Ghosts & Gallows (6 page)

The trial lasted two days, much of which was taken up by the testimony of Ann Marten, who recounted in great detail the last hours of her stepdaughter’s life and her clandestine arrangement to meet William Corder at the now notorious Red Barn. Throughout her testimony she made no mention of her prophetic dreams, but they were well known outside of the courtroom. Towards the end of the second day Corder took the stand and in an impassioned speech protested his innocence to the last, claiming that Maria had in fact turned a pistol on herself following a quarrel and in a panic he had buried the body and fled to London. The jury, however, were unconvinced and took just thirty-five minutes to find him guilty of murder.

Nearer to our own times there have been various suggestions as to what actually took place in the Red Barn on that fateful May day, even to the point of questioning whether Corder was in fact guilty of the crime; this despite the condemned man’s own confession which was published over the weekend in the brief forty-eight hours between him leaving the crowded courtroom and stepping onto the scaffold at Bury Gaol. In the late 1940s, authors Dorothy Gibbs and Herbert Maltby suggested that Ann Marten was the mastermind behind the killing and, due to her own desire to marry William, persuaded the farmer to kill her stepdaughter so they could be together after Thomas Marten had died. When Corder reneged on their agreement and subsequently left for a new life in London, Ann revealed the crime out of spite by pretending to dream about Maria’s unquiet ghost and gladly went into the witness box to see him hanged. In 1967, crime writer Donald McCormick issued
The Red Barn Mystery
in which he suggests that after the initial shot and with Maria lying wounded, Corder was assisted in the murder by ‘Beauty’ Smith, while Suffolk historian Leslie Sheen has put forward the case for Corder’s complete innocence with Maria’s death being the result of a mock suicide which went wrong and Corder the victim of a miscarriage of justice. However, in the 1990s, writer Peter Haining, who made an extensive investigation into the case, became convinced of Corder’s guilt but felt Smith’s presence in the later part of the story (he was seen drinking with Corder at Polstead after the farmer’s return from London) provided an unsatisfactory conclusion to what actually went on inside the Red Barn on that fateful summer day.

William Corder was hanged outside the walls of Bury Gaol in front of a crowd of several thousand people (estimated but not confirmed to be as high as 20,000) on Monday, 11 August 1828. In the days before the ‘long drop’ system of Victorian execution pioneered by Horncastle cobbler William Marwood and the later lightning-fast twentieth-century hangings of Albert Pierrepoint, Corder’s death was slow and agonising: after Corder had fallen through the drop, executioner John Foxton (under the usual pseudonym of Jack Ketch) was forced to grip the struggling felon by the knees and pull on his legs for two minutes to speed up what was in effect death by strangulation. The body was left hanging on the scaffold for an hour before being cut down and taken by cart to the Shire Hall, where it was briefly put on exhibition and 5,000 people filed past to see it.

Later, to complete a series of gruesome incidents, Corder’s body was dissected, his scalp and ears pickled and plaster death masks were made – these sinister relics survive to this day and are on display at Moyse’s Hall Museum in Bury St Edmunds, along with a copy of Victorian writer James Curtis’ bestselling book on the case, bound in Corder’s own tanned skin. Such bizarre trophies were an indication of the phenomenon that the murder in the Red Barn (itself stripped by souvenir hunters and later demolished) would become in Victorian Britain and beyond, with stage plays, ‘penny dreadful’ novels, ballads and, much later, films and television dramas. Writing about the case in the early 1960s, Colin Wilson was able to state that romanticised versions of the story were still appearing ‘in the more lurid of women’s journals’ of the day.

Ghostly associations with the story of the Red Barn did not end with the dreams of Ann Marten. William Corder’s ghost, a shadowy figure dressed in a Victorian frock coat and stove-pipe hat, was allegedly seen walking through Polstead one summer evening in the mid-1920s and there is a tradition that his unquiet spirit returns to the district at intervals, particularly when 18 May, the anniversary of Maria Marten’s death, falls on a Friday.

However, it was the Englishman Robert Thurston Hopkins (1884-1958), a ghost hunter who had a penchant for investigating a number of screaming skulls and similar hauntings, who provided some of the most detailed evidence regarding paranormal associations with the Red Barn case, specifically in connection with the death’s head of William Corder himself.

