At two o'clock the body was exposed on the table in the centre of the Shire Hall; it was naked from the navel upwards. The crucial operation had been performed, and the skin of the breast and stomach turned back on each side. The body measured, as it lay, five feet five inches in length, and presented a very muscular appearance. The face and throat were somewhat swollen and discoloured, the right eye was open, and the left partially so; the mouth was also open sufficiently to show the teeth. The body was taken to the hospital the next day to be dissected, in pursuance of the sentence.
After the execution a spirited bidding took place for the rope which was used by the hangman; and as much as a guinea an inch was obtained for it. Large sums were offered for the pistols and dagger which were used in the murder, but they became the property of the sheriff of the county, who very properly refused to put them up to public competition. A piece of the skin of the wretched malefactor, which had been tanned, was exhibited for a long time afterwards at the shop of a leather-seller in Oxford-street.
We regret to say that little credit is to be attached to the confession which was made by the unhappy man on the night before his execution; for, taking the case in all its bearings, there can be little doubt that the murder was the result of premeditation. The pistols which the wretched malefactor carried with him had, according to the testimony of witnesses who were called for the defence, long been in his possession; but we are at a loss to know with what object he should have carried them in his pocket, loaded as they were, on the day of the murder, unless with a preconceived intention of taking away the life of his unhappy paramour. Upon consideration of the main features of the case, we fear that, revolting as such a conclusion must be to all persons possessing the common feelings of humanity, it must be supposed that the unhappy Maria Marten was enticed by her bloodthirsty assassin to the Red Barn, for the sole purpose of being there murdered. Corder's possession of the gun and the pistols, as well as the circumstance of his having been seen carrying the pickaxe to the barn, all tend to confirm this belief; and if a motive be looked for sufficient to induce the commission of this most heinous offence, a second murder, namely that of the infant child of the malefactor and his victim, and a desire to conceal a secret which he knew to be in the possession of the latter, and which might have been employed by her to the detriment of her seducer, may be at once assigned. There can be little hesitation in imputing so fearful an addition to his offence as that to which we have alluded to a man, whose cold-blooded villany shines through every passage of his connexion with his miserable victim, and of his subsequent life. His conduct in buoying up the anxious and inquiring hopes of the girl's mother after the murder, in so long residing on the very spot where his crime had been committed, probably in the daily habit of visiting the very barn, which was at once the scene of the death, and the grave of the wretched girl, exhibit him to have possessed a heart callous to the feelings of a man. Frightful, however, as was his crime against society, awful as was the expedient to which he resorted to get rid of what he deemed an annoyance and an obstruction to his wishes and comfort, he committed a no less dreadful offence against the welfare and happiness of the woman whom he made his wife, in permitting her to enter into the bonds of matrimony with him--a wretch, for whom even the punishment which he received at the hands of justice was scarcely retributive; knowing, as he did, that accident, one false step of his own, a persevering inquiry as to the place of abode of the girl Marten, would at once and for ever blast the hopes which she might have formed of future peace and domestic felicity. The mode in which he proceeded in this new insult to humanity, at once exhibited a heart upon which the recollection of past guilt could produce no effect.