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Mystery of the Red Barn
By G. Mark Jackson
FATE :: September 2001

There is an incident from British history when a mother’s dream of her daughter’s murder not only revealed the location of her body but led to the conviction of her killer as well.

The date was April 19, 1828. Since it was dawn, Thomas Marten needed a lantern with his walking stick as he crossed over the narrow crest of land separating the Corder Estate from the village of Polstead, England.

The Corders had lived in a two-story, Tudor-style house from which they administered 300 acres of prime farmland in the county of Suffolk. Then, in 1826, after three of his sons had died from disease or drowning, John Corder himself passed away from grief leaving only one son, William. By contrast, the Marten family lived in one of the thatched cottages that characterized the country villages of England in the early years of the 19th century.

The focus of Marten’s interest was a barn, the prominent structure in a cluster of outbuildings that overlooked Polstead from the fringe end of the Corder property. Each evening, as the setting sun cast a bloody hue over the barn’s red walls, Marten hoped that the phenomenon would not serve as a foreshadowing to his trek to the Corder barn.

Each night of the previous week, Marten’s wife Anne had suffered through the same nightmare in which their only daughter, Maria, was murdered in “the Red Barn” and her body swallowed whole inside the right-hand bay.

On May 18, 1827, nearly a year ago, Maria had eloped to London with William Corder after a rendezvous at the barn. While they had not heard from Maria in all that time, Thomas Marten felt no concern for her well-being.

Despite his reassurances, Anne continued begging him to investigate the Red Barn. Each night of the week leading to April 19, her entreaties grew more intense, leaving Marten to wonder if the strain of her daughter’s disappearance was starting to affect her judgment. It was more a need to allay his wife’s fears rather than any apprehension on his part that led Marten to knock on the door of Corder’s bailiff, a man named Pryke, who lived in one of the outbuildings adjacent to the barn.

He had Pryke open the barn, telling him that they were missing some of Maria’s clothes and wondered if she had left them in the barn on the night of the “elopement.”

Pryke was hesitant, but as Marten was his employer’s unofficial father-in-law, he was willing to comply with the unusual request.

Once the barn was open, Marten proceeded to the right-hand bay. As he probed the ground with his walking stick, he felt an unexpected obstruction. He summoned Pryke to his side and they both scratched through soft earth to find a sack that had been buried in a hollow pit.

The burial had taken place at least a few months earlier, since the sack had deteriorated to the point where they could easily tear it away to reveal a decomposing corpse curled in the fetal position.

Despite the extensive decay, they could see the body was female. Fighting back his revulsion, Marten examined the rotting flesh until he recognized earrings and a green scarf that belonged to his daughter Maria ...

Read the rest of this article in the September 2001 issue of FATE

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