Caroline: In the 1930s, using the proceeds from several collaborative book projects, the Detection Club rented its own premises in central London. Their two rooms were upstairs at 31 Gerrard Street in the Soho area of London’s West End, which at the time was a proper red light district, known for its nightclubs of varying levels of legality and notoriety.
Indeed, Gladys Mitchell later recalled how, when the members were walking back to the Club rooms after dinner at a local restaurant, “we women had to assert over the Gerrard Street ladies who had attached themselves to the coat-sleeves of our highly respectable men colleagues”. Dorothy L. Sayers and Margaret Cole were especially fierce defenders of their more timid male friends’ virtue, apparently.
In the rooms themselves, the Detection Club had been able to create a little oasis that catered to their mutual preoccupations. Comfortable armchairs, tables, supplies for making drinks, and books to be shared and borrowed were soon installed. Most interesting of all, they put up pictures on the walls. Their taste in decoration was perhaps appropriate, if a little macabre: they chose prints depicting scenes from famous real-life murder cases. From the list of villains and victims they immortalised in this way, one face in particular stands out to me — that of William Corder, the so-called Red Barn Murderer. What was this relic of an apparently cut and dried murder case from 1827 doing looking down at a gang of mystery writers over a century later? Why did they want Corder there at all? Why did he still matter?
Today, we must go inside the Red Barn itself to learn more.
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Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton.
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I have talked a great deal in the past on this podcast about the true crimes that influenced golden age detective fiction. These are mostly from the half-century or so prior to the first world war. These are the cases that the Detection Club members, many of them born in the 1880s and 1890s, had grown up reading and hearing about. It makes sense, then, that these are the ones that colour their fiction and their approach to crime.
Moreover, the crimes that linger longest in the public consciousness tend to be ones that involve some unusual feature or lingering doubt about the justice or fairness of the outcome. Thus we have the story of Crippen from 1910, with its thrilling trans-Atlantic pursuit and arrest. And there’s Florence Maybrick’s highly controversial conviction from 1889 that resulted in her unprecedented release from prison in 1904 after serving 15 years for a crime with which she had never been charged. Or that of Constance Kent, which although the murderous events occurred in 1860, the true solution was never revealed as Constance pleaded guilty and was sentenced without a full trial. And of course, there’s the tragedy of Edith Thompson from 1922, who was arguably executed for the non-crime of having had an affair and written some passionate love letters.
The Red Barn Murder, though? As you will see, there was never any real doubt over who had committed the crime or why he had done it. There was no difficulty in arresting him or bringing him to justice, nor did the investigation demonstrate any particular eccentricities. The sentence handed down was entirely standard for the time, too. This was a crime from a completely different era as well, occurring during the reign of George IV, previously the Prince Regent. The wide expanse of the Victorian and Edwardian ages, not to mention the First World War, lay between the Red Barn Murder and the founding of the Detection Club. Given all of this, there would seem to be little that a detective novelist in the 1930s could find interesting about this case.
Except, the Red Barn Murder has always exerted a peculiar hold over the British psyche. Barely a decade has passed since the 1820s without the publication of some new book about it. There have been many sensational plays, some of which started appearing on stage before the trial in this case had even concluded. A novelised version of the trial transcript by penny blood author Robert Huish, titled The Red Barn, A Tale Founded On Fact, was rushed out almost as soon as the verdict was handed down. And there are traces of its influence in sensation fiction, the precursor to detective fiction, for instance in the work of Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.
Untangling the essential facts of this case, 197 years after these events took place, amid all of this fiction is not easy, but I’ve done my best.
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The story begins in a small village called Polstead in Suffolk, about ten miles north of Colchester, where the Red Barn of the Red Barn Murder was situated. In the 1820s, Polstead had between twenty and thirty houses. Among the residents of these were two families: the Corder family, who were middle class tenant farmers, and the Marten family, who were lower down the social hierarchy. Thomas Marten was a mole-catcher for hire and also supported his family by selling vegetables grown in the garden of their tiny cottage.
