by Jan Bondeson
In 1838 as well as now, French-speaking people were known for their reluctance to learn foreign languages. Since the options to learn English back in France or Switzerland were limited for all but the wealthy, the Foreigner must have been a resident of Britain, most probably London, for some time. How many young Frenchmen were there in London who could speak Italian, and also knew fluent English, and who perfectly matched the description of the Foreigner? Certainly not very many. The better class of London Frenchman was represented by those connected with the French Embassy, and a smattering of businessmen involved in the wine and grocery trades; these individuals could usually speak good English. At the lower end of the social spectrum, there were quite a few restaurant cooks and waiters, hotel servants of every degree, as well as a variety of mariners; these men were usually well-nigh monoglot. As a French-speaking gentleman’s valet with five years of experience in various London households, and a great fondness for nocturnal amusements with the ladies, Courvoisier fits the profile of the Foreigner to perfection. In 1875, Laura Cecilia, Countess of Antrim, told Colonel Harold Malet that sometime in the late 1830s, Courvoisier had come home in the early hours of the morning, panting and bedraggled, and it was suspected that he had committed a murder or a highway robbery.36
We may also speculate about Eliza Grimwood’s cryptic remark to her friend at the Strand Theatre, overheard by The Times reporter John Sharp: ‘I am going out with … He is here.’ This sentence makes no sense whatsoever, but what if Eliza, who spoke no or little French, had in fact said, ‘I am going out with Courvoisier’, pronouncing his name ‘Coor-voos-hier’ like an English speaker would? Then there is the matter of the statement of Catherine Edwin, namely that she thought the name of the Foreigner was very similar to that of one of the men who had taken a shot at the King of France. The chief conspirator in the attempt to assassinate King Louis Philippe in 1835 was Giuseppe Marco Fieschi, who was caught, tried and guillotined. Now compare the names, as pronounced by an English speaker: ‘Fi-e-schi’ and ‘Coor-voos-hier’. Courvoisier was in London at the time of all four murders, and while the three convicted killers of women discussed in Chapter 13 could be excluded as the murderer of Eliza Grimwood, with the greatest of ease in all cases, there is nothing whatsoever to exclude Courvoisier as a suspect. It may be objected that it is uncommon for a serial killer to murder young women for the sake of perverted pleasure, and wealthy men for the purpose of gain, but then we have the talented Richard Brinkley, who murdered his prostitute girlfriends for kicks, before forging the will of an old lady, murdering her and trying to poison the person who witnessed the will but accidentally murdering two other people. The opportunist serial killer, who kills both for pleasure and for profit, may well be a rare phenomenon, but he does exist.37
In his confessions, Courvoisier never explained how he could avoid getting his clothes bloodstained while murdering Lord William. After all, the murder room was a dreadful sight, and liberally sprinkled with gore. It was considered surprising that there were no bloodstains in the remainder of the house, nor any bloody fingermarks on the doors. In his confession, Courvoisier just said that when he cut Lord William’s throat, he had turned up the coat- and shirtsleeves of his right hand. This was manifestly impossible, however, and did not satisfy the curious, since the blood spatter was so very extensive, and would have deluged the remainder of his clothes. Later, before his execution, when he was again asked how he had avoided getting his clothes stained with blood, he delivered the same unsatisfactory explanation. According to John Adolphus, when Sheriff Evans once more asked Courvoisier the same question before he was taken to the scaffold, the murderer explained that he had committed the murder in a state of nudity.38 This remarkable statement was never mentioned in any contemporary newspaper, and may well be untrue.
A story has been stewing for a long time that a profligate young lord, or possibly a general, had been visiting a lady in the house opposite Lord William’s residence. On the evening of the murder, he had seen a young man escalating the stairs with a lighted candle at No. 14 Norfolk Street. When he read about the murder in the newspapers, he realised that he had seen the murderer, but to protect the honour of his Norfolk Street lady friend, he initially did nothing at all. When one of the housemaids became a suspect, Lord X went to see his solicitor, since he alone knew that Courvoisier was the guilty man, but the solicitor advised him to wait a little. Not long after, Courvoisier was discovered to have pawned some of the stolen goods, and Lord X could remain silent.39 Initially, this story seems to provide a neat explanation of what had happened, but it has multiple drawbacks. Firstly, neither housemaid at No. 14 Norfolk Street was ever a suspect; secondly, Courvoisier had never pawned any valuables from the household. Thirdly, there is nothing to suggest that the murderer had washed inside the murder room. A naked man descending the stairs dripping with blood would surely have left bloodstaining on the stairs. Fourthly, the murder house had no bathroom or bathtub. How was the wretched man supposed to get clean after committing the murder, with the use of only a primitive sink and a jug of water, without leaving any bloodstaining behind?
