July 22, 2025 • 57 mins
In this episode, we examine the story of Sarah Cornell, a young Methodist textile worker who was the inspiration for Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. The difference, of course, is that Hester Prynne wasn’t murdered. And she certainly didn’t kill herself.
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This episode was written by Mary Kay McBrayer
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Diversion audio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
A note this episode contains mature content and quite graphic
descriptions of violence that may be disturbing for some listeners.
Please take care in listening. The morning of December twenty first,
(00:38):
eighteen thirty two was frigid and windy. John Durfey was
thirty six years old. He was a Justice of the peace,
a town councilman, and he was a profitable farmer on
his father's property. John took his team from home down
the hill full of gopher holes to the river. About
(01:00):
quote sixty rods from the house was a haystack. The
haystack was supported with four metal steaks wedged into its
metal at about a forty five degree angle, and each
steak was driven into the ground to keep the stack
from toppling over over the top of it all. A
burlap cover protected the hay from moisture, although this was
(01:25):
a clear morning, no rain or snow. When John durfy
came upon this haystack, he gasped. Hanging from one of
the steaks was the frozen body of a young woman.
Her short black hair was frozen to her face and
covered in frost. Her long black cloak was buttoned to
(01:46):
her throat. Her bonnet was drawn around her chin, and
her shoes lay neatly on the ground beside her. In
the dim sunrise light, John Durfy saw that this woman's
knees dangled four or five inches from the ground, her
feet dragged behind her. He watched her body sway for
(02:12):
just a moment in disbelief before he yelled for help.
Three men responded, and together they started taking the body down.
(02:40):
Welcome to the greatest true crime stories ever told. I'm
Mary Kay mcbrair, author of the true crime book Madame Queen,
the Life and Crimes of Harlem's underground racketeer Stephanie Sinclair.
Today's episode we're calling the Real Scarlet Letter. It's the
story of Sarah Cornell, a young Methodist textile worker who
(03:04):
was the inspiration for Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's book
The Scarlet Letter. The difference, of course, is that Hester
Prynne wasn't murdered, and she certainly didn't kill herself. I'll
tell you all about it after this quick break. It
(03:39):
probably won't surprise you listener to know that I was
always in honors and advanced placement English classes. I was
that nerd who always got the book at pizza. Jasmine
Williams might have beaten me in every other subject, but
I was the accelerated reader. What I mean is I
(04:03):
never didn't do the assigned reading. I tell you, I
read every single word of the Odyssey, and I did
not understand a damn thing. I mean, I understood the
phrases singing me muse, and when Dawn with her rose
red fingers, and how it was really just the barred
buying time basically ancient Greek for what had happened was
(04:27):
But how was a ninth grader supposed to understand that
the only reason athena goddess of wisdom, could get the
warrior Odysseus off of Circe this sex Witch's island is
because Uncle Poseiadin was blackout drunk in Ethiopia, accepting sacrifices
at his own festival. Yes, that is how the Odyssey
(04:50):
actually opens, y'all. Until I had to teach it in
university world literature, I didn't even know that. And I
also did not understand the gravitas of another required ninth
grade reading, that is, of course, Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The
Scarlet letter, I remember scraps. One thing I remember is
(05:10):
that in order for me to slog through the diction,
I kept a tallly of how many times he used
the adjective ignominious. I remember that Hester Prynne was ostracized
for having a child out of wedlock, and I remember
that she would not out her baby's daddy, and that
everyone admired her for it. They did not, however, admire
(05:32):
her enough to accept her back into the community. And
I remember our teacher having to really spell out for
us that the ugly reverend was the father, and my
brain would not comprehend that the reason Hester didn't want
to tell anyone was because it would ruin the minister's reputation.
(05:53):
Even at fourteen, I remember thinking, well, it sounds like
the minister ruined the minister's reputation. And while that is
true and we've come a long way as a society since,
even then, I didn't know just how nuanced that situation
could be. And I definitely didn't know that Nathaniel Hawthorne
was an avid newsreader. Hawthorne was effectively a true crime junkie.
(06:19):
His son called it a quote pathetic craving. Six years
after Sarah Cornell's death, Hawthorne wrote in his journal about
visiting a wax display of Sarah Cornell. That's right, Nathaniel
Hawthorne heard the story I'm about to tell you at
a traveling wax museum. To be featured in Madame Tusso's Today,
(06:44):
one has to be pretty famous. Same then, in her
book The Sinners All Bow, which I referenced for this
episode very thoroughly, Kate Winkler Dawson says that quote being
featured in a wax exhibit indicated that the person had
achieved a certain level of fame or notoriety or infamy,
(07:06):
and this case absolutely achieved that certain level. By the way,
at the end of this episode, I get to interview
Kate Winkler Dawson herself, so make sure you stick around.
It's really a good talk. I should also mention while
we're having this sidebar that Kate Winkler Dawson credits a
co author to her book The Sinner's All Bow. Katherine
(07:28):
Williams wrote what might have been the first true crime
book ever about this case just one year after the
crime itself. That's how we have so many direct quotes
from court testimonies, of course, but also from interviews that
Catherine conducted shortly after the proceedings. This is a component
I will definitely ask Kate about in our interview, and
(07:50):
the fact that Catherine was not a man writing about
this story is definitely relevant, but I'll talk about that
more later. Now back to the story. At the top
of the episode, I explained how John Durfy found Sarah
Cornell and took in everything that he saw, which was
fortunate because he became not only a key witness in
the case, but also a key investigator. John Durfy called
(08:13):
for help when he saw her frozen body. He clocked
that her cloak was buttoned up, her head was uncovered,
and her shoes were neat at her side. John Durfy's
seventy five year old father was the first to arrive
at the scene. Richard owned the property even though John
managed it day to day. John tried to free Sarah
(08:34):
Cornell's body from the cord by quote lifting her up
and slipping the line, but he couldn't. His father told
him to cut her down, so he did. He later
noticed that the reason why he couldn't undo the noose
was because the cord was embedded almost half an inch
(08:55):
into her neck. Once her body was freed, lying on
the ground, John Durfey went to fetch the coroner. A
little later in the morning, in just a few blocks
away from the durfy farm, doctor Thomas Wilbur was about
(09:18):
to have breakfast with his family. He saw from the
window that people ran up and down the street, and
he felt uneasy. He didn't small fire, which he thought
was the most likely reason for panic, but he was
determined not to get involved, that is until a concerned
neighbor summoned him. By the time Thomas arrived on the scene,
(09:42):
a crowd had gathered around the body. No one had
yet identified her. A local Methodist minister named Ira Bidwell said,
when asked quote, she is a respectable young woman and
a member of my church. John Smith also recognized her.
He was the overseer of a weaving room where Sarah worked,
(10:05):
and doctor Thomas Wilbur recognized her too. She was one
of his patients. He knew her well, and her death
clearly shook him emotionally. He removed the cord from inside
her neck with difficulty. Her face was distorted, her tongue
protruded through her teeth, and there was a deep indentation
(10:26):
on her cheek. Thomas had been treating Sarah for months.
He said he was concerned about her mental health. Thomas
believed that she had completed suicide. John Durfy asked the
elderly coroner, Ellahu Hicks, if he could move her body
to his farmhouse, Ella, who agreed. They laid her in
(10:48):
a horse wagon, wrapped in a blanket with hay under her,
and they drove the horses slowly up the smooth road
to the house. This was later important to note because
any marks upon her person would have definitely happened prior
to her discovery. Soon after, the coroner summoned a jury.
(11:21):
I didn't realize this, but for a lot of American history,
coroners summoned juries to rule a cause of death. Doctor
Wilbur suspected suicide, but the coroner's jury would determine if
that was official. The men on the coroner's jury, and
it would have been all men would have had little
or no medical knowledge, just good standing in the community.
(11:44):
You might remember from some of our former episodes that
even coroners didn't need medical degrees because they were just
as often appointed as they were elected. The coroner's jury
was scheduled to meet the following morning, about twenty four
hours after the body's discovery, to determine the cause of death.
They all agreed that it was most likely suicide, though
(12:04):
especially because they refused to examine her body without her
clothes for the sake of propriety. But before that, on
the day of her death, the body had to be
prepared for examination and subsequent burial, and the people who
did that were a group of five or six respectable
(12:28):
matrons from the village who often volunteered for this abhorrent task.
When they began the preparation, they all assumed that Sarah
had died by suicide. It seems like they all pitied
her and assumed that some hard fortune had driven her
to take her own life. Then they removed her cloak,
(12:48):
her dress, and her undergarments, and then they changed their minds.
They later told Catherine Williams quote, there were bad bruises
on the back, and the knees scratched and stained with grass,
as though they had been on the ground during some struggle.
And it got much more intense than that. One matron
(13:10):
had the opinion that Sarah had been violated, which was
the nineteenth century term for sexually assaulted. She thought so
based on the blood and fecal matter in her undergarments.
There were also bruise marks on her abdomen on the
lower part of her belly that fitted large hands. The
(13:31):
thumb prints were inside each hip bone and the fingers
spread over the hips. There was froth tinged with blood
from her mouth and nose as well. It was certain
that her cause of death had been strangulation by hanging.
What was not certain was who had hanged her before
(14:10):
the break I mentioned several key observations that the six
matrons observed on Sarah's corpse. She had bad bruises on
her back and hand shaped bruises over both hips. Her
knees were scraped up. The cord used to hang her
was embedded deep in her undergarments. The matrons found blood
and fecal matter. Doctor Thomas Wilbur described her face as distorted,
(14:35):
with her tongue sticking out. An indentation appeared on her cheek.
Bloody froth came from her mouth and nose. Her hair
was frozen to her face, and the doctor knew from
previous visits as his patient that she was pregnant. The
cause of her death was definitely strangulation, and it seemed
(14:56):
that she had suffered violence. Some of the injuries to
her body might have happened during a suicide, but others,
like the bruises shaped like hands around her hips, it
was clear that someone else had inflicted. Still, Kate Winkler
Dawson reminds us in her book The Sinners All Bow,
just because Sarah suffered violence at the hands of someone
(15:18):
else before she died doesn't mean she was murdered. Even
though it seems like those two things have to go together,
they don't necessarily. It only matters what can be proved
in court. The matrons asked John Durfy to locate burial
(15:42):
clothes for Sarah, and they wanted him to find letters
to or from her family and friends so that they
could notify her people of her death. So John had
Sarah's landlady bring over her belongings. They arrived in a
locked bandbox. Her landlady said the key was probably in
Sarah's pocket, since she always carried it with her. One
(16:06):
of the matrons had indeed found the small key in
her pocket, and when John opened the box, he realized
Sarah had written many letters. He retrieved four letters that
seemed of interest. Two of them were to Reverend Ira Bidwell,
the same Methodist minister who had attested to her quote
(16:26):
good character when her body was discovered. One of them, unposted, unopened,
and undated, said that she wanted to separate herself completely
from the Methodist society. She said, quote, I have not
seen a well or happy day since I left the
Thompson Campground. The meeting at the Thompson Campground was at
(16:50):
the end of August, which is important. What happened there
would determine the course of her trial. The other three
letters were all unsigned but directed to Sarah. One mentioned
two days of meeting depending on whether. Another ended with
right soon say nothing to no one. They weren't threatening,
(17:12):
not overtly. At least, John found more evidence in her trunk.
