The molecatcher's daughter

Long before Truman Capote, there was James Curtis, the journalist who created modern crime reporting. Known for his eccentric and tenacious style, it was not until a gruesome case in Suffolk in 1828 that he really got inside a murderer's skin. By Paul Collins.

The letters arrived in the winter of 1827 at Mr Foster's shop on London's Leadenhall Street, dozens of them written in the careful quill-scratches of women from across London. There were those that immediately cut to the matter at hand: "I propose meeting you tomorrow at twelve o'clock," summoned one, "I shall be... distinguished by wearing a black gown, with a scarlet shawl, white handkerchief in my hand." In another, a 22-year-old orphan wasted no time. "You will favour me by calling to-morrow November 30th, between the hours of four and five," she commanded. "Be punctual..."

But he was not punctual.

There were those, as always, who insisted they'd never done this before: "Now, I am not generally disposed to view advertisements of this description in a very favourable light, but..." one started. Some refused to describe themselves at all - "I say nothing of my personal appearance, as I propose ocular demonstration" - while others trustingly revealed themselves to him. "I am considered a pretty little figure," wrote one. "Hair nut-brown, blue eyes, not generally considered plain, my age nearly 25."

But he did not care how they looked.

Others tried banter. "Although your advertisement reads very fair," one teased, "there may be some little trick on your side." Another poked at him that "I beg to answer your advertisement of last Sunday, but really think it nothing but a frolic..." Others, less confident, fumbled through misspellings and plainly bared their own desperation to him. "I think Providence as ordained that you and I shood come together," an 18-year-old wrote hopefully, "for I am not very pleacntury situated myself..."

Words, words, words. It didn't matter. They'd wait for him, he wouldn't show up, and they'd walk home through the streets of London alone and disappointed.

The letters made for piteous reading, if only someone would read them. But Mr Foster didn't care: it wasn't his job to care. They weren't his letters. The missives arriving in his stationer's shop were for a boarder who lived down the street, a supercilious young man who had advertised for matrimony in the Times under no name, just two initials: AZ. A day passed, then a week, then months, and soon Foster hardly noticed AZ's pile of unopened letters. He was too busy selling his wares to Londoners, in any case; some of the paper he sold might well have come right back into his shop, scribbled out into these hopeless missives. And, well, that was just good business, wasn't it?

Thomas Marten's wife kept having bad dreams.

He was used to her complaining, of course. But lately she'd had stranger complaints than usual: grim and fantastical bad dreams. And that was a shame, but he had his own work to be doing. He went out to prepare for a day of his fated vocation in the little village of Polstead - for Thomas was the local molecatcher, no small job in a farming area of Suffolk - and he humoured his wife's premonition that he would find something in the barn across the field from their cottage. He cleared some old hay and debris from a floor in one corner: nothing there.

Or rather, something was not there: one patch lacked the tamped-down hardness of the rest of the floor. The soil felt a little loose. That seemed odd. Hefting up his mole-spike, he plunged it down into the dirt floor of his barn. It was... it was stuck.

He pulled it back up, and a foul smell filled his nose. A dirty lump was impaled on the tip of his mole-spike, but it was not a mole. No, it was - something else. Flesh.

Thomas began to dig. The smell grew sharp and choking, and soil moist and foul below his digging hands. A form began to emerge: a rotting buried sack, a ridge of bone exposed in the dirt. A flap of rotted flesh. Teeth. A green scarf... It didn't make sense. How could it?

She was supposed to be in London...

The Sunday inquest was held in Polstead's local pub, hardly an unusual choice for a small village in those days. This snug old building, where so many men and women of the village had contemplated their hard lives, would now serve for contemplating an even harder death. The inquest jury came in, sobered by what they'd just seen down in the barn - the body, stuffed head first into a sack, was all too easy to identify. The jury waited patiently as Thomas Marten, sitting in the bar and looking utterly stricken, recounted his story to coroner John Wayman.

"I am the father of Maria Marten," he began, "who has had three illegitimate children, the last of which was by William Corder. I was not at home when she went away. I frequently saw Corder afterwards, and inquired about my daughter who he said was very well."

The father laboured under his grief in the dimly lit pub. Yes, the children were all accounted for, if you could call it that: one had miscarried, two had died in infancy, and another lived with a grandfather. So there was nobody watching out for Maria, exactly - nobody who relied upon her. But hadn't he wondered why he never heard from his wayward girl in 10 months, then?

