Ghosts & Gallows (5 page)

Whatever the truth of such tales, Maria needed little encouragement to keep an appointment with Matthews in a hotel bedroom in Ipswich. It was the beginning of another illicit affair, this time with secret meetings in Suffolk and London, a second pregnancy and the birth of another bastard child, Thomas Henry, who was brought up in the Marten household with support from Peter Matthews, who drew a line under his involvement with Maria by agreeing a quarterly £5 allowance for her and her son. By the time that William Corder returned to Polstead, Maria, whose promiscuity seemingly knew no bounds despite the disapproval of her family and the continued gossip of village locals, was regularly away from the village pursuing further affairs in Bury St Edmunds, Ipswich and sometimes as far as London. Ultimately she was to find another eligible and willing suitor – her last – much closer to home.

There were no witnesses to the first meeting between Maria Marten and William Corder early in 1826 but by the summer of the same year the two clearly were lovers. Much of their early affair was carried out in secret as for their clandestine meetings they chose the one place in the whole of Polstead that villagers were unlikely to visit, or if they did happen to pass by, were certain not to linger near for long. The Red Barn was an old agricultural building with a sinister and possibly haunted reputation located on the Corder estate around half a mile south-east of the village centre and within easy reach of both Street Farm and Maria Marten’s cottage. An old Suffolk superstition well known in the area at the time told of the uncanny ability of the evening sunlight to act as a warning against evil by picking out buildings, woods and similar places that held bad luck in a characteristic red glow. One such site noted by the village locals to be afflicted by this particular portent was the Corder barn and as such it was normally given a wide berth by travellers passing along the road between Polstead and Withermarsh Green, where it could be seen silhouetted and eerily illuminated on the hillside. It would seem that the building’s ominous title derives mainly from this association, although the roof, despite being mainly of thatch, was also partly covered with red clay tiles.

As their relationship continued, the couple became bolder and less inhibited about being seen together in public, with the result that Corder became a regular visitor to the Marten cottage. With his position in the family business much improved due to the demise of his father, William was in Maria’s eyes an eligible catch, not quite as high on the social scale as some of her previous conquests, but worth pursuing due to the future certainty of an inheritance from the Corder farm. For William, the young village girl, despite her penchant for promiscuity, was a far cry from the scheming and tempestuous Hannah Fandango, with the result that for much of their early time together there was genuine affection between the couple. This, however, was to change as fate soon began dealing both Maria and William heavy and ultimately deadly blows.

The first of these was in the late autumn of 1826 when, with alarming predictability, Maria announced to her lover that she was carrying his child. Corder’s initial reaction was to conceal the pregnancy from both his own family and Maria’s, but as the weeks passed this proved impossible and he was forced to confess to Thomas and Ann Marten that he was the father of Maria’s unborn child. In an attempt to mitigate matters, William insisted he would marry Maria at the most opportune moment, more specifically when his financial situation improved, and made the suggestion, to which all agreed, that to hide the birth from the rest of the Corder family and the village as a whole it would be prudent for Maria to go into lodgings until after the baby was born. However, as Corder was making arrangements for this to take place he suffered a personal tragedy. On the morning of 23 February 1827, his younger brother Thomas was killed within sight of Street Farm when hurrying to catch up with a friend, he had attempted to take a shortcut across a frozen pond and died after falling through the ice. His death quickly left William struggling to run the family business almost single-handed.

On 19 March, Maria left for the market town of Sudbury twelve miles away and it was there, in a small house in Plough Lane, that she gave birth to a baby boy in the second week of April; later the same month she and her son returned to Polstead where, both in poor health, they were looked after discretely by Ann Marten. Whatever happiness the couple and the Marten family may have shared in this new parenthood, however, was to be short-lived as the infant grew progressively weaker and died a fortnight after Maria’s return; Corder himself may not even have seen the child alive.