One was a vial of oil of tansy. John Durfy
mentioned it in the presence of doctor wilburh and it
nowed at him. Sarah had asked doctor wilbur about it
in one of her patient visits. He did not prescribe
it to her. Rather, he cautioned her against using it.
(17:36):
It might have been used for suicide, but in the
nineteenth century it was also used to terminate pregnancy, to
varying results. Oil of tansy was definitely dangerous, regardless of
its intended use. When doctor wilburh learned of its presence
in her trunk is when he divulged her secret, he
(17:57):
knew Sarah to be pregnant. He also felt that he
knew at this point the cause of Sarah's supposed suicide.
He caught Reverend Ira Bidwell and said that his brother,
a fellow Methodist minister named Ephraim Avery, had made Sarah
so unhappy. He had been manipulative and cruel, and doctor
(18:22):
Bidwell said to the whole party that despite ruling this
death a suicide, he thought she deserved a Christian burial.
Sarah Cornell was one of Reverend Ira Bidwell's most favored disciples.
Ira left quickly and promised to return with information about
the burial and funds with which to do it, but
doctor Wilbur felt that something was off. Doctor Thomas Wilbur
(18:46):
told the coroner's jury that he suspected a married man
had sexually assaulted Sarah, humiliated her, and left her destitute.
Still an observation of the suicide verdict. John H. Durfy
had a farm hand dig her grave on his own property.
The Matrons moved along with their plans, that is until
(19:08):
later on when they rummaged around in Sarah's trunk. The
two Matrons, who happened to be John Durfy's sisters, were
hoping to find others to contact regarding Sarah's burial service.
What they found was a key clue. It was a
four inch long piece of soiled paper signed s MC.
(19:29):
It read, if I am missing, inquire of the Reverend E. K. Avery.
The verdict of suicide came and went without acknowledgment of
this note. Both Catherine and Kate figured that the coroner's
(19:50):
jury did not hear about the evidence before the burial
because they still did not suspect murder. Just a few
hours before the service, That's when the Matrons turned the
letter over to John Durfy. He read it multiple times
and he stayed quiet about it, but he did think
it was suspicious that not a single Methodist minister was
at the funeral service. There was other confusing evidence at hand, too.
(20:15):
Sarah's cloak was buttoned all the way up her shoes
were neat and placed beside her. Her gloves were not dirty.
The strings of her bonnet were underneath the cord used
to hang her. The string was a very specific kind
called marline twine, but it was not common in any
laborer's tool kit, though it was not present in the
(20:36):
mill where Sarah worked, and then her knees were just
a few inches above the ground. He also uncovered a
few more pieces of evidence. One was a broken comb.
When he asked her landlady about the piece found on
his farm, she confirmed it with Sarah's. She identified it
because of its unique pattern. And then there was the
(20:57):
oil of Tansy. John Durfy molded over None of it
rolled out a suicide definitively. It made suicide more unlikely,
but it didn't rule it out. Overbidwell also returned with
the news that the meeting would not hear of a
Christian burial for Sarah as a suicide. John Durfy thought
(21:20):
something was amiss. Just yesterday, Ira had vouched for Sarah's character.
Now something had changed. Then John Durfy's brother, Williams, a
former mariner, brought something to light. The cord was wrapped
around her neck twice, and it was tied in an
uncommon knot called a clove hitch knot. He said that
(21:43):
to tighten a clove hitch it had to be pulled
at both ends. He claimed that it wouldn't have pulled
tightly enough to strangle her if she had tied it herself.
That was the piece of evidence that at the time
of the trial changed things. The day after the coroner
examined her exhumed corpse again, now there was reason to
(22:06):
believe it could have been murder. Listeners Kate Linkler Dawson
did this really cool thing where she took this evidence
from two hundred years ago, and she asked forensic investigator
(22:28):
Paul Holes about it, and he said, no, none of
this evidence rolls out a suicide completely. She could have
gotten the twine, she could have tied the knot, and
it was actually more common that suicides hanged low rather
than dropping from a height like at a gallows. Sarah
could have hanged herself without dirtying her gloves over her
(22:48):
bonnet's ribbon, with both hands under her cloak. She could
have positioned her shoes. She could have broken her comb.
She could have written the note specifically to frame a
f avery for her murder out of revenge. She could
have she could have done all that, but why would
(23:08):
she have more after the break. I didn't know this
about nineteenth century Methodists, but it was kind of a
wild denomination at the time. That might sound diametrically opposed
(23:31):
to the Methodist faith now, but in the eighteen thirties
it was the trendy new thing. Becoming a minister in
the faith did not require any official training, and the
denomination was known for its tent revivals in the woods.
They were parties that preached to the common man, both
inspiring the crowd and controlling it. The revivals were concerning
(23:55):
because they lasted for days, they caused physical and emotional fatigue,
and they had, of course, a charismatic leader. Religious sects
still use these tactics today because the exhaustion yields a
kind of lightheaded hysteria that can feel sort of divine.
(24:17):
And if these tactics sound cultish, that's because this group
of Methodists held several characteristics of a cult. In Sarah's
own words, she was seeking a home church when she
arrived in Fall River, Massachusetts, and she found one in
the local Methodists. In one of her letters to her sister,
(24:39):
she mentioned donating the contemporary equivalent of about two hundred
dollars toward a Methodist meetinghouse. That was a lot of
money for a thirty year old working woman, and it
showed her devotion to the faith. I feel like I
should go into detail about what Sarah's work was like too.
She was a textile worker. Women were especially well suited
(25:02):
to mill work because they quote tended to work hard
without complaint. They also drank infrequently, mostly because they were
tightly supervised in their boarding houses. Mill workers were husbandless, childless,
and untethered to parents, so they could work long hours
without the need to tend to a family. And these
women were as a rule compliant. Otherwise they were made
(25:26):
to move on, and Sarah had moved on from many
other jobs throughout her twenties. She had jumped between villages
in New England. She even had a little bit of
a bad girl past involving theft in her youth, which
she was trying to escape, and she longed for community.
She was the perfect prey for a trendy new religious sect.
(25:50):
According to some accounts, Sarah held a job within E.
Fhram Avery's house until Avery's son came home and told
someone Paw kissed Sarah Marine at Cornell. After that, Efrom
Avery had expelled her from the church. Efrom Avery denied
(26:18):
that Sarah had ever been inside his house, let alone
work there, And the reason why Reverend Irah Bidwell was
not at Sarah Cornell's funeral service was that he was busy.
He was on his way to tip off Reverend Efrom Avery,
who promptly fled. He said later that he feared for
(26:39):
his safety at the hands of a vigilante mob and
that could be true. But let's talk more about e
From Avery before we judge him for fleeing. The Avery
family book said that Ephram Avery quote did not wish
to become a farmer, which was his father's occupation. He
studied to become a doctor, but did not complete his education.
(27:00):
He then worked at a general store, became a school teacher,
went into the ministry. After his son's observation, Sarah was
expelled from the Methodist community in Fall River. She secured
a job in Lowell's textile mill, but because her Methodist
overseer learned the rumors about her, he said she had
(27:21):
to confess her sins to her former minister in order
to keep her job. I am not sure how to
explain that this situation is bananas, so I'm going to
keep moving. But listeners, you can be sure that it
is bananas. Rather than issue Sarah a certificate of good standing,
(27:42):
which was another bananas thing, the minister made her confess
to fornication so that she would again be expelled, but
Sarah declined to her friends that she had ever had
sex before. Sarah left Lowell for New Hampshire, but then
the Methodist minister in her new town asked Reverend Ephram
(28:03):
Avery for a character reference, and Ephraim said that Sarah
was guilty of fornication, theft, and lying. Sarah then confronted
Avery and Lowell. He agreed to sign a certificate of forgiveness,
another existent banana, but then he immediately revoked it. That
(28:25):
humiliated Sarah, but she tried one more time. They talked
again in late summer of eighteen thirty two at a
camp meeting. When she returned to her sister's house, Sarah
told her sister that she had tried to get away
from Ephraim, but he had raped her, so Sarah could
(28:48):
have framed Ephram, But I have my doubts. She had
told a friend before that she'd never had sex. What
she likely meant was that she had never had consensual sex.
She had written letters to her friends about local suicides
and how she abhorred the act, which makes it unlikely
that she would have done it. But the thing for
(29:09):
me is she didn't want to out the minister. She
only told doctor Wilbur after he asked many times, and
after he encouraged her to demand the father to support
her and the child financially. Whether she spoke his name
or not, I have to say I'm so glad he
told her that. I feel like not everyone would have
said that back then or now. Anyway, Sarah thanked him,
(29:33):
and then she asked about the oil of tansy that
Ephram gave her. Ephram told her to take thirty drops
of it. Doctor Wilbur said that four drops was considered
a large dose. Thirty drops would be violently fatal. I
should remind you efrom Avery was a former medical student.
(29:55):
He would have known that Ephram had tried to kill
her already, or more specifically, he had tried to kill
her in a way that looked like suicide. Already, And
the thing that really made me doubt that Sarah's death
was a suicide was this. After the conversation about the
(30:16):
oil of Tansy, doctor Wilbur told her that if she
wanted to terminate the pregnancy, she would have to go
to a different doctor. Sarah said she didn't want to.
She was excited to raise the child, and she told
him that soon she would meet with the baby's father again.
(30:49):
The second inspection of Sarah's corpse was a more appropriate autopsy.
Both doctor Thomas Wilbur and a new doctor, Foster Hooper
inspected her. They confirmed irregular indentations on her face. One
side of her abdomen was severely discolored, but he attributed
it to decomposition, not a bruise from trauma. The left
(31:12):
side of her abdomen, though, also had a large contusion.