"I asked him why she did not write," the father admitted. "He accounted for it by saying that she had a sore hand. Another time he said, 'She is so busy when I am with her that she has no time to write.'"

Busy? Oh yes - for Corder had told him that they'd got married.

There were already some newspaper reporters on hand, and their transcriptions in the pub continued undeterred by the father's grief. Now here was a story: a local girl with a tarnished reputation - an offer of honourable marriage - then the family living unaware for nearly a year with her body underfoot, thinking all along she was living in London, and... The girl hadn't even made it past the property line.

Everyone knew who'd done it. The only real question left for the reporters to wonder was: when would their colleague Jimmy show up?

James Curtis was part of the first generation of reporters to work the crime beat. Of course, criminal proceedings had always held a fascination for readers: ever since the 1600s there'd been a roaring market in broadsheets that relished the details of a grim crime and a malefactor's bloody end, usually with a crude accompanying woodcut showing them dangling from a gallows. By 1774, these accounts were gathered together in the immensely popular Newgate Calendar.

But the fly-by-night pamphleteers and court transcript anthologies found themselves up against a tide of cheap penny newspapers in Britain in the 1820s. What these papers needed was a new class of writers to straddle the simplistic crime narratives of old with the often confusing and undigested testimony of court records. What was needed, in short, was modern crime reporting. Competition became very intense, as when the editor of a Saturday newspaper stumbled one Thursday night upon a fresh suicide dangling from a tree; he was so mortified that a Friday paper would scoop him that he cut down the victim and hid him overnight in his own cellar, reasoning that he could then "find" him the following night in time for the Saturday edition. The plan went awry when a servant found the strangled body; the arrested editor only escaped a capital charge of murder when a suicide note was rather fortuitously discovered in the deceased's coat.

But of all the reporters plying their trade in London, none was quite so singular a character as James Curtis. A writer for the Times, Curtis was famed for not having missed an Old Bailey session or an execution in London in decades: he was, in short, quite possibly the most knowledgeable crime reporter that had ever lived. How did he do it? To begin with, the man had the decided advantage of being an insomniac. Curtis typically stayed up far past midnight, only to rise again before 4am - if he rose much at all, as the fellow was quite fond of sleeping fully dressed in his chair. One year he positively outdid himself by going 100 days straight without once lying flat on a bed.

Curtis was the original shoe-leather reporter, with an encyclopaedic intimacy with the streets of London and its denizens that came from a horror of any form of locomotion save walking; he utterly refused to use a horse or coach. Once up from his armchair in his rumpled clothes, he invariably set out from his flat to walk upward of eight miles in the predawn hours, starting out near his house at Farringdon Market, and making a peculiarly coiled loop - often retracing his steps several times over - through the vegetable sellers at Covent Garden Market, down through Hungerford Market, and milling with the famously foul-mouthed fishmongers at Billingsgate as they laid out Thames oysters, Scottish salmon, and Norwegian lobsters upon the stroke of their market's 5am opening.

By the time he reached the opening of the Old Bailey, the sun was up and he was ready to write. The other reporters were only just now rubbing the sleep out of their eyes and stumbling in; none could hope to compete with Curtis, and they didn't really try. Curtis alone recorded every trial, regardless of whether it had any news interest, quite simply because he liked to keep his own record of the court. Such a monumental task would have crippled the hand of any other journalist. But Curtis was known to have a fearsome ability at shorthand - he was so fast, in fact, that he published his own guide, titled Shorthand Made Shorter.

He was at the court before they arrived, and he would stay after they left. Impervious to any need for sleep, he'd stay up all night with men condemned to die in the morning. Forsaken by the rest of the world in their final hours, they would pour their souls out to him. And then, when taken to the scaffold, his kindly face would be one of the last countenances they would see before the stifling hood, and the final fitting of the rope around their neck. And so it was that nobody wondered at Curtis being the one who invariably got the story. In this strange, rumpled man there was the most perfect combination of talents ever known for crime reporting: they only awaited the perfect criminal to set them into motion.

By the time the Polstead inquest resumed to take account of William Corder's arrest, some 15 competing reporters were crowding and bustling into the little room: nobody had ever seen anything quite like it, and the small-town officials were irked by their big-city visitors. No notes, the Coroner ordered. Put your paper away. The reporters were dumbfounded. No notes? Just who did the learned gentleman think he was? One of the London reporters, another tartly noted, "said that he had been 15 years in the habit of attending similar inquiries, and this was the first time he was prevented from performing his duty." The murder, the inquest, the media themselves: the whole affair was metastasising into something unaccountably strange and new.

