The New Taste for Blood A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley

Murder's the darkest and most despicable crime of all,

and yet we're attracted to it.

Grisly crimes like these would appal us

if we encountered them in real life.

But something happens when they're turned into stories

and safely placed between the covers of a book.

If you think about people's reaction

to notorious killers like Dr Crippen,

or to great detectives like Sherlock Holmes or Poirot,

you'll see that this preoccupation with murder has a very long history.

In this series, I'll trace its origins

back to the sprawling London of the early 19th century,

when newspapers first began to delight in reporting murder

to a frightened public.

An appetite for sensation developed as Britain became more literate,

and working-class people were starting to be able to read.

I'll show how all this had a huge influence on Charles Dickens,

who turned murder and its detection

into a suitable subject for literature,

and how the detective writers who followed,

from Conan Doyle to Agatha Christie, distanced murder

from sordid reality.

They turned it into an elegant kind of crossword puzzle,

involving the most respectable of suspects.

In this first programme, I want to begin not with fiction,

but with real-life murder, 200 years ago.

Grasmere, in the Lake District.

In 1811, the writer Thomas De Quincey

was renting a cottage from his friend, the poet William Wordsworth,

when something happened

to shatter the tranquillity of this lakeside village.

A young family had been murdered -

not here, but 300 miles away in the docklands of London.

Yet the news shocked Grasmere, because this was something new,

a senseless and motiveless murder by a stranger

of four people, all at once.

In the preceding year, 1810,

there had only been 15 convictions for murder in the whole of Britain.

De Quincey was struck by the effect this crime had

on the good people of Grasmere.

"One lady, my next door neighbour,

"never rested until she had placed 18 doors,

"each secured by ponderous bolts and bars and chains,

"between her own bedroom and any intruder of human build.

"At every sixth step, one was stopped by a sort of portcullis."

But De Quincey noticed something else besides fear

in the reaction to this murder.

There was an element of ghoulish enjoyment.

He felt that the British

were turning into a nation of what he called murder-fanciers.

Quincey began to define what made a good murder,

breathlessly describing the ultra-fiendishness of the crime

and revelling in the murderer's "tiger's heart".

The murder that repulsed and gripped in equal measure

took place in December,

near the church of St George's in the East,

at 29, the Ratcliff Highway, Wapping.

The family who lived here were terribly young.

Timothy Marr was a former sailor. He was just 25.

His wife, Celia, had recently given birth to their baby boy,

and they also had an apprentice, James, who was 14.

On the evening of 7th December, just before midnight,

the Marr family sent out their servant, Margaret Jewell,

into the poorly-lit neighbourhood to buy oysters,

not then a luxury, but a cheap and nutritious type of street food.

Her journey was fruitless.

There were no oysters to be had at this late hour.

On her return, she found that she had been locked out.

Margaret banged on the front door

and called out for the Marrs to open up.

While Margaret the maid was waiting to be let in,

she heard a sound inside the house.

She heard footsteps, and the crying of the baby.

But nobody came to let her in.

She was still waiting outside at half past midnight

when the night watchman came by.

Their conversation and Margaret's banging

woke up the next door neighbour, a pawnbroker,

and it was he who eventually got access to the house

by climbing over the wall and coming in through the back door.

The Marrs' next door neighbour now started to search the house,

and very soon, he came across the body of James, the apprentice.

His head had been bashed in,

so much so that his brains were splattered on the ceiling.

Then he found Mrs Marr, Celia.

She was face down, crushed up against the front door.

Then behind the shop counter, there was Mr Marr, also face down,

just as dead as the rest of them.

A little crowd had gathered outside the front door,

so the neighbour now went running out. He shouted "Murder! Murder!"

These people outside knew the Marr family, and they had a question.

Where was the baby?

The baby was still in his cradle...

but his throat had been slit.

Into this scene of slaughter came Constable Charles Horton,

from the nearby marine police office at Wapping.

After searching the shop,

Horton concluded that no money had been taken.

He then explored the rest of the house.

When he reached the bedroom, he discovered the murder weapon,

a maul, leaning against a chair.

A maul is a special type of mallet used by ships' carpenters.

It was covered with blood.

The Marrs' shop and home was now turned into a morgue,

and it was also open to the public.

In the days following the murder,

hundreds of people traipsed through to look at the bloodstains,

even to gawp at the bodies which were laid out upon the beds.

All ranks in society came, from the richest to the very poorest.

This sort of access to a crime scene

would be utterly inconceivable today.

This parade of neighbours and strangers through the murder scene

was motivated by fear, by curiosity

and a feeling that they too should look for clues

and help to solve the crime.