He then confirmed through an incision to her belly that
Sara was in fact pregnant. It was a girl about
half grown. That meant that the child was conceived when
Sarah told doctor Wilbur. He had apparently pressed her for
(31:34):
the name of the father's child. When Sarah told him
that the married man would not help to support her
at long last, she disclosed that it was the Methodist
minister Ephram Avery. She actually had asked early on if
it was safe to take the ol of Tansey to miscarry.
He told her it was not, not at all, that
(31:56):
it would endanger her life and if she lived through it,
her health would suffer, and just like that, she decided
against it. The age of the fetus aligned with the
time Sarah had been alone with Ephrom Avery at the
Thompson campground. Doctor Wilburgh recognized that this illegitimate pregnancy could
very well be the motive for murder, but the other
(32:18):
men on the coroner's jury did not look at this evidence. Again,
she was denied a proper exam for the sake of respectability.
Doctor wilbur looked for signs of attempted pregnancy termination, but
he did not find any. By the way, in the
eighteen thirties, abortions were not illegal, but the drugs used
(32:40):
for them were, and those drugs were often fatal. When
Reverend Ira Bidwell met up with Ephram Avery and told
him the facts, Ephram seemed panicked, and then he went
into hiding. Harvey Harndon went with a warrant in hand
to collect him. He found him hiding at the family
(33:00):
home of another Methodist. Shortly after, two judges remanded Ephraim
for trial for murder. Listeners I said at the beginning
that the government had to prove Sarah's death was not
suicide beyond a reasonable doubt. The opening statement of Richard
Randolph demanded, if the jury doubted whether this was murder
(33:23):
or suicide, they need go no further. They must acquit
the prisoner. Long story less long. They did acquit Reverend
f from avery. They had the same information that we
(33:51):
do now, and it could have been a suicide. She
could have physically done it. When Kate Winkler Dawson asked him,
even contemporary forensic investigator Paul Holes conceded that she could
have physically done it. Kate also spoke with legal experts
who say that the jury in the criminal trial was
(34:13):
correct in their verdict. The jury determined based on evidence
that Ephraim was not guilty, not that he was innocent.
He was burned in effigy six times in total, and
ultimately he was dropped from the church and shunned. He
became a farmer after all, and when Kate Winkler Dawson
(34:34):
interviewed his surviving family. They agreed that Ephram Avery killed
Sarah Cornell. Paul Holes agreed too. She might have tied
that complicated, not by herself, but it wasn't likely. And
Avery had already tried to convince Sarah to take poison.
No one else had a motive, and she was not
psychologically at risk of suicide. But the thing that sealed
(34:58):
the deal for our contemporary very expert was the testimony
of the matrons. The matrons were familiar with dead bodies.
They would not have confused decomposition with bruising. He did it.
There just wasn't convincing enough evidence to legally seal a
guilty charge. And now here's my interview with Kate Winkler Dawson,
(35:22):
author of The Sinners All Bow two authors, One Murder
and The Real Hester Prynne. Kate, thank you so much
for coming on the show to talk about Sinners All Vow.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Thank you. I'm excited to be here. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
Yeah, I'm just gonna go ahead and jump in. We
want to know what was your research process and how
did you get to Catherine's notes on the case.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Oh well it's complicated, I figured. Yeah, Well, the research
method was. You know, first I initially got the story
I thought from a listener she had suggested the Haystack murders,
and then I found Sarah's story and then went back
to the listener said thanks for the recommendation, and she said,
that's not what I was talking about. But I'm glad
you found the subject of her next book. And my
(36:18):
show Buried Bones will cover the actual Haystack murders that
she was talking about. So, you know, my research method
is I think most writers would agree, nonfiction writers would
agree that research is their favorite part and writing is
what's really really hard to do. I bet you feel
like that.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
I mean, definitely, I.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
Don't actually know anybody who loves writing as a job.
It's really difficult to do. So the research part is
so much fun. You know, I create, I'm pretty I'm
pretty rigid, so I create a lot of different folders
and I have just a list of resources that I
go through. So, you know, the biggest thing I needed
to do was figure out what my my primary sources
(36:57):
were so I would write a book. This is my
fourth and a half book. I have a half book
which is you know, called The Ghost Club, and it's
an audible only book. So this is, you know, one
of many projects that I've had to really deeply research,
and I have a checklist I can't do without. I
(37:17):
can't do a book or a project really without having
a huge amount of primary sources, which means not newspapers
or necessarily other people's articles. It means for me, trial
transcripts and you know, books that have been written when
the person is there, like a reporting like what Katherine
Williams did. And so you know, the first thing I
(37:38):
do is I go to a couple of I probably
about six or seven sources where I look and see
what's available. And that's how I found out the prosecutor's
notes where we're in Rhode Island. Katherine Williams wrote a
book where she was a centrally, a reporter right there
on the scene. She had so many interviews. There were
letters at the Fall River Historical Society from the original
(38:00):
letters from Sarah Cornell who is our victim to the
suspect from avery, as well as cash of a lot
of other things. So then you know, you put all
that stuff together, and then you of course didn't look
at the secondary sources, which are unreliable beyond belief. I mean,
eighteenth century nineteenth century newspapers are terrible, but they do
(38:21):
give a lot of social context and that's really helpful.
And then you know, I will often go to Happy Trust,
or I'll go to archive dot org and look and
see what other kind of books are out there, you know,
from the time period. So there was a book from
the deputy sheriff who pursued the suspect from avery across
New England, and he thought so much of what he
(38:44):
did that he wrote a little book about it that
was really helpful. And then of course the trial transcripts.
It would be very difficult for me, I think, to
write a full book about something that didn't go to
trial in some way only because you know, that's where
you get the most information and what I would consider
it to be in many ways the most accurate, unbiased information.
Although I find trial transcripts in the eighteen hundreds to
(39:06):
be very inconsistent because any of y'all who could go
and sit there and take notes and then sell it
as a trial transcript, so I would say that's it.
I mean, it's just like a mass like you take
a large, large net and you throw it out there
and kind of keep whatever it is. And then I
usually have like a little folder that says unused, and
I'll dump stuff in there that I think I'm not
going to use, and every once in a while I'll
(39:26):
check on it and pull stuff out of it. So
there you go.
Speaker 2 (39:30):
That's amazing. I love how organized it is. I'm just like,
this is where you know the worm hole took me,
and then you fill it in later. But that makes
a lot more sense and it's probably a lot more
efficient of a move. And so thank you for sharing
that with us. I remember in the opening of the
book that we have of yours, you talk about Catherine
(39:51):
Williams's book and how you are noticing biases in some
of her writing. Can you just talk about that and
how to Well, like first tipped you off to that,
what'd you do about it?
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Yeah. One of the things that's unique about the book
is that I kind of call her my well, I
do call her my co author, and I actually wanted
her on the title of the book on the front page,
on the front cover, and my editor said, well, there
might be some legal issues with that. Who knows, because
you know, when I got her book, it was the
first of this kind written in America. It's amazing. I
(40:24):
had never seen anything like it, and I've gone very
far back to find narratives. And she had written this book,
you know, a couple hundred pages, and I thought, okay,
she's going to be a great source. And then the
more I read how it read like what I would do,
what a journalist did, I thought, okay, this is you know,
this is going to be somebody who contributes so much.
Because Sarah's family wouldn't talk to anybody, barely the prosecutors
(40:44):
in the case, and she and they shared letters with Catherine,
you know, on and on. She was given access, this
incredible access to the factories where Sarah worked. She had
all of these great interviews with the people who Sarah
worked with. So she had this access that I had
to acknowledge, I mean, and there was so much of it.
So I thought, okay, well i'll introduce her. And Sarah
(41:05):
or Catherine and I had a lot in common. You know,
we both were the heads of our household and we
were kind of slogging through writing and we just had
these sort of parallels, and so I related to her.
But as I have to do, I have to chuck,
double check myself. And then of course, you know, I
immediately said, well, I have to double check her, and
I haven't hard enough time double checking myself. Now I've
got to add this lady into it, who I can't
(41:26):
talk to because she died in eighteen seventy two. So
you know, I'm going through everything, and it just starts
to occur to me that when you read Catherine's narrative,
which is beautiful, she talks about standing in the moonlight
where Sarah died and going to her burial ground. I mean,
you know, all of this stuff, and it's very poetic,
but it's also very factual. But within I would say,
(41:48):
the first three or four pages of her book, it
is very clear that she thinks this Methodist minister is
guilty of murder. And I wasn't so sure. That was
the reason I was interested in the book. I wanted
to re examine. It rose a lot about handwriting and notes,
anonymous notes, which you know, were the reason that Sarah
showed up at that place to begin with where she died,
and so I really, you know, I had to hire
(42:10):
handwriting expert, which is not cheap, by the way, and
you know I had to talk to all of these
other a not forensic, not expert. I had to figure
out all this stuff. But Catherine was so sure. And
I teach a true crime podcast class, and you know,
I always talk to them about the intent. Don't just
listen to what the story is. Why is the content creator,
whether it's TikTok or HBO or everything in between, or me?
(42:33):
Why am I telling the story in this way? Why
is the victim framed in this way? And why is
the killer framed in this way? And I wanted to
know why she was framing it for Avery as the killer,
just straight away from the beginning. And so that's when
I started to think, Okay, well this is problematic, and
I am not used to putting this in first person,
and this kind of you know, my book kind of
(42:54):
goes back and forth. But when I am double checking myself,
I am also double checking Catherine, and I acknowledge, you know,
pretty quickly in the book that there are some things
that she's done wrong that are inconsistencies. But I kind
of figure out why she's doing it, and so much
of it is to frame her victim, which you know
(43:16):
came about in the eighteen thirties. Her victim needed to
be the perfect victim, no matter what Sarah had actually
done in life. She had stolen several times. But then
I found out Catherine conflated all of these you know,
thieving incidents into one because oh it was a simple mistake,
and in the eighteen hundreds that would have been unacceptable.
So Catherine, I think, really needed Sarah Cornell to be flawless.
(43:41):
And we don't do that. I mean, that's what journalists do.
But if you read her book, it is the gospel.
