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Good Evening. Acclaim 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 Hawthorne's 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 small New England town. When her troubled passed and a secret correspondence with charismatic Methodist minister Reverend Ephraim 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 investigation. As the trial was unfolding and wrote what many claimed 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 All Bow, acclaimed true time historian Kate Winkler, Dawson travels back in time to nineteenth century small town America, emboldened to finish the work William started nearly two centuries before, using modern investigative advancements including forensic n analysis and criminal profiling, which was invented fifty five years later with Jack the Ripper, Dawson fills in the gaps of William'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. The book that we're featuring this evening is The Sinner's All Bow. Two authors, One Murder and the Real Hester Prynne, with my special guest, crime historian, journalist, podcaster, and author Kate Winn Claire Dawson. Welcome, back to the program, and thank
you very much for this interview. Kate Winkler Dawson, thanks for having me, Thank you so much, and congratulations on the Sinners.
All Bow, Thank you. I love all my books, but this is probably my favorite. Really is.
Now very very interestingly the situation that you are in in terms of having a co author for this book. So tell us about this unique situation and circumstances surrounding that decision to make her your co author. Tell us about Katherine Reid Arnold Williams.
Well, Catherine is brilliant, absolutely brilliant. I think a poet who was a single mom and was raising her daughter on her own and made a massive amount of money from being a very well known poet, and then when she heard about the story, she decided that she wanted to write a book. And so I used her book really as a source at first, and then I thought she had so much information. I really want to make
her a co author. And then I really felt like I needed to go back and kind of examine some things because I've never worked with a co author before, and I wanted to double check her reporting, which was accurate, but her motivation was something that I questioned, And so, you know, as I was working with her material and learning more about her as a person, I started thinking about journalism and ethics and why we're motivated to write, and how powerful storytelling is and how you can, you know,
you can really frame a narrative from whatever point of view you want ruin somebody's life, you know, And so I really was fascinated by it. I think the most interesting thing about Catherine Arnold Williams is that she died about one hundred and fifty years ago. So I'm working with a co author who has a long since past, and I have a lot of access She didn't, and she had a lot of access I didn't.
You talked about that motivation for her writing this book, and so you also go into her history and her background that would shape her to have this certain motivation for writing this book. So tell us some of the things about her life that seem to have shaped her and her motivation and her perspective.
So Catherine was very religious. She jokes that she was raised sort of as a nun. Her mother died when she was very young. Her father was out to see all the time. He was like a sea captain, and so she was raised by some aunts who I can only describe as one of the phrases I hate the most, which are Spinster's aunts, who were very religious in an instilled I think a set of ethics in her that and morals and love of the Bible that carried her through.
What it also ended up doing is creating a lot of acrimony for her between Catherine and any religion that was not you know, mainstream Protestant Episcopalian. I mean, she really was distrustful of the Baptists and some of the religions that were coming up, but she particularly had a disdain for the Methodists, which I always say, hold on to your hats, but the Methodists were wild in the
eighteen hundreds. I mean they were not the grape jews drinking Methodists of today, and so she really looked at the Methodists and their tent revivals and their handsome ministers with a lot of disrespect and sort of like resentment in a way. So that background of rooted in writing and religion, and sort of the reverence for the traditional minister who was very solemn and formally educated. I think all of those things really came into play with this book.
Because the book is centered on a young woman who met a minister at a Methodist church and ended up dead, and that's the basic part of the story and what happens to her. And I think that Catherine went into investigating the death of Sarah Maria Cornell already very clear that she was murdered, and I wasn't so sure.
Let's go back a little bit. You talked, you just touched on the Methodist and Methodism, but you talk about Congregationalists and versus the Methodist which was considered a new Protestant movement and mistrusted by people like Catherine and many other people. So tell us a little bit more about what the congregational Congregationalists, pardon me, what their philosophy was, and what their criticism was of the Methodist church.