As for Curtis, he'd taken his time to get up to Polstead: as always, he was travelling on foot. He set out on St Swithin's Day, 15 July of 1828, to trudge over 50 miles from central London to the quiet little village in Suffolk. Along the way he had plenty of time to reflect on the facts of the case as they were now known. Maria Marten, 20 years old at the time she departed from home: she was said to have been very pretty and fond of fine clothing, which was a dangerous combination for a small-town servant girl. One lover had been a member of the visiting gentry who flattered her with gifts, but proved less interested after she became pregnant. To the squire's credit, though, he did regularly send her a £5 cheque to support his offspring.

Then there was Thomas Corder, the strapping son of a wealthy local farmer. She bore a child by him as well, but this one died in infancy. The father followed soon after, plunging through the ice of a pond whose thickness he'd misjudged. And then there was William. He was Tom's younger brother, which was awkward enough, and it grew even more awkward in short order: she now became pregnant by her late lover's brother. This child also quickly perished.

Three children by three different men, and all illegitimate. By now Maria had a stepmother only a few years older than her, and perhaps the new Mrs Marten wanted her out of the house. Though Maria's exasperated family pressed William to propose, he was diffident. But then, curiously enough, something changed. Yes, he decided, they would get married! They could elope. But he insisted they leave in secret, claiming that he'd heard Maria was about to be arrested for loose morals.

And so, hopeful for a settled life at last, she said her goodbyes to her stepmother and sister and slipped away with her beau. They were last seen heading towards the Red Barn on 18 May, 1827; far beyond that lay their final destination of Ipswich. Maria walked alongside her new fiancé and off into oblivion.

People die all the time, but the cherry fair comes but once a year. And so instead of taking a coach into Bury St Edmunds and lingering at the courthouse, Curtis's instincts led him somewhere altogether different: he went to the Polstead Fair and wandered around its rustic entertainments, quietly making notes. Yes, of course the locals there knew young Mr Corder. Yes, they could take a minute to talk about it. And a lot of people did want to talk about it.

Two weeks - yes, he'd spend two weeks here.

Living inside the very place where a crime happened was an unheard of thing for a reporter, but something told him it was the only way to really get the story. And it was going to be a story. By going to the Polstead Fair, Curtis had learned something: the murder of Maria Marten was turning into something much, much bigger than anyone could have imagined. As it was, the news out of Polstead was literally changing the media itself: the infamous Red Barn, that place of sex and death, was now termed The Polstead Golgotha, while other headlines screamed the Polstead horror. The story was so big that the Weekly Dispatch earned the dubious typographic honour of inventing the device of all-capitalised headlines with tantalising subheads to hype the story.

People were crowding in from the outlying villages, and even now - her body still scarcely buried - at the fair there were puppet shows re-enacting Maria's grisly murder. The trial hadn't even started yet, and the case was entering the realm of myth. Drinking cider under the hot sun and eating handfuls of the fair's cherries, the swelling audiences milled about to watch Maria die and die again.

'He's coming! He's coming!' the cry arose the next morning from outside the courthouse in Bury St Edmunds.

What? - the magistrates and counsels had scarcely a moment to wonder as they stepped down from their carriages. The crowd surged towards the door, and court officials held on for dear life: two lost their wigs, another his court robes, and one was lifted right off his feet by the tide. Hands grabbed at them and wallets and hats went missing. The crowds were such that press-only tickets had been issued for the courtroom, and constables pushed the crowd back again, bickering with the populace - "No preference," indignant citizens yelled; "a court of justice is free and open to all!" It took an hour just for the bewildered reporters to get inside and proceedings to start.

Inside the stifling courtroom a wonder awaited: the coroner, after his small-town fumbling of reporters at the inquest, was now determined to show them a real trial. The room was packed with family members of the deceased and the accused, with lovers, her neighbours, the murderer's old co-workers, the arresting constable - all witnesses in a chronology leading to the murder. There was a doctor ready to testify about the corpse's wounds. And on a table lay beautifully detailed wooden models of the Red Barn and the surrounding cottages, especially created by a local craftsman so that the witnesses could point out where each event had occurred. It was, in short, a modern murder trial, the like of which no one had ever seen before.