The Corders had six children, four sons and two daughters, of which our protagonist William Corder was the third boy. Maria Marten, who will become very important to our story in just a moment, was the eldest of Thomas’s four children, born in 1801. His wife Grace had died giving birth to the fourth, and Thomas had remarried to a local woman called Anne who was quite a lot younger than him. This meant that Maria had a stepmother only ten years older than her, and apparently by the mid 1820s when the significant events of this case began to unfold, this was causing tension in the household.
Maria Marten had been sent out to work at the age of seven, serving as a maid in the house of a clergyman in a neighbouring village. She was summoned home in her early teens, when her mother died. She became the housekeeper and de factor caregiver for her younger siblings until her father’s remarriage a few years later. Much was made later on about Maria’s flirtatious ways even as a very young woman, but it’s easy to see how a young girl, yanked back from the promise of an independent life and career to take care of three children and a house, might find blowing off steam with other people her age in the village to be a diverting pastime.
The first material connection between these two families, the Corders and the Martens, did not concern William at all. When she was 18, Maria became romantically involved with Thomas Corder, the family’s second son and supposedly his father’s favourite to inherit the farm. In many ways, this affair followed exactly the pattern you might expect for a liaison between two young people of differing class backgrounds at this time. She quickly became pregnant, he made it clear he would not be marrying her, and after the baby died at just a few weeks old, Thomas Corder cut off all contact with Maria.
Next, Maria took up with Peter Mayhew or Mathews — his name appears both ways in different documents. He was a “gentleman about town” of independent means and a relative of the gentry family who owned the local manor, Polstead Hall, and leased the Martens’ cottage to them. This relationship between Peter and Maria seems to have been even less likely to result in her getting to set up her own household, but this time the child she conceived survived and was named Thomas Henry Marten. The child’s naming is a major clue that his father wanted nothing to do with him, but apparently Peter did provide Maria with a quarterly maintenance payment of five pounds, equivalent to about £350 today. Maria and young Thomas continued to live with her father and stepmother in Polstead.
Next, tragedy struck at the Corder household. John Corder, the tenant farmer, died, leaving his wife Ann in sole charge of 300 acres and six grieving children. It got worse, though. Two of his sons, James and John, soon followed their father into the village graveyard, perishing from health problems that were recorded at the time as “tuberculosis”. Then in February 1826, Maria’s former paramour Thomas drowned in the Polstead pond while trying to take a shortcut across its frozen surface. In the space of eighteen months, William had gone from being the third of four sons of a busy farmer, to inheriting the tenancy as the sole surviving heir.
William had not ever intended to spend his life tied down to the agricultural life in the village where he had been born. As a third son, it would have been natural to assume that he would seek his own profession and fortune away from the family farm, which would more than likely eventually pass into the hands of his oldest brother. He attended the village school and then to a grammar school in the nearby market town of Hadleigh. He was an able student and expressed interest in becoming a writer or a teacher.
His father, however, had no interest in supporting his son in these ambitions. When William was 16, he was brought home to Polstead to begin work as a labourer on the family farm. He endured this until he was 22, spending his free time in drinking and gambling at the local inns, before his religious father lost patience with his son’s loose ways and sent him away in disgrace to London to enlist in the Merchant Navy. William was rejected by the Navy recruiting office, though, because of poor eyesight. In one of the famous illustrations of him at his trial that were later republished everywhere, William is wearing glasses and a smart suit, as if he is making a conscious effort to separate himself from his farming background. Anyway, after his rejection by the Navy, William spent the next several months in London, carousing with a group of new acquaintances who boasted varying degrees of criminality, before eventually returning to Suffolk and the farm in April 1824. A little over a year later, his male relatives began dying around him.
It was at some point during this harrowing time that he formed a connection with Maria Marten. The pair had taken to meeting in an old barn on the Corders’ lands, which was known locally as “the Red Barn”. The naming of this building is interesting — despite what we might assume, it had this monicker long before the tragic events of this case. I have found two differing but plausible explanations for the name: one holds that it was the use of red tiles as well as thatch on the barn’s roof that prompted the nickname, while others suggest that it was so orientated as to catch the sun’s last rays at sunset, which turned its walls briefly red. Either way, it was known locally as the Red Barn, and it was here that William and Maria conducted their affair.