Thurston Hopkins was well qualified where the Red Barn mystery was concerned: when Bury Gaol was sold off by the Prisons Commission, his father bought the property and Robert lived at Gyves House as a boy. Thurston Hopkins senior, a man who ‘spoke of ghosts as though their existence had always been accepted by all sensible people’, was a close friend of Dr Kilner, whose family, many years before, had been bequeathed the Corder relics, including the murderer’s articulated skeleton and pickled scalp. This skeleton was used for many years as a teaching aid at the old West Suffolk General Hospital
2
and around the 1870s, Dr Kilner made a display of William Corder’s skull by swapping it with a replacement and repairing the original with parts of a third anatomical skull. From this moment on, Kilner seemed to be haunted by some terrible presence and a number of curious and unnerving incidents, reminiscent of events in Robert Bloch’s screenplay and later novel
The Skull of the Marquis de Sade
(1976), were related by him to Thurston Hopkins’ father. These included being followed by a shadowy figure dressed in an old-fashioned greatcoat and beaver hat, footsteps walking the house, psychic attacks and the materialisation of a disembodied hand on the handle of a bedroom door.

Tiring of these encounters with the unseen, Dr Kilner ultimately presented the death’s head to Robert Thurston Hopkins’ father, who claimed to have experienced the sinister power of the skull himself: the day he took possession of the relic he slipped and badly twisted his ankle, while the next day his horse was killed when it fell over the edge of a quarry. According to the account that Thurston Hopkins senior often related to his family – by way of a supper-time Christmas ghost story it must be said – he later suffered ‘illness, sorrow and financial disaster such as he had never dreamed possible’ and finally broke the curse of the haunted skull by bribing a gravedigger to give it a Christian burial (enclosed in a japanned cashbox) in an unnamed churchyard near Bury St Edmunds. An account of the haunting has been given by Peter Underwood in his 1985 book
The Ghost Hunters
.

The Red Barn murder is the first in this volume where strange paranormal forces seemingly sent a murderer to the gallows. It is not, however, the last …

NOTES

1
. Borley Rectory, a rambling Victorian building in rural Essex, built in 1863 and badly damaged by fire in 1939; demolished in 1944 and long known as the ‘most haunted house in England’. It was the subject of a lengthy investigation by Harry Price (see Chapter 7), a well-known and controversial researcher during the interwar years who wrote two full-length books on the case. For a modern reassessment by the present author in collaboration with Eddie Brazil and Peter Underwood see
The Borley Rectory Companion
(2009). Number 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill, London, was one of the most notorious murder houses in post-war England, known for the crimes of necrophile serial killer John Reginald Christie and the controversial execution of Timothy John Evans, hanged in March 1950 for the murder of his daughter. Following publication of the book
Ten Rillington Place
(1961) by journalist and broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy and subsequent campaigning, Evans was granted a posthumous free pardon in October 1966, his crime attributed to Christie. For an alternative viewpoint see John Eddowes’
The Two Killers of Rillington Place
(1994).

2
. In August 2004, at the request of a descendant, Linda Nessworthy, Corder’s skeleton was released by the Royal College of Surgeons and subsequently cremated at the South London Crematorium at Streatham; the ashes were later interred in St Mary’s churchyard at Polstead.

When the
Leicester Mercury
published an obituary for one of the city’s noteworthy sons on 12 January 1931, it contained among a number of statements one particular item that would have caught and held the attention of all but the most casual of readers. According to the unnamed writer, as well as being a former Fleet Street reporter, author and a social worker who conducted King Edward and the Prince of Wales incognito on a tour of a London mission for the poor, Mr Robert James Lees, father of fifteen children and associate of former Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, also ‘claimed to be the only surviving person who knew the identity of Jack the Ripper, the notorious murderer’. The responsibility of this knowledge was something that had weighed heavily on Mr Lees in his later years, so the newspaper was told by one of his daughters, Miss Eva, who also informed the
Mercury
that she hoped ‘to receive a message from my father in the dream-state’, a comment that Robert Lees’ standing as a ‘noted spiritualist’ puts into context.