Mr Aspell, the clerk of assize, read the indictment aloud to the courtroom, and kept reading it, and it went on and on. The accused was charged with shooting Maria Marten... and stabbing her.

And strangling her.

And burying her.

And...

What the hell was going on outside?

The reporters looked out of the window: desperate women spectators, barred from the courtroom so as not to harm their delicate sensibilities, were throwing up ladders against the sides of neighbouring buildings. They were - good Lord - the ladies were climbing on to the rooftops to get a view into the courtroom. The defence attorney, Mr Broderick, had already seen enough - What kind of trial was this? Did his Lordship know that, among the rabble outside, a preacher had come up from London and preached at the Red Barn to a crowd of 10,000? "This is not all, my Lord," Broderick continued. "For, in the very neighbourhood, and indeed, in all parts of the country, there have been puppet-shows representing this catastrophe... Is there not a camera obscura near this very hall at this moment, exhibiting him as the murderer?" What fair trial could there be now?

And yet a trial there would be. The family was brought forward to identify the effects of the deceased. Marten's lover Peter Matthews was called forward: the father of her first child, he'd been quietly sending £5 remittances for the upkeep of his son Henry, and it had become obvious that last spring Corder had stolen one of these cheques. Theft of the mail, theft of a poor mother's child support, forging cheques at the bank; these were the sort of things that got a man sent to Botany Bay. When Matthews figured out what had happened, Corder had been absolutely terrified in his letters to him, beseeching him to "forgive the enormous crime." Which he did - not knowing that, in Corder's desperation to rid himself of the single mother who could now throw him in jail if he didn't marry her, his correspondent might have committed an even more appalling offence.

The young wife of the grieving Thomas Marten was called. It was Ann Marten who had the bad dreams fearing for Maria's safety, and Ann who had a weirdly prophetic dream that specifically instructed her husband to dig in the Red Barn. Accounts of the trial marvelled at the wondrous sagacity of dreams, how murder will out, and so forth. But a cynic might notice that, though they were unrelated and almost the same age, portraits of Maria Marten and Ann Marten show them to be strikingly similar. One might wonder whether a man attracted to the one might have fancied the other - or why it was that she was the sole witness to Maria's departure - or why it was that her dreams started only after Corder's letters and visits from London had stopped.

Yes, a cynic might wonder about that - but the prosecutor did not.

"I am a surgeon, and I live at Boxford," stated his witness, who identified himself as John Lawton. He'd seen the body right after it was uncovered. In fact, he'd brought something with him today: numerous pieces of clothing so rotted with time and viscera as to be almost utterly formless. Among them were two handkerchiefs. "This I found under the hips," he rummaged, "and this I took off her neck... It was drawn extremely tight, so as to form a complete groove around the neck. It was apparently done for the purpose, as if pulled by some person. It was drawn sufficiently tight to have killed anyone - I mean to have produced strangulation... There was [also] an appearance of an injury having been done to the right eye, and the right side of the face, apparently. It appeared as if something had passed deep into the eye, deep into the orbit, injuring the bone on the right side of the nose... Upon my subsequent inspection, I [also] found something had penetrated between the fifth and sixth ribs, and there was a stab in the heart which exactly corresponded with the wound in the ribs."

But he was not done yet - far from it.

"I have the head here," he announced, "and produce it."

The courtroom gaped in disbelief as Lawton pulled out the decapitated head.

"This is the jaw," he apologised for it falling into two pieces, "and there are two teeth gone. I think, but am not positive, that one of the teeth fell out after death - the other one has been out much longer."

He rambled on. But in the courtroom, all eyes now locked upon one man. For there, in the docket, his face betraying no emotion as he gazed upon the skull, stood the cause of it all: a slender man, fashionably dressed, his youthful face freckled and his slight squint hidden behind studious glasses. For all his life, he'd been known in Polstead as little Bill Corder. But the women of London knew him by a different name: the marriage-minded Mr AZ.

James Curtis would get hold of the Leadenhall Street letters: anyone could, because Corder's opportunistic stationer had dug through the dead letters in his shop and published them as Advertisement for Wives. It wasn't even the first time that Corder's private mail had been shamelessly plundered to make a quick buck: on the night of his arrest he'd written an anguished letter to his mother, which almost immediately appeared in all of the papers. Everyone could know Corder's inner thoughts now. But to contemplate the places and the people behind them - only one person could do that.

