Murder Maps. Drew Gray

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      PART ONE — EUROPE.

      In May 1827, Maria Marten (unknown–1827) disappeared. She was last seen heading off to marry her latest beau, William Corder (1803–28), a local tenant farmer who owned a barn at Polstead, Suffolk. Maria was no virgin bride; she had already had two illegitimate children by two different lovers and she had given birth to Corder’s child earlier that year. However, the subsequent discovery of her dead body, buried in Corder’s red-painted barn, allowed her less than respectable past to be airbrushed for a very public refashioning of her life story.

      Corder almost certainly killed Maria and then fled, claiming he and his bride had moved to the Isle of Wight. Maria’s father found her body, supposedly after Maria’s ghost had appeared to her stepmother in a dream. More plausibly, Mr Marten (dates unknown) grew suspicious after he received a letter from Corder saying all was well but that his new wife had injured her hand and was unable to write herself. The local magistracy commissioned a Bow Street Runner from London to hunt down the farmer and Corder was caught and put on trial

      for murder. Even if he had been innocent, he would have stood no chance of being acquitted. The press had already condemned him, painting Maria as the melodramatic victim of an evil seducer intent, without any foundation in truth it seems, on getting his hands on her property. It was claimed that Corder had tricked her into marriage, that he had tried this several times with other women and that he had even attempted to poison Maria’s two older children by secreting pills inside pears. None of this was true, but that hardly mattered to a reading public who were becoming increasingly fascinated by each and every twist of the ‘red barn’ murder case.

      A play was made about Maria’s murder and was performed while Corder was awaiting trial; there was even a report of a magic lantern show in the local church hall that presented Corder as Maria’s killer. His defence team did what they could to complain but it made little difference. Corder was convicted, having cut a pathetic and unconvincing figure in the dock. He was hanged in August 1828 and died slowly, taking eight minutes to expire as the hangman pulled on his legs. His dissected body was flayed and the skin tanned and used to bind a printed account of the murder; the rope was sold off at a guinea an inch, and pottery miniatures of Corder, Maria and the red barn at Polstead were bought by curious middle-class collectors.

      Corder was an ordinary murderer, Maria’s death a fairly ordinary murder, but the press and the emerging ‘murder industry’ turned an otherwise squalid, if tragic, killing into the leading sensation story of its day. In several respects, the red barn murder was the birth of ‘true crime’ in ‘modern’ Britain and it set the model for the exploitative presentation of murder news that developed across the next century or more. •

      WILLIAM CORDER’S HOUSE.

      the farmhouse inhabited by

      william corder.

      MARIA MARTEN’S HOUSE.

      the cottage in which maria

      marten lived.

      THE RED BARN.

      the barn in which maria marten was murdered by

      william corder.

      the red barn, polstead.

       May .

       englandsuffolk.

      WILLIAM CORDER.× Maria Marten.