September 2, 2025 • 47 mins
We’re taking a short break and using this time to amplify the voices of other creators we love in the true crime space. While we’re enjoying our summer hiatus, we’ve got something dark and compelling to keep your earbuds company. We're dropping an episode from Ye Olde Crime hosted by twisted sister co-hosts and our friends from the midwest - Lindsay and Madison.
In this episode, Lindsay is joined by author and fellow podcaster Kate Winkler Dawson to discuss her latest work, “The Sinners All Bow,” an acclaimed true-crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson travels back in time to nineteenth-century small-town America. Using modern investigative advancements—including “forensic knot analysis” and criminal profiling (which was invented fifty-five years later with Jack the Ripper)—Dawson fills in the gaps of Williams’s research to find the truth and bring justice to an unsettling mystery that speaks to our past as well as our present, anchored by three women who subverted the script they were given.
Visit our website! Find us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Patreon, & more! If you have any true crime, paranormal, or witchy stories you'd like to share with us & possibly have them read (out loud) on an episode, email us at pnwhauntsandhomicides@gmail.com or use this link. There are so many ways that you can support the show: BuyMeACoffee, Spreaker,or by leaving a rating & review on Apple Podcasts.
In this episode, Lindsay is joined by author and fellow podcaster Kate Winkler Dawson to discuss her latest work, “The Sinners All Bow,” an acclaimed true-crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson travels back in time to nineteenth-century small-town America. Using modern investigative advancements—including “forensic knot analysis” and criminal profiling (which was invented fifty-five years later with Jack the Ripper)—Dawson fills in the gaps of Williams’s research to find the truth and bring justice to an unsettling mystery that speaks to our past as well as our present, anchored by three women who subverted the script they were given.
Visit our website! Find us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Patreon, & more! If you have any true crime, paranormal, or witchy stories you'd like to share with us & possibly have them read (out loud) on an episode, email us at pnwhauntsandhomicides@gmail.com or use this link. There are so many ways that you can support the show: BuyMeACoffee, Spreaker,or by leaving a rating & review on Apple Podcasts.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
We are, we Are. We are Cultivate, Cultivate, Cultivate, Cultivate, Cultivate, Cultivate,
we Are Cultivate.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Hello, and welcome to Your Crime, where we discuss the funny, strange,
and obscure crimes of yesteryear. I'm your host, Lindsay Valenti,
and with me today instead of my sister is author
and podcaster Kate Winkler Dawson. Kate is a seasoned documentary
producer and podcaster who's hit podcasts Tenfold More Wicked, Wicked Words,
(00:52):
and Buried Bones appear on the Exactly Right Network. She
is the author of Death and the Air, American Sherlock
and All That Is Wicked, and is a professor of
journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. Today, Kate
is joining us to discuss her latest book, The Sinner's
All Bow, which is set to be released January seventh.
(01:12):
Acclaimed journalist, podcaster, and true crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson
tells the true story of the scandalous murder investigation that
became the inspiration for both Nathaniel Hawthorns, The Scarlet Letter,
and the first true crime book published in America. On
a cold winter day in eighteen thirty two, Sarah Maria
Cornell was found dead in a quiet farmyard in a
(01:34):
small New England town. When her troubled past and a
secret correspondence with charismatic Methodist minister refriend f from Avery
was uncovered, more questions emerged. Was Sarah's death a suicide
or something much darker? Determined to uncover the real story,
victorian writer Catherine read Arnold Williams threw herself into the
(01:54):
investigation as the trial was unfolding, and wrote what many
claim to be the first American true crime narrative, Fall River.
The murder divided the country and inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne's The
Scarlet Letter. But the Reverend was not convicted, and questions
linger to this day about what really led to Sarah
Cornell's death until now. In The Sinner's Albaugh, acclaimed true
(02:16):
crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson travels back in time to
nineteenth century small town America, emboldened to finish the work
Williams started nearly two centuries before, using modern investigative advancements,
including forensic not analysis and criminal profiling, which was invented
fifty five years later, with Jack the Ripper, Dawston fills
(02:38):
in the gaps of Williams's research to find the truth
and bring justice to an unsettling mystery that speaks to
our past as well as our present, anchored by three
women who subverted the script they were given. So, Kate,
welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
So before we kind of dive into the book, what
got you into writing?
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Oh boy, I think in high school I had an
English teacher who thought I was a pretty good writer,
and I didn't know what kind of writing I wanted
to do, and she did something really interesting. Well, I've
told this story enough where I really should reach out
to miss Darrell and tell her thank you for this.
I mean, I keep talking about her. Jane Darrell in Austin,
(03:20):
she decided that everybody in all of her ninth grade
students needed to learn how to interview for a job
like an internship or anything McDonald's wherever you wanted to be.
So she brought in all of these people who were
in the professional world who were friends of hers, and
one of them was a guy who managed a radio
station here in Austin, and so he did a fake
interview with me to you know, be an intern, and
(03:43):
then at the end of the interview, I guess he
thought I did a good job, and he said, do
you want to like actual job as an intern at
my radio station?
Speaker 2 (03:50):
For sure?
Speaker 1 (03:51):
And so then I ended up shifting over to television.
And then I almost like, I almost had no choice
but to write news because at fifteen, you know, in sixteen,
I was hired as an editor at the ABC station here.
At that age, I was so used to being told
what to do still by my parents, Oh right, right,
journalism okay, and Harry go, I'm gonna write journalism now.
(04:12):
So it was so I was pretty like pitcheonholed from
the very beginning, and then of course I loved it,
thank goodness. So Ketch, that's the lesson for any of
your listeners who you know, have kids. It's like, man,
catch them early, try to get them. Trying to get
my girls to do that. Figure out now, because that's
what keeps you out of trouble in high school. Kept
me out of trouble because I just said, I definitely
(04:32):
want to do this. I'm not going to screw it
up by doing something stupid exactly.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
That's The struggle I have with my sixteen year old
is she doesn't know what she wants to do either,
and it's hopefully she'll figure it out sooner rather than later.
Oh yeah, you know, So what inspired you to investigate
the focus of the story, which is the case of
Sarah Maria Cornell.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
You know, my other books have been very male centric,
which is sort of odd for me because I really
do gravitate towards female centric stories. But these three the
first three books, Looney Tune, serial Killer, Stuck in a
Fog was my first book. The second one was about
a forensic scientist, American Sherlock, and then the third one
was about you know, Edward Rulov, who was a genius
(05:15):
but not at getting away with crimes. So for this
fourth book, I thought, I really need a woman at
the center of it. And I write an awful lot
about men killing women. And I had a listener when
I was when I had Tenfold the podcast Tenfold More Wicked,
I had a listener reach out to me and said,
you need to look at the Haystack murders, and so
I googled it and I found Sarah's story That is
(05:38):
not the Haystack murder she was talking about, there's a
completely different haystack murder that happened one hundred years later
in Kansas. I think. So, you know, I I when
I read Sarah Cornell's story and I just sort of
realized how similar it is to stories today. I mean, really,
if you break down her story, she is a woman
who you know, is pregnant and she wants to do
(06:00):
what's best for her child, and she is demanding rights,
and then she ends up dead. And we know that
women are out their most vulnerable when they're pregnant. Statistically,
they just are vulnerable for being murdered. So you know,
when I read that story on the podcast that I
have with Paul Holes, buried Bones, we talk about it
all the time. Man, this just seems like this could
(06:21):
have happened last week. This would have happened to a
modern day woman. Absolutely, So to show that, you know,
as as a story of the Sarah Maria Cornell being
the inspiration of course for hester Prnne with the Scarlet letter,
and how much that resonates in. What to me was
terrifying about that story was, you know, I'm looking for heroes,
(06:42):
and I love looking for women heroes. In these stories,
and I found them with the women who recognized that
she had not taken her life most likely that she had,
you know, had violence put upon her. But then the
villains of the story, really the villains, the true villains
to me, were women, and the awful people who took
the stand us destroyed her character for you know, the
(07:03):
sake of protecting a really sleazy guy. So there was
a real for me, a real mixed bag. I was
so proud of some of the women in the story
and completely disgusted by other women.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Exactly as I was reading the book and you're discussing
the trial and like the testimonies and stuff, I physically
went like throughout the book, just like so disgusted with
some of the things these women were saying about her,
And I'm like, why, you know, So it's.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, you saw in the
book that I interviewed a woman who an attorney who
represents victims of sexual harassment, and she read the whole
transcript of everything that the defense said about Sarah Mario Cornell. Basically,
she's a slut, she's a thief, she can't be trusted,
she was miserable, she set him up and took her
(07:50):
own life to frame him. And you know, the attorney
in the book said, I mean this is sort of
like flowery eight, you know, nineteenth century language. But this
is this is absolutely something that would come out of,
you know, a court case today. It wouldn't be allowed
into most courts. But that is the thought process that
is used by the defense that she deserved it or
(08:10):
she was vindictive defense.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
In the book, you note that your co author is
a woman named Catherine Read Arnold Williams. Can you tell
us a little more about her and kind of the
part she plays in this story as well.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Yeah, so it's interesting to have this kind of a
co author. She's a single mom poet turned journalist and
you know, making her own way kind of through this world,
trying to raise her daughter, you know, by selling books
and doing a great job. And she hears about the
story of Sarah Maria Cornell and decides that she wants
to write a book about it, and she has all
(08:46):
of this amazing access and I you know, I read
her book about the story in the trial, and I
thought this would be a fantastic co author. Of course,
you know, the trick is that she's been dead for
one hundred and fifty years. Yeah, she wrote she wrote
the country's first true crime book, to me, which is
a stunning revelation for me to have because you know,
(09:07):
I think conventional wisdom is that Capodi wrote kind of
the first mainstream you know, in Cold Blood, which I
have a whole issue with. And then you know, really
crime historians know about Edmund Pearson, who I adored, who wrote,
you know, in the nineteen twenties, and he wrote throughe
crime books. He really, to me, was sort of that
the beginning of that genre. But Catherine Williams decides in
(09:30):
eighteen thirty three that she's going to take up this case.