Regency London, which was expanding rapidly,

had no centralised police force.

Policing relied on night watchmen and constables,

paid for by local parishes.

Magistrates had to depend on witnesses

willing to come forward with information.

The overcrowded streets of the East End teemed with foreign sailors.

Crime was rising,

but people were more worried about disease, destitution or war

than they were about being murdered.

But now, locals began to fear every stranger in their midst.

Without the murderer being quickly apprehended,

fear would soon turn to panic.

To discover more about the problems faced by the authorities

in a case like the killing of the Marrs,

I've come to meet Rosalind Crone

at the Marine Police Museum in Wapping,

still located in its original 1811 building.

What have you got there in that big book?

This is what we call a register,

which lists all the constables who were working

for the Thames River Police, or the Marine Police,

in the early 19th century.

So if we look down the ledger here,

we can see the name of Charles Horton.

-And he's the man who responds to the Marrs' murder?

-He is.

He's the first constable on the scene.

The Marine Police were employed specifically

to protect the docks and ships' cargoes from light-fingered locals.

It was just by chance that their man, Horton,

was near to the Marrs' shop.

You've picked up the cutlass that men would have carried for...

-Defence?

-Protection, yes.

And he would have had a little set of handcuffs, too.

I don't think they were expecting

to capture too many female criminals through those.

-No, you'd slip out of those easily.

-Straight on and off.

And they were only one of many.

There were thousands of these small proto-police forces across London?

Yes. What we've got to remember about the early 19th century is,

we are dealing with old policing structures,

as opposed to a police force, which comes in in about the late 1820s.

So we have, basically, policing at a local level,

often the parish level,

with the employment of a small number of constables

and then a larger force of night watchmen.

We've got to remember that these constables are mainly reactive.

They're not active. They're not detectives.

And we are dealing with a murder here that was particularly horrendous

and pretty much unheard of among the local community.

This is a really shocking act.

What did people think of the response of the authorities?

Lacking. They hadn't caught anyone yet,

and it gave people a real sense of fear,

but also a sense of anger,

because the authorities looked like they weren't doing enough.

They hadn't caught the perpetrator.

He was still out there at large, and could commit another crime.

To find the killer, the authorities relied on rewards.

In Wapping, the magistrates first offered a reward of £50.

Then other parishes and the Home Office

chipped in to increase this to £700, a staggering sum.

How did the news spread outside the immediate neighbourhood?

How did it get outside London?

When a crime happened,

especially a particularly notorious crime such as this one,

with fairly salacious details, news spreads quickly -

first of all through newspapers,

newspapers that are mainly bought by more affluent people

because they're quite expensive.

A key thing is that you don't have to be able to read to get the news?

That's right. News is read aloud.

Newspapers are read aloud in public houses and coffee shops.

Some people in streets would club together to buy a newspaper

and read it to each other.

The Marrs' neighbours in the East End

showed an admirable sense of community in the face of their fear.

Seven days after the slaying of the Marrs,

thousands lined the streets to pay their respects.

The funeral cortege made its way through Wapping

to the parish church of St George's in the East.

There was a terrible sense of outrage and shock after this crime.

The victims were killed in their own home by strangers.

Nobody around here felt safe.

There was also a good deal of sympathy

for this young, hard-working, respectable family.

Only two months earlier,

Mr and Mrs Marr had been at the church

for the christening of their son.

Now, all three of them were buried in a single grave.

Their tombstone has disappeared,

but their epitaph read "Life is uncertain in this world".

Though deep in mourning, the East End was chilled by the realisation

that a brutal murderer remained at large, and might strike again.

And then, only 12 days after the killing of the Marrs,

it seemed that the same murderer visited Wapping a second time.

On 19th December, a very strange sight was seen

outside the King's Arms pub in New Gravel Lane.

The lodger who lived on the top floor of the pub

started climbing out of the window.

He came down a rope that was made by his bedsheets.

People passing by in the streets stopped and stared at him,

wondering what was going on.

It became clear when they heard what he was saying.

He was shouting "Murder! Murder!"

A crowd soon gathered and forced its way in.

Inside, they found the bodies of the publican, John Williams,

his wife and his servant.

Like the Marrs, they had been hacked and beaten to death.

That night, there was pandemonium.

Fire bells were rung and drums were beaten in alarm.

Volunteers armed with cutlasses and pistols

searched houses and boats moored on the Thames.

Even London Bridge was closed.

The desperate magistrates now demanded

that anyone at all suspicious be picked up -

foreigners, vagrants, all the usual suspects.

