Barbaric Murders - Child victims, lady-killers and bodies in boxes (Infamous Murderers)

by Rodney Castleden

  Tommy Ontko ran the new details through the criminal records database and found he had been arrested twice, once just three weeks before in Miami. Ontko then phoned an old police friend in Florida, who sent him Montes’s photos and fingerprints, which Ontko forwarded to France and Portsmouth. At 7 that evening, Ontko went home to eat alone. As he did so, he started wondering if this Montes really was the same Montes and, if so, whether he was still in prison. When he went in to work the next morning he discovered that Montes was still in prison and for a very significant offence. He had broken into a youth hostel, where he was caught masturbating while standing over a sleeping teenage girl. The previous October Montes had been arrested near another Miami youth hostel carrying a torch and a small pair of scissors, but on that occasion had not been jailed. The scissors were a regular feature of Montes’s attacks; he used them to cut his way through the clothes of his victims.

  More checks on Montes were made in the USA, and Ontko found that Montes was wanted in Germany, Switzerland, Spain and Venezuela for questioning in relation to similar crimes. Tommy Ontko knew then that Montes was the man who had killed Caroline Dickinson.

  Two years before he attacked Caroline Dickinson, Francisco Montes was caught in the act of trying to abduct an Irish teenager from a French youth hostel. The French police released him without charge. He had stalked Valerie Jacques, who was then aged fourteen, for days, following her and her school party from Paris to the Loire valley in 1994. She noticed him following her and staring at her. He broke into the room Valerie was sharing in a hostel at Bléré and tried to attack her. He asked her to go outside and help him fix his car. She looked round the room and saw that everyone else was asleep. She screamed and he ran away. The incident was reported to the hostel proprietor, but the following night Montes got into the hostel again. Valerie was now very frightened. She and the other four girls in her room were the only girls to have no proper security. There was no lock on their door, so they slid a chest of drawers against it. Once again she was woken up by the sound of Montes calling her name and trying to push his way in. She was terrified, jumped out of bed and ran to the far corner of the room. Then she heard the police arriving. The police asked her to identify Montes, but in spite of her identification, he was released with a caution.

  Valerie Jacques only told the rest of her family about the incident when she saw his photograph on television after he was arrested in 2001 for Caroline Dickinson’s murder.

  Montes admitted the sexual assault on Caroline, but denied intending to kill her. In June 2004, at the age of fifty-four, he was sentenced to thirty years in prison.

  Francesco Javier Arce Montes was born on 14 March, 1950 in Gijon in northern Spain. His father, Geraldo Montes, ran a grocery store; he died in 1997. Since the arrest of ‘Javi’ in 2001, the Montes family have moved away, and don’t want to talk about him; ‘you do not choose your relatives’. In a statement to the court in Rennes, Montes’s mother elderly mother disowned him. She moved out of her house when he returned there in 1996 after murdering Caroline. She said, ‘I could not stand living with him any more’, and admitted to being frightened of him. The family pleaded with a Spanish judge to keep him in prison when he was arrested near Gijon for the attempted rape of a teenage girl in 1997, but after only three months in prison he was released. The mother had made three complaints to the police that he had threatened her with violence.

  Montes complained that his upbringing had been difficult, but knew that he had been a difficult person. He admitted to having a poor relationship with his mother and his sister, and blamed them for everything that had gone wrong. He even accused his mother of poisoning his food.

  Montes spent some time living in Britain during the 1990s. Given that he was a serial offender, the British police are now wondering whether he was responsible for sex attacks while living in the Earls Court area of London. Detectives from Swansea will seek permission to interview Montes in relation to a series of unsolved sex attacks in Wales that coincided with a four-year period when he was in Britain. The South Wales Police inquiry has a particular case as its focus; a man attempted to rape a thirteen year old Girl Guide on the Gower Peninsula in 1993, a girl who only escaped when holiday-makers heard her screams and went to her aid. At that time, Montes was working in a restaurant in Swansea. There was also an attack on a fifteen-year-old French girl at Oxwich Bay about seven miles from Swansea. Devon and Cornwall Police are asking all British police forces to re-examine unsolved sexual assaults from 1993 to 1996, though so far there has been little active research, and Scotland Yard said it had already ruled Montes out of any serious sexual assaults in London.

  The one positive result from this sad story is that John Dickinson’s campaign to press the French police into higher levels of activity has led to the routine use of DNA testing in France. John Dickinson is using the successful conviction of his daughter’s killer as the basis for a new campaign for the creation of a global database of DNA to prevent other families suffering the same fate. Interpol is aiming to simplify the process of DNA identification by using a numerical process that will enable rapid preliminary matching; this is then followed up with further laboratory testing to make sure the match is exact. But, as in all such collaborative ventures, ‘We are reliant on the contributions of each member state. While some, such as Britain, are advanced, others are slowing down.’

  PART TWO: THE LADY-KILLERS

  William Corder

  ‘and the Murder at the Red Barn’

  The infamous Murder at the Red Barn was probably the murder that most caught the public imagination in the nineteenth century. It was a dramatic news story, a story of love turned sour, and it soon became one of the stock Victorian melodramas.