She was so disgusted with the way that Sarah Maria
Cornell was being treated after she died. I mean, quite frankly,
she hated the Methodists. The Methodists were wild and out
of control, and Catherine Williams was a very conventional Christian woman,
very conservative, and so it was an it's an interesting
(09:53):
juxtaposition for her to take up a case of a
woman who you know, is being framed as promiscuous and
deserve to be you know, to die is unusual. I mean,
Catherine Williams came from a very very well known family,
the Arnold family. Yep, so you know, to kind of
have her as this co author where I was able
to use all of her materials. She has an archive
(10:15):
at Brown University. I've read. I met her descendant. It
was her great granddaughter, a great great granddaughter who was
just amazing and gave me, you know, access to letters
I had never I had never even heard of before.
So you know, the flip side of that is is
I have all this modern technology. I had access to
prosecutor notes that she had not. She had died by
(10:36):
the time the notes from the prosecutor were released, so
I had information she didn't have.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
It's interesting and I have to like go back and
put on the lens of what it was like in
history at that time, because as soon as I read
about the Methodist I was like Methodists, like, they're really
not that crazy, Like I was raised Methodist and I
was like, well what, I was like, what they just
sing a lot?
Speaker 1 (10:59):
And then I no, I'm reading this story. I was.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
I was like, apparently they were much more wild and
crazy back back in the day. But you know, so
it was even for me. I was like I can't
even like fathom this weird sub sect.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Like which as there would have would.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Have been super shocking coming from like a Puritan lens
as well. So it's so it's like night and day.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Somebody asked me what was the most surprising part of
the book, and I said, I mean that the Methodist
who drink rape juice had these tent revivals where there
was literally something called a tent baby because people got
pregnant so often they called them tent babies. And you know,
I just it's so hard for me to believe that
(11:49):
they were as evangelical as they were. I will say this,
this was really funny. I should give this, you know,
I thought about I talked to this woman who interviewed
me this morning, and she said that she had known
American sign language and she said the sign for American
sign language for Methodists is rubbing your hands together. And
she said, I never understood the significance of it. The
(12:09):
significances of it was she said it was meant to
show great enthusiasm. It's a very old sign. And so
she said, that explains it. Your book explains why great enthusiasm,
because she said modern Methodists, I'm not quite sure that enthusiastic,
but she said they were obviously in the eighteen hundreds,
(12:29):
and she said that the sign is a very old sign.
So it's funny you don't understand the origin of certain
phrases and everything. But she said, now that makes sense
because I did not think they were enthusiastic, but apparently
they were.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Way back in the day. They were ragers.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Apparently, Yeah, shocking, Yeah, and it horrified Catherine Williams, who
was just a very staunch Episcopalian, you know, quiet and demure,
and to have all of these people out there, you know,
women passed out and speaking, and I know she was
horrified by speaking in tongue, speaking in tongues. And I
didn't even think that would be just all of this.
(13:05):
The description's crazy.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Yeah, it comes to cross as very sort of what
today we would label us, almost like Pentecostal, as far
as like denominations and so yeah, like even me reading
the book, I was like, that's not all at all
what Methodists are like today.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Like you know the way that Catherine described a tent
revival that she went to, you know, before Sarah had
been found, before she started on the book, and she
the way she was describing it with like people around
the fire, it's been almost pagan like. It wasn't a
pagan thing, and I just thought, man, she's got to
be this has to be overblown. But then I started
reading other accounts of these tent revivals, and they would
(13:45):
mix with the bath with the crazy Baptists, those wild Baptists,
and you know, so I'm not sure that was what
John Wesley intended when he came to America, you know,
fifty to seventy years earlier. I think that they had
gotten pretty wild. But so, you know, the the kind
of centerpiece of that story is this fight between the
Methodists who were trying to protect a minister, one of
(14:07):
their ministers, who's being accused of something terrible and the
Fall you know, the Fall River the factory owners who
were predominantly Congregationalist, conservative, mainstream Protestants who just said, you know,
we can't have these men from the Methodist churches preying
on our young girls who were working in the factories.
(14:29):
And so, you know, ef Avery, the minister and Sarah
Cornell became avatars for these different religions, and I just
had no clue how threatened churches can be religious movements
can be I just I didn't understand, and then I
find out that the Methodist ministers were being tarred and feathered,
and just they were very threatened. The mainstream Protestants were
(14:52):
very threatened.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
You also note, as you kind of mentioned already, the
connection between Sarah Maria Cornell and Hester. Pret Now can
you dive into the similarities between Sarah Hester and Nathaniel
Hawthorne's take on everything in The Scarlet Letter?
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Yeah? Well, I read The Scarlet Letter in high school,
like I'm pretty sure most of America did, and you know,
I found it to be very dense and difficul and
difficult to get through. Yes, but I think the spirit
of the story was fascinating, And you know, I think
that one of the reasons why this book, of all
(15:31):
the books I've written, this is my fourth, this has
been my favorite. Done to my editor, but this is
my favorite because the feeling that I get of discussed
of like a Sarah Worthing, who is one of the
women who sat on the stand and I think lied
frankly about Sarah having an affair with her brother in law.
I mean, just coming up with all of these terrible
things that were never proven. Just to get just get
(15:53):
this guy out of trouble, this Methodist minister out of trouble.
All of that echoes through the Scarlet Letter clearly, which
was written about eighteen years or so after No scarl
he was in written in eighteen fifty. So yeah, almost
twenty years later, Nathaniel Hawthorne was in Salem and he
went to this fantastic Wax Museum and there was a
(16:13):
depiction of true crime of the day and there was
a depiction of the Minister kind of like lording over
in a figure that was supposed to be Sarah Maria Cornell.
And Hawthorne commented on it, and he was a huge
fan of newspapers and of true crime in general. So
you know the parallels between hester Prinne I mean being
(16:33):
just ultimately shamed by the matrons of the town and
Sarah the same thing happening to her, you know the
minute of course, the Minister, I mean, the main character
aside from hester prinn is the Minister. And you know
we have the minister in our story. They meet in forests,
both of them, which you know, not to get too
much into it, but the I would say one of
(16:55):
the things that is the most upsetting that I think
has been misreported about Sarah's story is, you know, she
is pregnant when she dies, and it is often said
I think that she had an affair with the Methodist minister,
and there's no evidence that they had had a consensual relationship.
(17:15):
There is evidence that he sexually assaulted her, and that's
how she ended up pregnant. So you know, the scene
in the forest to me is very important, you know,
and then there are this is a retreat that that
Hester Prynne and the minister have in the Scarlet Letter
is in the forest. Of course, there's the water theme.
I mean, Sarah works on the water, she's on factories.
(17:36):
So I think a lot of this is a woman
trying to do what's best for her child, and that is,
for me, the centerpoint of this story is Sarah Maria
Cornell saying, my child deserves better. I'm keeping her where
I'm gonna put her in like a daycare system, and
still work in the factory and you know, making demands
(17:59):
and then she's dead, and so I think you see
that kind of parallel and Scarlet Letter demands and you know,
pride and like fighting for something even though it would
be in some ways easier to kind of you know,
go back into the recesses. And that's not what either
of these women chose. And also what's wonderful about both
of the women are both Sarah Maria Cornell and hester
(18:21):
Print are gifted at you know, like weaving and selling.
I mean, these are you know, at crafting, and they
use them to help other people. So, you know, they
talk about hester Print kind of you know, helping people
in the town, even though they kind of they won't
even really acknowledge her publicly, but they're grateful for her help.
And Sarah Maria Cornell had helped what had been kicked
(18:44):
out of a house because people thought she was promiscuous.
And yet a woman became sick in the house and
Sarah volunteered to take care of her even though she
was getting booted out of this house, and the woman
who owned the house, who was kicking her out said
it was just the most generous thing she had ever seen.
She's her out and then she regretted it later on.
But that's what I mean. I mean, she was an
(19:04):
autoistic woman. She gave a lot of money to the
Methodist church, you know, to a church that ultimately turned
on her.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
So in the book, you set out to decide through
a modern lens if Sarah committed suicide or if she
was murdered. And given that the death took place in
eighteen thirty two, can you share with our listeners kind
of what types of forensic tools were available at that
time well, which was pretty much nothing.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Admitted you know. My second book, my second book, American Sherlock,
was set in the nineteen twenties, and I thought it
was pretty slim pickings back then. I mean yeah, back
one hundred years more. So there was no fingerprinting. What
they did was actually I thought an innovative, if not incorrect.
There were very little, for very few forensic things available,
(19:51):
and even fewer forensic clues available in this situation. So
when she is found hanging from a haystack poll by
John Durfy, immediately the men look at the knots that
were tied. It was assumed that she had taken her
own life. And there was a square knot, which is
the only knot I can tie, at the top of
connecting the rope to the haystack pole. But then around
(20:13):
her neck was a clove hitch knot which your listeners
might have remembered. That is the knot that Dennis Raider
would use sometimes was a clove hitch btk. So the
argument for murder was that you cannot tie a clove
hitch knot yourself. You have to use like both hands,
and you have to have a certain amount of strength.
(20:36):
And I spoke to a forensic not expert as well
as Paul Hols, and they both said that's bs. Paul said,
I've seen people you know who have just it has
spontaneously turned into a cloth hitch not. It's not hard. Yeah,
So they are hinging this entire case on the idea
that she could not have done this herself, she had
(20:56):
to have had somebody else do it to her, and
that was incorrect. You know, there was a rudimentary handwriting analysis.
I mean a lot of this is that, you know,
why who brought Sarah Cornell to this farm December nineteenth,
eighteen thirty two when it was twenty something degrees outside
and freezing and she's by herself. And there are letters
(21:19):
that she kept that show somebody said, come to this place,
we need to talk, presumably the father of the child.
And so you know these were anonymous letters. They tried
to compare them to efform Avery, and nobody came to
a definitive conclusion. And so I part of the investigation
I did was I hired a modern handwriting expert to
(21:40):
compare them, and so, you know, I think that they
were so limited it made the case really really difficult
to tackle because there were no witnesses. There were witnesses
in that you know, there were people that saw a lanky,
tall guy which you know, matched Ephraim's description, but nobody
knew him, so nobody could say ever Avery was there
(22:02):
with her. I saw them together. They could just kind
of offer vague assurances and there was not very much else.