Boy, I mean, you just couldn't get any more different. I think. So the Congregationalists that part of, like I said, the main stream Protestant church are the factory owners, the business owners. This is sort of like not puritan necessarily, but this is this is very much along those lines where you're very quiet, you're very solemn in church, you sit in pews, you have I mean, I would not say boring, but probably pretty boring. Ministers who are ministering
to people, you know, in a very formal setting. It is not at all exciting. It is certainly not evangelical and passionate. It is reverence towards the Bible traditions community protecting women if whatever you agree with that definition. Their definition of protecting women was, you know, making sure that they, you know, stayed away from men essentially or at least, you know, the kind of men that their families didn't approve of. And then you have the Methodists who had
only been in America for fifty years. John Wesley had come fifty years earlier. And these are the like the circuit riders if you're familiar with those at all. These are the people who, along with the Baptists and some other religions, would like go to the western frontier and minister to people there and you know, really try to convert draw people on. You have these tent revivals that are wild, lots of alcohol. I mean, I don't think they were all like that. I don't think that was
John Wesley's vision, but they were wild. And you have these young ministers like the man at the center of our story. At for Avery, you have these young, good looking ministers who have not been formally taught how to preach the word. There are like women flailing around, making moaning noises, speaking in tongues. The ministers are passionate and attractive, and you know they actually there was a phrase I read. One academic wrote, there was a phrase literally called tent babies,
babies who were born because of these tent revivals. And so this is very different, like I said, than the Methodists we are familiar with now. So when Catherine went to one of these tent revivals years earlier, she thought the serenic, the setting was very serene and beautiful. She
was optimistic. And then when she saw all of this, which she felt like women who were very clearly being not attacked, but just sort of like there were vulnerable women who clearly couldn't protect themselves and bad things were happening,
she was incredibly critical. So when this case comes up years later, after she had experienced this lascivious debauchery at a tent revival from Methodists, when this case comes up where you have a woman who's a victim, potentially a victim of a Methodist minister it just flipped every switch for her. I mean, it's like when you talk about triggers, that's a trigger for Katherine Williams.
What was it about Catherine Williams's life that was controversial at that time and talk about she identified with Sarah in terms of the sense of independence that women were now yearning for and now had gained, and that's via the work that was available at factories. Tell us more about this.
I'm a little surprised that Catherine was so supportive of women working in factories. It was dangerous. These are young women who were they could have been domestic workers, you know in big cities like New York at the time, or most of them came from more rural areas and they were given the opportunity to earn money, not much, but earn money and independence by working at these factories
that were springing up in eighteen thirties. Jacksonian America. So you have places like Fall River, Massachusetts of Lizzie Borden fame, who you know, kind of at the beginning, they're the nexus of where a lot of these factories came from. There on the water on Biscayne Bay. I mean, there's just various you know city, Well, it's hold on, let
me go back. It's you know, some of these factories are like they're on Mount Hope Bay, you know, they're all up and down the East Coast, and so these women are given the opportunities to work i mean twelve to fourteen hour days or more. It's dangerous, they can get hurt. There's a large machinery. They're weaving and looming and literally working in factories that have really hard equipment
to deal with. And then they go home to a boarding house, usually headed up by a matron who takes them to church and there's a bell that rings for dinner. It's a very regulated life. So it's interesting to say independence because a lot of these women were independent, but you know, still not they were still told what to do. There was still a patriarchal society and play in all of these towns. But Sarah Maria Cornell, who hailed from
the very famous Cornell family as in Cornell University. You know, Sarah Maria Cornell came from the or side of that family and she wanted more independence and she got it. She was very talented. She moved from factory to factory, but it definitely made a lot of people nervous in the society for women to be given that much free reign. Catherine Williams, as you had mentioned, was a little controversial.
You would not think this was the case. But she had been married for one or two years to a man name Horatio Williams, whose ancestor was Roger Williams, who was a very famous, you know, person who came and founded Rhode Island. I believe they got married, and she was vague in her memoirs that I read, in the letters that I read about what was wrong, But it sounded like he got Horatio got involved with some bad
people and made some bad decisions. He had promised her that they would move west, and then he kind of isolated her in upstate New York. So she divorced him. So this would have been something like eighteen late eighteen twenties. They had a little girl named Amy, and boy to get a divorce, you know, as I say in my book, to get a divorce in the early eighteen hundreds, he must have been bad. He must have been a bad husband something, because that was like an act of God
to get a divorce instigated by a woman. And so, you know, she was raising Amy without really any resources, her aunts who raised her. When one died, she left her some money, but I mean that money was going to run out. I think she put it all in a house in Providence, Rhode Island. And so she was raising very successfully this little girl on her own by herself, simply through writing books of poetry. And she wrote a
couple of biographies that were successful. So she is a successful writer when she takes on this story.