Valuable time was wasted on false leads.

And people were starting to grow angry with the authorities,

who failed to protect their community

from what now looked like a serial killer.

But at last, there was a breakthrough.

A sharp-eyed police constable

noticed a clue on the murder weapon itself,

not before time, you might think.

He spotted initials on the handle, JP,

and a woman came forward to say that she knew who JP was.

It was John Peterson, a sailor from Hamburg.

But, it has to be said, he had the perfect alibi.

On the night of the killings, he had been away at sea.

Another lodger, a 27-year-old seaman called John Williams,

quickly became the prime suspect,

from no other evidence than that he'd had access to the maul.

Williams was arrested

and taken to Cold Bath Fields prison for questioning.

Two days after Christmas,

the prison guards found his lifeless body

hanging from an iron bar in his cell.

Because John Williams had committed suicide,

everybody instantly jumped to the conclusion

that this was an admission of guilt.

He killed himself to cheat the hangman.

The police and the magistrates were delighted with this outcome.

They'd really needed to reassure Londoners

that the killer was off the streets and that the case had been solved.

At the same time, though, they had been denied the proper trial

and execution to provide a sense of closure.

On New Year's Eve, 1811,

a cart bearing John Williams' body left the prison

and made its way through the streets of Wapping.

It was a very public display

that the authorities had at last got their man.

Shops were shut, and blinds were drawn.

There is little evidence that Williams really was guilty,

but scapegoat or not,

his dead body was used to placate the people of Wapping.

When the procession reached the home of the Marrs, it came to a halt.

The cart with the murderer's body was now directly outside their home.

Here's the murder weapon, the bloodied maul,

positioned by his head. At this point,

one of the members of the crowd leaped up onto the cart,

and they twisted his body around

so that he had to look at the home of his victims.

It was as if the crowd were forcing him

to confront the consequences of his actions.

This ritual of punishment ended here

at the crossroads of old Cannon and Cable Street.

At the end of the procession, the crowd did find its voice.

There were groans and cheers and shouts

as John Williams' body was lowered into a shallow grave

at the centre of the crossroads,

and then a stake was hammered through his heart.

This was traditionally what you did to a suicide,

to stop his or her ghost from wandering around.

But John Williams' skeleton did go wandering.

A couple of decades later, gas pipes were installed along here,

and the workmen digging the hole discovered his bones.

His skull somehow ended up in the possession of the landlord

at the Crown and Dolphin.

The horror in Wapping reached all corners of the country

through illustrated, one-sheet publications called broadsides.

These sold in their hundreds of thousands.

Newspaper proprietors realised that sensational killings

could boost circulation enormously.

But fact and fiction became blurred.

By the time the Ratcliff Highway story reached the Lake District,

the murders had taken on an almost mythic quality,

a process that did not go unnoticed

by Grasmere's most curious resident, Thomas De Quincey.

Thomas de Quincey was a complete oddball.

He was addicted to opium,

and spent a lot of his time in a sort of crazy, creative dream.

He was an unconventional, but rather brilliant writer.

Some people think the two things are connected.

When he was living here at Dove Cottage, he would produce

the best-known piece of writing about the Ratcliff Highway killings.

Thomas De Quincey's essay on murder was basically a great, big tease.

He was setting out to provoke all the newspaper readers

who had sucked up the details of the real-life crimes and relished them.

De Quincey claimed that there was this imaginary murder club

for people who took things even further.

They were connoisseurs of crime,

and they believed that murder ought to be elevated

into one of the fine arts. This was all satirical, of course.

At their meetings, they talked about their favourite murderers,

and top of the tree was John Williams,

the most accomplished practitioner yet of this new act.

"Mr Williams has exalted the ideal of murder to all of us.

"He has carried his art to a point of colossal sublimity.

"All other murders look pale beside the deep crimson of his.

"Leave aside morality after the deed is done.

"Why not enjoy a good murder?"

De Quincey's satirical musings on the dark side of human nature

might well have been fuelled by his heavy,

if not excessive, use of opium.

This amazing thing is Thomas De Quincey's set of opium scales.

Today, his drug-taking sounds really squalid and debauched.

But actually, opium was quite an established part

of 19th-century life. It wasn't illegal.

You could buy the powder at the chemist's,

or you might take it in liquid form.

This is tincture of opium.

There's actual drugs in there.

And this is Kendal Black Drop, a famous local brand.

You might give this to your baby if it cried,

or to kill the toothache,

which was how Thomas de Quincey himself got started.