He had, like the dumbest alibi ever, which I describe
as like a walk about, you know, on a tiny
island where nobody he knew really was there and he
just had allows the It's like a oh, yeah, I
was asleep. I was at home by myself watching TV alibi.
(22:25):
So yeah, yeah, I mean I think that they were
very limited, very very limited at the time, and the
defense knew that, and they were able to leverage Sarah
had made some mistakes in the past, and they were
able to really really exploit those mistakes to turn this
on her character, not on his character.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
As we've kind of discussed already, Sarah's death comes at
an interesting time in history when millwork was becoming more
common for young women. And not only that, but there
was this religious movement that was creating some waves. So
can you illustrate for our listeners some of them the
unique elements of this case that sort of made it
so popular to mainstream media if you will.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Oh, I mean, I think the religious aspect of it
was crazy. So there there's often it is said that
Eform Avery was the first minister put on trial for murder,
which is not true. Somebody actually countered that years ago
in the New York Times. There was somebody and who
was like four months before or something. I certainly from
Avery was the more high profile case. To have a
(23:30):
minister not only beyond trial for anything, but let alone
murder in the United States in the eighteen thirties was
pretty remarkable to have a Methodist minister, you know, a
minister within a religion that was so threatening that they
were being tored and feathered by people who were threatened
by this new fangled religion. So there's that there is
(23:52):
a beautiful thirty year old girl, who young woman who
you know, had a troubled past, who men just fell
in love with. She was, you know, described as beautiful,
and so there's that sort of idea that she is
the fallen woman. And is he this lascivious, awful, you know,
(24:13):
religious man who you know, a wolf in sheep's clothing
or was she this vindictive, slutty woman who was willing
to take her own life just to get back at
him for And now we'll just say because you know,
she had made some mistakes that followed her and she
wanted to join a new Methodist church, but she had
(24:34):
to have a certificate of good standing, and you know,
afrol mavery have refused her. He said, I don't think
you're a good person. He at first said okay, I'll
do it. Then she confessed all her sins on paper
to him, and then he used it to sexually assault her.
But you know, in the meantime, when he said I'm
not going to give you this certificate of good standing,
(24:55):
I don't really care what you say. That is what
the people who stand behind him, his you know, supporters
say that's what triggered her, was that she was never
going to get into a Methodist church. She was not
going to help her because she was a slut, and
that was that. So, you know, you have these two
plausible narratives happening. You know, you have a vindictive woman
(25:18):
attacking a guy who did nothing wrong except had some standards.
And then you have, you know, on the flip side
of a disgusting, horrible, you know, man who was using
the pulpit as a way to seduce and it ultimately
ended up, you know, sexually assaulting a young woman who
then felt so threatened that he had to murder her.
So there you go. I mean, there's two compelling stories.
(25:40):
So what media then or now would not want to
report on that story?
Speaker 2 (25:44):
Exactly in the book you highlight when Catherine and your
co author, when her biases are coming through in her work,
which is faul River. So how difficult was it during
the process of sort of compiling Sarah Maria Cornell's story
to bat this in order to stay true to a
neutral journalistic viewpoint.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
I mean it was awful. I had I have a
hard enough time policing myself and I had to police
another person, and then I was telling somebody else I
don't know if people know this, but because I've worked
in the eighteen hundred so much. In the eighteen hundreds,
you would have not just one trial transcript, but like
nine different versions. You would have all of these trial
(26:26):
reporters come because they would then turn around and print
them and sell them, so they were highly motivated. You
could have gone out and made your own trial transcript
and have you know, paid a publisher, and then you
could have sold it. But the problem with that is
is each one of these trial reporters had their own slant.
They were either hired by the defense or hired by
the prosecutor. I mean, the newspapers would hire them. So
(26:48):
not only do I have to police myself, which is
hard enough, then Catherine, then on top of that all
of these numbnut reporters who all had inconsistencies, so then
I had to figure out who's the most accurate out
of all of it. So it was very difficult. And also,
you know, I have a true crime podcast class that
I teach at the University of Texas and I tell them,
(27:10):
you know, we have to think about motivation when you
hear a crappy podcast, and I mean crappy as in
they don't care about the victim. They're glorifying the killer.
You know, they're saying, they're they're giving details that don't
need to be given, that are violent or disrespectful, They're
retraumatizing family members. You have to think, why are they
doing that? That's one of the first things I think,
(27:31):
why are they doing that? So when when I started
seeing inconsistencies with Catherine and her reporting, not that it
wasn't accurate, but she was taking facts and sort of
like mushing them to make them into the narrative that
she wanted. You know, Sarah Maria went to her doctor
and she was interested in terminating the pregnancy. At first,
(27:53):
she had several questions about it. He said she was
considering it. Catherine really skipped over that. I mean, she
did not acknowledge it even for a second. Really. I
think she said basically maybe she half thought about it,
but then realized that would be like an abomination or something.
That's not what she said. She was scared of dying
during the procedure. And then she revealed to her doctor
(28:17):
that the minister who had gotten her pregnant had said,
please take this oil of tansy. You can you know,
terminate the pregnancy that way. But he said, well, the
doctor said that dose is going to kill you. He's
trying to kill you. Yeah. So but the way that
Catherine framed that was not there was no consideration at
all about terminating the pregnancy because that would have not
(28:39):
been appropriate for Sarah in eighteen thirty two. And Catherine
was motivated, very highly motivated, as a lot of people were,
to frame her as a martyr in a way perfect. Sure,
she stole several different things. Catherine conflated them into like
one or two events and that's it. But there were
more than one or two events, and so she was
(29:01):
very very careful to show that Sarah is is I
call it the perfect victim, you know that she and
because she really wanted to nail the Methodists and especially
ef Avery. But when she did that to me, she
became an unreliable co author. She just did I I
had a flip and go, who wants to do that?
I don't want to go double check my author? Yeah,
(29:21):
and I have to because I didn't trust her. By
the middle of the book, I couldn't trust her.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
So that's kind of the perfect segue. So how difficult
was it to research this case. Piggybacking off, that would
be like how long did it take you to work
on it, like confer with other experts and authors on
the case, as well as sort of like verify the
accuracy of the information, Like I'm a I'm picturing this
was a very long and involved process.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Yeah, I would say the research for me was a
couple of years. But it's very deceiving with me because
I get bored with one book, you know, like I'm
revising it or I'm reading over the paper or something,
and then I decide I want to find the next book.
And so it's receiving because there's all this crossover. And
then I had a friend of mine, Bill Brands, who
(30:09):
is a fan of hb Ransey's a fantastic nonfiction historian,
and he always said to me, you need to start
writing as soon as possible. And he said, I know
you want to do all this research. He's like, I
could research till the cows come home, but you have
to start immediately. And so took it took a long time,
and Catherine didn't make it easy. On the other hand,
(30:29):
she made it very easy because she had done so
much work. She had you know, collected these letters and
transcribed me. And she was accurate with her transcriptions of
Sarah's letters from what I could tell. She had done
interviews with Sarah's family, which obviously I couldn't do one
hundred and fifty years later, although I did interview Sarah's
family modern family now. So there's there's a lot of
stuff that she made things easier on me and than harder.
(30:52):
At the same time, the trial transcripts were rough. I
mean to have that many different variations and to kind
of just go, okay, what's the most accurate, saying there's
a guy named David Casserman who wrote Full River Outrage,
which is an excellent book, very good book on this case.
And so I actually had to trust him when he
would say, you know, I would read in his book
(31:14):
and he would say, so, there are gazillion trial transcripts,
here's the one I think is the most accurate. And
then I would say, I think he's right, and so
that's the one I would lean to. So it was
a collaborative effort. I would say, so.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
The book and it's pacing does an amazing job like
laying down the groundwork ahead of the murder trial. That
took place in eighteen thirty three, and given the breadth
of witnesses that were called over the span at the trial,
how does it compare to a trial that you would
see today.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Well, you know, there's there were a lot of witnesses,
and actually I think the sad fact was Catherine pointed
this out and then I had to verify and she
was right. I think the defense literally called twice as
many witnesses as the prosecutor did, and she describes the prosecutor,
and then I did research and she was pretty accurate
with this too. It's just sort of this guy. I
(32:02):
think he died shortly after the trial. He was pretty
sickly to begin with. He was Albert Green. Maybe he
was pretty sick to begin with. And then you know,
the Methodist Conference had hired these dynamo like states or
US congressman senators to represent Afro avery. So you know,
I think that that part of the trial was longer
(32:25):
than I had expected. Usually trials in the eighteen hundreds
went on like a nanosecond. They were like two days
if that. Yes, yes, so this was very long because
it was so controversial. I mean, it was this minister
and this quote unquote factory girl, and they represented two
parts of society that were on the rise, and it
(32:46):
was scary fall you know, factory girls on the rise
was scary. I mean, it was independence with women. It
scared the crap out of a lot of men. And
then the Methodist scared the crap out of the mainstream Protestants.
So it was all. It was all very traumatizing for
a lot of very traditional people in New England.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
And when it comes to cases involving sexual assault survivors,
how does her trial compare to others of its?
Speaker 1 (33:13):
Like today, when I talked to Sharon Vinnick, who was
the woman I interviewed. She was a sexual harassment attorney,
and she said, you know, she wrote through the trial
transcripts and said, well, this is exactly what they would say. Now.
She said, however, this would not get into trial, all
of this stuff. She's just slit this and all of that.
It wouldn't get into trial. But you know, because there
(33:35):
are so many laws. But she said, then it does
slip in somehow. But this was so blatant. You know,
what Sarah the prosecutor was trying to defend against was
so blatant. You know, she slept with her brother in law,
she stole all of this stuff, She acted like she
was insane, She had numerous venereal diseases, none of which
(33:55):
were confirmed. So, you know, really just systematically, if this
were happening today, a judge would strike most of this
stuff down as not consequential and inadmissible. And I will say,
even you know, Catherine Williams brings up some several really
nasty stories about efhrom Avery that I'm sure we're discovered
(34:16):
before trial. They're not entered into evidence because they're not consequential.