Once again, Maria became pregnant, and once again, the baby did not survive. William, however, gave the impression that he still wanted to marry Maria despite the loss of their child. He told her, as well as her father and stepmother, that they must hurry because the local constable was planning to apprehend Maria for the supposed “crime” of having illegitimate children which the parish then had to support. This was completely untrue, not least because Maria’s only living child was being amply supported by his father Peter Mayhew’s quarterly allowance, but Maria does not seem to have objected to William’s urgency.
The plan was made, in her parents’ hearing, that she would sneak out disguised as a boy to the Red Barn, where she would then change into her own clothes and pick up her luggage that had been previously stashed there. The couple would then depart for Ipswich, the county town of Suffolk, and be married there by special licence. This was done so they could avoid having the banns read on three successive Sundays in their own church in Polstead and presumably then endure a month of village gossip about why Maria Marten, the unwed mother of one child and abandoned mistress of a deceased Corder man, was now marrying his brother the lucky heir.
The final glimpse of Maria Marten, dressed in breeches with a green handkerchief tied around her neck, was caught by her stepmother Anne, who was looking on from the cottage door as the couple left. They climbed over a gate together and began to make their way across the fields towards the Red Barn. Maria was never seen alive again.
After the break: what really happened in the Red Barn.
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Although Maria was never seen again in Polstead, her supposed husband William Corder was a surprisingly regular visitor after the couple’s apparent elopement. The following Monday, he was back at the Martens’ cottage, assuring them that their daughter was safely lodged in Ipswich. She could not come herself or write to them because she was so busy preparing for the wedding, he insisted, but all was well. Over the next few weeks, William was in the village a lot, helping his widowed mother with the farm. He always had a good explanation as to why Maria was not with him.
This continued through the spring and summer of 1827, with Maria’s stepmother Anne growing more and more suspicious. William eventually told her that Maria had hurt her hand and that was why he had only verbal messages to pass on rather than letters. Anne was not fooled, especially because William freely admitted that the pair still weren’t married and it was unclear how Maria was affording this independent life away from Polstead. In September, presumably after the harvest on the Corder farm was completed and the need for him at home had lessened somewhat, William finally left the village for a longer period.
In October, he wrote to Maria’s father from London that the couple had finally married. Maria was in Newport on the Isle of Wight — an island in the English Channel off the south coast of England — and he, William, had come up to town to attend to some business. They planned to settle on a farm near Newport and there was much to sort out. He claimed that Maria had already written to her family with the news of their wedding and was disappointed to have received no reply. Later, it was established that there was no evidence that such a letter had ever existed. The Marten family had certainly never received it.
The next thing that we know William did was extremely strange. In November 1827, he paid for an advertisement to appear in both The Morning Herald and the Sunday Times that began as follows:
“MATRIMONY- A private gentleman, aged twenty-four, entirely independent, whose disposition is not to be exceeded, has lately lost chief of his family by the hand of Providence, which has occasioned discord among the remainder, under circumstances the most disagreeable to relate. To any female of respectability, who would study for domestic comfort, and is willing to confide her future happiness to one in every way qualified to render the marriage state desirable, as the advertiser is in affluence.”
Yes, you did hear that right. William Corder, who claimed to be in the Isle of Wight with his wife Maria Marten, was in fact in London, advertising in the newspapers for… a wife. And astonishingly, it worked. He received around a hundred responses from women who were, shall we say, interested in the opportunity he was offering. This was peculiar behaviour even by the standards of 1827. The enterprising stationer that William used as a forwarding address later published a selection of these letters once the trial began, in a book appropriately entitled Advertisement for Wives. Charles Dickens was also fascinated by this action of William’s and published his own commentary on the letters in his magazine All The Year Round.