He would take his laudanum,

or tincture, in a glass of brandy,

thereby getting addicted to alcohol at the same time.

And his consumption was extraordinary -

8,000 drops a day, we hear, or a whole ounce.

This isn't opium, it's ginger, but that's a whole ounce.

He would take that in a single day.

If you did that without being used to it, it would clearly kill you.

Drug-inspired or not, De Quincey gives us a fundamental insight

that we all enjoy a good murder,

although sometimes we're reluctant to admit it.

De Quincey skewered this idea that we consume murder,

that we judge them, that we like a good one, with vulnerable characters

and interesting developments.

But if a crime is dull and brutish, as he said, we damn it unanimously.

And this sense that we enjoy murder

runs from De Quincey's time right until the present day.

20 years after the murder in Wapping,

another killing was turned

into one of the 19th century's most potent stories.

It would be mythologized

and transformed into popular entertainment

within weeks of the murder itself.

This story played to the growing obsession with violent crime.

It would be acted out not in the turbulent East End,

but in the sleepy Suffolk village of Polstead.

It was here, in 1827,

that a crime took place that still resonates today.

Maria Marten and the murder in the red barn.

Maria Marten was the daughter of the local mole catcher.

She lived on the edge of the village with her family

and her illegitimate child.

In a much grander house at the centre of Polstead

lived the man who would kill her.

This is the much grander house lived in by William Corder.

His father was a prosperous and God-fearing yeoman farmer.

In some of the stories that later sprang up around this case,

William Corder was described as the squire of the village,

but this actually makes him sound straighter than he really was.

He did have criminal contacts in London,

and when he'd been at school,

his friends had given him a nickname that reflected his sneaky ways.

They called him Foxy.

The third character in the story was the red barn itself,

which stood in a field just outside Polstead.

There is a very melodramatic explanation

of the name of the red barn.

As the sun set, the evening light is supposed

to have turned the barn the colour of blood,

giving it the reputation amongst the locals as a place of evil.

So it was an ideal place

for secret meetings between William Corder and his lover.

They weren't going to be observed.

Friday, 18th May was the last time

that anyone in Polstead saw Maria alive.

That night, she had a secret rendezvous with William Corder

under the cover of darkness at the red barn.

She thought that they were planning to run off together.

For a whole year, as far as Maria's parents knew, she really had eloped.

William Corder even wrote to them saying "I have left her at Ipswich".

Maria couldn't write herself, he said,

because she had hurt her wrist.

In April 1828, Maria's stepmother began to have nightmares.

"I have dreamt on three nights that she was murdered

"and buried in the red barn", she said.

This apparent intervention by providence

in the form of Maria's stepmother's dream

would become an important part of the story.

Her father now began a search,

and soon found Maria's decomposing body

in the exact spot the dream predicted.

The prime suspect was, of course, William Corder.

He was arrested by the constables in Brentford, outside London,

where he had set up home with a new wife.

In the phenomenon De Quincey had identified,

the sordid red barn murder

now provided excellent raw material for entertainment.

And in the 1820s, the most theatrical way

of telling the story of notorious murders was melodrama.

This stylised form of theatre was performed here

at the Old Vic in London,

which had opened ten years before the events in Polstead.

The proper name of the theatre was the Royal Coburg,

but because of all the gory murder mysteries they put on here,

everybody called it the Blood Tub.

Let's find out how that murder in sleepy Suffolk

got turned into a smash hit melodrama.

Melodramas were a heady mix of music and acting.

They had sensational plots,

with actors representing good and evil,

all to a raucous musical accompaniment.

For a modern audience, they were rather like pantomime.

To learn how real-life murder

was turned into this wildly popular form of entertainment,

I've come to meet the actor Michael Kirk.

Michael, what exactly is melodrama?

I suppose if we were describing melodrama nowadays,

we would probably describe it as over the top.

A story of great love, great passion...and they meant it.

It was very, very important.

The story of a melodrama is, "If we don't do this, we die."

It's that important.

And did the audience not mind the basic implausibility?

Because we get coincidences,

we get people seeing things in dreams, ghosts.

I think they loved it, because it was so popular.

And they loved to know what was going on.

They didn't want mystery or anything like that.

They wanted to know who the villain was, who the heroine was,

and that was very important. And they wouldn't just sit there and watch.

They would so much want to be part of the play.

The catcalls and the mayhem allowed people to let off steam.

Safe in their seats,

the audience always enjoyed seeing justice being done,

the murderer being punished and order restored.

They would expect to jeer the villain,

cheer the young village maiden.

It would have been a bloodbath out there.

I think it must have been every man for himself.