And then I kind of thought, why are her stories
about venereal diseases consequential in this trial? But efform Avery's
stories about being a complete jerk and you know, really
vilifying this poor woman in his other church and humiliating her,
How is that not consequential? So it's interesting to compare
(34:39):
those cases to today.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
Yes, can you explain to our listeners how Sarah's life
may have gone differently in the same sort of vein
as how Hester Prynne is portrayed in Nathaniel Hawthorne's book.
Did you kind of make that comparison a little bit
towards the end?
Speaker 1 (34:56):
Yeah, I think that, you know, Hawthorne maybe had hoped
that Sarah's life could have turned out like Hester Prinz,
where she in Hester Prynne's own way, you know, gains
independence and certainly self respect, and takes control of her
own narrative, certainly more than probably the matrons in her
town of their own narratives. Sarah Prinn doesn't Hester Prynne,
(35:19):
doesn't have a man telling her, you know what to do,
and so she's raising her daughter Pearl. And I think
that that was his hope for Sarah. I don't think
that he ever thought there. You have to be logical
about the time period you're living in, right, and there
there would not be a way for him to have
(35:40):
a totally absolved Hester of all of this and then
going on and having a perfect life and marrying this
perfect man, a rich man, and everything would be sort
of dismissed. That's not reality for Jacksony in America, but
for someone like Sarah Maria Cornell, she really had visions
of putting the baby to daycare during her work as
(36:03):
a factory worker. I mean, she really was planning for
the future, and that's what led her to her death,
was making a demand and saying, you know, we have
the brother in law, her sister, and her doctor and
an attorney all saying you must get child support from him.
You have to get child support. And the attorney said
you need to move to his state to get child support.
(36:26):
So she was protecting her own child when she died.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
How important was it for you to share Sarah's story?
Speaker 1 (36:33):
I think it's incredibly important because you know, Sarah Maria
Cornell is women today, I mean, you are there is.
It is a fact that pregnant women are at a
greater danger of being murdered than women who aren't, and
we certainly know now that Indigenous women are at higher
(36:57):
risk than most other women are. So I think that
one of the things I love so much about true
crime is that you are forced, very much forced to
talk about issues that people don't want to talk about.
You know, we talk about domestic violence, we talk about
mental illness, we talk about you know, personality disorders, you
talk about gun control, you talk about all of these
(37:19):
different things. Women who are marginalized, women who are victimized,
women who are survivors, And so I think that was
really important our audience, yours in mind, our podcast audience,
as you know, is probably eighty percent women, and they
are pretty much all, as far as I can tell,
one hundred percent advocates, and many of them themselves or survivors,
(37:43):
and they really want these stories to be told with respect.
They don't want the killers glorified in any way. And
we are at this inflection point in true crime where
we have a lot of like content creators who don't
know what they're doing and who do everything wrong. And
you know, my true crime podcast class listens to some
(38:05):
of the podcasts that I say, okay, let's listen to
one of these episodes, and they just walk away and go,
this is gross, And I said, that's why we're listening
to it. You need to know not what kind of podcast,
what kind of TV series you don't want to support,
because it just is not good. These are real people,
even my people from you know, the eighteen hundred, seventeen hundreds,
people still care about them.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
So I didn't write this question down, but I really
want to ask it. Do you think had the Matrons
not spoken up, had John Durfy not spoken up, do
you think we would even know about Sarah today?
Speaker 1 (38:37):
Nope, it would have been a suicide. She was in
the ground. I mean, you know, they disinterred her twice.
She's in her second burial spot now because because these women,
again people I count as the heroes, because these women
saw what they described as rash violence on her and
(38:58):
said this is wrong. And then you know, John Durfy,
the owner of the farm, retrieves her belongings from Missus
Hathaway's boarding house and finds that ominous note which essentially
says if I'm missing, talked to Reverend eff Or Mavery
and you know, which is a note that echoes through
mysteries and thrillers for you know, throughout time. You know,
(39:21):
if I go missing, call my husband. He's the one
who did it, you know. So I know, I think
I think it really was the matrons who who saw her.
And of course these days it would have been you know,
a pathologist or medical examiner or artici who whoever is
in charge of which which would have could have been
a man, absolutely, But in the eighteen hundreds, when you
(39:43):
have a coroner's jury and they're all men, they're not
going to take her dress off. I mean, they didn't
notice anything. She was fully clothed in a bonnet and clash,
and I mean she you know, they it would have
been in their eyes inappropriate to examine her. They assumed
it was a suicide. Her personal physician was there and
said she was pregnant. She was really upset about it.
(40:03):
This is a suicide. And so that's the way this
went down. And man, does that happen now?
Speaker 2 (40:09):
You know?
Speaker 1 (40:10):
Yeah, he was miserable. Oh yeah, he talked about suicide. Yeah,
but did he do it this time? Did the guy
kill himself this time? Is that what happened? And you know, so,
I think without these women intervening yet, this would have
not been a story.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
I kind of want to go back to John Durfy,
to him going and taking the time to actually get
her belongings to kind of see if there were any
other clues or anything in there, without really really realizing
himself that he was going and getting clues. Probably no. Yeah,
do you think to some extent, given that she copied
down some of the notes that she received from Ephraim,
(40:46):
do you think maybe in the back of her mind
she worried that this was going to be the outcome
of this meeting, that she was going to be attacked.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
I don't think she thought that I think that she
they said that missus Hathaway and her daughter. She said
she was in a great mood because she thought she
was going to get money and this would be settled.
You know, when she left, I don't think she thought
she was going to her death. I had another interviewer
asked me, say, man, doctor Wilbur, what terrible advice, you know,
(41:15):
saying meet up with him to get money. And I said, well,
doctor Wilbur said meet up with him. Don't go by yourself.
If you're going to do that, take a man with you.
So I don't think she thought, like many women don't
think that he was capable of murder. And I think
that she copied those notes as insurance policies. That was
very smart and I don't remember if I put this
(41:37):
in the book, but the handwriting analysis, it was interesting
because you know, she Sarah copied over one of his
letters and she was trying to the handwriting expert was
trying to compare Sarah's handwriting to Effra Avery's handwriting because
the idea was that the defense said, oh, well, she
(41:59):
wrote all the anonymous letters herself. She was excellent at
mimicking other people's handwriting. And she said, I've never had
an example like this where I could compare the anonymous
note the notes handwriting to Sarah's handwriting word for word,
because she copied the note word for word. And she said,
clearly she did not write that note. It's clear she
didn't do it that somebody else did. So it's interesting
(42:22):
how smart she was. She was very, very smart about
these insurance policies, you know. And she does mention his
name later on. So I think that there was a lot,
Thank goodness for letters. I worry about people fifty to
one hundred years from now who want to do true crime,
and what are they going to do without all of
these letters. I guess they can petition for emails. I
don't know. I guess what's text messages? Yeah, I mean
(42:44):
letters say so much, you know.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
Yep. And you did mention that in the book, by
the way.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
Oh good.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
So is there anything else regarding the sentaers all about
that I may have missed that you like to share
with our listeners as we're kind of winding down the interview.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
No, I think you know, As I said, the most
important thing for me was to tell the stories of
these powerful women. I don't always agree with them. So,
you know, I think that my co author, Katherine Reid
Arnold Williams, I feel like her heart was in the
right place, but I definitely think she got she was
(43:21):
she was manipulating the storyline, and I really wanted to
correct that. But I think that, you know, you have
the inspiration of these women, and I think you see
that as a writer, I see things where I you know,
I admire Katherine. She was the made main breadwinner of
her house. I am in mind she's raising, you know,
(43:43):
a young girl. I have two kids. She's really kind
of hitting her stride in midlife, so am I. So
I really admire a lot about her. And then I
could see the way that she looked at someone like
Sarah Maria Cornell, because Katherine Williams made a terrible decision
with whom she married. She made a bad decision. Sarah
(44:03):
Maria Cornell's mother made a terrible decision about who she married,
and that that's why Sarah was in the position she
was in. Her family got kicked out, you know, of
their very wealthy family, the Cornell family, and then Sarah,
you know, arguably made a bad decision by continuing, unfortunately
to go back to you never want to blame the victim,
but boys, she you know, I wish somebody had advised
(44:24):
her to stop trusting him, and you know, he was
excellent at manipulating her. And so I felt like there
were women in this story who I looked at with
a lot of admiration, including Sarah Maria Cornell. But I
and then you just think, oh my gosh, like jod
if just one thing had changed, if something were different,
they would be in a completely different position, you know.
(44:47):
But it's it's a I think, a wonderful book. I
really I love it. I loved writing it. It was wonderful.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
I had a hard time putting it down. There were
times when I was like, I need to go to bed,
I need to stop reading this for today and just
pick it up tomorrow. But yeah, I would kind of
echo that sentiment that to me, it read like a
classic case of narcissistic manipulation, where it's he's like tease
in her back, trying to spin this narrative where he
(45:16):
he's going to take care of her. You know, she
just has to do this. But make sure you don't
share share these letters with anybody, like to yourself, you know,
and it's just I pictured so many stories that you
hear today of domestic abuse survivors and things of that nature,
where I was just like, man like, if if only
she may have said something or like ask somebody to
(45:37):
go with her.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
You know, just yeah, But I mean.
Speaker 2 (45:40):
Would we even be talking about it?
Speaker 1 (45:42):
You know, she was not. I mean, look at this,
I gotta tell you, I mean, look at the story.
My kid's watching the story of Gabby Patito right now.
It feels very much like Gabby but trusting the wrong person,
you know. But I mean, Gabby Patito has amazing parents
and they didn't know, they didn't know. How can we?