The police inventory of Courvoisier’s wearing apparel shows that the Norfolk Street murderer was the owner of a mackintosh.40 I would suggest that he wore this garment over his clothes while committing the murder, just like the murderer of Eliza Grimwood was presumed to have done. By removing this garment after the crime, and putting it in a bag, he would have avoided any substantial bloodstaining to his clothes. When Courvoisier’s box was searched after the murder, nothing suspicious was found, but when Inspector Tedman searched it a second time several days later, he found a pair of white gloves, a silk handkerchief and a false shirt front, all with slight bloodstaining. During the trial, the audacious Charles Phillips tried to insinuate that the police had planted this false evidence to inculpate Courvoisier, but rightly, he was not believed. I would suggest that these garments were some of those worn by the murderer underneath his mackintosh, and that the story of Courvoisier committing the murder in the nude is a falsehood. One can only speculate why he did not want the real story behind the crime to become public knowledge; was it because he knew that the murderer of Eliza Grimwood had been clearly seen to carry a mackintosh on a perfectly fine summer day, or because the Ripper of Waterloo Road had made use of the same stratagem to avoid bloodstaining to his clothes during all four of his crimes?
15
THE BEAUTIFUL CORPSE
In the eighteenth century, criminals in general and murderers in particular fell into three categories. A few murderers were popular characters, working-class heroes who stood up against the authorities: the highwayman Dick Turpin, the protagonist of many a story and legend, stands out among them. In reality, Turpin was quite a cowardly character who shot down the Epping Forest keeper Thomas Morris in cold blood.1 The highwayman Claude Duval and the daring jailbreaker Jack Sheppard were also the subject of legend and admiration.
Another minority of murderers were regarded with pity and compassion, none more than the apprentice George Barnwell, who became corrupted after an affair with a prostitute and was lured into stealing from and in the end murdering his uncle. There is nothing to suggest that the sentimental story of George Barnwell has any truth to it, or that the man ever existed, however.2 The schoolmaster and scholar Eugene Aram, who murdered his friend Daniel Clark in 1744, and disposed of his remains in a cave in Knaresborough, was also viewed with interest and some degree of sympathy. Although goods belonging to Clark were found in Aram’s garden, there was not enough evidence for him to be tried for murder, although there was much local gossip about him. On being set at liberty, Aram left his wife and got a job as a schoolmaster in London. When Clark’s remains were found inside the cave in 1758, Aram was arrested and tried for his murder; after being found guilty, he was hanged at Tyburn. The sad fate of the scholar turned murderer has been told and retold over the years, and it inspired Thomas Hood’s poem ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram’.3
Eugene Aram murdering Mr Clark, from Vol. 2 of Wilkinson’s Newgate Calendar.