And so Curtis stared out from his chamber at the Cock Inn in the dead of night. Maria's house and the Red Barn were within sight of his window. Guards had been posted at the latter, as men had been tearing entire planks off the building as souvenirs; one had even offered to buy the building in order to turn its lumber into commemorative snuffboxes. God, the sheer madness of it all. The reporter's gaze shifted back and forth: "There, in yon once peaceful abode, Maria's infant prattle greeted the ears of her doting parents..." and turning his gaze, "There is the fatal building." He'd been to both, and even personally tested whether anyone in the nearest cottage could hear someone screaming in the barn. They couldn't.

What had happened in there that terrible day?

"Such were my frequent reflections, when the villagers of Polstead were wrapt in midnight slumbers," Curtis wrote, "and there was nothing to disturb my reverie, or divert my attention, save the beautiful warblings of the feathered songster, the distant hooting of the gloomy night-bird, and the twittering of the swallows who reposed in their clay-built nests close to my window."

Turning away from the window hardly lessened the pensive reflection: Curtis had hired out the very inn room that William Corder had been kept in overnight after his arrest. "I had only to withdraw the milk-white curtains of my bed of down, to behold the canopy which lately surmounted the head of that guilty man on the last night he ever saw his natal village. I had heard of his groanings and tossings to and fro, and in imagination I heard them re-echoed, and the chain which fastened his murderous arm to the bedpost seemed to clank in my ear." He could hear Corder's voice in his ear because he really had been hearing Corder's voice. Along with interviewing local families and witnesses, Curtis had befriended the accused himself.

The reporter left the window, lay down in the murderer's bed, and - for once - slept soundly.

Scritch, scritch - the chorus of steel-nib pens moved in counterpoint as the hours passed. Only some of them were held by writers: the others were sketch artists. Their subject fidgeted uncomfortably in the sweltering courtroom on the trial's second day: he wouldn't stay still. "He put on his spectacles," Curtis wrote, "and leaned his back against the pillar behind him, at the same time displaying an oscillating and swinging motion of his body."

Curtis watched as the prisoner pulled out from his coat pocket a blue copybook of the sort that a schoolboy might use. He fiddled with his spectacles, bowed nervously to the court, and read his defence in a wavering voice. He could explain everything, he promised. "Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction," he stammered - for, he claimed, they were on their way past the barn when they'd had a terrible argument. Then something extraordinary happened:

"I turned from her, and had scarcely proceeded to the outer gate of the barn-yard, when I heard a loud report, like that of a gun or pistol. Alarmed at this noise, I immediately ran back, and to my horror I found the unhappy girl on the ground apparently dead... I perceived the fatal weapon, which I took up, when, to add to my terror, and the extraordinary singularity of my situation, I discovered it to be one of my own pistols, which I had always kept loaded in my bedroom. The danger of my situation now flashed upon my mind..."

She had killed herself and, panicked that he'd be accused, he'd buried her. And the stab wounds? They were by the father--it was the spike of the molecatcher that had smashed those holes into the head and heart of Maria Marten. And he, William Corder, was innocent. "It was known to her family that we were going to the barn," he proposed. "Does any man who meditates a crime make known the place at which it is to be committed?" His long and apologetic explanation continued on, with Curtis smoothly shorthanding all of it for his readers. As he wrote, he looked up to appraise the jury. He'd sat in on so many capital cases by now that he knew well the expressions that faces took as they faced the greatest decisions of belief.

They weren't buying it.

It only took 35 minutes to reach a verdict. "Nothing remains now for me to do," the judge intoned, "but to pass upon you the awful sentence of the law, and that sentence is this: That you be taken back to the prison from whence you came, and that you be taken from thence, on Monday next, to a place of Execution, and that you there be Hanged by the Neck until you are Dead; and that your body shall afterwards be dissected and anatomised..."

Corder slumped down in a dead faint.

"... and may the Lord God Almighty," the words hammered upon his prostrate body, "of His infinite goodness, have mercy on your soul."

Continued on page 83

The prisoner was revived, and carried away sobbing. The courtroom emptied slowly as onlookers tried for one last time to get a look at the condemned man in his holding cell. Among the crowd, at least one person was feeling a good deal more embarrassment than morbid fascination. One of the sketch artists for an Ipswich paper had already sent to press a full-length portrait of the infamous Corder: he had, of course, picked out the man who was at the centre of all the court's dread action, the one sitting right at the defence team's table and showing the keenest interest through hour after hour of testimony. Only, he hadn't drawn murderer William Corder at all. He'd drawn reporter James Curtis.