And I actually don't think we ought to talk about it any more.

We ought to go up there and give it a go.

So it's time for curtain up for Maria Marten,

or The Murder In The Red Barn.

Scene the third, inside the red barn.

Corder, discovered digging a grave.

Villain's music.

SOMBRE MUSIC

All is complete. I now await my victim. Will she come?

Oh, yes. A woman is fool enough

to do anything for the man she loves.

Hark! It is her footsteps bounding across the field.

She comes with love in her heart, a song on her lips.

Little does she think that death is so near.

William not here?

Where can he be? What ails me? I feel fear in my heart.

My limbs tremble. I will return to my home.

Stay, Maria.

William! I'm so glad that you are here.

You don't know how frightened I've been.

-Did anyone see you cross the fields?

-Not a soul.

-I followed your instructions.

-That's good. Now, Maria,

do you remember threatening to betray me about the child to the constable?

It was but a girlish threat.

Tremolo fiddles.

But don't talk about that now. Let's leave this place.

Not yet, Maria.

Look what I have made here.

A grave! William, what do you mean?

To kill you! To bury your body there.

You are a clog upon my actions,

a chain that keeps me from reaching ambitious heights.

Spare me! Oh, spare me!

It is no use. My mind's resolved.

You die tonight!

Aaagh!

Oh, you wretch!

Oh! May this crime forever be accursed.

Thunder and lightning.

THUNDER CRASHES

Thank you.

APPLAUSE

It wasn't only in cities and towns

that people could enjoy murderous melodramas.

They also appeared in the repertoire of travelling marionette theatres.

The story of the red barn was being performed at country fairs

even before William Corder stood trial.

Oh, Maria, hello! You've come! You've come!

And these belonged to a company that actually toured East Anglia?

Yes, so we know that this company performed Maria Marten.

What was it like to go and see a puppet show?

Oh, incredibly exciting.

Not only was it exciting to see the characters,

it was also exciting to see the scenery,

because they had proper puppet scenery.

It was a miniature version of being in any theatre.

So this is not for children and it's not just funny,

-these are important points?

-Absolutely.

They did a whole range of different types of plays.

They did everything that was exciting or amusing the people.

So they did the melodramas and the murders.

People in outlying rural areas

would have really looked forward to the marionette theatre coming.

Even from a distance,

you can tell that William Corder here is the villain.

He's got a very villainous moustache.

Yes, and he's got glassy, staring eyes.

Oh, William! I cannot wait until we are together.

Well, that's what you think, but I haven't brought you here for love.

I've brought you here, my girl, to kill you!

Oh, William! Do not treat me so!

Die, woman!

Back in real life, once William Corder had been captured,

his story continued. He was brought back to Bury St Edmunds,

the nearest assize town to Polstead.

The trial began on 7th August 1828,

in the Shire Hall of Bury St Edmunds.

William Corder initially pleaded not guilty,

but later on, he did confess.

He claimed that he had shot her in the eye by accident,

and that the gun had gone off in his trembling hands.

The trial lasted just two days,

and the jury took only 35 minutes to reach their decision.

Guilty.

On the day of his hanging,

a huge crowd gathered outside the jail,

in the hope of catching a glimpse of the villain.

It took William Corder a long time to die, around ten minutes,

and that was with the hangman pulling down on his legs.

As the newspapers said, he died hard.

His body was barely cold

before the story of William Corder

was featuring in street ballads and alehouse songs.

At the Cock Inn in Polstead, I'm meeting Vic Gammon

to hear how the story of Murder In The Red Barn was turned into music.

# It's William Corder, it is my name

# I brought my friends to grief and shame

# Unlawful passions caused my fall

# And now my life must pay for all. #

Now, there's a whole lot of William Corder songs, aren't there, that's not the only one?

No, I've found about four of them.

There's one really famous one. The Murder Of Maria Marten

is the one that really circulated in a large way.

It was a national hit, then?

It was a national hit, that's a good way to put it.

It's really the interest in the case,

plus the fact that there was at that time, the 1820s,

a strong popular singing tradition -

people singing for themselves, for recreation, for fun -

-that meant things like this were a hit.

-Well, let's have a sing.

Yes, let's.

# Come, all you thoughtless young men

# A warning take by me

# And think upon my unhappy fate to be hanged upon the tree

# My name is William Corder

# To you I do declare

# I courted Maria Marten

# Most beautiful and fair. #

Supposing I was a servant in London in 1928

and I wanted to learn this song, how would I go about doing it?

The most likely way you would learn it

is from a street ballad singer.