The vast majority of eighteenth-century murderers, however, were viewed simply as inhuman monsters; they could not count upon any sympathy whatsoever, and the cautionary tales of their exploits were told in a variety of Newgate Calendars. Charles Drew, who murdered his father in 1740, and Matthew Henderson, who murdered Lady Dalrymple in 1746, were typical Newgate Calendar villains, as were that mariticidal trio, Mary Aubrey, Catherine Hayes and Amy Hutchinson, and the sadistic Elizabeth Brownrigg, who murdered one of her servant girls in 1767.4
In early nineteenth-century London, literacy was increasing, and there was a vigorous newspaper press, catering to readers who were often keen to read about the latest criminal news. At this time, several factors contributed in making a ‘media murder’. Firstly, the general gruesomeness of the crime or crimes, and the number of victims: having a mass murderer on the loose in the metropolis was a media sensation of the highest order. This was never more apparent than in the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811, where an unknown assassin went into a draper’s shop and murdered the entire Marr family: husband, wife and son, and a young apprentice lad as well. Hundreds of people came to see the murder house, and outside it was such a throng of spectators that Ratcliffe Highway became well-nigh impassable. Twelve days later, Mr and Mrs Williamson were murdered at their tavern, the King’s Arms in New Gravel Lane. A man named John Williams was arrested for the murders, and he later committed suicide in prison. Not only were the Ratcliffe Highway murders featured in the newspapers, but there were prints showing Marr’s shop, the King’s Arms murder pub, and the procession taking the body of Williams through the Wapping streets to a suicide’s grave at the crossroads. The reason the Ratcliffe Highway became one of the earliest media murders was simply that the East End people were frightened of being murdered themselves.5
Charles Drew guns down his father, from Vol. 3 of the Malefactor’s Register.
Other Victorian serial killers, like the Rugeley poisoner Dr William Palmer and the Northern Borgia Mary Ann Cotton, who poisoned three of her husbands and eleven of her thirteen children with arsenic, also became criminal celebrities, as did the baby-farmers Amelia Sachs and Annie Walters. Another element influencing the media popularity of recent murders were if some person of high rank had been involved, like the eighteenth-century murderer Earl Ferrers, the murder victims Sir Theodosius Broughton and Lady Dalrymple, and for that matter Lord William Russell himself. The Radlett murder of 1823 was another ‘media murder’ of its time: the gambler John Thurtell and his cronies Hunt and Probert had invited the wealthy solicitor Mr William Weare, to whom Thurtell owed £300, for a weekend of gambling at Probert’s country cottage. On the way there, Thurtell shot Weare in the face with a pistol, and then finished him off with a knife and the pistol butt. The corpse was thrown into a pond, and the three miscreants went on to amuse themselves in the cottage all evening, eating, drinking and carousing. In the end, Thurtell was hanged, Hunt was transported to Australia, and Probert, who had given evidence against the other two, was later executed for another crime. Thurtell’s wax effigy was exhibited at Madame Tussauds for 150 years, and a mug with his portrait enjoyed good sales. The murder of William Weare owed some of its fame to being a cold-blooded and premeditated act, but more to the constant immorality of the murderous trio, who liked prizefighting, gambling, partying and bad company.
Mary Aubrey murdering her husband, from Vol. 2 of Wilkinson’s Newgate Calendar.
The mariticidal Catherine Hayes, from the first volume of the New Newgate Calendar (London 1863).
The execution of Catherine Hayes, from the first volume of the New Newgate Calendar (London 1863).
Murderesses were viewed with particular revulsion, the aforementioned husband-killers and baby-farmers in particular. In 1849, the married couple Frederick and Marie Manning murdered the moneylender Patrick O’Connor, stole his money and railway shares, and disposed of his remains underneath the kitchen floor. There was widespread public interest in this murderous couple, who were eventually captured, tried and convicted for the murder. Marie Manning was a native of Switzerland and, just like Courvoisier, she had entered service as a domestic servant; she equalled her countryman with regard to amorality and cunning, and many people found it equally revolting and fascinating that a woman had taken an active part in a premeditated murder plot for profit.6
Matthew Henderson murdering Lady Dalrymple, from the first volume of the New Newgate Calendar (London 1863).
Another, more obscure cultural motif that could make an early Victorian media murder was that of the ‘beautiful female murder victim’. As outlined by the American scholar Daniel A. Cohen, there was an unwholesome public interest, on both sides of the Atlantic, in cases of women being murdered by men for sexual motives.7 The typical scenario was that a young and attractive unmarried woman was murdered by a young unmarried man, in the context of a romantic encounter gone wrong; the murder victim had a sexual ‘past’ and her seduction or ‘fall’ was directly related to her murder. There was typically more than a hint of necrophilia, with graphic and salacious descriptions of the victim’s corpse. Dr Cohen attempted to link the cult of the beautiful female murder victim to medieval court romances, but not with much success, and I would be disposed to suggest that this particular cult began around the year 1800, and enjoyed its culmination from 1820 until 1840. As judged from the sometimes unwholesome interest in Mary Kelly, the fifth and youngest victim of Jack the Ripper, and the Black Dahlia mystery in the United States, remnants of it flourished well into modern times, and it may well still be influencing tabloid journalism today.