Strangest of all, William did, in fact, get a wife from his advertisement. He liked the letter from one Mary Moore, a former governess of independent means, arranged to meet her, and sealed the deal. In December 1827 — about three weeks after the advert had been published — William and Mary were wed at St. Andrew’s Church, Holborn. They wanted to start a school together, so they moved into a large house in Brentford and over the winter welcomed their first pupils. Mary’s mother even moved in with them, to be close to her daughter and to help out.
Meanwhile, back in Polstead, Anne Marten was struggling to sleep through the night. By early April, she had had the same macabre dream several times, she later described, and kept waking herself up with her own shouts. The subject of her dream? Maria, who had apparently visited her stepmother from beyond the grave to tell her that she had been murdered and buried in the Red Barn.
Or at least, so the legend runs. Anne Marten was not questioned about her dreams under oath and they weren’t admitted as evidence in the trial. But what we do know for sure is that in the spring of 1828, for some reason Thomas Marten went digging in the earthen floor in one particular corner of the Red Barn. There, he easily found the remains of what was later identified as his daughter’s body. The green handkerchief she had worn around her neck on that last evening when she departed with William for their supposed wedding was still there. Thomas also said in court that “I thought when they turned the body up it was like the mouth of my daughter, Maria Marten”. His wife later identified some of the other clothes and fabrics they found in the shallow grave. A more thorough search of the barn revealed bloodstains and the marks of a bullet on one of the walls. Maria, then, was not in the Isle of Wight making a new life with her new husband, William Corder. She had never left Polstead or the Red Barn at all.
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What came next was entirely predictable and in line with the policing conventions of the time. After learning from Maria’s parents of her relationship with William Corder and the circumstances in which she had last been seen, the local Suffolk coroner and constables decided that Corder was the obvious person to provide an explanation of her tragic death. Knowing that he had previously spent time in London, they looked for him there first. A Lambeth parish constable assisted with the search, and had no difficulty tracking Corder down to his new residence at the school in Brentford. He was charged, arrested and put in a coach to be taken back to Suffolk. An inquest was held at the Cock Inn in Polstead — which is still there, by the way — and the jury decided that William Corder was the wilful murderer of Maria Marten. He was taken to the jail in Bury St Edmunds to await a full criminal trial.
That trial took place in November of 1828. William was charged with ten separate counts of wrongdoing: as well as murder, the convention at the time was to separate out every action in an attempt to prevent the trial collapsing as a mistrial. Thus, he was accused of stabbing Maria in the ribs, in the face, in the neck, of shooting at her, of strangling her, of suffocating her with earth, of burying her improperly, and so on. It should be mentioned that the forensics in this case left a lot to be desired. The body had been in a shallow grave for around nine months by the time it was examined and local expertise was minimal. The stab wounds could well have been the marks from the tools used in the excavation, for instance.
Everyone I have mentioned in this story so far gave evidence in the trial, as well as Maria’s younger brother George, who claimed to have seen William after his sister’s apparent elopement walking away from the Red Barn with a pickaxe. William pled not guilty and was permitted to speak in his own defence. He did not deny having buried Maria in the Red Barn and lied to her parents about her whereabouts. He had not been present at her death, though, he insisted. He told the court that they had quarrelled on the walk from the Martens’ cottage to the barn.
She was angry that their marriage was being conducted in such a cloak-and-dagger way and accused him of being ashamed of her, and he was so disgusted and angry with her that he declared he had changed his mind about marrying her. He left her alone in the barn and stormed off, he said, but before he had gone more than a few yards, he heard a shot and ran back inside. He found her dead on the ground, having shot herself with a pair of pistols he recognised as his own — she must have taken them from his bedroom at the farm, he said.
Out of his mind with panic and, not unreasonably, assuming that he would be accused of shooting her himself, he buried the body in the barn and kept up the fiction that Maria had gone away to become his wife. He did not attempt to explain the other injuries that had been observed on the body, such as the stabbing or the strangling, nor did he account for the fact that he had advertised for a new wife while still pretending to the Martens that he was married to Maria.