Back at the jail, there was the sound of clattering sledgehammers smashing through brickwork. Corder's journey back from the courthouse was so violent - the crowds had actually snapped the running board off the carriage - that at the jail it was quickly decided that a new door should be specially constructed by punching out a section of an exterior wall. This impromptu service exit, instead of the exposed front entrance, would be used to evade the crowds and spirit the prisoner out to the gallows on Monday. Corder himself was made less recognisable; he was a convicted man now, and had to give up his fashionable suit of clothing for prison garb. His clothes were to be set aside for later use, though; he would be allowed to die in them.

He sat in his cell variously attended by three men: the prison's governor, a chaplain, and James Curtis. Everyone knew why Corder was here in this cell. But what was Curtis doing there?

Well, murder is entertaining.

For centuries, art has represented violent death to a curiously disproportionate degree, and this creates an inescapable circular logic. Murder is often our entertainment: therefore, murder is entertaining. In any civilised society, it's also a highly unusual way to die. Yet ordinary death is profoundly unsatisfying. It lacks a story. A murder has a chronology with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it has clearly defined actors and a motive - and even if it doesn't, it holds out the tantalising promise of these things. An ordinary death is hopelessly diffuse in cause and maddeningly fuzzy in its logic. Who, exactly, is responsible for a heart attack? When did it begin? The avoidance of natural death is an indefinite matter of actuarial odds-making. Murder, on the other hand, lends itself to facile interpretation as a series of binary decisions. If only the victim had not done, say, this one thing, they would still be alive. This - and not the bewildering series of blind and unknowable choices that life actually hands us - means that murder allows us to believe that we can make sense of death. It gives the cessation of someone else's life the comforting predictability and narrative pull of fiction.

And so they pressed him for the details. Had it really been so easy to find a whole new wife? Indeed it had, Corder admitted. In November 1827, six months after disappearing with Maria Marten, Corder was placing London personal ads titled "MATRIMONY". One of the scores of respondents had been Mary Moore, a young schoolmistress from Gray's Inn Terrace; he proposed to her on their second meeting, and then they got married.

"Was that long after your acquaintance?" he was asked.

"About a week," the prisoner said.

Yet their hasty marriage was by all accounts a happy one, and William had liked running a school with her. And there was more: just before his arrest, she'd become pregnant.

He wrote one last letter to his wife - "My life's loved Companion--I am now going to the scaffold..." - and then the prisoner and his keepers walked outside and into a sea of humanity. Even Curtis, for all his years of reporting executions, was dazed by the sight that awaited them. The grounds outside the prison formed a natural amphitheatre - a surprisingly beautiful sloping meadow - and it had been filling up since dawn, fed by streams of spectators from around the countryside. "Every foot of ground was occupied in the spacious pasture," Curtis reported. "We should say that the field alone contained from eight to nine thousand persons, exclusive of those who possessed more elevated situations."

The scaffold was waiting for William Corder: the authorities had been so sure of a conviction that they'd put in a requisition order for it before the trial had even started. The carpenters had delivered their final verdict a full day before the jury did.

There was some agonising fussing over the contraption as the minutes to Corder's death ticked away. The rope was fitted around the condemned's neck, and he spoke his last words: "I am guilty - my sentence is just - I deserve my fate - and may God have mercy upon me!" The trapdoor was released and he fell earthwards with a jerk: the hangman grabbed his waist and pulled him down harder to the finish the job quickly, and after raising his hands upwards a few times - in supplication or in agony - Corder gave a final convulsion and expired.

As the body was cut down, lengths of the rope that hung him were quickly pieced out and sold for a guinea an inch. Within an hour Corder's still-warm body was delivered to Mr Creed, the county surgeon; he made a longitudinal incision through the abdomen and peeled back the skin to reveal the muscles of Corder's chest. This body - stripped of clothes and skin down the waist - was then left upon a table for public display. The crowds were so great that constables were stationed to keep the line moving, and thousands of onlookers filed through the room to stare at the mutilated body.

Curtis watched the procession thoughtfully. He'd been to every such execution in and around London for decades - to more, perhaps, than any man alive in Britain - and there seemed to be something odd about this one. The crowd at both the execution and the viewing somehow felt different, and the reason soon became apparent - indeed, he noticed the difference among the very earliest arrivals, the onlookers pressed up directly under the gallows platform.

"There were," the reporter mused, "a great number of females present."