It has taken his fact, and the people in the
eighteen hundreds did that when they read her book. It
went through two different printings, so a lot of people
read it and it was taken his fact, and I
needed to correct the record, no matter what the record
reflected about Sarah Cornell.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
So one of the things that I thought was super
interesting and that I thought it in the beginning, and
then you circle back to it at the end as
it's so objective, right, you're an incredible journalist. But at
this time we had a coroner's jury of appointed like
men about town who had a ton of integrity but
no real medical knowledge. And it seemed to me and
(44:23):
I think it seemed dot three quarters the way through
that the matrons, the group of matrons who dressed the
body really function more like literally as the medical examiners.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
And they may not have had formal training either, a
formal education either, but they did have a lot of
firsthand experience treating bodies. So is the reason why they
were not the ones to determine the cause of death?
Is it just sexism or is there like another reason?
Speaker 1 (44:51):
No, it's sexism, And I would and I would, I mean,
I think you were being incredibly generous to the men
who were able to be on this corner stury. It's
like you had to own a land, a little bit
of land, and that was it. And actually the next
day they had to replace two of the members of
the corner's jury because they found out they didn't have land.
So that was it. So they found these two new people.
(45:12):
So it took nothing. You just had to be a
man in decent standing, not even good standing, and that's
you know, it's it's still the case. I mean, you know,
corner's juries don't have to have a medical background. So
you know, when what was very very common in the
seventeen hundreds and eighteen hundreds is that when a woman died,
she was not undressed, she was not strip naked in
(45:34):
front of men. That would be very, very improper, and
it would have to be an extreme circumstance, especially if
they thought that this was a suicide. And when Sarah
is found hanging from this pole and it's freezing, and
she looks sort of content and at peace, you know,
she's wearing clothing, her shoes are neat next to her.
(45:58):
Her physician says, I think this is a suicide. She
was pregnant and she was going through a lot of turmoil.
So that was that they weren't highly motivated to break
these rules of society. These men and stand around and
look at it, a naked dead woman in a barn,
and so you know, they just ruled it very quickly
as suicide. And then when the matrons, whose whole purpose
(46:20):
for a couple of hundred years has been to take
the clothes off the woman and then you know, clean
her and dress her properly for burial, which now I
think would probably be a funeral director's job. They would
be the ones that would see, you know, what happened.
And so when the matrons did that with Sarah Cornell
(46:40):
preparing her for a quick burial the next day. There's
no embalming involved in the early eighteen hundred, so this
one had to be pretty quick, which was a challenge,
I'm sure, because we're talking about fall River in the
you know, the in December, and so digging the ground
would have been hard. And so when they take all
her clothes off and they start to you know, prepare her,
(47:01):
they see immediately what one woman described as rash violence.
It was just very clear that she had been in
the fight for her life. But the men didn't see
it because they saw none of it because she was
fully clothed. Right, So it was women. It was the
women who sounded the alarm initially. Right, this would have
been a suicide. This would not have been a book,
(47:22):
and Catherine wouldn't have had a book unless it was
not for these women. And I'm always looking for women
as heroes in my books, and they also happen to
be the villains in this book because later on, you know,
there are many many women who Sarah thought were her friends.
Other Methodists who worked in the same factories, would take
the stand and lie to make sure that their Methodist
(47:43):
minister wasn't convicted of murder, so I have good women
and bad women in this book.
Speaker 2 (47:49):
Nathaniel Hawthorne used this case as the basis ish for
his novel The Scarlet Letter. So obviously he took some
artistic license a lot with the story from true crime
to novel. You know, the most important distinction being like,
there's no murder in The Scarlett Letter. Talking about intent,
(48:10):
Why do you think he made the changes that he made.
Was it like for his audience or was it not
okay to talk about the murder or what do you think?
Speaker 1 (48:19):
I think that with Sarah's story, it's very clear that
this was sort of the basis for hester Prinne, for
the most famous I think heroin ever in American literature.
And you know, this woman who is demonized because she,
you know, has a child out of wedlock and she
cannot live up to society's very strict expectations of women.
(48:41):
And you know there are other women who certainly, you know,
inspired Hawthorne. It seems like in this book too. I mean,
I think it is the general plight of what I
just said, women in these societies in the eighteen hundreds,
in the seventeen hundreds and the nineteen hundreds who were
not it was impossible to live up to these expectations.
(49:02):
The parallels are pretty surprising in a lot of ways
for me. You know, you have Sarah Cornell who is
pregnant and she ends up dead because she has begun
to demand financial support, child support essentially from the man
who sexually assaulted her, something that always gets rewritten incorrectly.
(49:23):
I think when I read this story is that they
had an illicit affair. It's not what happened. She says
that he sexually assaulted me, and I absolutely believe that
she wrote that to her family, and you know, she
said it to her family. She had no reason to
lie about any of that. So I think that, you know,
you've got these parallels between Hester Prynne, who has a
(49:44):
child out of weblock involved with a minister, and Sarah
Cornell has been sexually assaulted by a minister. They're both
quote unquote factory girls. They're both women who you know,
use their trade, they can they're weavers or knitters, and
Sarah was a taylor and they're both very altruistic. You know,
they do things for people who are not very nice
(50:05):
to them. You know, there's Hester Prinne who because she
wears the scarlet letter looks down, you know, people don't
make eye contact with her. But then those same people
ask her in the dead of night for help and
she gives it. And Sarah Cornell from several stories, had
done the same thing. There was one where she was
getting kicked out of a boarding house because somebody thought
she was flirting with a man would have been inappropriate.
(50:28):
And there was a sick person in this house, and
Sarah said, I'll take care of them, even though she
was getting kicked out. So, you know, the parallels are
pretty amazing, I think, and I think more importantly the
academics who have really dug into these parallels, who I
was able to, you know, use some of their material.
I think that this is Sarah Cornell was, who Hester
(50:52):
Prynne was, who Sarah Cornell could have been if things
had gone differently. She planned to keep the baby. She
told her family how much child so or how much
daycare would be, and so she could keep working in
the factory. She seemed excited about all of this, and
she was very happy when she left for this meeting
with an anonymous person because she was going to get
(51:12):
money finally, And so I think then you look at
hester Prerinn, who eventually at the end sort of fits
into society one way or the other, and under her
other's terms, but also under her own terms, she takes
a lot of control. And I think that could have
been Sarah had things not gone differently. And I mean,
I just think the biggest regret ever, is that she
(51:34):
left without somebody going with her to that situation with him,
And that to me is not blaming the victim. That's
simply to say she just did not know, and it's
so upsetting because then she ended up dead.
Speaker 2 (51:47):
Is there anything I should have asked you that I
didn't like? What do you want to talk about when
you come on interviews to promote your book?
Speaker 1 (51:54):
Well, I mean, I think it's the main message I
always told my journalism students at the University of Texas.
You know, it's it's the why are we doing this
story now? And I think you've had to answer that
question for your editor or your agent, and I always
have to answer that question. Why why would an audience
in twenty twenty five care about a story that happened
in eighteen thirty two? And you know, for me, the
(52:16):
answer is that Sarah was vulnerable, she was pregnant, she
was demanding, you know, support from the man who who
was the father of this child, and when she finally
stood up for herself, she ended up dead. And that
happens now, and it's happened then. I mean, you know,
(52:38):
I work in historical crime. Some of it's even more
recent though, and it's a lot, an awful lot about
stories about women who are murdered when they're pregnant or
right after they have children. I mean I just dozens
and dozens of them. And you know, we see that
Colonel Lacy Peterson as a really high profile example, you know,
Shenan Watts from Colorado.
Speaker 2 (52:58):
There.
Speaker 1 (52:58):
The list goes on and on, and you know, I
was so curious about it. I looked it up. And
the main reason that women who are pregnant die in
this country right now is murder. It's not infection. I mean,
you know, probably a couple hundred years ago is infection,
but it's not infection. It's murder, and postpartum it's murder.
(53:19):
So and of course we have to assume it's often
by mostly by their partners. So there were Sarah Cornell's
before Sarah was found hanging from that pole, and there
are Sarah's more to come. It just doesn't stop. And
so when people say to me, why should I care
about somebody from eighteen thirty two? You know what makes
why did you want to tell this story? It's because
(53:42):
the reason that people kill, the reason that people are victims,
is no different in eighteen thirty two than it is now.
It's the same people. The family annihilator, like Chris Watts
just a couple of years ago in Colorado, is the
same as John List in the sixties who killed his
whole family. Who was the same as Eugene Burt here
austin Texas in the eighteen hundreds, who killed his own family.
(54:02):
They all say the same thing. It's all the same excuses.
It's they are the same people. And so, you know,
to learn from Sarah, if we can learn anything and
at least understand what makes people vulnerable. What you know,
I mean, anger is fear and what is that that
drove eform Avery to do this. I think all of
(54:24):
that is valuable information. Yes, it's from the eighteen hundreds,
but this is you know, this is a story that
reverberates throughout history and I think that's important. This is
not about a battle. To me, it's not a battle
between mainstream Protestants who hated the Methodists and the Methodists
are trying to protect their reputation. I read that a
lot in the context of this case, and that, to me,
is not the story. The story is this woman finally
(54:46):
standing up for herself and then she ends up dead
hanging from a haystack pole by herself on a desolate
farm in below freezing temperatures in Fall River, Massachusetts.
Speaker 2 (54:57):
Yeah, what a takeaway if you can see like I'm
not an easy crier, like my eyes are wondering up
at this story. But thank you so much for coming
on to our show. Love talking to you always. Where
can our listeners find.
Speaker 1 (55:11):
You well, Instagram and Facebook is where I am, and
then you know you can post stuff or whatever and
you can reach out to me on I have a website,
you know, Kate Winklare Dawson, So you know those places.
Speaker 2 (55:25):
Okay, great, We'll make sure to link to them in
our show notes. And thank you again so much for
coming on.
Speaker 1 (55:31):
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (55:43):
I'd like to thank Kate Winkler Dawson again. Both for
taking the time to talk to me and for writing
this episode's key source, The Center's All Bow two authors
One Murder and the Real Hester Prynne Listeners. This is
our last episode of season two, so i'd also to
thank you for sticking with me this long. I hope
you've enjoyed these women centered stories around true crimes. If
(56:07):
this seasonin't enough of them for you, come on and
follow me on Instagram, where I'll keep going, probably forever.
The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told is a production
of Diversion Audio. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, and I hosted
(56:29):
this episode. I also wrote this episode. Our show is
produced by Leokulp and edited by Antonio Enriquez. Theme music
by Tyler Cash, Executive producer Scott Waxman, and one more
thing before I go, If you haven't already, I'll love
you forever. If you get my true crime book Madam Clean,
(56:49):
The Life and Crimes of Harlem's underground racketeer Stephanie Sinclair,
there's a link to do it at your favorite retailer
in our show's notes
Diversion audio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
A note this episode contains mature content and quite graphic
descriptions of violence that may be disturbing for some listeners.
