A Very British Murder (34 page)

Smartly dressed ‘Blue Devils’ or ‘Raw Lobsters’, as the constables of Robert Peel’s new Metropolitan Police Force were nicknamed. They wore blue on purpose to avoid confusion with the red coats of the army.

Edwardian police officers demonstrating disguises for undercover work. Sherlock Holmes borrows his own skill in changing his appearance from the real-life Eugène Vidocq, the man behind the first official detective squad in France.

Dragging the pond for the body of William Weare, 1823. The pond became one of the stops on the celebrated ‘Elstree Murder Tour’. The yellow gig, the vehicle in which the murderer travelled, is an emblem of this particular murder.

This mug commemorates the murderer John Thurtell who killed William Weare and threw his body into the Elstree pond. Knick-knacks like this were often souvenirs from an enjoyable day out at a public hanging. Thurtell’s own was attended by 40,000 people.

Madame Tussaud’s gallery of waxworks in Baker Street still contains a figure of its founder, the original Madame, who brought her travelling exhibition from Paris to London in 1802.

Her exhibition specialized in celebrities of the French Revolution, royalty, and horror. She’d modelled the heads of its victims as they came off the guillotine, including those of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI.

Broadsides about murderers usually featured a picture of the crime itself. Today they may look almost laughably naïve – note the lady’s severed legs in the coal scuttle – but contemporaries enjoyed their hard-hitting, horrific nature.

A much more harrowing image of criminals at the gallows, by Théodore Géricault, 1820. It’s an unusual image because artists at a public hanging often concentrated on the spectacle of the vast crowd rather than those about to die.

The inscription in this book reveals that Corder’s skin was removed and tanned by one of the surgeons at the Suffolk Hospital after his execution in Bury St Edmunds in 1828.

This looks like an ordinary book about the life of William Corder, who committed ‘The Murder in the Red Barn’, but its extraordinary binding is made out of the skin of Corder himself.

The most powerful of the many souvenirs from ‘The Murder in the Red Barn’: the scalp of its perpetrator,William Corder, with his little shrivelled ear at the bottom. The skin also retains a fuzz of short, ginger hair. It’s the star exhibit at Moyse’s Hall Museum, Bury St Edmunds.

Ceramic models of crime scenes, like ‘The Red Barn’ shown here, and figurines of the murderer and his victim, were displayed on many nineteenth-century mantelpieces.