Now you talk about the agenda for Catherine to write this book, and again, this is not something that she had in tended to do with her writing career at all, but she found herself with this story. Tell us about her agenda for this book, and then tell us about your agenda.
Her agenda is mysterious. So she when she heard about this case, she was given full access to everything you could think of. I mean they she was introduced to Sarah Maria Cornell's family, who gave her letters between Sarah and the would be killer, between Sarah and the family. She was given access that nobody else had been given access to. So when I really started reading about this stuff, I thought, why did this happen? I mean, who was giving her all this access. She went in towards some
of the factories, she met with a prosecutor. She I mean, she really had this incredible access. And so, you know, the more that we get into the book, the more I think. I was thinking to myself, Okay, she is a passionate advocate for women. And I spend the majority of my time, as I think you do, too, Dan, talking about men killing women. I mean, that is just the reality time, right, And so I think thinking about that, I was thinking, Okay, well, is she an advocate, an
advocate for women, for female victims. Is she trying to get them give them a voice? And I think that's true. I also think that there were people motivated to hire her to write a book that was just going to gut the Methodist Church and everything the Methodist Church stood for. So as I had said, I really this book in particular really made me think about journalism and the biases that come with it. I mean, I went to a graduate school where I was told you have to stay
I'm biased, no matter what I mean. That is just it. You are bipartisan, That is it. That is the way journalism is. I agree with that to a certain extent, but we're human beings. We all have things you know about us that that are going to influence us, and I think Catherine was heavily influenced. I think her reporting was excellent. But there's two parts to writing a book
like this. There's the reporting research part, and there's the Okay, now you've got there's the you have all of this information, how do I craft a narrative? And I think that the way that she crafted a narrative is what I was struggling with the most, because her narrative from the beginning framed the Methodist Church as essentially evil and framed the suspect as guilty before he even went on trial, so that.
Jesus as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now you talk about this narrative that she's crafting, it seems that she's trying to counter what she sees as an inherent and prejudice already beset Sarah Cornell.
Yeah. You know, one of the things about Sarah that Catherine I think tried to really kind of mold is her public image, because Sarah really was dismantled during these trials. I mean, her character was questioned, and Sarah did some stuff, I mean simple theft. There were some things that did happen. They were irrefutable. From my point of view, it's a young woman who did something stupid. I don't think it's you know, something ingrained in her to be a criminal.
It ended up ruining her reputation. I mean, stealing address, you know, ten years earlier, follows you in this time period, from town to town, she gets a reputation. People see her with a man, they say, well, she's a thief. She's sleeping with him too. I mean, a bad person is a bad person, and that's it. And so I think that's the kind of thing that continues on forever
for her. And when you read Catherine's account of Sarah's life, it truly is painted like everything that happened to her was preventable, that she did nothing wrong, that she was already cursed from the beginning because her father abandoned the family, and that was the truth. He did abandon the family and caused so much strife, and so you know, you see these echoes her Catherine made a bad decision marrying Horatio Williams, very bad decision, even though she got a
daughter out of it. Sarah Maria Cornell. Her mother made a bad decision by marrying Sarah's father. It ruined that part of the family. And then you have Sarah making another bad decision, maybe trusting somebody too much. These are all involving bad men who are manipulating good women, and that is the theme that she sticks with with the story.
I think, you know, I mean, it's it's I think she sees so many parallels between these various lives that you know, she gets caught in that narrow when she's writing, and it was really up to me to decide what was happening with that.
Let's go back to the basic facts of the case, just so we can understand how she came to be in a position in fall River at the Deurfy Farm in December eighteen thirty two.