The jury took only 35 minutes to find William Corder guilty of murdering Maria Marten. The judge then sentenced him to death by hanging, giving him 48 hours to “prepare himself” for his fate. According to one newspaper account, William “sobbed loudly and convulsively for some moments” after the trial concluded. Later, the night before his execution, he confessed that he had in fact shot Maria, but it had been an accident. She was changing out of her disguise in the barn and they were arguing, and the pistol he was waving about went off. Whether this was the truth, or just another version of the “accidental death” story he had told at the trial, we will never know.
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The Red Barn Murder case is a simple and very recognisable tale, woven into a centuries-old tapestry of male violence against women. It could be summed up as: boy meets girl, boy gets girl pregnant, boy promises to marry girl, boy kills girl so he doesn’t have to marry her. There will have been hundreds of other cases just like this in nineteenth century England. So why is it William Corder’s portrait that the Detection Club put up on their walls, rather than that of any other perpetrator?
The answer, I think, lies in the extraordinary way this case became a legend, or a folktale, even while its events were still unfolding. This simultaneous narrativisation began the moment that William Corder was arrested. He quickly became the lecherous squire, who had knowingly preyed upon the virginal village maiden — even though in reality William and Maria were neither of those things. And then the ease with which William was brought to justice and got, in the eyes of many, his just deserts from the hangman, made for a very satisfying ending. Facts aside, this myth of virtue sullied and gentry punished was better than any Gothic tale of sensation, because it carried with it the frisson of real life. These are themes that still resonate, even now. I even think the fact that the case came ready with a catchy, murder-adjacent name — The Red Barn Murder — helped ensure its immortality as a melodrama.
Wherever William was taken after his arrest huge crowds would gather, hoping for a glimpse of him, and hundreds of strangers turned up for Maria’s funeral after the inquest in April 1828. For the trial itself, people travelled great distances to attend and queued in the rain for a chance to sit in the court’s public gallery. Newspapers covered every minute development in the case for months, and in the absence of any good information simply invented it. There was even a fierce appetite from the public for souvenirs. Staffordshire pottery figures of William and Maria were very popular, as were ceramic models of the Red Barn itself. The Victoria & Albert Museum in London has in its collection a pair of marionettes representing the doomed couple, artefacts of the brisk business in replaying the case as a puppet show, or a play, or through song, or a travelling peepshow, or one of many other ways.
William himself even became a commodity in this bleak industry. After he was hanged, his skin was pickled for preservation. His scalp became a valuable artefact and a book bound using some of his skin is, I believe, still on display at the Moyse’s Hall Museum in Bury St Edmunds. His skeleton was also preserved, with the intention of studying his skull-shape and so on for evidence of his criminal tendencies, the pseudoscience of phrenology being at the peak of its popularity in the 1820s. In 2004, William’s remains were finally cremated and a memorial service held for him after five years of campaigning by his descendant Linda Nessworthy. “He was a human being and had a right to be laid to rest,” she said at the time.
The village of Polstead is still much as it was in 1828, nestled in a rural part of Suffolk. With one crucial difference: the Red Barn itself is nowhere to be found. It burned down in 1842 as the result of an arson attack, although of course legends abounded that it had spontaneously caught fire because of a curse from Maria’s ghost or from the concentration of pure evil within. It was already a ruin by the time it was ablaze, though, because every single moveable piece of it, from the rooftiles to the beams to the plank cladding had been ripped off by souvenir hunters. You could even buy a piece of the Red Barn that had been fashioned into a toothpick. Compared to the thrill of cleaning your teeth with a piece of wood that had sort of witnessed a murder, the Detection Club’s portrait of William Corder seems tame, even staid, by comparison. But both objects serve the same purpose: they are a tangible reminder of the extraordinary and enduring power of a good crime story.
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This episode of Shedunnit was written, narrated and produced by me, Caroline Crampton. If you’d like more from the podcast, including extra interviews, behind the scenes commentaries and the chance to read a book each month with a community of other mystery lovers, join the Shedunnit Book Club now at shedunnitbookclub.com.
You can find a full list of the books I mentioned in this episode at shedunnitshow.com/theredbarnmurder. We publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.
Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from CC McLoughlin.
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