Murder In The Red Barn.

It is a dark and dirty Sunday afternoon, so I thought I would pass the time writing something because I have neglected my Blog page for the last few days. I went to the pub last evening to celebrate my team Peterborough United beating Queens Park Rangers 2-0 in the 4^th round of the FA Cup. The great news is that they have been drawn at home to Manchester City in the 5^th round. Man City are one of the best teams in Europe, if not the world, so it will be an awesome day for Posh. Anyway, because of being in the pub I fell asleep in my chair when I got home and did not awake until the witching hour.

Looking for something worth watching on the telly I stumbled across a film from 1953 called Turn The Key Softly. It was on the Talking Pictures channel. It wasn’t that great, but I watched it anyway. A young Joan Collins was in it. Whenever I watch old films like this, I always look on Wikipedia to learn about the cast. There was an actress in it called Kathleen Harrison and on Wiki it said that her first role was in 1931 in a film called Hobson’s Choice (Not to be confused with a later film of the same story starring Charles Laughton and John Mills) It said that the 1931 film is listed on the BFI (British Film Institute) list of the 75 Most Wanted missing films because no copy of it is now known to exist. This aroused my curiosity even further, so I looked up this list of missing films.

The first film on the list was from 1913 called Maria Marten, or the Mystery of the Red Barn. A silent film which used the actual location of the famous Red Barn murder of 1827. The plot thickened for me because I had never heard of the Red Barn murder, so I investigated further. That is the great thing about the internet because you can find out anything. Little did I realise the macabre tale that would unfold. The Red Barn murder took place in Polstead, Suffolk, England. A young woman called Maria Marten arranged to meet her lover William Corder at the Red Barn.. He had promised her that they would elope together, but she was never seen alive again. Corder wrote to her family assuring them that she was alive and well and they were living on the Isle Of Wight, but in reality he had started a new life in London and had married a lady called Mary Moore who he had met through a Lonely Hearts advert in The Times newspaper. It was then that things got eerie. Mary Marten’s stepmother Ann claimed to be having strange dreams in which Mary told her that she had been murdered and buried in the Red Barn.

Maria Marten Memorial.

On April 19^th, 1828, the stepmother persuaded her husband to start digging in the Red Barn and a corpse was soon discovered buried inside a sack. An inquest was held at the local pub The Cock (which still exists today) and Mary was identified by her sister. Corder was soon tracked down in London and brought back to Suffolk to face trial in the town of Bury St Edmunds. It took the jury only 35 minutes to find him guilty. The judge sentenced him to death with the words, “You be taken back to the prison from whence you came, and that you be taken from thence, on Monday next, to a place of Execution, and that you there be hanged by the Neck until you are Dead; and that your body shall afterwards be dissected and anatomized; and may the Lord God Almighty, of his infinite goodness, have mercy on your soul!”. 

Corder went to the gallows on August 28^th, 1828, in front of a crowd of 7,000 who had come to see the grisly spectacle. The hangman John Foxton cut him down after an hour and claimed Corder’s trousers and socks, as was his right. The next day his body was dissected in front of an audience of students from Cambridge University who carried out various electrical experiments on the body. His skin was tanned and used in the binding of a manuscript about the murder.

After the execution, rumours began to grow about the truth of what happened in the Red Barn on that fateful night. Many people didn’t believe the story about the stepmother’s ‘dreams’. She was only a year older than Mary. Corder was well known locally as a ‘ladies man’. Was the stepmother having an affair with Corder? And did she assist in the murder? Did she discover the body as an act of revenge against Corder because he married another woman? We shall never know what really happened at the Red Barn 195 years ago. There was a similar event in the USA in 1897 known as the mystery of The Greenbrier Ghost in which a man was convicted of the murder of his wife on the evidence of her ghost. I can’t be bothered telling you that story now though. I have written enough for one afternoon. If you google The Greenbrier Ghost, I am sure you will find it.