How can we or how could I expect Sarah Cornell
(46:03):
to pick up on anything from that guy, you know,
when he had manipulated so many other people. So it
is it's a really hard story in a lot of ways,
because she had an incredibly difficult life. She was doing
the best she could. She was a wonderful person, and
you know, ultimately ends up dying by herself, you know,
(46:24):
be in the cold alone on a farm for hours
before somebody finally found her. And then you know, whether
she received justices is you know, arguable at this point.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Well, I don't have any more questions, but I would
like to thank you for joining me today and before
we go, can you tell our listeners where they can
buy the book and if there's anything else that you'd
like them to know about you and your future books
that are going to be coming out.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
No, I think you can buy books wherever you buy books,
you know, I love shopping shopping local, but you know,
everybody has their choices there. It's an audiobook. I read
the audiobook in case people prefer audio. Moving forward, I'm
definitely experimenting with fiction a little bit more. I adore
nonfiction and I won't stop doing nonfiction, but you know,
I like to branch out. Storytelling for me is the
(47:14):
most important thing. The mode actually doesn't matter in some ways.
It's more of like, can I get a story out
that moves you and makes you think?
Speaker 2 (47:21):
Yep?
Speaker 1 (47:21):
You know, so that's the goal.
Speaker 2 (47:23):
Well, on that note, as always, I'm Lindsey and we'll
see you next time with another tale as old as Crime.
We are, we Are. We are Cultivate, Cultivate, Cultivate, Cultivate, Cultivate, Cultivate,
we Are Cultivate.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Hello, and welcome to Your Crime, where we discuss the funny, strange,
and obscure crimes of yesteryear. I'm your host, Lindsay Valenti,
and with me today instead of my sister is author
and podcaster Kate Winkler Dawson. Kate is a seasoned documentary
producer and podcaster who's hit podcasts Tenfold More Wicked, Wicked Words,
(00:52):
and Buried Bones appear on the Exactly Right Network. She
is the author of Death and the Air, American Sherlock
and All That Is Wicked, and is a professor of
journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. Today, Kate
is joining us to discuss her latest book, The Sinner's
All Bow, which is set to be released January seventh.
(01:12):
Acclaimed journalist, podcaster, and true crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson
tells the true story of the scandalous murder investigation that
became the inspiration for both Nathaniel Hawthorns, The Scarlet Letter,
and the first true crime book published in America. On
a cold winter day in eighteen thirty two, Sarah Maria
Cornell was found dead in a quiet farmyard in a
(01:34):
small New England town. When her troubled past and a
secret correspondence with charismatic Methodist minister refriend f from Avery
was uncovered, more questions emerged. Was Sarah's death a suicide
or something much darker? Determined to uncover the real story,
victorian writer Catherine read Arnold Williams threw herself into the
(01:54):
investigation as the trial was unfolding, and wrote what many
claim to be the first American true crime narrative, Fall River.
The murder divided the country and inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne's The
Scarlet Letter. But the Reverend was not convicted, and questions
linger to this day about what really led to Sarah
Cornell's death until now. In The Sinner's Albaugh, acclaimed true
(02:16):
crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson travels back in time to
nineteenth century small town America, emboldened to finish the work
Williams started nearly two centuries before, using modern investigative advancements,
including forensic not analysis and criminal profiling, which was invented
fifty five years later, with Jack the Ripper, Dawston fills
(02:38):
in the gaps of Williams's research to find the truth
and bring justice to an unsettling mystery that speaks to
our past as well as our present, anchored by three
women who subverted the script they were given. So, Kate,
welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
So before we kind of dive into the book, what
got you into writing?
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Oh boy, I think in high school I had an
English teacher who thought I was a pretty good writer,
and I didn't know what kind of writing I wanted
to do, and she did something really interesting. Well, I've
told this story enough where I really should reach out
to miss Darrell and tell her thank you for this.
I mean, I keep talking about her. Jane Darrell in Austin,
(03:20):
she decided that everybody in all of her ninth grade
students needed to learn how to interview for a job
like an internship or anything McDonald's wherever you wanted to be.
So she brought in all of these people who were
in the professional world who were friends of hers, and
one of them was a guy who managed a radio
station here in Austin, and so he did a fake
interview with me to you know, be an intern, and
(03:43):
then at the end of the interview, I guess he
thought I did a good job, and he said, do
you want to like actual job as an intern at
my radio station?
Speaker 2 (03:50):
For sure?
Speaker 1 (03:51):
And so then I ended up shifting over to television.
And then I almost like, I almost had no choice
but to write news because at fifteen, you know, in sixteen,
I was hired as an editor at the ABC station here.
At that age, I was so used to being told
what to do still by my parents, Oh right, right,
journalism okay, and Harry go, I'm gonna write journalism now.
(04:12):
So it was so I was pretty like pitcheonholed from
the very beginning, and then of course I loved it,
thank goodness. So Ketch, that's the lesson for any of
your listeners who you know, have kids. It's like, man,
catch them early, try to get them. Trying to get
my girls to do that. Figure out now, because that's
what keeps you out of trouble in high school. Kept
me out of trouble because I just said, I definitely
(04:32):
want to do this. I'm not going to screw it
up by doing something stupid exactly.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
That's The struggle I have with my sixteen year old
is she doesn't know what she wants to do either,
and it's hopefully she'll figure it out sooner rather than later.
Oh yeah, you know, So what inspired you to investigate
the focus of the story, which is the case of
Sarah Maria Cornell.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
You know, my other books have been very male centric,
which is sort of odd for me because I really
do gravitate towards female centric stories. But these three the
first three books, Looney Tune, serial Killer, Stuck in a
Fog was my first book. The second one was about
a forensic scientist, American Sherlock, and then the third one
was about you know, Edward Rulov, who was a genius
(05:15):
but not at getting away with crimes. So for this
fourth book, I thought, I really need a woman at
the center of it. And I write an awful lot
about men killing women. And I had a listener when
I was when I had Tenfold the podcast Tenfold More Wicked,
I had a listener reach out to me and said,
you need to look at the Haystack murders, and so
I googled it and I found Sarah's story That is
(05:38):
not the Haystack murder she was talking about, there's a
completely different haystack murder that happened one hundred years later
in Kansas. I think. So, you know, I I when
I read Sarah Cornell's story and I just sort of
realized how similar it is to stories today. I mean, really,
if you break down her story, she is a woman
who you know, is pregnant and she wants to do
(06:00):
what's best for her child, and she is demanding rights,
and then she ends up dead. And we know that
women are out their most vulnerable when they're pregnant. Statistically,
they just are vulnerable for being murdered. So you know,
when I read that story on the podcast that I
have with Paul Holes, buried Bones, we talk about it
all the time. Man, this just seems like this could
(06:21):
have happened last week. This would have happened to a
modern day woman. Absolutely, So to show that, you know,
as as a story of the Sarah Maria Cornell being
the inspiration of course for hester Prnne with the Scarlet letter,
and how much that resonates in. What to me was
terrifying about that story was, you know, I'm looking for heroes,
(06:42):
and I love looking for women heroes. In these stories,
and I found them with the women who recognized that
she had not taken her life most likely that she had,
you know, had violence put upon her. But then the
villains of the story, really the villains, the true villains
to me, were women, and the awful people who took
the stand us destroyed her character for you know, the
(07:03):
sake of protecting a really sleazy guy. So there was
a real for me, a real mixed bag. I was
so proud of some of the women in the story
and completely disgusted by other women.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Exactly as I was reading the book and you're discussing
the trial and like the testimonies and stuff, I physically
went like throughout the book, just like so disgusted with
some of the things these women were saying about her,
And I'm like, why, you know, So it's.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, you saw in the
book that I interviewed a woman who an attorney who
represents victims of sexual harassment, and she read the whole
transcript of everything that the defense said about Sarah Mario Cornell. Basically,
she's a slut, she's a thief, she can't be trusted,
she was miserable, she set him up and took her
(07:50):
own life to frame him. And you know, the attorney
in the book said, I mean this is sort of
like flowery eight, you know, nineteenth century language. But this
is this is absolutely something that would come out of,
you know, a court case today. It wouldn't be allowed
into most courts. But that is the thought process that
is used by the defense that she deserved it or
(08:10):
she was vindictive defense.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
In the book, you note that your co author is
a woman named Catherine Read Arnold Williams. Can you tell
us a little more about her and kind of the
part she plays in this story as well.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Yeah, so it's interesting to have this kind of a
co author. She's a single mom poet turned journalist and
you know, making her own way kind of through this world,
trying to raise her daughter, you know, by selling books
and doing a great job. And she hears about the
story of Sarah Maria Cornell and decides that she wants
to write a book about it, and she has all
(08:46):
of this amazing access and I you know, I read
her book about the story in the trial, and I
thought this would be a fantastic co author. Of course,
you know, the trick is that she's been dead for
one hundred and fifty years. Yeah, she wrote she wrote
the country's first true crime book, to me, which is
a stunning revelation for me to have because you know,
(09:07):
I think conventional wisdom is that Capodi wrote kind of
the first mainstream you know, in Cold Blood, which I
have a whole issue with. And then you know, really
crime historians know about Edmund Pearson, who I adored, who wrote,
you know, in the nineteen twenties, and he wrote throughe
crime books. He really, to me, was sort of that
the beginning of that genre. But Catherine Williams decides in
(09:30):
eighteen thirty three that she's going to take up this case.
She was so disgusted with the way that Sarah Maria
Cornell was being treated after she died. I mean, quite frankly,
she hated the Methodists. The Methodists were wild and out
of control, and Catherine Williams was a very conventional Christian woman,
very conservative, and so it was an it's an interesting
(09:53):
juxtaposition for her to take up a case of a
woman who you know, is being framed as promiscuous and
deserve to be you know, to die is unusual. I mean,
Catherine Williams came from a very very well known family,
the Arnold family. Yep, so you know, to kind of
have her as this co author where I was able
to use all of her materials. She has an archive
(10:15):
at Brown University. I've read. I met her descendant. It
was her great granddaughter, a great great granddaughter who was
just amazing and gave me, you know, access to letters
I had never I had never even heard of before.
So you know, the flip side of that is is
I have all this modern technology. I had access to
prosecutor notes that she had not. She had died by
(10:36):
the time the notes from the prosecutor were released, so
I had information she didn't have.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
It's interesting and I have to like go back and
put on the lens of what it was like in
history at that time, because as soon as I read
about the Methodist I was like Methodists, like, they're really
not that crazy, Like I was raised Methodist and I
was like, well what, I was like, what they just
sing a lot?