There were hundreds of these people,

even in the mid-19th century in London.

They're not just buskers,

because they would both sing and sell the ballad at the same time,

and that's the way you would learn the tune.

We have accounts of large crowds of people standing

listening to ballad singers.

It's a really good idea,

because if everybody across Britain is singing this,

it's like a massive public safety warning,

saying "Don't go murdering ladies and burying them in barns.

"It will be bad for you. You will die".

Yes! You can look at it that way,

or you can look at it on the way that the popular press

both delights in and takes a sort of distanced view

of gory happenings and so on.

There's both the fascination and the warning element in there.

They're both quite strong.

The lesson of the song is, though, don't do it, isn't it?

Although they are taking a bit of pleasure

in the "bleeding, mangled body".

-Shall we try the "bleeding, mangled" verse?

-Yeah, I like that one.

# With heart so light she thought no harm

# To meet him she did go

# He murdered her all in the barn and laid her body low

# And after the horrible deed was done

# She lay weltering in her gore

# Her bleeding, mangled body he buried

# Beneath the red barn floor. #

That's ridiculously ghoulish!

The blood, the body, the mangling, ugh!

Murder is not a nice thing, and this is relishing in that detail.

The voice of an angel.

GLASSES CLINK

Melodramas and broadsides and ballads

had made Polstead infamous.

Murder tourists arrived, wanting to visit the village

to see the red barn, and even to touch the grave of poor Maria.

This board here tells us that Maria Marten is buried nearby.

She was aged just 25 years.

We can't see her actual gravestone

because it was chipped to pieces by souvenir hunters,

and there isn't a trace of it left.

As in many a crime story,

the murder in the red barn shows that we are more interested

in the character and the deeds of the murderer

than those of the victim.

William Corder's crime created a weird industry

in what we might call murder souvenirs.

Anyone who had the cash

could buy one of these ceramic models of the red barn,

take it home and have it on your own mantelpiece.

Slightly more exclusive

were knick-knacks made out of the timbers of the red barn itself.

This is a little snuffbox in the shape of a shoe.

The items associated with the crime were more valuable.

These were the actual pistols. These are what he used to shoot her.

Ascending up the scale of gruesomeness,

this is a book about William Corder,

written by a journalist from The Times.

You'd think it was just a book, until you open up the cover

and you read that the leather binding is made

from the skin of the murderer,

taken from his body and tanned by a surgeon

from the Suffolk Hospital.

But top of the tree, absolutely most gruesome of all,

this is the back of William Corder's head.

It's the skin from his scalp.

You can see on it the little hairs,

and just over here is the murderer's ear.

Phrenologists were also keen to study Corder's head,

because they thought the lumps and bumps on it

represented the homicidal aspects of his personality.

What is this?

This is a full 3-D bust of William Corder, taken from death.

It does bear some of the grim signs

of his death by strangulation and asphyxiation.

If you look at the front

where you can see the lips and the nose are swollen,

that is where all the blood vessels are bursting in his face.

Here, you can see someone struggling through death.

Tell me what happened to William Corder's body afterwards.

He would have probably been left to hang for about an hour,

just to make sure he was certainly dead.

Then he would have been taken down to the Shire Hall,

where basically, they would have publicly anatomised him.

So I'm getting an impression of this dead body

being brought into the Shire Hall over there,

-and swarms of people coming to examine it, all in public?

-Yes.

Presumably, it would have been

the same sort of grand day out as the execution.

If you missed the execution,

you could go along and watch the body being cut up.

It was, in essence,

your chance to see a celebrity of the nefarious sort.

Would you say that he has contributed

-to the local tourist industry?

-Absolutely.

Since he's been on display here for the last hundred years,

people come in every day saying,

"Have you still got the book bound in skin?

"Have you got the bit of skin?" etc.

And to be honest,

the likes of the community of Polstead

still celebrate the story of William Corder

and the murder in the red barn.

It's really funny to hear you saying "We celebrate our local murderer"!

I think it's because the story has gone under so many transitions

to become basically so fabricated that it is a story.

And I think we're celebrating the story,

as opposed to the reality of the nastiness of the crime.

And it has all the bearings of a great, entertaining play.

The tale of Maria Marten showed

how a crime of passion in rural Suffolk

could become a national source of entertainment.

It elevated William Corder

into one of the most notorious murderers of the century.

20 years later, it would be a famous murderess

who would similarly enthral the public.

This attractive and apparently cold-hearted woman

became infamous for her part

in the crime known as the Bermondsey Horror.

Maria Manning was living

at No.3, Miniver Place, Bermondsey, South London,

with her husband, Frederick.

