Read Ghosts & Gallows Online

Authors: Paul Adams

Ghosts & Gallows (4 page)

BOOK: Ghosts & Gallows
13.77Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
CHAPTER 2
THE RED BARN MURDER
WILLIAM CORDER AND MARIA MARTEN, 1828

Far more well known than the Hill of Christie phantom is the case of William Corder, who entered the annals of English criminal history nearly eighty years after the death of Arthur Davies for his perpetration of the notorious Red Barn murder, described as ‘one of the best known and most curious murders in history’. This is the first instance in this book of a prophetic dream being linked with the apprehension and subsequent execution of a convicted murderer, and the immortalisation of Corder’s crime through the medium of melodrama in Victorian Britain was assisted in no short measure by this specific association with the supernatural – a subject which by its own unique nature has always leant itself to exploitation – while the murder site, a long-vanished farm building in the isolated hamlet of Polstead, Suffolk, some fifteen miles west of Ipswich, has become as unique a location in the annals of both ghostlore and criminology as Borley Rectory or Rillington Place
1
.

In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, Polstead, the ‘place of pools’, consisted in the main of around twenty or so cottages situated on the northern slopes of the River Box. The parish as a whole contained only 900 persons and the two ponds which gave the village its name were located between the village’s chief landmark, the twelfth-century church of St Mary, and the Cock Inn adjacent to the green at the top of the hill. Only one of these ponds survives today but a number of the buildings and locations which feature prominently in the Corder case are extant. The manor of Polstead was held at this time by Mrs Mary Ann Cook who lived at Polstead Hall, a sixteenth-century house sited next to the church in what, up to the 1940s, was still a deer park. Mary Cook was a major local landowner and in the 1820s had two tenant farmers, William Chaplin and John Corder.

Corder was a forthright, God-fearing man who worked a substantial farm of 300 acres in Polstead and the surrounding area. He was the father of eight children, of whom two died at a young age, leaving four sons – the eldest John, then Thomas, William and James – and two daughters, the eldest of whom, Mary, was married to a miller named Boreham and lived not far from the village. The Corder family resided in a substantial timbered farmhouse known as Street Farm, which still stands today relatively unaltered from those times and not far from St Mary’s Church. John Corder senior was a hardworking and at times difficult man and whatever affection he had for his children was directed mainly at Thomas, who was widely expected to inherit the running of the farm in the event of his father’s death.

William Corder, who was born in 1803 and whose short life was to end immortalised in tragedy, had a strained relationship with his father, who, for reasons that are now unclear, bore him much resentment and disfavour. Writing about the case in the mid-1960s, Donald McCormick has described how William was belittled by the elder man, who ‘made a point of holding him up to ridicule on every possible occasion, insisting that if any of his children committed any misdeed, however slight, William was to be punished as an example to them all’. The young man countered this with a simmering resentment of his own and found solace in the affections of his mother, which grew in proportion to the disdain that John Corder viewed his second youngest son. William grew to be a short, unprepossessing man who walked with a characteristic stooping gait. Despite being unpopular at the village school, where he was known as ‘Foxey’ Corder, he was intelligent and had a lively imagination, which found expression in creative writing.

Following local schooling, William was sent at the age of thirteen as a boarder to a private academy at Hadleigh, near the Essex coast. After three years he left with a favourable report, but any personal hope of directing his talents into a career in journalism or teaching was swiftly crushed by John Corder, who forbade any such plan and instead set his son to work with his brothers on the family farm. Instead of enjoying an equal status with his siblings, William was unfairly employed as little more than a farmhand, ‘with the meagrest perquisites of the small crofter’, and it seems likely that an unhappy realisation of this fact, coupled with the continued indifference and hostility of his father, created conditions which were to eventually lead to murder. William is known to have committed several acts of theft and other frauds against John Corder and others, but although it is true that he could be devious and cunning by turn, the reality of these times would appear to be far removed from the ‘wicked squire’ persona with which he would be posthumously cast in stage plays and ‘penny dreadfuls’.