Please take care in listening. The morning of December twenty first,
(00:38):
eighteen thirty two was frigid and windy. John Durfey was
thirty six years old. He was a Justice of the peace,
a town councilman, and he was a profitable farmer on
his father's property. John took his team from home down
the hill full of gopher holes to the river. About
(01:00):
quote sixty rods from the house was a haystack. The
haystack was supported with four metal steaks wedged into its
metal at about a forty five degree angle, and each
steak was driven into the ground to keep the stack
from toppling over over the top of it all. A
burlap cover protected the hay from moisture, although this was
(01:25):
a clear morning, no rain or snow. When John durfy
came upon this haystack, he gasped. Hanging from one of
the steaks was the frozen body of a young woman.
Her short black hair was frozen to her face and
covered in frost. Her long black cloak was buttoned to
(01:46):
her throat. Her bonnet was drawn around her chin, and
her shoes lay neatly on the ground beside her. In
the dim sunrise light, John Durfy saw that this woman's
knees dangled four or five inches from the ground, her
feet dragged behind her. He watched her body sway for
(02:12):
just a moment in disbelief before he yelled for help.
Three men responded, and together they started taking the body down.
(02:40):
Welcome to the greatest true crime stories ever told. I'm
Mary Kay mcbrair, author of the true crime book Madame Queen,
the Life and Crimes of Harlem's underground racketeer Stephanie Sinclair.
Today's episode we're calling the Real Scarlet Letter. It's the
story of Sarah Cornell, a young Methodist textile worker who
(03:04):
was the inspiration for Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's book
The Scarlet Letter. The difference, of course, is that Hester
Prynne wasn't murdered, and she certainly didn't kill herself. I'll
tell you all about it after this quick break. It
(03:39):
probably won't surprise you listener to know that I was
always in honors and advanced placement English classes. I was
that nerd who always got the book at pizza. Jasmine
Williams might have beaten me in every other subject, but
I was the accelerated reader. What I mean is I
(04:03):
never didn't do the assigned reading. I tell you, I
read every single word of the Odyssey, and I did
not understand a damn thing. I mean, I understood the
phrases singing me muse, and when Dawn with her rose
red fingers, and how it was really just the barred
buying time basically ancient Greek for what had happened was
(04:27):
But how was a ninth grader supposed to understand that
the only reason athena goddess of wisdom, could get the
warrior Odysseus off of Circe this sex Witch's island is
because Uncle Poseiadin was blackout drunk in Ethiopia, accepting sacrifices
at his own festival. Yes, that is how the Odyssey
(04:50):
actually opens, y'all. Until I had to teach it in
university world literature, I didn't even know that. And I
also did not understand the gravitas of another required ninth
grade reading, that is, of course, Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The
Scarlet letter, I remember scraps. One thing I remember is
(05:10):
that in order for me to slog through the diction,
I kept a tallly of how many times he used
the adjective ignominious. I remember that Hester Prynne was ostracized
for having a child out of wedlock, and I remember
that she would not out her baby's daddy, and that
everyone admired her for it. They did not, however, admire
(05:32):
her enough to accept her back into the community. And
I remember our teacher having to really spell out for
us that the ugly reverend was the father, and my
brain would not comprehend that the reason Hester didn't want
to tell anyone was because it would ruin the minister's reputation.
(05:53):
Even at fourteen, I remember thinking, well, it sounds like
the minister ruined the minister's reputation. And while that is
true and we've come a long way as a society since,
even then, I didn't know just how nuanced that situation
could be. And I definitely didn't know that Nathaniel Hawthorne
was an avid newsreader. Hawthorne was effectively a true crime junkie.
(06:19):
His son called it a quote pathetic craving. Six years
after Sarah Cornell's death, Hawthorne wrote in his journal about
visiting a wax display of Sarah Cornell. That's right, Nathaniel
Hawthorne heard the story I'm about to tell you at
a traveling wax museum. To be featured in Madame Tusso's Today,
(06:44):
one has to be pretty famous. Same then, in her
book The Sinners All Bow, which I referenced for this
episode very thoroughly, Kate Winkler Dawson says that quote being
featured in a wax exhibit indicated that the person had
achieved a certain level of fame or notoriety or infamy,
(07:06):
and this case absolutely achieved that certain level. By the way,
at the end of this episode, I get to interview
Kate Winkler Dawson herself, so make sure you stick around.
It's really a good talk. I should also mention while
we're having this sidebar that Kate Winkler Dawson credits a
co author to her book The Sinner's All Bow. Katherine
(07:28):
Williams wrote what might have been the first true crime
book ever about this case just one year after the
crime itself. That's how we have so many direct quotes
from court testimonies, of course, but also from interviews that
Catherine conducted shortly after the proceedings. This is a component
I will definitely ask Kate about in our interview, and
(07:50):
the fact that Catherine was not a man writing about
this story is definitely relevant, but I'll talk about that
more later. Now back to the story. At the top
of the episode, I explained how John Durfy found Sarah
Cornell and took in everything that he saw, which was
fortunate because he became not only a key witness in
the case, but also a key investigator. John Durfy called
(08:13):
for help when he saw her frozen body. He clocked
that her cloak was buttoned up, her head was uncovered,
and her shoes were neat at her side. John Durfy's
seventy five year old father was the first to arrive
at the scene. Richard owned the property even though John
managed it day to day. John tried to free Sarah
(08:34):
Cornell's body from the cord by quote lifting her up
and slipping the line, but he couldn't. His father told
him to cut her down, so he did. He later
noticed that the reason why he couldn't undo the noose
was because the cord was embedded almost half an inch
(08:55):
into her neck. Once her body was freed, lying on
the ground, John Durfey went to fetch the coroner. A
little later in the morning, in just a few blocks
away from the durfy farm, doctor Thomas Wilbur was about
(09:18):
to have breakfast with his family. He saw from the
window that people ran up and down the street, and
he felt uneasy. He didn't small fire, which he thought
was the most likely reason for panic, but he was
determined not to get involved, that is until a concerned
neighbor summoned him. By the time Thomas arrived on the scene,
(09:42):
a crowd had gathered around the body. No one had
yet identified her. A local Methodist minister named Ira Bidwell said,
when asked quote, she is a respectable young woman and
a member of my church. John Smith also recognized her.
He was the overseer of a weaving room where Sarah worked,
(10:05):
and doctor Thomas Wilbur recognized her too. She was one
of his patients. He knew her well, and her death
clearly shook him emotionally. He removed the cord from inside
her neck with difficulty. Her face was distorted, her tongue
protruded through her teeth, and there was a deep indentation
(10:26):
on her cheek. Thomas had been treating Sarah for months.
He said he was concerned about her mental health. Thomas
believed that she had completed suicide. John Durfy asked the
elderly coroner, Ellahu Hicks, if he could move her body
to his farmhouse, Ella, who agreed. They laid her in
(10:48):
a horse wagon, wrapped in a blanket with hay under her,
and they drove the horses slowly up the smooth road
to the house. This was later important to note because
any marks upon her person would have definitely happened prior
to her discovery. Soon after, the coroner summoned a jury.
(11:21):
I didn't realize this, but for a lot of American history,
coroners summoned juries to rule a cause of death. Doctor
Wilbur suspected suicide, but the coroner's jury would determine if
that was official. The men on the coroner's jury, and
it would have been all men would have had little
or no medical knowledge, just good standing in the community.
(11:44):
You might remember from some of our former episodes that
even coroners didn't need medical degrees because they were just
as often appointed as they were elected. The coroner's jury
was scheduled to meet the following morning, about twenty four
hours after the body's discovery, to determine the cause of death.
They all agreed that it was most likely suicide, though
(12:04):
especially because they refused to examine her body without her
clothes for the sake of propriety. But before that, on
the day of her death, the body had to be
prepared for examination and subsequent burial, and the people who
did that were a group of five or six respectable
(12:28):
matrons from the village who often volunteered for this abhorrent task.
When they began the preparation, they all assumed that Sarah
had died by suicide. It seems like they all pitied
her and assumed that some hard fortune had driven her
to take her own life. Then they removed her cloak,
(12:48):
her dress, and her undergarments, and then they changed their minds.
They later told Catherine Williams quote, there were bad bruises
on the back, and the knees scratched and stained with grass,
as though they had been on the ground during some struggle.
And it got much more intense than that. One matron
(13:10):
had the opinion that Sarah had been violated, which was
the nineteenth century term for sexually assaulted. She thought so
based on the blood and fecal matter in her undergarments.
There were also bruise marks on her abdomen on the
lower part of her belly that fitted large hands. The
(13:31):
thumb prints were inside each hip bone and the fingers
spread over the hips. There was froth tinged with blood
from her mouth and nose as well. It was certain
that her cause of death had been strangulation by hanging.
What was not certain was who had hanged her before
(14:10):
the break I mentioned several key observations that the six
matrons observed on Sarah's corpse. She had bad bruises on
her back and hand shaped bruises over both hips. Her
knees were scraped up. The cord used to hang her
was embedded deep in her undergarments. The matrons found blood
and fecal matter. Doctor Thomas Wilbur described her face as distorted,
(14:35):
with her tongue sticking out. An indentation appeared on her cheek.
Bloody froth came from her mouth and nose. Her hair
was frozen to her face, and the doctor knew from
previous visits as his patient that she was pregnant. The
cause of her death was definitely strangulation, and it seemed
(14:56):
that she had suffered violence. Some of the injuries to
her body might have happened during a suicide, but others,
like the bruises shaped like hands around her hips, it
was clear that someone else had inflicted. Still, Kate Winkler
Dawson reminds us in her book The Sinners All Bow,
just because Sarah suffered violence at the hands of someone
(15:18):
else before she died doesn't mean she was murdered. Even
though it seems like those two things have to go together,
they don't necessarily. It only matters what can be proved
in court. The matrons asked John Durfy to locate burial
(15:42):
clothes for Sarah, and they wanted him to find letters
to or from her family and friends so that they
could notify her people of her death. So John had
Sarah's landlady bring over her belongings. They arrived in a
locked bandbox. Her landlady said the key was probably in
Sarah's pocket, since she always carried it with her. One
(16:06):
of the matrons had indeed found the small key in
her pocket, and when John opened the box, he realized
Sarah had written many letters. He retrieved four letters that
seemed of interest. Two of them were to Reverend Ira Bidwell,
the same Methodist minister who had attested to her quote
(16:26):
good character when her body was discovered. One of them, unposted, unopened,
and undated, said that she wanted to separate herself completely
from the Methodist society. She said, quote, I have not
seen a well or happy day since I left the
Thompson Campground. The meeting at the Thompson Campground was at
(16:50):
the end of August, which is important. What happened there
would determine the course of her trial. The other three
letters were all unsigned but directed to Sarah. One mentioned
two days of meeting depending on whether. Another ended with
right soon say nothing to no one. They weren't threatening,
(17:12):
not overtly. At least, John found more evidence in her trunk.