Why did this murder of a lover in an obscure village so transfix the country, and women in particular? Perhaps the case's peculiar circumstances evoked the deepest fears of modern life. First, there was the notion that one could disappear and nobody would even know. Maria was not a recluse: this was someone with family, a child and a fiancé. She was murdered and buried on her own property, and yet nobody there ever noticed - like a ghost, she was present and yet invisible to her own family. True, one farmhand had detected a stench in the barn that summer; but, he explained in court, he'd just assumed it was a dead rat.

The other key to the case's fascination is Corder's living wife, the much-suffering Mary Moore. Despite Corder's fears, there was great public sympathy for Moore and her newborn child, and after her husband's execution the Suffolk Chronicle even headed a successful fundraising drive for the unfortunate widow. In Mary's fate, many women could see their own. In this new urban world of young people leaving villages for the city, and thrown upon their own devices to form relationships, sometimes all one knew of anyone's past was what they told you. A predator could appear as a loving and gentle suitor - you could even unwittingly marry a murderer and bear his child. What happened to Mary Moore was the culmination of the most paranoid fears of young women of her era.

Polstead quickly became a site of morbid pilgrimage: in 1828 alone, a staggering quarter of a million visitors came to this little village of 20 dwellings. Naturally, hucksters rushed in to meet the demand. You could buy "criminal crockery" made with clay dug up in Polstead, purchase lithographs of the infamous Red Barn, view the wicked William and the doomed Maria at a waxworks, or watch the murder re-enacted onstage. But one of the very first to capitalise on the case was the colourful London hack "Jemmy" Catnach. Along with their confessions, Catnatch's penny execution broadsheets always magically unearthed some doggerel written by condemned men - whether or not, in fact, the dead man had written anything at all. Sure enough, Catnatch gleefully followed a transcription of Corder's confession with eight stanzas of crashingly awful doggerel "by W. Corder"--"Come all you thoughtless young men, a warning take by me/And think upon my unhappy fate to be hanged upon a tree..." Catnatch sold an incredible 1,166,000 copies of this farrago in the aftermath of the "author's" execution.

Catnatch's broadsheet sales were not lost upon Curtis; he couldn't let his Times columns just sit there. What Curtis undertook next - stitching together his newspaper reports into a best-selling book - is such a commonplace practice today that we easily forget that somebody had to be the first to do it. In anyone else's hands, An Authentic and Faithful History of the Mysterious Murder of Maria Marten would have been merely another disjointed trial transcript: but Curtis had gotten inside the story and lived there. Blessed with unique talents and faced with an unprecedented criminal case, Curtis single-handedly invented the modern true-crime book. And there he stopped. Aside from Shorthand Made Shorter - the sole known copy of which is now missing from the British Library - he never wrote another book. But he was well aware that he'd created something special.

"Nothing pleased him more," his colleague James Grant recalled, "than to be called the biographer of Corder."

But what of the molecatcher's daughter? As tourists poured into Polstead, it became a habit among them to hike up to St Mary's Church and chip little flakes off Maria's gravestone as souvenirs. By the end of the century, fame had returned her to where she began: lost and in an unmarked grave. The Red Barn fared even worse, having burned down mysteriously in 1841. But go to Polstead today, and you'll find William's house and Maria's cottage are still very much in evidence, and indeed still inhabited. And locals still contemplate life now as then at the Cock Inn.

Corder himself, in fact, may still be seen... sort of. After the public viewing of his mangled corpse, Corder was stripped nude and the executioner demanded the dead man's trousers as his traditional "undoubted right". Shipped over to the county hospital, Corder's chest cavity was dissected and a plaster cast taken of his head. Doctors deemed him physically healthy, though a phrenologist viewing the head cast propounded that he had enlarged organs of Combativeness and Secretiveness. Like so many criminal skeletons, Corder's bones would be cleansed of their flesh and wired together for display in a medical college. But the autopsy's supervising surgeon, George Creed, decided he had another splendid idea for Corder's remains. He sliced away lengths of Corder's discarded skin, cleaned and tanned it, and then...

He bound a copy of Curtis's book in Corder's own hide.

And so it was that in an obscure Suffolk village, James Curtis achieved the physical embodiment of what every crime writer has merely aspired to ever since: he got inside a murderer's skin.

Paul Collins teaches creative nonfiction at Portland State University. His latest book, 'The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine' (Bloomsbury, £12.99), is out now