to only one conclusion: either Donald McCormick was fed spurious information by his network of international contacts, resulting from his years spent as foreign manager for the Sunday Times, or he deliberately manufactured evidence in order to make a good story.
A search of the internet will reveal that Jeremy Duns, an active writer and journalist, and Melvin Harris, a writer now deceased, both charge Donald McCormick with manufacturing evidence for use in his books. Harris claimed that McCormick invented evidence in respect of two of his books, The Mystery of Lord Kitchener’s Death, and The Identity of Jack the Ripper. Details can be seen here: http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/maybrick_diary/mb-mc.html
Jeremy Duns claims that McCormick’s The Life of Ian Fleming also contains manufactured evidence. Duns’ material can be seen here:
www.jeremy-duns.com/blog/2018/1/17/licence-to-hoax?rq=mccormick
All of this means that Donald McCormick’s book on the Red Barn murder is effectively worthless as an account of historical fact.
The book by Peter Haining...
Maria Marten, the Murder in the Red Barn, by Peter Haining, 1992, is very disappointing. The book calls itself ‘a reinvestigation of the famous Victorian crime’. Mr Haining’s editor and Haining himself might have failed to notice that the Victorian era did not commence until ten years after the Red Barn murder, but that is to quibble.
More importantly, for a book apparently written with the intention of clarifying what happened, Haining succeeds only in confusing fact with fiction, myth and legend, right from the start. He confuses, apparently deliberately, a fictional account of the murder by William Maginn, published shortly after the murder, with established fact. He relates ‘facts’ that cannot possibly be known: ‘…she did not actually give up her virginity until she was eighteen, and then to one Thomas Corder…’; ‘It was a bright morning as William [Corder] strolled past the Marten’s cottage…in the garden Maria was busy among the flowers…’ And so on.
Then Haining takes as verbatim a clear confusion in the trial report that appeared in The Times, where it talked about a spike being found in the body near the hip bone. He launches into half a page about vampirism, questioning the fact that no-one else had commented on this point, and embellished the paragraph with a photograph of the skeleton of a ‘suspected witch or vampire’. A comparison with reports in other newspapers makes it clear that the ‘spike’ mentioned was Thomas Martin’s mole-spike; The Times just got it wrong, and Haining failed to cross-check. There is a diagram of the layout of the Red Barn which is clearly incorrect, as can be seen by comparing it with pictures of the barn published in the same book, and the map of Polstead is poor and not to scale. (Actually, he misread, and misquoted in his book, a report of the trial in the Sunday Times).
Since Haining’s book also gives substantial space to the various fictional accounts of the Red Barn murder, including the film made in the 1930s, the reader interested in historical fact really struggles to separate out reality from everything else. As a study of a social phenomenon, the book might be interesting, but history it is not.
Those stab wounds...
There are many mysteries associated with the death of Maria Martin in the Red Barn in Polstead in 1827. Some of these follow from the actions of the man hanged for her murder, William Corder. Potentially, he had committed not one but three capital offences – he also stole a five pound note from Maria, and uttered a forged cheque for £93. But the major difficulty with Corder concerns his confession, signed twelve hours before he was executed. He admitted shooting Maria Martin in the Red Barn and burying her body there, but he always denied stabbing her:
…I declare to almighty God that I had no sharp instrument about me, and that no other wound than the one made by the pistol was inflicted by me.
The three surgeons consulted in the inquest and trial had asserted that as well as the gunshot wound to the head, the body showed evidence of a knife or sword thrust into the same wound. There were also stab wounds to the neck and between the ribs, puncturing the heart. In addition, a handkerchief was tied so tightly around the neck that strangulation might have occurred. Corder’s only comment on the handkerchief was that he might have dragged the body by it to the hole he had dug in the barn floor.
The surgeon who initially examined the body during the inquest, Mr Lawton, was not present several weeks later when Maria’s corpse was exhumed. A ‘Mr Glover’, whose involvement was never properly explained, but was probably a member of the jury and the ‘scientific gentleman’ referred to by another surgeon, had noticed a stab wound between the ribs that Lawton had not seen. Three surgeons and two separate examinations showed that Maria had been stabbed several times.
The authorities wished to tie up the loose ends. They had convicted Corder and he had subsequently confessed to the murder but absolutely denied that he had stabbed Maria… Was someone else involved? Could the evidence of the surgeons be trusted? That Lawton at least had failed to do his job properly, was evidenced by the necessity of digging up Maria’s remains for a second examination.
The Sunday Times, on 17th August 1828, the Sunday following the execution, ran a story to the effect that Mr Orridge, the prison governor at Bury who oversaw the execution, had conducted an investigation. He had concluded that the stab wounds on Maria's body were made by an overenthusiastic member of the inquest jury, who wished to probe ‘…how far decomposition had advanced…’ A few days later, Orridge had some correspondence with a J Curtis about the confession and Corder’s denial that he stabbed Maria. No mention was made of the involvement of a member of the inquest jury.
On Wednesday 20th August, the Bury and Suffolk Herald repeated the Sunday Times story as ‘…going the round of the London newspapers’, but denied that Orridge was involved. The story wanted the ‘corroboration of a living witness to attest to the “fact”…’
The newspaper also published a letter from one of the surgeons, John Charles Nairn, who was responding to questions raised about the veracity of their findings in the light of Corder’s denial of any stabbing. He said that the gunshot wound alone could not have killed Maria, and also questioned Corder’s statement about the heavy bleeding from the pistol shot, given the path of the bullet. He said that these conclusions were not just his but that he consulted ‘several respectable members of the profession.’ He went on to ‘prove’ how the mole-spade could not have made the wounds in the body when Thomas Martin was probing the ground looking for it, but failed to mention the possibility that the mole spike could have done it.
Two weeks later, Nairn had another letter published responding to the story about the enthusiastic juryman. He had been assured, he said, that none of the jurymen touched the body. Regarding the wound in the neck, he said that ‘…as soon as the handkerchiefs had been removed from the face and neck…one of the first things that attracted our attention, was the wound beneath them…’ But of course, he wasn’t there. Lawton was the only surgeon present. He, alone, had untied the handkerchief and observed the wound, and no word was forthcoming from him. He had failed to notice the thrust between the ribs, and for good measure he removed the head in order to investigate fully the track of the bullet. He thus ensured that no further evidence could be gained from the neck wound...
Click the button to read an article on William Corder's associate in animal thieving, 'Beauty Smith', published in Genealogists' Magazine in June 2014...
Where to find the book...
Copies of Murder in the Red Barn can be found in the Chelmsford Central Library, the British Library at King's Cross, the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, the Cambridge University Library and the National Libraries of Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
The Buttermarket branch of Waterstones and the Moyses Hall Museum, both in Bury St Edmunds, stock the book, as does the Kestrel Bookshop in Friars Street, Sudbury, Suffolk.
See the 'shop' page for other methods of purchase.
Copies of Murder in the Red Barn can be found in the Chelmsford Central Library, the British Library at King's Cross, the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, the Cambridge University Library and the National Libraries of Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
The Buttermarket branch of Waterstones and the Moyses Hall Museum, both in Bury St Edmunds, stock the book, as does the Kestrel Bookshop in Friars Street, Sudbury, Suffolk.
See the 'shop' page for other methods of purchase.