Speaker 1 (10:59):
And then I no, I'm reading this story. I was.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
I was like, apparently they were much more wild and
crazy back back in the day. But you know, so
it was even for me. I was like I can't
even like fathom this weird sub sect.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Like which as there would have would.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Have been super shocking coming from like a Puritan lens
as well. So it's so it's like night and day.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Somebody asked me what was the most surprising part of
the book, and I said, I mean that the Methodist
who drink rape juice had these tent revivals where there
was literally something called a tent baby because people got
pregnant so often they called them tent babies. And you know,
I just it's so hard for me to believe that
(11:49):
they were as evangelical as they were. I will say this,
this was really funny. I should give this, you know,
I thought about I talked to this woman who interviewed
me this morning, and she said that she had known
American sign language and she said the sign for American
sign language for Methodists is rubbing your hands together. And
she said, I never understood the significance of it. The
(12:09):
significances of it was she said it was meant to
show great enthusiasm. It's a very old sign. And so
she said, that explains it. Your book explains why great enthusiasm,
because she said modern Methodists, I'm not quite sure that enthusiastic,
but she said they were obviously in the eighteen hundreds,
(12:29):
and she said that the sign is a very old sign.
So it's funny you don't understand the origin of certain
phrases and everything. But she said, now that makes sense
because I did not think they were enthusiastic, but apparently
they were.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Way back in the day. They were ragers.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Apparently, Yeah, shocking, Yeah, and it horrified Catherine Williams, who
was just a very staunch Episcopalian, you know, quiet and demure,
and to have all of these people out there, you know,
women passed out and speaking, and I know she was
horrified by speaking in tongue, speaking in tongues. And I
didn't even think that would be just all of this.
(13:05):
The description's crazy.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Yeah, it comes to cross as very sort of what
today we would label us, almost like Pentecostal, as far
as like denominations and so yeah, like even me reading
the book, I was like, that's not all at all
what Methodists are like today.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Like you know the way that Catherine described a tent
revival that she went to, you know, before Sarah had
been found, before she started on the book, and she
the way she was describing it with like people around
the fire, it's been almost pagan like. It wasn't a
pagan thing, and I just thought, man, she's got to
be this has to be overblown. But then I started
reading other accounts of these tent revivals, and they would
(13:45):
mix with the bath with the crazy Baptists, those wild Baptists,
and you know, so I'm not sure that was what
John Wesley intended when he came to America, you know,
fifty to seventy years earlier. I think that they had
gotten pretty wild. But so, you know, the the kind
of centerpiece of that story is this fight between the
Methodists who were trying to protect a minister, one of
(14:07):
their ministers, who's being accused of something terrible and the
Fall you know, the Fall River the factory owners who
were predominantly Congregationalist, conservative, mainstream Protestants who just said, you know,
we can't have these men from the Methodist churches preying
on our young girls who were working in the factories.
(14:29):
And so, you know, ef Avery, the minister and Sarah
Cornell became avatars for these different religions, and I just
had no clue how threatened churches can be religious movements
can be I just I didn't understand, and then I
find out that the Methodist ministers were being tarred and feathered,
and just they were very threatened. The mainstream Protestants were
(14:52):
very threatened.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
You also note, as you kind of mentioned already, the
connection between Sarah Maria Cornell and Hester. Pret Now can
you dive into the similarities between Sarah Hester and Nathaniel
Hawthorne's take on everything in The Scarlet Letter?
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Yeah? Well, I read The Scarlet Letter in high school,
like I'm pretty sure most of America did, and you know,
I found it to be very dense and difficul and
difficult to get through. Yes, but I think the spirit
of the story was fascinating, And you know, I think
that one of the reasons why this book, of all
(15:31):
the books I've written, this is my fourth, this has
been my favorite. Done to my editor, but this is
my favorite because the feeling that I get of discussed
of like a Sarah Worthing, who is one of the
women who sat on the stand and I think lied
frankly about Sarah having an affair with her brother in law.
I mean, just coming up with all of these terrible
things that were never proven. Just to get just get
(15:53):
this guy out of trouble, this Methodist minister out of trouble.
All of that echoes through the Scarlet Letter clearly, which
was written about eighteen years or so after No scarl
he was in written in eighteen fifty. So yeah, almost
twenty years later, Nathaniel Hawthorne was in Salem and he
went to this fantastic Wax Museum and there was a
(16:13):
depiction of true crime of the day and there was
a depiction of the Minister kind of like lording over
in a figure that was supposed to be Sarah Maria Cornell.
And Hawthorne commented on it, and he was a huge
fan of newspapers and of true crime in general. So
you know the parallels between hester Prinne I mean being
(16:33):
just ultimately shamed by the matrons of the town and
Sarah the same thing happening to her, you know the
minute of course, the Minister, I mean, the main character
aside from hester prinn is the Minister. And you know
we have the minister in our story. They meet in forests,
both of them, which you know, not to get too
much into it, but the I would say one of
(16:55):
the things that is the most upsetting that I think
has been misreported about Sarah's story is, you know, she
is pregnant when she dies, and it is often said
I think that she had an affair with the Methodist minister,
and there's no evidence that they had had a consensual relationship.
(17:15):
There is evidence that he sexually assaulted her, and that's
how she ended up pregnant. So you know, the scene
in the forest to me is very important, you know,
and then there are this is a retreat that that
Hester Prynne and the minister have in the Scarlet Letter
is in the forest. Of course, there's the water theme.
I mean, Sarah works on the water, she's on factories.
(17:36):
So I think a lot of this is a woman
trying to do what's best for her child, and that is,
for me, the centerpoint of this story is Sarah Maria
Cornell saying, my child deserves better. I'm keeping her where
I'm gonna put her in like a daycare system, and
still work in the factory and you know, making demands
(17:59):
and then she's dead, and so I think you see
that kind of parallel and Scarlet Letter demands and you know,
pride and like fighting for something even though it would
be in some ways easier to kind of you know,
go back into the recesses. And that's not what either
of these women chose. And also what's wonderful about both
of the women are both Sarah Maria Cornell and hester
(18:21):
Print are gifted at you know, like weaving and selling.
I mean, these are you know, at crafting, and they
use them to help other people. So, you know, they
talk about hester Print kind of you know, helping people
in the town, even though they kind of they won't
even really acknowledge her publicly, but they're grateful for her help.
And Sarah Maria Cornell had helped what had been kicked
(18:44):
out of a house because people thought she was promiscuous.
And yet a woman became sick in the house and
Sarah volunteered to take care of her even though she
was getting booted out of this house, and the woman
who owned the house, who was kicking her out said
it was just the most generous thing she had ever seen.
She's her out and then she regretted it later on.
But that's what I mean. I mean, she was an
(19:04):
autoistic woman. She gave a lot of money to the
Methodist church, you know, to a church that ultimately turned
on her.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
So in the book, you set out to decide through
a modern lens if Sarah committed suicide or if she
was murdered. And given that the death took place in
eighteen thirty two, can you share with our listeners kind
of what types of forensic tools were available at that
time well, which was pretty much nothing.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Admitted you know. My second book, my second book, American Sherlock,
was set in the nineteen twenties, and I thought it
was pretty slim pickings back then. I mean yeah, back
one hundred years more. So there was no fingerprinting. What
they did was actually I thought an innovative, if not incorrect.
There were very little, for very few forensic things available,
(19:51):
and even fewer forensic clues available in this situation. So
when she is found hanging from a haystack poll by
John Durfy, immediately the men look at the knots that
were tied. It was assumed that she had taken her
own life. And there was a square knot, which is
the only knot I can tie, at the top of
connecting the rope to the haystack pole. But then around
(20:13):
her neck was a clove hitch knot which your listeners
might have remembered. That is the knot that Dennis Raider
would use sometimes was a clove hitch btk. So the
argument for murder was that you cannot tie a clove
hitch knot yourself. You have to use like both hands,
and you have to have a certain amount of strength.
(20:36):
And I spoke to a forensic not expert as well
as Paul Hols, and they both said that's bs. Paul said,
I've seen people you know who have just it has
spontaneously turned into a cloth hitch not. It's not hard. Yeah,
So they are hinging this entire case on the idea
that she could not have done this herself, she had
(20:56):
to have had somebody else do it to her, and
that was incorrect. You know, there was a rudimentary handwriting analysis.
I mean a lot of this is that, you know,
why who brought Sarah Cornell to this farm December nineteenth,
eighteen thirty two when it was twenty something degrees outside
and freezing and she's by herself. And there are letters
(21:19):
that she kept that show somebody said, come to this place,
we need to talk, presumably the father of the child.
And so you know these were anonymous letters. They tried
to compare them to efform Avery, and nobody came to
a definitive conclusion. And so I part of the investigation
I did was I hired a modern handwriting expert to
(21:40):
compare them, and so, you know, I think that they
were so limited it made the case really really difficult
to tackle because there were no witnesses. There were witnesses
in that you know, there were people that saw a lanky,
tall guy which you know, matched Ephraim's description, but nobody
knew him, so nobody could say ever Avery was there
(22:02):
with her. I saw them together. They could just kind
of offer vague assurances and there was not very much else.
He had, like the dumbest alibi ever, which I describe
as like a walk about, you know, on a tiny
island where nobody he knew really was there and he
just had allows the It's like a oh, yeah, I
was asleep. I was at home by myself watching TV alibi.