The year was 1849.

Frederick and Maria Manning

were a newly married couple in their late twenties.

Frederick had been a guard on the railways,

and then he had failed in business as a publican

and now he was unemployed.

His wife, Maria, was much more exotic.

She was Swiss, and she had lived the high life as a lady's maid.

She had travelled abroad and stayed in stately homes.

But she too had fallen on hard times.

Now she was making ends meet as a dressmaker.

A frequent visitor to the Mannings' house in Miniver Place

was Patrick O'Connor. He worked for the Customs,

and he was rumoured to be a very wealthy man.

The three of them certainly had a curious relationship.

In fact, it was scandalous. This was almost certainly a love triangle.

On Thursday, 9th August, Patrick O'Connor told friends

that he had been invited to have dinner with the Mannings.

This was the last time he was seen alive.

Sometime during that evening, he was ruthlessly killed.

Then, using his keys, Maria went to his lodgings

and stole his valuables, including his stock and share certificates.

Four days later,

O'Connor was reported missing to a now centralised Metropolitan Police.

On Friday the 17th of August,

two police constables got access to 3 Miniver Place.

They were PC Barnes of the K Division

and PC Burson of the M Division, both for the Metropolitan Police.

Inside the house, they found a state of confusion.

Whatever furniture had been here had disappeared

and the Mannings were gone.

The constables reported back that the nest were still here

but the birds had flown.

Their search then took them into the back kitchen.

The two police constables had eagle eyes.

In the kitchen,

they noticed that one of the flagstones was loose near the hearth.

They soon had it up and there was O'Connor.

He was naked, he's been trussed up, he'd been tossed in quicklime

and his dead body was now blue.

The hunt for the murderers was now on,

led by the newly formed detective branch of the Metropolitan Police

under inspector Charles Field.

The Bermondsey horror was a chance for them to prove themselves.

First, Field's men had to track the Mannings down.

But where were they?

The Mannings had split up and run in different directions.

It seems that Maria had gone off first without

the knowledge of her husband, but with the couple's stolen wealth.

The Mannings had robbed O'Connor and they'd killed him,

and on top of that, Maria had double-crossed her husband.

Maria fled north to Scotland

while the hapless Fredrick caught a steamer to the Channel Islands.

To discover more about how the detectives were able to trace

the Mannings, I met up again with Rosalind Crone in south London.

In 1811, when we have the Ratcliff Highway murders,

there's a slightly chaotic response from the authorities

but things are very different by the times of the Mannings, aren't they?

Yes. What we see is a much more joined-up system of policing,

but more significantly they're joined by a new detective force.

Now, the Metropolitan Police force in 1829 are meant to be very much

a preventing crime force,

so they patrol beats and keep a watch over people and property.

The detective force, founded in 1842, is meant to detect crime.

It's a slightly different function.

But they're only a small office at this stage -

about eight man in total in their office in Scotland Yard.

So we've got this new detective squad and they're allowed, actually,

to go after the criminals for the first time.

How did they actually catch Maria?

First of all, the detective sergeant who's sent out to have a

look at the house, is able to track down the cab driver who takes

Maria to the station.

He's able to figure out that she goes to Euston station

and gets on a train bound for Edinburgh.

Then he's able to use telegraphic communications to wire up

a message to his colleagues in the Edinburgh police,

putting out a description of Maria which they circulate

and are able to track her down.

Maria was arrested in Edinburgh.

Shortly afterwards, Frederick was apprehended in St Helier.

This was a coup for the new team at Scotland Yard.

Their success in capturing the Mannings was the first time

the public became conscious of their emerging role

investigating homicide.

Beside this square was the site of Horsemonger Lane Gaol

where the Mannings spent their last days.

The Mannings became national celebrities,

especially the dark, bewitching Maria.

The Times newspaper alone ran 72 articles on the case, and an

illustrated book about the couple sold a colossal 2.5 million copies.

What was it that made Maria Manning so fascinating?

Now, Maria Manning - well, part of her fascination is,

of course, because she's a woman and the idea of a female murderess

flies in the face of Victorian notions of femininity.

But it's also because she's foreign, and also

because she has been a lady's maid in some of the grand houses

and dresses beautifully in these black silk gowns

and she's very attractive.

It seems to me that she's unacceptably ambitious -

she's not happy to just be a servant,

she wants to get married to a rich man, and even better than that

she wants to marry another man that she didn't actually hook.

-She's got two men on the go.

-Yes, yes, that's right.