Corder’s relationship with his father eventually deteriorated to the point that around the beginning of 1825 he was dismissed from Street Farm and sent to London to enlist in the Merchant Navy. Several reasons have been given for this, ranging from heavy drinking and womanising to continued acts of thievery, but Corder was lucky enough to be prevented from going to sea due to poor eyesight and, unwilling to return to the drudgery of village life in Polstead, stayed on in the capital, where he spent what little money John Corder had given him to assist his seafaring in a heady explosion of drinking, gambling and whoring. It was during this period that William fell in with three unsavoury people who were to significantly shape future events – prostitute Hannah Fandango, Samuel ‘Beauty’ Smith, a habitual thief, and Thomas Wainewright, a painter turned murderer who in later years has been compared to the Frenchman Pierre Lacenaire, another man of letters who subsequently became a killer.

Hannah Fandango, of Creole descent on her mother’s side and the daughter of an English sea captain, was a former actress with expensive tastes who had left a boarding school at the age of fourteen in order to seek fame and fortune on the London stage. By turn she had descended from acting to being the mistress of a number of wealthy playboys as well as working as a smuggler and common prostitute, and it was as one of her many clients that William Corder first encountered this alluring but totally unscrupulous woman, who quickly infatuated the young country boy with her looks and talents. As a receiver of contraband goods, Hannah maintained a small cottage about a mile from Polstead, a remarkable coincidence that helped convince Corder he had in fact found the perfect match, with the result that John Corder’s meagre allowance was quickly spent and the farmer soon found himself looking around for another source of income in order to secure her affections.

At this time Corder still maintained hopes of beginning a career in journalism and it was to this end that the devious Hannah made introductions to her ‘manager’ Samuel Smith, in reality a card-sharp and pimp who, as part of the same smuggling ring, was an occasional visitor to Polstead where William Corder may have already heard of him by reputation – he is known to have been involved in the theft of livestock in the district and had served prison sentences for these and other offences.

It was through the efforts of both ‘Beauty’ Smith and Hannah Fandango that Corder also came to the attention of Thomas Wainewright, an enigmatic figure later immortalised by no less than Charles Dickens as ‘Slinkton’ in his 1859 short story
Hunted Down
. By the time he was introduced to Corder, who he later described as ‘a stooping youth with Napoleonic gestures and a sense of drama’, the thirty-one-year-old artist and sometime critic had already made attempts to support his extravagant lifestyle by defrauding the trustees who controlled his stocks and shares, and would later gravitate to murder in order to pay off his creditors and continue his affluent lifestyle. Corder obviously hoped that Wainewright would assist in developing his literary career but in fact the elder man, who published articles and criticisms intermittently under the pseudonym of Janus Weathercock, was of little help in this respect, despite being on friendly terms with several notable writers and artists such as the poet Sir Wentworth Dilke, essayist Charles Lamb and mystic William Blake, and appears to have mentored William more successfully in the art of forgery than journalism. The association was a brief one and, following on from their time together in London, both would become notorious in the history of criminology for their later activities, Corder for his murderous connections with the sinister Red Barn and Wainewright as a compulsive poisoner who ‘became fascinated with murder for its own sake’.

A short while after he met William Corder, Thomas Wainewright was suspected of killing his grandfather with strychnine and, in 1830, his mother-in-law also died suddenly. The proceeds of both these crimes went mostly in paying off his mounting debts but by the end of the same year Wainewright had resorted to poisoning his sister-in-law, Helen Abercromby, carefully insuring her life for £18,000 beforehand. He later claimed he had carried out the killing because he was offended by the thickness of the woman’s ankles. When the insurance company refused to pay, Wainewright fled to France, where he committed another insurance murder before returning secretly to England in 1837, but was recognised by a Bow Street Runner in a hotel in Covent Garden and arrested. Put on trial for forgery rather than murder, Wainewright was sentenced to transportation to Tasmania, where he died at the age of fifty-eight in 1852, ‘a vain and garrulous man who never ceased to boast of his past acquaintances with the great’, which included the young farmer from Polstead.