Maria Marten and the cottage where she lived, from the Romance of Crime (London 1860).
Corder wooing Maria Marten, from the first volume of the New Newgate Calendar (London 1863).
Maria Marten, who was murdered in the Red Barn at Polstead, Suffolk, in 1828, was an early and prominent English ‘beautiful female murder victim’.8 Maria was born in the year 1801, the daughter of a mole-catcher who lived in a cottage in the village of Polstead. A good-looking, dark-haired wench, she was seduced by Thomas Corder, the son of a wealthy local farmer, already in her teens, and she gave birth to a child that died young. Maria then had an affair with the well-to-do yeoman farmer Peter Matthews, and gave birth to yet another child. Matthews did not want to marry Maria, but at least he paid her some maintenance money for his son. The feckless Maria went on to enjoy other village intrigues, to the embarrassment of her father and stepmother, who wanted to see her married and settled down. In 1826, Maria met William Corder, the younger brother of Thomas, who had been her first lover. William was a short, ugly young man wearing a strange, over-large cap, but Maria was impressed with his wealthy family, and willingly became his mistress. They had yet another child, and when it died at the age of four weeks, Corder took the body away and buried it in secret. He assured Maria’s father and stepmother that he still wanted to marry her, but in reality, he was getting tired of his mistress and wanted to get rid of her. In the end, he lured her to go to the Red Barn in Polstead, and here he shot and stabbed her to death and buried the body in a shallow grave. But although Corder assured Maria’s father and stepmother that she was still alive and well, and lodging with his friends in Ipswich, they were getting increasingly apprehensive. In the end, the stepmother, who may well have known more about proceedings than she wanted people to believe, told a story that she had dreamt of Maria being murdered and buried at the Red Barn. Excavations proved this story to be nothing but the truth. Corder, who had absconded to London and married a woman who taught at a school in Ealing, was arrested, tried and convicted of murder, and hanged at Bury St Edmonds in front of a great crowd of people. More than 1 million execution broadsides, priced at a penny each, were sold to the populace.
There was immediate interest in the R
ed Barn Murder, and Londoners made excursions to Polstead to see the Marten family’s cottage, Corder’s house and the Red Barn itself. Maria’s gravestone at Polstead cemetery was eventually chipped away to nothing by souvenir hunters, and the planks of the Red Barn itself were made into memorabilia toothpicks and paperweights, until it eventually burnt down in 1842. Corder had been dissected after the execution, and his skin had been tanned and used to bind a book about his trial. His mounted skeleton was used, for many years, to teach the nurses anatomy at the West Suffolk Hospital.9 His clothes, and the rope used to hang him, were also put on exhibition. In the popular retellings of the Red Barn Murder, the blackguard Corder was transformed into a wicked squire, capable of any crime, and intent on seducing the innocent village beauty Maria. Her somewhat colourful past, with three bastard children all with different fathers, was only hinted at. Corder’s constant immorality did not need to be exaggerated: there were rumours that he had murdered his own child with Maria to get rid of an encumbrance, that he had enjoyed an affair also with Maria’s stepmother, who was just one year older than her, and that he consorted with cattle-rustlers and stole pigs from other Polstead farms just for the fun of it. After murdering Maria and absconding to London, Corder had advertised for a wife in the Morning Herald and The Sunday Times, getting no fewer than ninety-eight replies from various metropolitan ‘lonely hearts’. From this harem of candidates he chose Miss Mary Moore, whom he married in Holborn; they were teaching at a school in Brentford at the time of his arrest. There was a series of Staffordshire pottery figures of Maria Marten, William Corder, and the Red Barn, and the Victoria & Albert Museum has a set of marionette puppets used to re-enact the Red Barn Murder before an enthusiastic audience. There were several fictional and semi-fictional accounts of the Red Barn Murder, and a play based on the case was the most frequently performed in Victorian times. There was also a 1935 melodrama starring Tod Slaughter as Corder, and a 1980 BBC drama based on the case.