One was a vial of oil of tansy. John Durfy
mentioned it in the presence of doctor wilburh and it
nowed at him. Sarah had asked doctor wilbur about it
in one of her patient visits. He did not prescribe
it to her. Rather, he cautioned her against using it.
(17:36):
It might have been used for suicide, but in the
nineteenth century it was also used to terminate pregnancy, to
varying results. Oil of tansy was definitely dangerous, regardless of
its intended use. When doctor wilburh learned of its presence
in her trunk is when he divulged her secret, he
(17:57):
knew Sarah to be pregnant. He also felt that he
knew at this point the cause of Sarah's supposed suicide.
He caught Reverend Ira Bidwell and said that his brother,
a fellow Methodist minister named Ephraim Avery, had made Sarah
so unhappy. He had been manipulative and cruel, and doctor
(18:22):
Bidwell said to the whole party that despite ruling this
death a suicide, he thought she deserved a Christian burial.
Sarah Cornell was one of Reverend Ira Bidwell's most favored disciples.
Ira left quickly and promised to return with information about
the burial and funds with which to do it, but
doctor Wilbur felt that something was off. Doctor Thomas Wilbur
(18:46):
told the coroner's jury that he suspected a married man
had sexually assaulted Sarah, humiliated her, and left her destitute.
Still an observation of the suicide verdict. John H. Durfy
had a farm hand dig her grave on his own property.
The Matrons moved along with their plans, that is until
(19:08):
later on when they rummaged around in Sarah's trunk. The
two Matrons, who happened to be John Durfy's sisters, were
hoping to find others to contact regarding Sarah's burial service.
What they found was a key clue. It was a
four inch long piece of soiled paper signed s MC.
(19:29):
It read, if I am missing, inquire of the Reverend E. K. Avery.
The verdict of suicide came and went without acknowledgment of
this note. Both Catherine and Kate figured that the coroner's
(19:50):
jury did not hear about the evidence before the burial
because they still did not suspect murder. Just a few
hours before the service, That's when the Matrons turned the
letter over to John Durfy. He read it multiple times
and he stayed quiet about it, but he did think
it was suspicious that not a single Methodist minister was
at the funeral service. There was other confusing evidence at hand, too.
(20:15):
Sarah's cloak was buttoned all the way up her shoes
were neat and placed beside her. Her gloves were not dirty.
The strings of her bonnet were underneath the cord used
to hang her. The string was a very specific kind
called marline twine, but it was not common in any
laborer's tool kit, though it was not present in the
(20:36):
mill where Sarah worked, and then her knees were just
a few inches above the ground. He also uncovered a
few more pieces of evidence. One was a broken comb.
When he asked her landlady about the piece found on
his farm, she confirmed it with Sarah's. She identified it
because of its unique pattern. And then there was the
(20:57):
oil of Tansy. John Durfy molded over None of it
rolled out a suicide definitively. It made suicide more unlikely,
but it didn't rule it out. Overbidwell also returned with
the news that the meeting would not hear of a
Christian burial for Sarah as a suicide. John Durfy thought
(21:20):
something was amiss. Just yesterday, Ira had vouched for Sarah's character.
Now something had changed. Then John Durfy's brother, Williams, a
former mariner, brought something to light. The cord was wrapped
around her neck twice, and it was tied in an
uncommon knot called a clove hitch knot. He said that
(21:43):
to tighten a clove hitch it had to be pulled
at both ends. He claimed that it wouldn't have pulled
tightly enough to strangle her if she had tied it herself.
That was the piece of evidence that at the time
of the trial changed things. The day after the coroner
examined her exhumed corpse again, now there was reason to
(22:06):
believe it could have been murder. Listeners Kate Linkler Dawson
did this really cool thing where she took this evidence
from two hundred years ago, and she asked forensic investigator
(22:28):
Paul Holes about it, and he said, no, none of
this evidence rolls out a suicide completely. She could have
gotten the twine, she could have tied the knot, and
it was actually more common that suicides hanged low rather
than dropping from a height like at a gallows. Sarah
could have hanged herself without dirtying her gloves over her
(22:48):
bonnet's ribbon, with both hands under her cloak. She could
have positioned her shoes. She could have broken her comb.
She could have written the note specifically to frame a
f avery for her murder out of revenge. She could
have she could have done all that, but why would
(23:08):
she have more after the break. I didn't know this
about nineteenth century Methodists, but it was kind of a
wild denomination at the time. That might sound diametrically opposed
(23:31):
to the Methodist faith now, but in the eighteen thirties
it was the trendy new thing. Becoming a minister in
the faith did not require any official training, and the
denomination was known for its tent revivals in the woods.
They were parties that preached to the common man, both
inspiring the crowd and controlling it. The revivals were concerning
(23:55):
because they lasted for days, they caused physical and emotional fatigue,
and they had, of course, a charismatic leader. Religious sects
still use these tactics today because the exhaustion yields a
kind of lightheaded hysteria that can feel sort of divine.
(24:17):
And if these tactics sound cultish, that's because this group
of Methodists held several characteristics of a cult. In Sarah's
own words, she was seeking a home church when she
arrived in Fall River, Massachusetts, and she found one in
the local Methodists. In one of her letters to her sister,
(24:39):
she mentioned donating the contemporary equivalent of about two hundred
dollars toward a Methodist meetinghouse. That was a lot of
money for a thirty year old working woman, and it
showed her devotion to the faith. I feel like I
should go into detail about what Sarah's work was like too.
She was a textile worker. Women were especially well suited
(25:02):
to mill work because they quote tended to work hard
without complaint. They also drank infrequently, mostly because they were
tightly supervised in their boarding houses. Mill workers were husbandless, childless,
and untethered to parents, so they could work long hours
without the need to tend to a family. And these
women were as a rule compliant. Otherwise they were made
(25:26):
to move on, and Sarah had moved on from many
other jobs throughout her twenties. She had jumped between villages
in New England. She even had a little bit of
a bad girl past involving theft in her youth, which
she was trying to escape, and she longed for community.
She was the perfect prey for a trendy new religious sect.
(25:50):
According to some accounts, Sarah held a job within E.
Fhram Avery's house until Avery's son came home and told
someone Paw kissed Sarah Marine at Cornell. After that, Efrom
Avery had expelled her from the church. Efrom Avery denied
(26:18):
that Sarah had ever been inside his house, let alone
work there, And the reason why Reverend Irah Bidwell was
not at Sarah Cornell's funeral service was that he was busy.
He was on his way to tip off Reverend Efrom Avery,
who promptly fled. He said later that he feared for
(26:39):
his safety at the hands of a vigilante mob and
that could be true. But let's talk more about e
From Avery before we judge him for fleeing. The Avery
family book said that Ephram Avery quote did not wish
to become a farmer, which was his father's occupation. He
studied to become a doctor, but did not complete his education.
(27:00):
He then worked at a general store, became a school teacher,
went into the ministry. After his son's observation, Sarah was
expelled from the Methodist community in Fall River. She secured
a job in Lowell's textile mill, but because her Methodist
overseer learned the rumors about her, he said she had
(27:21):
to confess her sins to her former minister in order
to keep her job. I am not sure how to
explain that this situation is bananas, so I'm going to
keep moving. But listeners, you can be sure that it
is bananas. Rather than issue Sarah a certificate of good standing,
(27:42):
which was another bananas thing, the minister made her confess
to fornication so that she would again be expelled, but
Sarah declined to her friends that she had ever had
sex before. Sarah left Lowell for New Hampshire, but then
the Methodist minister in her new town asked Reverend Ephram
(28:03):
Avery for a character reference, and Ephraim said that Sarah
was guilty of fornication, theft, and lying. Sarah then confronted
Avery and Lowell. He agreed to sign a certificate of forgiveness,
another existent banana, but then he immediately revoked it. That
(28:25):
humiliated Sarah, but she tried one more time. They talked
again in late summer of eighteen thirty two at a
camp meeting. When she returned to her sister's house, Sarah
told her sister that she had tried to get away
from Ephraim, but he had raped her, so Sarah could
(28:48):
have framed Ephram, But I have my doubts. She had
told a friend before that she'd never had sex. What
she likely meant was that she had never had consensual sex.
She had written letters to her friends about local suicides
and how she abhorred the act, which makes it unlikely
that she would have done it. But the thing for
(29:09):
me is she didn't want to out the minister. She
only told doctor Wilbur after he asked many times, and
after he encouraged her to demand the father to support
her and the child financially. Whether she spoke his name
or not, I have to say I'm so glad he
told her that. I feel like not everyone would have
said that back then or now. Anyway, Sarah thanked him,
(29:33):
and then she asked about the oil of tansy that
Ephram gave her. Ephram told her to take thirty drops
of it. Doctor Wilbur said that four drops was considered
a large dose. Thirty drops would be violently fatal. I
should remind you efrom Avery was a former medical student.
(29:55):
He would have known that Ephram had tried to kill
her already, or more specifically, he had tried to kill
her in a way that looked like suicide. Already, And
the thing that really made me doubt that Sarah's death
was a suicide was this. After the conversation about the
(30:16):
oil of Tansy, doctor Wilbur told her that if she
wanted to terminate the pregnancy, she would have to go
to a different doctor. Sarah said she didn't want to.
She was excited to raise the child, and she told
him that soon she would meet with the baby's father again.
(30:49):
The second inspection of Sarah's corpse was a more appropriate autopsy.
Both doctor Thomas Wilbur and a new doctor, Foster Hooper
inspected her. They confirmed irregular indentations on her face. One
side of her abdomen was severely discolored, but he attributed
it to decomposition, not a bruise from trauma. The left
(31:12):
side of her abdomen, though, also had a large contusion.