Corder’s tempestuous relationship with Hannah Fandango ended in April 1825 and, leaving London, he returned to Suffolk, where John Corder allowed his son to continue in the family business. However, William was haunted by his experiences in the low-life dens of the capital and its persistent spectres were later to follow him out into the peaceful English countryside. Seemingly free from the negative influences of the likes of ‘Beauty’ Smith and Thomas Wainewright, as well as the temptations of Hannah, Corder appeared to live a reformed and respectable life at Street Farm for some time. However, the seeds of destruction were sown when, in the winter of 1825, John Corder died suddenly and almost immediately afterwards two of the Corder boys, James and John, were struck down with tuberculosis, which left them virtual invalids for the rest of their lives. Assisted by William, Thomas Corder took up the role which had been his practically from birth, but with the dominating influence of his father gone, conditions became right for William Corder to see the possibility of rekindling the pleasures of former days. However, in the spring of the following year, Corder was to have the encounter that, in just over two years, would not only send him to the gallows, but would make the tiny hamlet of Polstead forever synonymous around the world with both murder and supernatural prophecy.

Maria Marten was the twenty-five-year-old daughter of Thomas Marten, the Polstead mole-catcher who supplemented a specialist but poorly paid profession by selling vegetables and poultry from his small garden, the cottage of which, like the Corder farmhouse, survives to this day. Despite their having never met before, William Corder knew her well by reputation as, at the age of nineteen, she had born his elder brother Thomas an illegitimate child which had died in infancy and was buried in St Mary’s churchyard. Such was the clear favouritism shown by the God-fearing John Corder that the affair, well known through Polstead village gossip, had been both quietly ignored by the family and wrestled with some ease from the old man’s conscience, with the result that unlike William, Thomas Corder had not been banished to a life on the high seas for his misdemeanour. Far from being the village saint that later Victorian writers and commentators made out, Maria was in fact a forceful, highly sexed and promiscuous young woman, the course of whose short life of illicit affairs and drama was to ultimately begin and end with tragic associations with the Corder family.

The eldest of four daughters, Maria had been born to Thomas and Grace Marten on 24 July 1801. At the age of seven, and to assist with the family finances, she was put into service in the household of a clergyman at Layham, a nearby village, where she was taught to read and write, and for a number of years enjoyed a good relationship with her employer who unwittingly created the conditions for the girl’s later love of the high life by allowing her to wear his daughter’s cast-off dresses. By the time she was fifteen Maria’s true colours began to show. Dismissed from Layham ‘for levity of behaviour and an inordinate love of fine clothes’, she returned to Polstead where circumstances dictated – much to her dissatisfaction – the necessity of taking on much of the responsibility for running the Marten household; by this time Grace Marten had died and there were three other children besides her father to look after, a situation that continued for some time until Thomas Marten eventually remarried. Maria’s stepmother Ann, a local woman, was young, the equal of Maria in terms of good looks, and the two women found it difficult to get along. Ann Marten was known locally for her ‘second sight’ whose accuracy was to prove distressingly accurate as the years wore on.

As the Polstead ‘village belle’, Maria had many male admirers but her years living amongst the finery of the rector’s household at Layham had created the desire and a firm belief that she was destined for something better than simple country life. Then came the affair with Thomas Corder, which was followed soon after by another liaison, this time with a relative of the owner of Polstead Hall, Mary Cook. This was Peter Matthews, a wealthy visitor from London with his own estate in Berkshire, who Maria encountered for the first time as he rode through Polstead during the Cherry Fair, an annual fête, and whose introduction to the seductive village beauty was said to have been foretold by a gypsy fortune teller passing by the Marten cottage some years before. Such was the power of the Red Barn murder in Victorian England that, grafted onto the story in later years, was an alleged village tradition that this gypsy was none other than the formidable Hannah Fandango in disguise, filling the impressionable young girl’s head with tales of future riches and high living that would be brought to her by a handsome stranger riding a grey horse.

BOOK: Ghosts & Gallows
13.77Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Firefly Effect by Gail, Allie
Abigale Hall by Forry, Lauren A
The Mystery of the Blue Ring by Patricia Reilly Giff
The Ninth Floor by Liz Schulte
Free Woman by Marion Meade
Long Lankin: Stories by John Banville
Bewitched & Betrayed by Shearin, Lisa
The Deep Dark Well by Doug Dandridge