Whether he felt genuine grief at the loss or simply considered his son’s death to be a partial alleviation of his gradually mounting financial commitments is unclear. In what was no doubt a charged and emotional atmosphere following the bereavement, Corder persuaded all concerned that it would be prudent to conceal the birth and death from becoming common knowledge around the Polstead area and as such the infant’s body should be buried secretly and outside of the district. To these ends Maria agreed to accompany the farmer and, under increasing pressure from Thomas and Ann Marten to honour his promises to their daughter, Corder placed the corpse in a wooden box and the two left to bury the child in Sudbury.

What passed between the couple during the course of this unpleasant task is unknown but the grim facts are that the tiny body never reached the town and in fact was buried in an unmarked grave, probably in a field somewhere on the Corder farm on the outskirts of Polstead. Why they chose to do this has never come to light but most likely the decision was Corder’s and not Maria’s. At this point in time no one would have realised that this tragic young woman had in fact less than a month to live.

Maria Marten was last seen alive on 18 May 1837. Despite a growing tension between the couple, understandable due to the macabre circumstances of the clandestine burial of their child – something that Maria clearly felt unhappy with – and which was undoubtedly not helped by an earlier incident of thievery on Corder’s part when he intercepted and spent one of Peter Matthew’s maintenance payments for Thomas Henry, Corder began making arrangements for marriage. On the excuse that, according to local rumour, John Balham, the district police constable, was about to serve Maria with an arrest warrant for bastardy (which amounted practically to a charge of prostitution), Corder made the suggestion that they travel to Ipswich to marry by special licence and a date was fixed for Monday 14 May. However, business at Stoke Fair delayed the farmer’s return to Polstead and this, coupled with the sudden illness of James Corder at Street Farm, had the result that it was not until the following Friday that William Corder finally arrived at the Marten cottage.

Relief that the man was at last acknowledging his commitments was somewhat tempered by his immediate plans for the trip. Corder was insistent on secrecy and that they should not be seen leaving together. To achieve this the couple would take to the Red Barn a bag containing Maria’s clothes; they were to go there separately and, to ensure the success of the plan, Maria was to travel dressed in male clothing. Corder later left with a brown holland bag containing an assortment of clothes: a black silk gown, stockings, a leghorn hat and other items, returning some time afterwards with a suitable disguise for Maria comprising clothes apparently belonging to his brother James. Maria changed into these: a brown coat, striped waistcoat and blue trousers; she wore a man’s hat over her hair combs and concealed her earrings with a large silk handkerchief. Around half-past twelve, following a tearful farewell with her parents, the couple left the cottage by separate doors and made their way across the fields towards the distant Red Barn, out of village obscurity and into the annals of both criminal and supernatural history.

The following day Corder returned to Polstead alone. Problems with the marriage licence, so he informed Thomas and Ann Marten, had delayed the union and until these were sorted out Maria had decided to stay on in Ipswich. Over the next few weeks Corder continued to work on at Street Farm, but without Maria. When questioned by the Martens, Corder insisted she was well and busy in Ipswich preparing for their imminent marriage, something that the couple seemed to accept; their daughter had not written personally due to rheumatism in her hand.

During the summer, Corder was spared the increasing concerns and questions of the Marten family by events at Street Farm, which kept him away from the Marten cottage for long periods – both James and John Corder died within days of each other of a combination of tuberculosis and typhus, leaving practically the entire running of the business to William alone. Corder later informed the Martens that, fearing for his health, he had decided to take a holiday and was going to join Maria at a resort on the Isle of Wight, where she had travelled after enjoying a holiday by herself at Yarmouth. Corder borrowed £400 from his mother and left for London, ostensibly en route for the south coast. On 18 October, five months practically to the day that Maria had last been seen in Polstead walking over the fields towards her rendezvous in the Red Barn, Corder wrote to the Martens from the George Inn in Leadenhall Street, informing them that they were now married and that he was travelling to Newport where, after completing the sale of Street Farm, they would be setting up a new business together. It was the last the old mole-catcher and his wife were to hear of William Corder for several months.

