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Jan. 16, 2018 - Skeptoid
17:22
Skeptoid #606: The Murder in the Red Barn

A murder was said to have been solved by the intervention of the victim's ghost. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Go Premium for Longer Episodes 00:01:56
In 1827, an English woman dreamed that her daughter came to her in that dream and said that she hadn't married and moved away four months ago like everyone thought, but that instead her betrothed had murdered her and buried the body in the family's red barn.
The family dug in the barn and found to their horror that the dream had been true.
Ever since, the murder in the red barn has been held up as proof that a ghost had identified her killer from beyond the grave.
Is that in fact what happened?
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The murder in the Red Barn Can the ghost of a murder victim come back and help identify her killer?
The Red Barn Murder Mystery 00:07:29
That's exactly what is said to have happened in 1827 at the village of Polestead, County Suffolk, England.
Maria Martin was murdered in a red barn by her betrothed, William Corder, who buried her inside.
Then months later, Maria began appearing to her stepmother in a series of dreams and identified the spot where she died.
Her father went to that spot described in the dream, dug, and was horrified to discover the decomposed body of his daughter.
Corder was convicted and executed in 1828.
Today, we're going to look at the famous Red Barn murder and see if our skeptical eye can find a slightly less paranormal explanation.
In the 1820s, Polstead was a lovely farming town of 900 inhabitants among rolling green hills.
Our interest today is on two local families.
First, the Corders.
William Corder was the sole surviving son, having lost his father and brothers in just the past year.
Consequently, he inherited the family property, and after a lifetime of petty thefts and forgeries and frauds, he suddenly found himself a man of respectable means.
Corder owned extensive farming property, which included a great red barn that was somewhat notable as a local landmark.
The Martins were another family.
Old Thomas Martin was an exterminator who trapped and killed moles for the local farmers.
He was married to his second wife, Anne, and among his daughters was the pretty Maria.
She'd had two sons to different boyfriends.
The first had died, but the second survived and received some support from an absentee father.
In 1826, at the age of 24, Maria began dating William Corder, two years her junior.
Soon they had another son of their own, but the child was sickly and died after only one month.
Cord and Maria did plan to marry, but trouble was afoot.
Corder brought news, never proven, that a warrant had been issued for Maria for the crime of having a child out of wedlock.
And so on May 18th, 1827, Corder presented his plan to the Martin family.
He and Maria would elope.
Maria would disguise herself in a man's clothing.
The two would leave by separate routes, Corder armed with a pair of loaded pistols, and they would meet at the Red Barn, half a mile distant from the Martin home.
They would then make their way to Ipswich, some 15 miles away, and get married the very next day.
Few days later, Corder returned to the Martin household and explained that there was some hold-up with the marriage license, and that Maria was remaining in Ipswich to try and resolve it.
He came back again a few weeks later with the same news, and again, and again.
By the end of 1827, Corder wrote the Martins from London, explaining that he and Maria had moved there and had finally been able to get married.
He wrote several times, always telling them of Maria's happiness in their new life.
But then, in April of 1828, Anne Martin suggested to her husband that he should go to the Red Barn and examine it.
He asked why, and she answered, I have very frequently dreamed about Maria, and twice before Christmas, I dreamed that Maria was murdered and buried in the Red Barn.
Surprised that she'd kept this to herself for four months, he asked why she hadn't told him this before, and she explained that she was worried he would consider her to be superstitious, a trait of which she knew he disapproved.
Anne was insistent, and so on April 19th, Thomas collected a stalwart friend and the two went to the Red Barn.
They cleared away the straw from the floor and saw one place against the back wall where the earth appeared to have been disturbed.
They dug, and it is not necessary to try to describe a father's anguish at what he found.
Police took over from there and quickly determined the cause of the violent murder and retrieved a handkerchief from the body which Anne identified as Corder's.
They learned of Anne's dreams and all regarded it as a miracle that Maria had somehow been able to solve her own murder from beyond the grave.
Investigators quickly tracked down Corder and arrested him in London only four days later.
News of Maria's ghost spread over all of England.
Songs and plays and poems and puppet shows recreated the grisly murder.
By the time Corder's trial began on August 7th, London hotels were said to have been filled two weeks in advance.
Such was the fame of the case that when Corder was hanged on August 11th, between 7 and 20,000 spectators were reported to have witnessed it.
Fourteen years later, the Red Barn burned down, bringing an end to the story, and the smoke could be seen from the Martin home.
And now we fast forward to the present day, where that same home still stands, expanded a bit and modernized, still ensconced in greenery, and now listed in the UK's National Archives as an historic location.