On 25th October 1849, the Mannings, husband and wife,

were brought to the greatest theatre in the land.

The Central Criminal Court, better known as the Old Bailey.

For the ever curious British public,

this latest melodrama was reaching its climax.

They'd met a new hero, the detective,

who could hunt down and capture the killer.

And murder itself had entered the modern age.

The perpetrators fleeing by train,

the sleuths tracking them down by telegraph.

The stage was set for the finale the nation had been waiting for.

Numerous distinguished visitors would now turn up to watch the show.

There are members of the House of Lords

and some very grand foreign diplomats

like the Austrian Ambassador

and the first secretary to the Prussian delegation.

All the action would happen in Court Number One.

Maria made the fateful climb from the cells below

to put in her most important public appearance.

She was dressed to kill in her usual close-fitting dress

of fine, black satin.

The charges are read out.

Frederick George Manning is accused of murdering Patrick O'Connor,

aided by his wife, Maria Manning.

Both of them plead not guilty.

The court heard that O'Connor had been shot through the eye

and received 17 blows to the head that had smashed his skull.

There were details to suggest that this was a premeditated crime.

In the weeks before O'Connor's disappearance,

the Mannings had bought a crowbar from an ironmonger

in King William Street, a shovel from a shop in Tooley Street

and quicklime from a builder in Bermondsey Square.

And it wasn't the only damning evidence that Maria faced.

By the second day, she seemed to be on trial not only for being

a killer, but also for being a woman.

To save his client from the gallows,

Frederick's defence barrister chose to blame Maria for the crime.

He demonised her as that most terrible of creatures,

a female of loose morals,

quite capable of doing the foul deed on her own.

We're all in the habit, he says, of associating the female

character with the idea of mildness and obedience.

The female is capable of reaching a higher point in virtue than

the male, but when she gives way to vice, she sinks far lower.

The court deliberated for two days

and then the jury withdrew for 45 minutes.

When they came back, it was with a verdict of guilty.

Frederick Manning is given the opportunity to address

the whole court but he turns it down.

Maria is given the same chance and she takes it. She lets rip.

There is no justice for a foreigner in this country.

I have no protection from the judges or my husband.

In the middle of this explosive rant, Maria grabs the herbs,

used as air fresheners in the court, and hurls them at the judge.

I am unjustly condemned by the court.

Shameful England.

Maria Manning and her black satin dress

would cast a really long shadow over years to come.

She became known as the Lady Macbeth of Bermondsey

and she inspired Charles Dickens.

He refashioned her as Hortense the lady's maid, who turns out to

be the killer in Bleak House.

She was immortalised in wax.

Her figure at Madame Tussauds became so popular that it was

still on display there when I first visited the gallery in the 1970s.

The case was a sensation of the age.

Yes, there was sex, greed and treachery, but there was much more.

There was detection by methodical police work, bringing with it

a new and satisfying kind of resolution for the public.

The execution of the Mannings took place on 13th November,

up on the roof of the Horsemonger Lane Gaol.

This was pure theatre - a huge crowd was expected,

so three days beforehand,

the surrounding streets were all cleared and barricades were erected.

On the day, it was estimated that 50,000 people turned up,

with 500 policemen to maintain order.

Hangings were getting increasingly scarce,

particularly for females, so this double dose of husband

and wife was a complete treat for execution lovers.

Changes in the law back in the 1820s meant that the death penalty

was now reserved only for treason or murder.

Previously, it had been applied to a whole range of crimes.

So by 1849, a public hanging was a real occasion,

which is why Charles Dickens chose to observe this one.

He and a group of his friends rented a room overlooking the jail

and they held a sort of party as events unfolded.

Now, Dickens was fascinated by murder and murderers.

He was also in favour of capital punishment.

He believed that they should hang for their crimes.

But what really upset him on this occasion was the ghoulish

and disrespectful behaviour of the crowd.

Outside the jail, the crowd waited for showtime.

They sang mocking songs and ate commemorative biscuits.

We hear that inside, in private, there was

a final reconciliation between Frederick and Maria.

They ascended to the gallows as husband and wife.

The Mannings were hanged side by side, on a scaffold

that had been lifted up to give maximum visibility

and theatricality to the grim business.

Maria was defiant and stylish to the end,

wearing her black satin dress and gloves for her final appearance.

She died with dignity.

The case of the Mannings was a turning point

in the history of crime.

It had been a case played out in public,

a ghastly melodrama with the nation sucking up every gory detail.

But it was also a case that had been solved

by the new Metropolitan Police force,

its constables and especially its detectives.

A new chapter in the history of murder was about to begin.

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