  The victim of the crime was Maria Marten. She was born in 1801, the daughter of a humble mole-catcher at Polstead in Suffolk. She was given a good education, rather better than was normal for a girl of her station. She was also a very good-looking young woman with a fine figure and a pretty face. Not surprisingly she was surrounded by admirers, and not very surprisingly she gave way to temptation, not once or twice but several times. She became pregnant by ‘a gentleman of fortune’ who lived in a house nearby, and at the time of her death the child was three years old. She formed a new liaison in 1826, this time with William Corder.

  Corder was the son of a rich farmer at Polstead. He was a smartly and fashionably dressed young man of twenty-four, with a florid complexion. He was naturally attracted to the good-looking Maria, a relationship developed and she had another child – Corder’s child. The infant died shortly after it was born and Corder took the body away at night and disposed of it in haste, by means that he would never discuss. Naturally people wondered whether the child had been deliberately murdered by Corder and disposed of to destroy the evidence. Maria used the scandal that was circulating as a lever on her father to make him agree to a marriage.

  On 18 May, 1827 William Corder called at old Mr Marten’s house to tell Marten that he was willing to marry Maria. He added that no time should be lost, and in order to get the marriage through as quickly as possible it should be as private as possible and by licence rather than by banns. He and Marten agreed on the following day as the day of the wedding. Corder persuaded Maria, who was very unhappy at this way of doing things, to dress in a suit of his own clothes and go with him in disguise to a barn on his farm. It was called the Red Barn.

  At the Red Barn, she could change into her own clothes and from there he would take her in a gig to a church in Ipswich – where they would be married. Maria reluctantly agreed to this strange set of arrangements and Corder went home. Maria followed soon after, carrying an outfit that she could wear for the wedding. Corder had meanwhile managed to persuade Mrs Marten, Maria’s stepmother, that he was determined to make Maria his lawful wife, and that they had to rush the marriage through immediately as he knew there was a warrant out against Maria for her bastard children.

  A few minutes after Corder had l
eft Maria, he was seen by Maria’s brother walking towards the Red Barn with a pickaxe over his shoulder. From that moment on, nothing more was heard of Maria, except Corder’s lies. It was expected that Maria would return from Ipswich within a day or two, but her earlier visits to Corder had been of varying lengths and Corder had undertaken to find her lodgings in Ipswich. Her delayed return was not regarded as ominous or alarming.

  After a fortnight, the Martens began to wonder where Maria had got to. Mrs Marten pressed Corder for an explanation. He said she was safe and well and that he had lodged her some distance away, so that his friends would not discover the fact of his marriage and be annoyed with him. Corder used this style of answer repeatedly when the Martens wanted more news of their daughter.

  In September Corder said he was unwell and visiting the Continent for the sake of his health. Before he went, he expressed concern that the Red Barn should be well filled with stock, and he saw to it himself; it is not clear why he did that. Presumably if the barn was full of cattle it would be rather difficult for anyone to take a spade to the earth floor; in fact in a barn full of cattle no-one would even think of doing that. He took £400 with him before setting off.

  Several letters arrived subsequently, addressed to his mother and Maria’s parents, to say that he and Maria were at Newport on the Isle of Wight, living together as man and wife, yet all the letters carried a London postmark. He also expressed surprise that they had had no answer to Maria’s letter to them describing the marriage ceremony. In a letter to someone else, Corder explained that Maria was unable to write herself because she had hurt her hand. William Corder was now very obviously lying. People started to speculate about what was going on. Mr and Mrs Marten became more and more dissatisfied and alarmed.

  In March 1828, Mrs Marten (Maria’s stepmother) had the same dream on three successive nights. She dreamt that her daughter had been murdered and buried in the Red Barn. Mrs Marten was terrified. These dreams seemed to make sense of her daughter’s disappearance and William Corder’s endless lies and evasions. She was initially reluctant to say anything to her husband because it would sound silly and superstitious, but she became convinced that the dreams contained the truth of what had happened. Eventually she told him and his reaction was as she had anticipated. He would do nothing. She nagged. On 19 April she persuaded her husband to apply for permission to examine the Red Barn, specifically to look for Maria’s clothes. The grain that had been stored in the Red Barn had been removed and at the moment it stood empty. Mrs Marten’s repeating dream had been so vivid that she even knew the exact spot where her husband ought to dig.

  Poor Thomas Marten went into the empty barn, its timber-frame interior latticed with vertical, horizontal and diagonal struts. Marten dug where his wife said he should, in the middle towards one end. The soil was softer there. Before long he turned up the green silk handkerchief (belonging to Corder) which he knew his daughter had been wearing on the day she left their home. Filled with fear and apprehension about what he would find next, he went on digging. Eighteen inches down he found part of a human body. Overwhelmed with horror, Mr Marten dropped his tools and staggered outside to raise the alarm. He knew what he had found and when help arrived and more digging was done his worst fears were realised. He had indeed found the grave of his murdered daughter.