Today we have the luxury of looking back on this tale with some hindsight and with a bit of skeptical experience under our belts.
You don't have to be a police detective to know how today's police would regard Anne's dream revelation.
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When Psychics Provide Tips 00:05:29
In 2014, Florida police were investigating the murder of Kelly Brennan.
A friend of the victims, Sheila Graham Tott, contacted police claiming to have had an experience she believed was psychic, a dream in which she saw Brennan being hurt.
She first told her sons about it and described exactly where the attack happened in the dream.
Sure enough, they found Brennan's body in a wooded area exactly where she said it was.
The case could not have been a more perfect parallel for the Red Barn murder.
Soon it came out that Graham Tott had discovered that her friend Brennan was having an affair with her husband and beat her to death with a hammer.
Graham Tott was arrested, convicted of first-degree murder, and sentenced to life in prison.
The lead investigator expressed his belief that Graham Tot never actually had any dreams or visions, and that it was guilt that compelled her to make up the story as a way to reveal the location of Brennan's body.
When psychics come to police with a tip that actually does pan out, which is the rare exception, one of two things usually happens.
The first and most common is that it turns out police only said the tip came from the psychic.
In most cases, it actually came from a confidential informant, whose identity the police want to protect.
So they'll cheerfully allow the credulous media to attribute the success to whatever psychic was hounding the police to assist in the investigation.
Thus, the history of news is peppered with reports of cases where psychics actually did provide valuable assistance.
In his 1994 book, Psychic Sleuths, ESP and Sensational Cases, Joe Nicol discussed just such a case.
Claims of psychics aiding police investigations are almost always cover stories to protect actual witnesses.
Be skeptical next time you hear one.
But it is the second most common outcome that we're interested in today.
The psychic, upon providing a tip that turns out to be true, immediately becomes a prime suspect and, as often as not, is arrested and proven guilty by the evidence they themselves provided.
This is exactly what happened in the Kelly Brinnan murder, and it could well be what happened if the Maria Martin murder was being investigated today.
It turns out that Anne Martin, the stepmother who had the dream, may have had a motive to kill Maria, or at least participate in her murder.
And then, 10 or 11 months later, she had another motive to throw Corder under the bus by revealing Maria's murder.
For it turns out that Anne and Corder were having an affair, and had been for some little while, both before and after the murder.
It's probably the reason Corder hung around Polstead for a few months before finally going to London.
This affair was known to some and suspected by others, and came out during Corder's trial.
Anne, although married to Maria's father, was only a year older than Maria, and was said to be no less susceptible to the charms of this handsome young man of means, as compared to her dreary, fat, old, mole-catching husband.
No proof survives, and so we can only speculate.
But Anne may have played an active role in the premeditated plan to remove this rival for Corder's affection.
Corder himself, as reported by multiple witnesses, was said to be annoyed at Maria's pressure on him to marry her.
Doctors who examined Maria's body found that she had died first by strangulation from Corder's handkerchief tied around her neck.
Then she'd been shot in the face and stabbed in the eye, neck, and chest.
However, the exact circumstances of what happened in the Red Barn and who was present will never be known.
It's probable that the reason Corder stayed around Polstead for a while was to continue his affair with Anne.
Once he moved to London, one of the first things he did was to write home to the Martins multiple times describing the fictional wedding he and Maria had enjoyed.
But while he was writing those, he was also writing a personal ad to run in the London papers, via an intermediary to keep his identity secret.
The ad ran on November 13th and again on November 25th.
Dozens of replies were received and ultimately read in court.
A young lady named Mary Moore captured his heart immediately, so much so that the second ad may not have even been necessary.
London records show only one marriage between a William Corder and a Mary Moore, and it was on November 27th, two days after the ad ran, though its birth year shown for Corder is five years off, so it may not be the right record.
Corder wrote more letters to the Martins, telling them how happy he and Maria were, even after he was married to Mary Moore.
But the grapevine of gossip eventually had its way with him.
By April of 1828, Anne Martin learned that Corder had married.
And then, coincidentally, her dreams began, and she outed him as a murderer.
Jilted much?
Skeptoid Live Shows and More 00:02:23
This is not a new theory.
Such rumors were being tossed about even before Corder's trial.
Nevertheless, it is Anne's claim of a dream that has become the popular version of the story that is told and retold today.
Did Maria come to her loving stepmother in a dream and show her where she'd been murdered?
Or is it possible that some other, more earthly and more worldly, explanation was at the root of the story?
When you hear a ghost story that sounds like contrived fiction, even if it surrounds actual events, you should always be skeptical.
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