Local readers with a reasonable memory may well have found the information somewhat familiar as just over a year before, another newspaper, the
Illustrated Leicester Chronicle
, had published an interview with Robert Lees himself, in which his singular knowledge about the killer of Whitechapel was given a brief and somewhat throwaway mention. This curious provincial story proved to be surprisingly persistent and three months later it was to be given national prominence. Expanding on the original material, the
Daily Express
, in its editions for 7-9 March 1931, published the contents of ‘an astonishing document … one of the most remarkable narratives that has ever reached a newspaper office’ which went on to describe in three instalments how Robert Lees, a gifted clairvoyant, had used his abilities to assist Scotland Yard in tracking down the East End murderer, who, contrary to popular belief, had been caught and on the findings of a medical committee locked up as an anonymous inmate in an asylum for the criminally insane. The document was described as a testimony dictated by Lees himself, who had placed an embargo on its publication until after his own death.

Not surprisingly, the paranormal aspect of this information proved to be of particular interest to at least two of the many personalities involved in organised psychical research during the inter-war years. Three years after the
Express
articles, Dr Nandor Fodor (1895-1964), a practising New York psychoanalyst and one of the great unsung heroes of twentieth-century supernormal investigation, included Lees in his monumental
Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science
(1934) in which he described the clairvoyant as having ‘rendered the greatest service to the English police’ in his tracking down and closure of the Ripper case. Fodor was not the only psychical researcher who gave credence to this version of events which had been played out in the dark forbidding streets and alleyways of East End Victorian London. Writing in the fledgling
Fate Magazine
in May 1949, British-born American Hereward Carrington, a veteran of over half a century of paranormal research which included ground-breaking séance room investigations with physical mediums such as Eusapia Palladino and ‘Margery’ Crandon
1
, was confident that ‘Dr’ Robert Lees, ‘at the height of his powers as a “seer”’, had led the police to a solution of the Ripper’s crimes.

The end of the 1950s and through into the following decade saw the beginning of a modern resurgence of interest in and intensive study of the Whitechapel murders, a phenomenon which continues with great persistence to this day, over 120 years after the brutal events of the autumn of 1888. The catalyst was the simultaneous but unconnected activities of a number of interested writers: in 1959, at the same time as broadcaster Daniel Farson, nephew of
Dracula
author Bram Stoker, was researching the case for a BBC television programme, crime journalist Donald McCormick (who would later carry out a personal investigation of the Red Barn mystery) issued his book
The Identity of Jack the Ripper
, while the following year fellow writer and criminologist Colin Wilson also published a series of articles entitled ‘My Search for Jack the Ripper’ in the
London
Evening Standard
. In 1965, two major Ripper books appeared within a few weeks of one another –
Autumn of Terror
by Tom Cullen and
Jack the Ripper in Fact and Fiction
by Robin Odell – both of which quickly became the benchmark texts for a new generation eager to pull back the veil of many decades in the hope of finally putting a name to not only one of England’s most merciless and sadistic killers but, as Colin Wilson has described him, ‘the most notorious killer of all time’.

All of the authors writing in the 1960s presented what has become a reasonably official and generally accepted version of these events. Between 31 August and 8 November 1888, at least five women, all working as prostitutes, were murdered by an assailant armed with a knife within close proximity of each other in the Whitechapel district of East London; with the exception of one victim, the killer mutilated the bodies and removed internal organs after initially strangling them into unconsciousness and cutting their throats.

Earlier in the year two other murders, both unsolved, took place in the same area which some commentators have attributed to the Ripper: in the early hours of the morning of 3 April 1888 (Easter Monday), forty-five-year-old Emma Elizabeth Smith died of peritonitis in the London Hospital in Whitechapel Road after being viciously assaulted (according to her own account) by four men in Osborn Street who pushed a metal rod into her vagina; while just over four months later, on 7 August, thirty-nine-year-old Martha Tabram (or Turner) was found dead, the victim of a frenzied knife attack, on the first-floor landing of a communal stairwell in the George Yard Buildings, a tenement block to the north of Whitechapel High Street. However, what is considered to be the first Ripper murder, the first of the ‘canonical five’, took place a few streets away at the end of the same month.