  Maria’s body was badly decomposed, but the dress, which was still in perfect condition, allowed no doubt to remain about whose body it was. The corpse’s teeth were still intact and there were sufficiently distinctive features of the teeth to make it absolutely certain that this was Maria. Maria’s sister Ann recognized the set of teeth from the position of a missing tooth.

  The whole village was in uproar at the discovery. John Wayman, the Bury St Edmunds coroner was notified and a surgeon, John Lawden, examined the body. The coroner opened an inquest at the Cock Inn at Polstead. Lawden said the victim had died violently; there was blood on her face and clothes and on a handkerchief tied round her neck. There was also a visible wound in the throat, which had been inflicted by a sharp instrument. There was another wound in the orbit of the right eye; something had been thrust in which had broken the bones and penetrated the brain. When the body was found, it was partly inside a sack and dressed only in a shift, petticoat, stays, stockings and shoes.

  Everyone’s thoughts turned to William Corder as the murderer. The local constable, Ayres, went off to brief a London policeman, Constable James Lea, in an attempt to find Corder. Lea was given little to go on except a single London address where Corder had been, in the Gray’s Inn Road area, but traced Corder’s movements from address to address, eventually finding him towards the end of April at Grove House in Ealing Lane near Brentford. He was there with his wife of three weeks, and he was – almost incredibly – running a boarding-house for young ladies. Lea had some difficulty in gaining access to Grove House, but Lea pretended to have a daughter he might wish to place at the boarding house, and was shown into a parlour. There he found William Corder sitting at breakfast in his dressing-gown with four ladies. He was holding his watch, timing the boiling of some eggs.

  Constable Lea called Corder to one side to tell him discreetly that he had a serious charge against him. Corder was alarmed and asked if they could discuss it in the drawing room. Did he know a person named Maria Marten at Polstead? No, he knew no-one of that name. Lea handcuffed him and set about searching the house. Amongst other things he found a passport to France dated December 1827 and some threatening letters from a man called Gardener, suggesting that some other offence had been committed that Corder needed to cover up. In the course of the search he found a pair of pistols, a powder-flask and some balls in a velvet bag. The pistols had been bought immediately before the murder from Harcourts in Ipswich. Later, when Mrs Marten saw the velvet bag she recognized it as the bag Maria was carrying when she left their house for the last time. Lea also found a sharp-pointed dagger. This was later identified by a cutler named Offord as being the one he had sharpened for Corder a few days before the murder.

  Corder was taken before magistrate Matthew Wyatt at the Lambeth Street police station and charged with the murder. After that, he was taken straight to Polstead to be questioned by the coroner. Corder’s behaviour seems to have varied between extremes, rather like his complexion, which was seen to change colour from minute to minute during the trial. In London he had been frightened. On the roof of the coach from London to Colchester he was in high spirits, cracking distasteful jokes. At the trial he was overwhelmed by the gravity of what he had done and seemed unconscious of what was going on.

  On arrival at Colchester, Corder and the policemen stayed at the George Inn for the night; Corder was secured by one hand to the bed-post all night.

  Crowds gathered to get a look at Corder when he arrived. He was already an infamous celebrity. Confronted by the coroner, he seems to have realised that it was all lost; he became very agitated. The coroner concluded that Maria Marten, aged 26, had been wilfully murdered by William Corder. Meanwhile, Corder’s unfortunate wife, who knew nothing at all about Maria Marten or the murder in the Red Barn, was still under the impression that Corder was arrested on a charge of bigamy; no-one had the heart to tell her the truth.

  His trial opened on 7 August, 1828 in the shire hall at Bury St Edmunds. Everyone in the neighbourhood wanted to be there. Hundreds of people gathered round both entrances to the shire hall, some arriving as early as five in the morning. The rain fell in torrents, but many stood in the rain for four hours waiting for the doors to open. At 9 o’clock so many people poured into the shire hall that the barristers had to struggle against the press of the crowd, and were repeatedly driven back. When the judge had taken his seat, the names of the jurors were read out, summoning them to take their places, but there were so many people in the building that it was almost impossible for them to get into the courtroom. Nearly an hour later, the jury was still incomplete and they had to be passed over the heads the crowd, some arriving with their coat
s torn, their shoes pulled off and fainting from shock.

  There were crowds elsewhere too, at the gaol and along the road from the gaol to the shire hall. Everyone wanted to catch a glimpse of the infamous murderer, William Corder. Corder dressed carefully for the occasion in a new black suit. He brushed his hair down over his forehead, instead of his usual style which was brushed up in front. Perhaps he thought it made him look less raffish. Corder challenged several of the jurors, so it was some time before a full jury was empanelled. Corder pleaded not guilty. Then the evidence of the identity of the body in the Red Barn – his barn – was described, and the surgeon’s evidence of her violent death. Maria Marten’s brother was also able to give evidence that when Corder left the house of Mr Marten he was carrying a loaded gun.

  Corder was asked to defend himself. He read, quietly and tremulously, from a piece of paper an account of what had happened. When they had reached the barn, he said, Maria had flown into a temper, which had made him angry with her. He had told her he would not marry her after all and made to leave the barn. Then he heard the sound of the gun going off. Maria had shot herself. He had tried to revive her and failed. He had panicked.