(22:25):
So yeah, yeah, I mean I think that they were
very limited, very very limited at the time, and the
defense knew that, and they were able to leverage Sarah
had made some mistakes in the past, and they were
able to really really exploit those mistakes to turn this
on her character, not on his character.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
As we've kind of discussed already, Sarah's death comes at
an interesting time in history when millwork was becoming more
common for young women. And not only that, but there
was this religious movement that was creating some waves. So
can you illustrate for our listeners some of them the
unique elements of this case that sort of made it
so popular to mainstream media if you will.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Oh, I mean, I think the religious aspect of it
was crazy. So there there's often it is said that
Eform Avery was the first minister put on trial for murder,
which is not true. Somebody actually countered that years ago
in the New York Times. There was somebody and who
was like four months before or something. I certainly from
Avery was the more high profile case. To have a
(23:30):
minister not only beyond trial for anything, but let alone
murder in the United States in the eighteen thirties was
pretty remarkable to have a Methodist minister, you know, a
minister within a religion that was so threatening that they
were being tored and feathered by people who were threatened
by this new fangled religion. So there's that there is
(23:52):
a beautiful thirty year old girl, who young woman who
you know, had a troubled past, who men just fell
in love with. She was, you know, described as beautiful,
and so there's that sort of idea that she is
the fallen woman. And is he this lascivious, awful, you know,
(24:13):
religious man who you know, a wolf in sheep's clothing
or was she this vindictive, slutty woman who was willing
to take her own life just to get back at
him for And now we'll just say because you know,
she had made some mistakes that followed her and she
wanted to join a new Methodist church, but she had
(24:34):
to have a certificate of good standing, and you know,
afrol mavery have refused her. He said, I don't think
you're a good person. He at first said okay, I'll
do it. Then she confessed all her sins on paper
to him, and then he used it to sexually assault her.
But you know, in the meantime, when he said I'm
not going to give you this certificate of good standing,
(24:55):
I don't really care what you say. That is what
the people who stand behind him, his you know, supporters
say that's what triggered her, was that she was never
going to get into a Methodist church. She was not
going to help her because she was a slut, and
that was that. So, you know, you have these two
plausible narratives happening. You know, you have a vindictive woman
(25:18):
attacking a guy who did nothing wrong except had some standards.
And then you have, you know, on the flip side
of a disgusting, horrible, you know, man who was using
the pulpit as a way to seduce and it ultimately
ended up, you know, sexually assaulting a young woman who
then felt so threatened that he had to murder her.
So there you go. I mean, there's two compelling stories.
(25:40):
So what media then or now would not want to
report on that story?
Speaker 2 (25:44):
Exactly in the book you highlight when Catherine and your
co author, when her biases are coming through in her work,
which is faul River. So how difficult was it during
the process of sort of compiling Sarah Maria Cornell's story
to bat this in order to stay true to a
neutral journalistic viewpoint.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
I mean it was awful. I had I have a
hard enough time policing myself and I had to police
another person, and then I was telling somebody else I
don't know if people know this, but because I've worked
in the eighteen hundred so much. In the eighteen hundreds,
you would have not just one trial transcript, but like
nine different versions. You would have all of these trial
(26:26):
reporters come because they would then turn around and print
them and sell them, so they were highly motivated. You
could have gone out and made your own trial transcript
and have you know, paid a publisher, and then you
could have sold it. But the problem with that is
is each one of these trial reporters had their own slant.
They were either hired by the defense or hired by
the prosecutor. I mean, the newspapers would hire them. So
(26:48):
not only do I have to police myself, which is
hard enough, then Catherine, then on top of that all
of these numbnut reporters who all had inconsistencies, so then
I had to figure out who's the most accurate out
of all of it. So it was very difficult. And also,
you know, I have a true crime podcast class that
I teach at the University of Texas and I tell them,
(27:10):
you know, we have to think about motivation when you
hear a crappy podcast, and I mean crappy as in
they don't care about the victim. They're glorifying the killer.
You know, they're saying, they're they're giving details that don't
need to be given, that are violent or disrespectful, They're
retraumatizing family members. You have to think, why are they
doing that? That's one of the first things I think,
(27:31):
why are they doing that? So when when I started
seeing inconsistencies with Catherine and her reporting, not that it
wasn't accurate, but she was taking facts and sort of
like mushing them to make them into the narrative that
she wanted. You know, Sarah Maria went to her doctor
and she was interested in terminating the pregnancy. At first,
(27:53):
she had several questions about it. He said she was
considering it. Catherine really skipped over that. I mean, she
did not acknowledge it even for a second. Really. I
think she said basically maybe she half thought about it,
but then realized that would be like an abomination or something.
That's not what she said. She was scared of dying
during the procedure. And then she revealed to her doctor
(28:17):
that the minister who had gotten her pregnant had said,
please take this oil of tansy. You can you know,
terminate the pregnancy that way. But he said, well, the
doctor said that dose is going to kill you. He's
trying to kill you. Yeah. So but the way that
Catherine framed that was not there was no consideration at
all about terminating the pregnancy because that would have not
(28:39):
been appropriate for Sarah in eighteen thirty two. And Catherine
was motivated, very highly motivated, as a lot of people were,
to frame her as a martyr in a way perfect. Sure,
she stole several different things. Catherine conflated them into like
one or two events and that's it. But there were
more than one or two events, and so she was
(29:01):
very very careful to show that Sarah is is I
call it the perfect victim, you know that she and
because she really wanted to nail the Methodists and especially
ef Avery. But when she did that to me, she
became an unreliable co author. She just did I I
had a flip and go, who wants to do that?
I don't want to go double check my author? Yeah,
(29:21):
and I have to because I didn't trust her. By
the middle of the book, I couldn't trust her.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
So that's kind of the perfect segue. So how difficult
was it to research this case. Piggybacking off, that would
be like how long did it take you to work
on it, like confer with other experts and authors on
the case, as well as sort of like verify the
accuracy of the information, Like I'm a I'm picturing this
was a very long and involved process.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Yeah, I would say the research for me was a
couple of years. But it's very deceiving with me because
I get bored with one book, you know, like I'm
revising it or I'm reading over the paper or something,
and then I decide I want to find the next book.
And so it's receiving because there's all this crossover. And
then I had a friend of mine, Bill Brands, who
(30:09):
is a fan of hb Ransey's a fantastic nonfiction historian,
and he always said to me, you need to start
writing as soon as possible. And he said, I know
you want to do all this research. He's like, I
could research till the cows come home, but you have
to start immediately. And so took it took a long time,
and Catherine didn't make it easy. On the other hand,
(30:29):
she made it very easy because she had done so
much work. She had you know, collected these letters and
transcribed me. And she was accurate with her transcriptions of
Sarah's letters from what I could tell. She had done
interviews with Sarah's family, which obviously I couldn't do one
hundred and fifty years later, although I did interview Sarah's
family modern family now. So there's there's a lot of
stuff that she made things easier on me and than harder.
(30:52):
At the same time, the trial transcripts were rough. I
mean to have that many different variations and to kind
of just go, okay, what's the most accurate, saying there's
a guy named David Casserman who wrote Full River Outrage,
which is an excellent book, very good book on this case.
And so I actually had to trust him when he
would say, you know, I would read in his book
(31:14):
and he would say, so, there are gazillion trial transcripts,
here's the one I think is the most accurate. And
then I would say, I think he's right, and so
that's the one I would lean to. So it was
a collaborative effort. I would say, so.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
The book and it's pacing does an amazing job like
laying down the groundwork ahead of the murder trial. That
took place in eighteen thirty three, and given the breadth
of witnesses that were called over the span at the trial,
how does it compare to a trial that you would
see today.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Well, you know, there's there were a lot of witnesses,
and actually I think the sad fact was Catherine pointed
this out and then I had to verify and she
was right. I think the defense literally called twice as
many witnesses as the prosecutor did, and she describes the prosecutor,
and then I did research and she was pretty accurate
with this too. It's just sort of this guy. I
(32:02):
think he died shortly after the trial. He was pretty
sickly to begin with. He was Albert Green. Maybe he
was pretty sick to begin with. And then you know,
the Methodist Conference had hired these dynamo like states or
US congressman senators to represent Afro avery. So you know,
I think that that part of the trial was longer
(32:25):
than I had expected. Usually trials in the eighteen hundreds
went on like a nanosecond. They were like two days
if that. Yes, yes, so this was very long because
it was so controversial. I mean, it was this minister
and this quote unquote factory girl, and they represented two
parts of society that were on the rise, and it
(32:46):
was scary fall you know, factory girls on the rise
was scary. I mean, it was independence with women. It
scared the crap out of a lot of men. And
then the Methodist scared the crap out of the mainstream Protestants.
So it was all. It was all very traumatizing for
a lot of very traditional people in New England.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
And when it comes to cases involving sexual assault survivors,
how does her trial compare to others of its?
Speaker 1 (33:13):
Like today, when I talked to Sharon Vinnick, who was
the woman I interviewed. She was a sexual harassment attorney,
and she said, you know, she wrote through the trial
transcripts and said, well, this is exactly what they would say. Now.
She said, however, this would not get into trial, all
of this stuff. She's just slit this and all of that.
It wouldn't get into trial. But you know, because there
(33:35):
are so many laws. But she said, then it does
slip in somehow. But this was so blatant. You know,
what Sarah the prosecutor was trying to defend against was
so blatant. You know, she slept with her brother in law,
she stole all of this stuff, She acted like she
was insane, She had numerous venereal diseases, none of which
(33:55):
were confirmed. So, you know, really just systematically, if this
were happening today, a judge would strike most of this
stuff down as not consequential and inadmissible. And I will say,
even you know, Catherine Williams brings up some several really
nasty stories about efhrom Avery that I'm sure we're discovered
(34:16):
before trial. They're not entered into evidence because they're not consequential.
And then I kind of thought, why are her stories
about venereal diseases consequential in this trial? But efform Avery's
stories about being a complete jerk and you know, really
vilifying this poor woman in his other church and humiliating her,
How is that not consequential? So it's interesting to compare
(34:39):
those cases to today.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
Yes, can you explain to our listeners how Sarah's life
may have gone differently in the same sort of vein
as how Hester Prynne is portrayed in Nathaniel Hawthorne's book.
Did you kind of make that comparison a little bit
towards the end?