He then confirmed through an incision to her belly that
Sara was in fact pregnant. It was a girl about
half grown. That meant that the child was conceived when
Sarah told doctor Wilbur. He had apparently pressed her for
(31:34):
the name of the father's child. When Sarah told him
that the married man would not help to support her
at long last, she disclosed that it was the Methodist
minister Ephram Avery. She actually had asked early on if
it was safe to take the ol of Tansey to miscarry.
He told her it was not, not at all, that
(31:56):
it would endanger her life and if she lived through it,
her health would suffer, and just like that, she decided
against it. The age of the fetus aligned with the
time Sarah had been alone with Ephrom Avery at the
Thompson campground. Doctor Wilburgh recognized that this illegitimate pregnancy could
very well be the motive for murder, but the other
(32:18):
men on the coroner's jury did not look at this evidence. Again,
she was denied a proper exam for the sake of respectability.
Doctor wilbur looked for signs of attempted pregnancy termination, but
he did not find any. By the way, in the
eighteen thirties, abortions were not illegal, but the drugs used
(32:40):
for them were, and those drugs were often fatal. When
Reverend Ira Bidwell met up with Ephram Avery and told
him the facts, Ephram seemed panicked, and then he went
into hiding. Harvey Harndon went with a warrant in hand
to collect him. He found him hiding at the family
(33:00):
home of another Methodist. Shortly after, two judges remanded Ephraim
for trial for murder. Listeners I said at the beginning
that the government had to prove Sarah's death was not
suicide beyond a reasonable doubt. The opening statement of Richard
Randolph demanded, if the jury doubted whether this was murder
(33:23):
or suicide, they need go no further. They must acquit
the prisoner. Long story less long. They did acquit Reverend
f from avery. They had the same information that we
(33:51):
do now, and it could have been a suicide. She
could have physically done it. When Kate Winkler Dawson asked him,
even contemporary forensic investigator Paul Holes conceded that she could
have physically done it. Kate also spoke with legal experts
who say that the jury in the criminal trial was
(34:13):
correct in their verdict. The jury determined based on evidence
that Ephraim was not guilty, not that he was innocent.
He was burned in effigy six times in total, and
ultimately he was dropped from the church and shunned. He
became a farmer after all, and when Kate Winkler Dawson
(34:34):
interviewed his surviving family. They agreed that Ephram Avery killed
Sarah Cornell. Paul Holes agreed too. She might have tied
that complicated, not by herself, but it wasn't likely. And
Avery had already tried to convince Sarah to take poison.
No one else had a motive, and she was not
psychologically at risk of suicide. But the thing that sealed
(34:58):
the deal for our contemporary very expert was the testimony
of the matrons. The matrons were familiar with dead bodies.
They would not have confused decomposition with bruising. He did it.
There just wasn't convincing enough evidence to legally seal a
guilty charge. And now here's my interview with Kate Winkler Dawson,
(35:22):
author of The Sinners All Bow two authors, One Murder
and The Real Hester Prynne. Kate, thank you so much
for coming on the show to talk about Sinners All Vow.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Thank you. I'm excited to be here. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
Yeah, I'm just gonna go ahead and jump in. We
want to know what was your research process and how
did you get to Catherine's notes on the case.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Oh well it's complicated, I figured. Yeah, Well, the research
method was. You know, first I initially got the story
I thought from a listener she had suggested the Haystack murders,
and then I found Sarah's story and then went back
to the listener said thanks for the recommendation, and she said,
that's not what I was talking about. But I'm glad
you found the subject of her next book. And my
(36:18):
show Buried Bones will cover the actual Haystack murders that
she was talking about. So, you know, my research method
is I think most writers would agree, nonfiction writers would
agree that research is their favorite part and writing is
what's really really hard to do. I bet you feel
like that.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
I mean, definitely, I.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
Don't actually know anybody who loves writing as a job.
It's really difficult to do. So the research part is
so much fun. You know, I create, I'm pretty I'm
pretty rigid, so I create a lot of different folders
and I have just a list of resources that I
go through. So, you know, the biggest thing I needed
to do was figure out what my my primary sources
(36:57):
were so I would write a book. This is my
fourth and a half book. I have a half book
which is you know, called The Ghost Club, and it's
an audible only book. So this is, you know, one
of many projects that I've had to really deeply research,
and I have a checklist I can't do without. I
(37:17):
can't do a book or a project really without having
a huge amount of primary sources, which means not newspapers
or necessarily other people's articles. It means for me, trial
transcripts and you know, books that have been written when
the person is there, like a reporting like what Katherine
Williams did. And so you know, the first thing I
(37:38):
do is I go to a couple of I probably
about six or seven sources where I look and see
what's available. And that's how I found out the prosecutor's
notes where we're in Rhode Island. Katherine Williams wrote a
book where she was a centrally, a reporter right there
on the scene. She had so many interviews. There were
letters at the Fall River Historical Society from the original
(38:00):
letters from Sarah Cornell who is our victim to the
suspect from avery, as well as cash of a lot
of other things. So then you know, you put all
that stuff together, and then you of course didn't look
at the secondary sources, which are unreliable beyond belief. I mean,
eighteenth century nineteenth century newspapers are terrible, but they do
(38:21):
give a lot of social context and that's really helpful.
And then you know, I will often go to Happy Trust,
or I'll go to archive dot org and look and
see what other kind of books are out there, you know,
from the time period. So there was a book from
the deputy sheriff who pursued the suspect from avery across
New England, and he thought so much of what he
(38:44):
did that he wrote a little book about it that
was really helpful. And then of course the trial transcripts.
It would be very difficult for me, I think, to
write a full book about something that didn't go to
trial in some way only because you know, that's where
you get the most information and what I would consider
it to be in many ways the most accurate, unbiased information.
Although I find trial transcripts in the eighteen hundreds to
(39:06):
be very inconsistent because any of y'all who could go
and sit there and take notes and then sell it
as a trial transcript, so I would say that's it.
I mean, it's just like a mass like you take
a large, large net and you throw it out there
and kind of keep whatever it is. And then I
usually have like a little folder that says unused, and
I'll dump stuff in there that I think I'm not
going to use, and every once in a while I'll
(39:26):
check on it and pull stuff out of it. So
there you go.
Speaker 2 (39:30):
That's amazing. I love how organized it is. I'm just like,
this is where you know the worm hole took me,
and then you fill it in later. But that makes
a lot more sense and it's probably a lot more
efficient of a move. And so thank you for sharing
that with us. I remember in the opening of the
book that we have of yours, you talk about Catherine
(39:51):
Williams's book and how you are noticing biases in some
of her writing. Can you just talk about that and
how to Well, like first tipped you off to that,
what'd you do about it?
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Yeah. One of the things that's unique about the book
is that I kind of call her my well, I
do call her my co author, and I actually wanted
her on the title of the book on the front page,
on the front cover, and my editor said, well, there
might be some legal issues with that. Who knows, because
you know, when I got her book, it was the
first of this kind written in America. It's amazing. I
(40:24):
had never seen anything like it, and I've gone very
far back to find narratives. And she had written this book,
you know, a couple hundred pages, and I thought, okay,
she's going to be a great source. And then the
more I read how it read like what I would do,
what a journalist did, I thought, okay, this is you know,
this is going to be somebody who contributes so much.
Because Sarah's family wouldn't talk to anybody, barely the prosecutors
(40:44):
in the case, and she and they shared letters with Catherine,
you know, on and on. She was given access, this
incredible access to the factories where Sarah worked. She had
all of these great interviews with the people who Sarah
worked with. So she had this access that I had
to acknowledge, I mean, and there was so much of it.
So I thought, okay, well i'll introduce her. And Sarah
(41:05):
or Catherine and I had a lot in common. You know,
we both were the heads of our household and we
were kind of slogging through writing and we just had
these sort of parallels, and so I related to her.
But as I have to do, I have to chuck,
double check myself. And then of course, you know, I
immediately said, well, I have to double check her, and
I haven't hard enough time double checking myself. Now I've
got to add this lady into it, who I can't
(41:26):
talk to because she died in eighteen seventy two. So
you know, I'm going through everything, and it just starts
to occur to me that when you read Catherine's narrative,
which is beautiful, she talks about standing in the moonlight
where Sarah died and going to her burial ground. I mean,
you know, all of this stuff, and it's very poetic,
but it's also very factual. But within I would say,
(41:48):
the first three or four pages of her book, it
is very clear that she thinks this Methodist minister is
guilty of murder. And I wasn't so sure. That was
the reason I was interested in the book. I wanted
to re examine. It rose a lot about handwriting and notes,
anonymous notes, which you know, were the reason that Sarah
showed up at that place to begin with where she died,
and so I really, you know, I had to hire
(42:10):
handwriting expert, which is not cheap, by the way, and
you know I had to talk to all of these
other a not forensic, not expert. I had to figure
out all this stuff. But Catherine was so sure. And
I teach a true crime podcast class, and you know,
I always talk to them about the intent. Don't just
listen to what the story is. Why is the content creator,
whether it's TikTok or HBO or everything in between, or me?
(42:33):
Why am I telling the story in this way? Why
is the victim framed in this way? And why is
the killer framed in this way? And I wanted to
know why she was framing it for Avery as the killer,
just straight away from the beginning. And so that's when
I started to think, Okay, well this is problematic, and
I am not used to putting this in first person,
and this kind of you know, my book kind of
(42:54):
goes back and forth. But when I am double checking myself,
I am also double checking Catherine, and I acknowledge, you know,
pretty quickly in the book that there are some things
that she's done wrong that are inconsistencies. But I kind
of figure out why she's doing it, and so much
of it is to frame her victim, which you know
(43:16):
came about in the eighteen thirties. Her victim needed to
be the perfect victim, no matter what Sarah had actually
done in life. She had stolen several times. But then
I found out Catherine conflated all of these you know,
thieving incidents into one because oh it was a simple mistake,
and in the eighteen hundreds that would have been unacceptable.
So Catherine, I think, really needed Sarah Cornell to be flawless.
(43:41):
And we don't do that. I mean, that's what journalists do.
But if you read her book, it is the gospel.
It has taken his fact, and the people in the
eighteen hundreds did that when they read her book. It
went through two different printings, so a lot of people
read it and it was taken his fact, and I
needed to correct the record, no matter what the record
reflected about Sarah Cornell.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
So one of the things that I thought was super
interesting and that I thought it in the beginning, and
then you circle back to it at the end as
it's so objective, right, you're an incredible journalist. But at
this time we had a coroner's jury of appointed like
men about town who had a ton of integrity but
no real medical knowledge. And it seemed to me and
(44:23):
I think it seemed dot three quarters the way through
that the matrons, the group of matrons who dressed the
body really function more like literally as the medical examiners.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
And they may not have had formal training either, a
formal education either, but they did have a lot of
firsthand experience treating bodies. So is the reason why they
were not the ones to determine the cause of death?
