Hey Thoughty2 here.
Let me tell you about a beautiful and very real 19th century love story involving a spellbound
couple in love, a quaint little barn in the English countryside and a bunch of body parts
sold at auction.
Well I never said it was a love story with a happy ending.
In 1827 at 22 years of age William Corder of Polstead, a sleepy English village in Suffolk
planned to elope to that most classic of elopement locations, Ipswich, with Maria Marten, the
daughter of a local mole catcher.
They had planned to meet in the middle of the night, at the local Red Barn, so named
because of its red roof.
And so Maria met Corder in the Red Barn that night and she was never seen alive again.
Corder fled Polstead without talking to anyone.
I know, he didn’t even leave a note saying I’ve just slaughtered my girlfriend in that
creepy looking barn, the cheek of it!
Maria’s remains were later discovered buried in a grain storage bin at the Red Barn.
So I think the elopement went really well.
Corder evaded capture for some time but he was eventually tracked down 90 miles away
in Brentford, London, where he had managed to find a new lucky wife and was running a
ladies boarding house, the natural career progression for any aspiring young psychopath.
After his capture the local newspapers reported that he was found “…in parlour with 4
ladies at breakfast, in dressing gown & had a watch before him by which he was 'minuting'
the boiling of some eggs.”
Let the man finish boiling his goddamn eggs before slapping the cuffs on him, that’s
just downright rude.
But something about this murder and boiled egg fanatic caught the public’s attention
and in a big way.
The media all over Britain were reporting of William Corder’s story of elopement,
betrayal, murder, red barns and eggs, those poor overcooked eggs.
The public went wild for it, they wrote songs and performed plays of the infamous red barn
murder, as it has come to be known.
Well I guess we all needed something to occupy our days with before Jeremy Kyle brought a
daily dose of inbreeding and social disfigurement into our homes.
Now when I say the public went wild for this unfortunate tale, I mean to say they behaved
like a pack of wild priests in a boarding school.
The red barn itself was raided and completely emptied by the public in search of souvenirs
from the crime scene.
Even the wooden panels from the floor and walls were prised off and sold.
You can imagine it now “murder planks, get your murder planks, only a shilling a piece,
the blood’s still warm folks”.
A novel was published about the case which quickly became a best-seller.
Corder was hanged and immediately afterwards, bits of the rope used to hang him were sold
to the public and most gruesome of all, his body parts were chopped up and auctioned to
the highest bidders, not for medical purposes, nope, just disturbing souvenirs.
Corder’s skin was even used to bind a book, as can be seen here.
Some say afterwards the book grew hair.
All throughout the 18th and 19th centuries plays were frequently performed detailing
the red barn murder.
Why?
Am I crazy for thinking that’s crazy?
Why did the public get so deeply enthralled with this case?
Overnight William Corder had been raised to celebrity or even rockstar status, yet Corder
was by all accounts a manipulative, lying, cheating, abusive, meglomanic psychopath who
enjoyed chopping up women and hiding them inside piles of grain.
His only redeeming feature was he cared deeply about the doneness of a boiled egg.
In a perfect society should we not forget about such an evil character, confining them
to the annals of history and not give the case so much attention, thereby only glorifying
the horrible act that the killer performed?
Yet we do quite the opposite, we all do, we are all obsessed with the sinister and macabre,
stop trying to hide it, you are too.
I’m just as guilty as the next man of cracking open a beer and enjoying a Netflix documentary
about the next serial killer who may or may not be guilty.
Why are novels, films and TV shows about killers so much more popular than your average romcom?
Even in a world where romantic filmmakers could actually write, I still believe this
would hold true.
Face it the sick general public absolutely loves a good gruesome murder story and the
more kills the perpetrator has to their name the more we lap it up like a sadistic, mentally
ill kitten.
And this has been the case for as long as man with long beard and stubby nose hit man
with beady eyes over the head with big rock, spilling red goo that man can’t drink all
over the cave floor.
Less than 150 years ago Jack the Ripper murdered and disemboweled anywhere from five to eleven
prostitutes in Whitechapel, London.
Yet today he is much as a household name as Jesus or Cillit Bang.
There are many Jack the Ripper fan clubs out there, hundreds of books, plays, songs, TV
shows and films.
All because a crazy man down a back alley, once sliced open some women to see what was
inside.
The ironic thing is Jack the Ripper knew how sick the general public were and how famous
he would inevitably become, because he branded himself.
In a letter that may have been written by the man himself he administered himself the
moniker of “Jack the Ripper”.
I would have gone for Slicy Pete myself, but I guess it’s a personal preference.
The stories of these professional psychopaths are endless.
Such as Dr. Harold Shipman, nicknamed Dr. Death, the doctor who murdered over 250 of
his own patients.
H.H. Holmes, the American serial killer who designed and constructed a purpose built hotel
including hidden rooms and passageways in the walls, for the sole purpose of torturing
and murdering his victims, of which there were an estimated 200.
Luis Garavito, nicknamed The Beast, a Colombian rapist and serial killer who sexually abused,
tortured and killed over 138 children.
And those are just the tip of a very large and deeply evil iceberg.
The Yorkshire Ripper, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway, I could go on and
on all day.
In fact the United States has produced 2,743 serial killers, and the UK is hot on its heels
with 145 psycho murderers on its list.
But have you ever noticed how we glorify these monsters by giving them cool sounding nicknames
Jack the Ripper, Dr. Death, The Beast, The Grim Sleeper, Son of Sam, The Green River
Killer, The Lady Killer, BTK.