Speaker 1 (34:56):
Yeah, I think that, you know, Hawthorne maybe had hoped
that Sarah's life could have turned out like Hester Prinz,
where she in Hester Prynne's own way, you know, gains
independence and certainly self respect, and takes control of her
own narrative, certainly more than probably the matrons in her
town of their own narratives. Sarah Prinn doesn't Hester Prynne,
(35:19):
doesn't have a man telling her, you know what to do,
and so she's raising her daughter Pearl. And I think
that that was his hope for Sarah. I don't think
that he ever thought there. You have to be logical
about the time period you're living in, right, and there
there would not be a way for him to have
(35:40):
a totally absolved Hester of all of this and then
going on and having a perfect life and marrying this
perfect man, a rich man, and everything would be sort
of dismissed. That's not reality for Jacksony in America, but
for someone like Sarah Maria Cornell, she really had visions
of putting the baby to daycare during her work as
(36:03):
a factory worker. I mean, she really was planning for
the future, and that's what led her to her death,
was making a demand and saying, you know, we have
the brother in law, her sister, and her doctor and
an attorney all saying you must get child support from him.
You have to get child support. And the attorney said
you need to move to his state to get child support.
(36:26):
So she was protecting her own child when she died.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
How important was it for you to share Sarah's story?
Speaker 1 (36:33):
I think it's incredibly important because you know, Sarah Maria
Cornell is women today, I mean, you are there is.
It is a fact that pregnant women are at a
greater danger of being murdered than women who aren't, and
we certainly know now that Indigenous women are at higher
(36:57):
risk than most other women are. So I think that
one of the things I love so much about true
crime is that you are forced, very much forced to
talk about issues that people don't want to talk about.
You know, we talk about domestic violence, we talk about
mental illness, we talk about you know, personality disorders, you
talk about gun control, you talk about all of these
(37:19):
different things. Women who are marginalized, women who are victimized,
women who are survivors, And so I think that was
really important our audience, yours in mind, our podcast audience,
as you know, is probably eighty percent women, and they
are pretty much all, as far as I can tell,
one hundred percent advocates, and many of them themselves or survivors,
(37:43):
and they really want these stories to be told with respect.
They don't want the killers glorified in any way. And
we are at this inflection point in true crime where
we have a lot of like content creators who don't
know what they're doing and who do everything wrong. And
you know, my true crime podcast class listens to some
(38:05):
of the podcasts that I say, okay, let's listen to
one of these episodes, and they just walk away and go,
this is gross, And I said, that's why we're listening
to it. You need to know not what kind of podcast,
what kind of TV series you don't want to support,
because it just is not good. These are real people,
even my people from you know, the eighteen hundred, seventeen hundreds,
people still care about them.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
So I didn't write this question down, but I really
want to ask it. Do you think had the Matrons
not spoken up, had John Durfy not spoken up, do
you think we would even know about Sarah today?
Speaker 1 (38:37):
Nope, it would have been a suicide. She was in
the ground. I mean, you know, they disinterred her twice.
She's in her second burial spot now because because these women,
again people I count as the heroes, because these women
saw what they described as rash violence on her and
(38:58):
said this is wrong. And then you know, John Durfy,
the owner of the farm, retrieves her belongings from Missus
Hathaway's boarding house and finds that ominous note which essentially
says if I'm missing, talked to Reverend eff Or Mavery
and you know, which is a note that echoes through
mysteries and thrillers for you know, throughout time. You know,
(39:21):
if I go missing, call my husband. He's the one
who did it, you know. So I know, I think
I think it really was the matrons who who saw her.
And of course these days it would have been you know,
a pathologist or medical examiner or artici who whoever is
in charge of which which would have could have been
a man, absolutely, But in the eighteen hundreds, when you
(39:43):
have a coroner's jury and they're all men, they're not
going to take her dress off. I mean, they didn't
notice anything. She was fully clothed in a bonnet and clash,
and I mean she you know, they it would have
been in their eyes inappropriate to examine her. They assumed
it was a suicide. Her personal physician was there and
said she was pregnant. She was really upset about it.
(40:03):
This is a suicide. And so that's the way this
went down. And man, does that happen now?
Speaker 2 (40:09):
You know?
Speaker 1 (40:10):
Yeah, he was miserable. Oh yeah, he talked about suicide. Yeah,
but did he do it this time? Did the guy
kill himself this time? Is that what happened? And you know, so,
I think without these women intervening yet, this would have
not been a story.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
I kind of want to go back to John Durfy,
to him going and taking the time to actually get
her belongings to kind of see if there were any
other clues or anything in there, without really really realizing
himself that he was going and getting clues. Probably no. Yeah,
do you think to some extent, given that she copied
down some of the notes that she received from Ephraim,
(40:46):
do you think maybe in the back of her mind
she worried that this was going to be the outcome
of this meeting, that she was going to be attacked.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
I don't think she thought that I think that she
they said that missus Hathaway and her daughter. She said
she was in a great mood because she thought she
was going to get money and this would be settled.
You know, when she left, I don't think she thought
she was going to her death. I had another interviewer
asked me, say, man, doctor Wilbur, what terrible advice, you know,
(41:15):
saying meet up with him to get money. And I said, well,
doctor Wilbur said meet up with him. Don't go by yourself.
If you're going to do that, take a man with you.
So I don't think she thought, like many women don't
think that he was capable of murder. And I think
that she copied those notes as insurance policies. That was
very smart and I don't remember if I put this
(41:37):
in the book, but the handwriting analysis, it was interesting
because you know, she Sarah copied over one of his
letters and she was trying to the handwriting expert was
trying to compare Sarah's handwriting to Effra Avery's handwriting because
the idea was that the defense said, oh, well, she
(41:59):
wrote all the anonymous letters herself. She was excellent at
mimicking other people's handwriting. And she said, I've never had
an example like this where I could compare the anonymous
note the notes handwriting to Sarah's handwriting word for word,
because she copied the note word for word. And she said,
clearly she did not write that note. It's clear she
didn't do it that somebody else did. So it's interesting
(42:22):
how smart she was. She was very, very smart about
these insurance policies, you know. And she does mention his
name later on. So I think that there was a lot,
Thank goodness for letters. I worry about people fifty to
one hundred years from now who want to do true crime,
and what are they going to do without all of
these letters. I guess they can petition for emails. I
don't know. I guess what's text messages? Yeah, I mean
(42:44):
letters say so much, you know.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
Yep. And you did mention that in the book, by
the way.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
Oh good.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
So is there anything else regarding the sentaers all about
that I may have missed that you like to share
with our listeners as we're kind of winding down the interview.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
No, I think you know, As I said, the most
important thing for me was to tell the stories of
these powerful women. I don't always agree with them. So,
you know, I think that my co author, Katherine Reid
Arnold Williams, I feel like her heart was in the
right place, but I definitely think she got she was
(43:21):
she was manipulating the storyline, and I really wanted to
correct that. But I think that, you know, you have
the inspiration of these women, and I think you see
that as a writer, I see things where I you know,
I admire Katherine. She was the made main breadwinner of
her house. I am in mind she's raising, you know,
(43:43):
a young girl. I have two kids. She's really kind
of hitting her stride in midlife, so am I. So
I really admire a lot about her. And then I
could see the way that she looked at someone like
Sarah Maria Cornell, because Katherine Williams made a terrible decision
with whom she married. She made a bad decision. Sarah
(44:03):
Maria Cornell's mother made a terrible decision about who she married,
and that that's why Sarah was in the position she
was in. Her family got kicked out, you know, of
their very wealthy family, the Cornell family, and then Sarah,
you know, arguably made a bad decision by continuing, unfortunately
to go back to you never want to blame the victim,
but boys, she you know, I wish somebody had advised
(44:24):
her to stop trusting him, and you know, he was
excellent at manipulating her. And so I felt like there
were women in this story who I looked at with
a lot of admiration, including Sarah Maria Cornell. But I
and then you just think, oh my gosh, like jod
if just one thing had changed, if something were different,
they would be in a completely different position, you know.
(44:47):
But it's it's a I think, a wonderful book. I
really I love it. I loved writing it. It was wonderful.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
I had a hard time putting it down. There were
times when I was like, I need to go to bed,
I need to stop reading this for today and just
pick it up tomorrow. But yeah, I would kind of
echo that sentiment that to me, it read like a
classic case of narcissistic manipulation, where it's he's like tease
in her back, trying to spin this narrative where he
(45:16):
he's going to take care of her. You know, she
just has to do this. But make sure you don't
share share these letters with anybody, like to yourself, you know,
and it's just I pictured so many stories that you
hear today of domestic abuse survivors and things of that nature,
where I was just like, man like, if if only
she may have said something or like ask somebody to
(45:37):
go with her.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
You know, just yeah, But I mean.
Speaker 2 (45:40):
Would we even be talking about it?
Speaker 1 (45:42):
You know, she was not. I mean, look at this,
I gotta tell you, I mean, look at the story.
My kid's watching the story of Gabby Patito right now.
It feels very much like Gabby but trusting the wrong person,
you know. But I mean, Gabby Patito has amazing parents
and they didn't know, they didn't know. How can we?
How can we or how could I expect Sarah Cornell
(46:03):
to pick up on anything from that guy, you know,
when he had manipulated so many other people. So it
is it's a really hard story in a lot of ways,
because she had an incredibly difficult life. She was doing
the best she could. She was a wonderful person, and
you know, ultimately ends up dying by herself, you know,
(46:24):
be in the cold alone on a farm for hours
before somebody finally found her. And then you know, whether
she received justices is you know, arguable at this point.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Well, I don't have any more questions, but I would
like to thank you for joining me today and before
we go, can you tell our listeners where they can
buy the book and if there's anything else that you'd
like them to know about you and your future books
that are going to be coming out.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
No, I think you can buy books wherever you buy books,
you know, I love shopping shopping local, but you know,
everybody has their choices there. It's an audiobook. I read
the audiobook in case people prefer audio. Moving forward, I'm
definitely experimenting with fiction a little bit more. I adore
nonfiction and I won't stop doing nonfiction, but you know,
I like to branch out. Storytelling for me is the
(47:14):
most important thing. The mode actually doesn't matter in some ways.
It's more of like, can I get a story out
that moves you and makes you think?
Speaker 2 (47:21):
Yep?
Speaker 1 (47:21):
You know, so that's the goal.
Speaker 2 (47:23):
Well, on that note, as always, I'm Lindsey and we'll
see you next time with another tale as old as Crime.
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