We have already noted the belief in local circles for what today would be called psychic abilities on the part of Ann Marten, and, during the winter of 1827, this singular talent began to come to the fore, specifically in connection with the whereabouts of her own stepdaughter. The woman’s sleep became restless and she was often heard to cry out in the night, but whatever troubled her either did not make itself fully clear or she was unwilling to reveal its cause. However, around the beginning of April the following year, on three successive nights, Ann Marten dreamt a vivid and terrible dream that on waking retained such clarity she felt sure it was in fact some supernormal vision. In the lonely Red Barn across the fields she saw Thomas Marten’s daughter dead, shot to death and buried beneath the earth floor; such was the intensity of the dream that she could describe, even though she had not set foot inside the building, the layout and exact spot where Maria lay cold and alone in a shallow grave.

Thomas Marten, who had been the most inclined to accept William Corder’s various explanations for the absence and continued silence of his daughter, was reminded that Maria’s stepbrother had claimed to have seen William striding towards the barn carrying a shovel and a pickaxe on the day they departed for Ipswich, and despite the initial shock at his wife’s outburst, was subsequently persuaded to make enquiries. On the pretext that his daughter may have left some clothes belonging to her at the barn, Thomas obtained permission from William Pryke, the Corder’s bailiff who had been retained on the estate by Mary Cook, to make an inspection and on the morning of 19 April they went together to look around the building.

The Red Barn was laid out in four principle bays with a central area used for threshing; one bay was allocated as a calf shed while the others were filled with straw, the layout corresponding exactly with the description given by Ann Marten in her dreams. In the bay where she claimed to have seen Maria killed, Marten and Pryke soon found some large stones under which the earth looked as if it had been disturbed at some time in the past. Pushing the handle of a rake and a mole spike down into the earth, Marten ‘turned up something that was black, and pieces of something like flesh stuck to the spike’. Locking the barn, Marten and Pryke went to fetch another villager, William Bowtell, and on returning the three men quickly cleared away a large amount of earth, beneath which they found a heavily decomposed human body fixed into the ground with a metal spike. The barn was locked again and the following day Thomas Marten and William Pryke returned accompanied by the local coroner, John Wayman, and Dr Lawton, the village surgeon. The body was fetched up from the grave and laid out on a door; an examination of the clothes subsequently identified the corpse as that of Maria Marten.

William Corder, immediately the prime suspect, was discovered within a few days in London where John Balham, the Polstead policeman, was directed to make enquiries. Assisted by James Lea, a detective from Balham police station, the two men followed a trail which lead eventually to a house in Ealing Lane, Brentford; Corder, about to sit down to breakfast, was arrested by Lea as he stood in his dressing gown timing a boiled egg on the stove with a fob watch. Charged with murder, Corder was taken back to Suffolk where, after an overnight stop at the George Inn at Colchester, he was committed for trial at Bury St Edmunds. On 20 April, Maria Marten was laid to rest in the churchyard of St Mary’s at Polstead, not far from the grave of the child she had born to William Corder’s brother, Thomas. The funeral was attended by hundreds of sightseers and was a growing indication of the public interest which the murder in the Red Barn, with its supernatural revelation, was soon to generate.

William Corder’s trial opened at the Shire Hall, Bury St Edmunds on 7 August 1828. The courtroom was ‘crowded to suffocation’ as people from all over East Anglia filled the public gallery, eager to be present at the proceedings. At the time of his arrest, Corder had been living a remarkable double life as the honorary headmaster of an Ealing girls’ school. A few weeks after he had written from Leadenhall Street to the Corders telling them about his alleged marriage to Maria, the Suffolk farmer had placed a notice in both the
Morning Herald
and the
Sunday Times
advertising for a wife: ‘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’, Corder advertised himself as a ‘private gentleman, aged twenty-four, entirely independent’. He received a hundred replies (some of which were later published as a sensational book of love letters) and from these selected Mary Moore, a young schoolteacher; they were married by special licence at St Andrew’s Church, Holborn in December 1827, Corder finally finding at last the teaching vocation denied him several years before by the forceful John Corder – he even bought a pair of spectacles to make himself appear more studious.