It’s like Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson had a lovechild and it made a film about serial
killers.
You can just picture the beautifully pastel coloured introductory title cards.
But don’t you think it's a bit strange how we are quicker to give awesome sounding monikers
to mass murdering psychopaths than to our favourite sports players.
It’s almost like the moment someone disposes of a few people they automatically have a
god-given right to a cool nickname.
And the general public lap it up.
Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung believes it's because we all need to feed our “shadow
self”.
Our shadow self is our dark side, that part of you secretly wants to punch a nun in the
face, even though we know it's wrong.
We all have it and psychiatrists believe that by watching serial killers on TV carrying
out heinous acts and learning how they performed said acts, we are scratching that itch we
all have to explore our dark side, all from the safe comfort of our couch.
Research shows we find indulging our dark side, from afar, therapeutic.
Greek philosopher Aristotle was curious why his fellow humans were obsessed with plays
about horrific things like murder.
Everyone loved a good tragedy.
Aristotle concluded that by experiencing what he called “dark emotions” such as disgust,
fear and depravity we can cleanse ourselves of such emotions.
It’s a kind of self healing, he called this process catharsis.
So according to Aristotle, the next time you’re lying in bed with your wife and that thought
pops into your head again “go on, just put the pillow over her face, it will only take
a minute and I’ll be free”.
You should instead pop on a gory horror film or true crime documentary and experience some
good old catharsis to cleanse that evil little person from your mind.
And if that doesn’t work for you, them I’m afraid you’re just going to have to start
planning where to hide the body.
Another reason why we find serial killers absolutely fascinating is because of how perplexing,
difficult and alien the concept of committing and getting away with multiple murders is
to us.
I’ve never tried it myself but I can imagine it’s really difficult to murder someone
and not get caught, after all the majority of murders are solved, approximately two thirds
of killers are eventually caught.
In today’s world of advanced forensics, ballistics, criminal psychology, CCTV everywhere
and internet and phone tracking, no matter how smart you think you are, only one tiny
mistake needs to be made before you’re found out and cuffs have been slapped on your wrists
faster than you can say “the voices made me do it”.
So naturally we find someone who can avoid being caught for many years whilst committing
more than one murder, sometimes many many murders, absolutely fascinating.
After all, that takes some skill.
On some level we find it impressive.
In the same way we find highly skilled acrobatic skydivers doing twists and turns whilst plummeting
at terminal velocity towards a six-thousand kilometre rock quite impressive.
We feel exhilarated when watching skydivers because it’s a terrifying experience that
most of us would never dream of doing, yet we all secretly want to know how it would
feel, so we can live that experience through watching and learning about somebody else
doing it on our behalf.
In this regard, our fascination with serial killers is no different.
Maybe this psychology also explains why so many people watch horrendously trashy TV shows,
like Keeping up With The Kardashians and Honey Boo Boo, just so we can experience through
others what it would feel like to be that stupid.
There’s another deep-rooted evolutionary, psychological reason for our love of serial
killers.
Uncertainty.
Humans hate the unknown, we always have, the same fear of the unknown can be seen in other
intelligent creatures.
It’s why apes at the zoo always seem so curious of new objects, they’re only interested
because they’re trying to discover if this new object will hurt them or not.
And so too are humans afraid of what may be around the corner, what is beyond the forest
or across the ocean.
During our 200,000 year span as modern homo sapiens we have found a way to deal with our
fear of the unknown, we dominate it.
We can’t predict what a wild animal will do when we meet it, it’s actions are unknown,
so we invented weapons to kill them.
We were afraid of what dangers may lie across the ocean, so we invented boats and we took
our weapons and we dominated the oceans and everything beyond them.
Simply because on a deeply psychological level it terrified us, not knowing what may be out
there.
It has been suggested by many a psychologist that serial killers kill for the exact same
reason.
Because they are afraid, so they feel the need to dominate their environment.
Many have trouble speaking to and becoming romantically entangled with women, so they
instead choose to dominate them through rape and murder, it’s no coincidence that an
overwhelming amount of serial killers throughout history have chosen prostitutes as their targets.
Some may have been beaten and abused as a child so they fear what other humans may do
to them, thus they decide to dominate them.
Serial killers often practice this domination on animals before humans, just as the human
race first practiced dominating cattle and sheep, before using the exact same techniques
to enslave humans during times of war and famine.
As observers we find people dominating others absolutely fascinating, because it teaches
us how to conquer the unknown, we learn what we might do if we were put into the same situation
of either the killer or the victim.
It’s the same macabre reason why horrific car crash videos are so popular online, and
fail videos where people have horrendous, bone-breaking accidents, even if sometimes
they did have it coming.
We aren’t all psychopaths, and although it makes us feel guilty watching these videos,
all we are doing is feeding a primal urge to dominate the unknown, deep down, we just
want to answer the question, what if?
What would happen if I was in that situation.
And by studying serial killers and enjoying true crime documentaries, we find out what
happens if we were to go on a satanic killing spree, and hopefully watching the story of
others unfold before us can dissuade us from following a similar path, because others are
conquering the unknown for us, whilst we stuff our faces with popcorn.
So thank you serial killers, you are providing a vital service for all of humanity.
No wait, I can’t say that, I can’t actually thank them, there are victims after all.
Okay how about, serial killers, you are very, very naughty, but from your naughtiness may
we all learn to be better people, that’s better, I think.
Thanks for watching.