Is it just sexism or is there like another reason?
Speaker 1 (44:51):
No, it's sexism, And I would and I would, I mean,
I think you were being incredibly generous to the men
who were able to be on this corner stury. It's
like you had to own a land, a little bit
of land, and that was it. And actually the next
day they had to replace two of the members of
the corner's jury because they found out they didn't have land.
So that was it. So they found these two new people.
(45:12):
So it took nothing. You just had to be a
man in decent standing, not even good standing, and that's
you know, it's it's still the case. I mean, you know,
corner's juries don't have to have a medical background. So
you know, when what was very very common in the
seventeen hundreds and eighteen hundreds is that when a woman died,
she was not undressed, she was not strip naked in
(45:34):
front of men. That would be very, very improper, and
it would have to be an extreme circumstance, especially if
they thought that this was a suicide. And when Sarah
is found hanging from this pole and it's freezing, and
she looks sort of content and at peace, you know,
she's wearing clothing, her shoes are neat next to her.
(45:58):
Her physician says, I think this is a suicide. She
was pregnant and she was going through a lot of turmoil.
So that was that they weren't highly motivated to break
these rules of society. These men and stand around and
look at it, a naked dead woman in a barn,
and so you know, they just ruled it very quickly
as suicide. And then when the matrons, whose whole purpose
(46:20):
for a couple of hundred years has been to take
the clothes off the woman and then you know, clean
her and dress her properly for burial, which now I
think would probably be a funeral director's job. They would
be the ones that would see, you know, what happened.
And so when the matrons did that with Sarah Cornell
(46:40):
preparing her for a quick burial the next day. There's
no embalming involved in the early eighteen hundred, so this
one had to be pretty quick, which was a challenge,
I'm sure, because we're talking about fall River in the
you know, the in December, and so digging the ground
would have been hard. And so when they take all
her clothes off and they start to you know, prepare her,
(47:01):
they see immediately what one woman described as rash violence.
It was just very clear that she had been in
the fight for her life. But the men didn't see
it because they saw none of it because she was
fully clothed. Right, So it was women. It was the
women who sounded the alarm initially. Right, this would have
been a suicide. This would not have been a book,
(47:22):
and Catherine wouldn't have had a book unless it was
not for these women. And I'm always looking for women
as heroes in my books, and they also happen to
be the villains in this book because later on, you know,
there are many many women who Sarah thought were her friends.
Other Methodists who worked in the same factories, would take
the stand and lie to make sure that their Methodist
(47:43):
minister wasn't convicted of murder, so I have good women
and bad women in this book.
Speaker 2 (47:49):
Nathaniel Hawthorne used this case as the basis ish for
his novel The Scarlet Letter. So obviously he took some
artistic license a lot with the story from true crime
to novel. You know, the most important distinction being like,
there's no murder in The Scarlett Letter. Talking about intent,
(48:10):
Why do you think he made the changes that he made.
Was it like for his audience or was it not
okay to talk about the murder or what do you think?
Speaker 1 (48:19):
I think that with Sarah's story, it's very clear that
this was sort of the basis for hester Prinne, for
the most famous I think heroin ever in American literature.
And you know, this woman who is demonized because she,
you know, has a child out of wedlock and she
cannot live up to society's very strict expectations of women.
(48:41):
And you know there are other women who certainly, you know,
inspired Hawthorne. It seems like in this book too. I mean,
I think it is the general plight of what I
just said, women in these societies in the eighteen hundreds,
in the seventeen hundreds and the nineteen hundreds who were
not it was impossible to live up to these expectations.
(49:02):
The parallels are pretty surprising in a lot of ways
for me. You know, you have Sarah Cornell who is
pregnant and she ends up dead because she has begun
to demand financial support, child support essentially from the man
who sexually assaulted her, something that always gets rewritten incorrectly.
(49:23):
I think when I read this story is that they
had an illicit affair. It's not what happened. She says
that he sexually assaulted me, and I absolutely believe that
she wrote that to her family, and you know, she
said it to her family. She had no reason to
lie about any of that. So I think that, you know,
you've got these parallels between Hester Prynne, who has a
(49:44):
child out of weblock involved with a minister, and Sarah
Cornell has been sexually assaulted by a minister. They're both
quote unquote factory girls. They're both women who you know,
use their trade, they can they're weavers or knitters, and
Sarah was a taylor and they're both very altruistic. You know,
they do things for people who are not very nice
(50:05):
to them. You know, there's Hester Prinne who because she
wears the scarlet letter looks down, you know, people don't
make eye contact with her. But then those same people
ask her in the dead of night for help and
she gives it. And Sarah Cornell from several stories, had
done the same thing. There was one where she was
getting kicked out of a boarding house because somebody thought
she was flirting with a man would have been inappropriate.
(50:28):
And there was a sick person in this house, and
Sarah said, I'll take care of them, even though she
was getting kicked out. So, you know, the parallels are
pretty amazing, I think, and I think more importantly the
academics who have really dug into these parallels, who I
was able to, you know, use some of their material.
I think that this is Sarah Cornell was, who Hester
(50:52):
Prynne was, who Sarah Cornell could have been if things
had gone differently. She planned to keep the baby. She
told her family how much child so or how much
daycare would be, and so she could keep working in
the factory. She seemed excited about all of this, and
she was very happy when she left for this meeting
with an anonymous person because she was going to get
(51:12):
money finally, And so I think then you look at
hester Prerinn, who eventually at the end sort of fits
into society one way or the other, and under her
other's terms, but also under her own terms, she takes
a lot of control. And I think that could have
been Sarah had things not gone differently. And I mean,
I just think the biggest regret ever, is that she
(51:34):
left without somebody going with her to that situation with him,
And that to me is not blaming the victim. That's
simply to say she just did not know, and it's
so upsetting because then she ended up dead.
Speaker 2 (51:47):
Is there anything I should have asked you that I
didn't like? What do you want to talk about when
you come on interviews to promote your book?
Speaker 1 (51:54):
Well, I mean, I think it's the main message I
always told my journalism students at the University of Texas.
You know, it's it's the why are we doing this
story now? And I think you've had to answer that
question for your editor or your agent, and I always
have to answer that question. Why why would an audience
in twenty twenty five care about a story that happened
in eighteen thirty two? And you know, for me, the
(52:16):
answer is that Sarah was vulnerable, she was pregnant, she
was demanding, you know, support from the man who who
was the father of this child, and when she finally
stood up for herself, she ended up dead. And that
happens now, and it's happened then. I mean, you know,
(52:38):
I work in historical crime. Some of it's even more
recent though, and it's a lot, an awful lot about
stories about women who are murdered when they're pregnant or
right after they have children. I mean I just dozens
and dozens of them. And you know, we see that
Colonel Lacy Peterson as a really high profile example, you know,
Shenan Watts from Colorado.
Speaker 2 (52:58):
There.
Speaker 1 (52:58):
The list goes on and on, and you know, I
was so curious about it. I looked it up. And
the main reason that women who are pregnant die in
this country right now is murder. It's not infection. I mean,
you know, probably a couple hundred years ago is infection,
but it's not infection. It's murder, and postpartum it's murder.
(53:19):
So and of course we have to assume it's often
by mostly by their partners. So there were Sarah Cornell's
before Sarah was found hanging from that pole, and there
are Sarah's more to come. It just doesn't stop. And
so when people say to me, why should I care
about somebody from eighteen thirty two? You know what makes
why did you want to tell this story? It's because
(53:42):
the reason that people kill, the reason that people are victims,
is no different in eighteen thirty two than it is now.
It's the same people. The family annihilator, like Chris Watts
just a couple of years ago in Colorado, is the
same as John List in the sixties who killed his
whole family. Who was the same as Eugene Burt here
austin Texas in the eighteen hundreds, who killed his own family.
(54:02):
They all say the same thing. It's all the same excuses.
It's they are the same people. And so, you know,
to learn from Sarah, if we can learn anything and
at least understand what makes people vulnerable. What you know,
I mean, anger is fear and what is that that
drove eform Avery to do this. I think all of
(54:24):
that is valuable information. Yes, it's from the eighteen hundreds,
but this is you know, this is a story that
reverberates throughout history and I think that's important. This is
not about a battle. To me, it's not a battle
between mainstream Protestants who hated the Methodists and the Methodists
are trying to protect their reputation. I read that a
lot in the context of this case, and that, to me,
is not the story. The story is this woman finally
(54:46):
standing up for herself and then she ends up dead
hanging from a haystack pole by herself on a desolate
farm in below freezing temperatures in Fall River, Massachusetts.
Speaker 2 (54:57):
Yeah, what a takeaway if you can see like I'm
not an easy crier, like my eyes are wondering up
at this story. But thank you so much for coming
on to our show. Love talking to you always. Where
can our listeners find.
Speaker 1 (55:11):
You well, Instagram and Facebook is where I am, and
then you know you can post stuff or whatever and
you can reach out to me on I have a website,
you know, Kate Winklare Dawson, So you know those places.
Speaker 2 (55:25):
Okay, great, We'll make sure to link to them in
our show notes. And thank you again so much for
coming on.
Speaker 1 (55:31):
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (55:43):
I'd like to thank Kate Winkler Dawson again. Both for
taking the time to talk to me and for writing
this episode's key source, The Center's All Bow two authors
One Murder and the Real Hester Prynne Listeners. This is
our last episode of season two, so i'd also to
thank you for sticking with me this long. I hope
you've enjoyed these women centered stories around true crimes. If
(56:07):
this seasonin't enough of them for you, come on and
follow me on Instagram, where I'll keep going, probably forever.
The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told is a production
of Diversion Audio. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, and I hosted
(56:29):
this episode. I also wrote this episode. Our show is
produced by Leokulp and edited by Antonio Enriquez. Theme music
by Tyler Cash, Executive producer Scott Waxman, and one more
thing before I go, If you haven't already, I'll love
you forever. If you get my true crime book Madam Clean,
(56:49):
The Life and Crimes of Harlem's underground racketeer Stephanie Sinclair,
there's a link to do it at your favorite retailer
in our show's notes
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