Here are the basic facts of the case. Sarah Maria Cornell was staying at a boarding house in near fall River, Massachusetts, and she finds herself a few months pregnant. She is demanding money from the father of the baby. We don't know who the father is. They exchange letters, thank goodness, so we have that proof, and he never signs his name. She never addresses him by name. So there is an exchange of letters going back and forth where she essentially says,
am I need money. I'm keeping this baby. I'm going to put the baby in it like a daycare while I work in the factory. I will make it work. But this is your responsibility. The letter writer says, meet me at the place that you and I have discussed, which turns out to be a farm in what was then Timperton, Rhode Island, what is now Fall River, Massachusetts. It's now a beautiful park in Fall River called Kennedy Park, and it's just actually a few blocks down from the
Lizzie Borden house. So he says, meet me the night of December nineteenth. It's very very cold, and again, you know, I had to hire a handwriting analyst to figure out who wrote these letters, to prove or disprove who wrote these letters to her. But that's what draws her to the farm. That night. It is very very cold, and it's around eight o'clock. People who live near the farm here screams, and some were saying moans, some were saying screams.
They're kind of going off. A couple of people are going off of their clocks on the wall for the time, and then a couple of people are going off the gongs of the dinner bell from one of the factories, summoning the girls home. So it's a little confusing because the time is off for some of these things. The border, the woman who runs Sarah's boarding house, reports that she never came back. She had told the woman and her daughter, I'm leaving. I'm not going to be out for very long.
I'm She was very excited because she thought she was going to get some money. So the next day, John Durfy with the Durfy name is incredibly well known in
Fall River, Massachusetts. Still and John Durfy is driving a team of horses back home and on a cart and he sees something in the distance on his property and he gets out and he walks over to a bunch of hay bales, huge hay bales, and there is a what's called a haystack pole which you would put a bail on hook it so that because this is when time, you know, it would not the snow and the rain
wouldn't rot the hay on the bottom. So there is a woman, you know, in a long cloak and a bonnet, and she is hanging by her neck from a haystack pole, and clearly she is dead. It is a freezing cold night below freezing and he calls for help. And that's how we end up with this case. And the question is was she murdered or was this an act of self harm? Did she take her own life? If she were murdered, who did it? What happened? And I think
it is confusing to a lot of people. One of the things that's so interesting about this case and about Catherine's reporting, is that various assertions people made. So the noto made at the top of the haystack that connects the rope to the haystack pole was a square knot typical is the only not I can do, square knot, And then the one around her neck is a clove
hitch not, which is unique. And so there was sort of a case closed attitude from Catherine and a lot of the people there that there's no way that this was suicide because she would not be able to have hanged herself with a clove hitch, because you would have to pull it from both hands and have a certain amount of strength. I talked to a forensic non expert who said that's not true. She could have done it
herself absolutely. So you know, it is looking at this case through a modern lens of what we know now versus what they thought they knew. Then. I learned a whole lot about eighteen hundreds forensics, which was interesting. I thought I knew it all, but I really didn't until I got into this case.
What are some of the clues that these investigators find at that time? But more importantly, at the very beginning, the men that were assembled at the Derfy farm, they seem to have a conclusion immediately that it's a suicide, don't they.
Absolutely. I think that's partially the times. I think that, you know, there is not an assumption that this a woman, a person would be murdered. I think they just automatically thought, particularly a hanging, who would hang somebody? Why bother doing that as a form of murder?
You know.
Obviously the idea is that she was strangled from behind, and then her body was hung from this haystack pole. So I think that the very first assumption was suicide. Her doctor shows up, who lives nearby. He sees all of the women in town rushing toward the scene, and he says okay, doctor Thomas Wilburn. He says, okay, well I better go, and he goes and he sees it's his patient. He says, she's pregnant. He says that it was from a Methodist minister. He says, I think this
is suicide. What else would it be. I mean, he said, I think she was humiliated, and he just said, this is, sadly, you know, suicide. It wasn't until one of the most
fascinating things. I think. It was not until the women in the town were dressing her for a funeral, the matrons, and this was very common in the eighteen hundreds and seventeen hundreds, where the women in town would be in charge of stripping the victim, stripping the dead person, cleaning them up, washing them, you know, putting makeup, whatever they would need to do to prepare for burial. This was a task for the women in town, for the really
upstanding women in town, right. So these matrons start to do that with her, and they see bruises and cuts, clear signs of a struggle that the men who gathered, as you mentioned, never saw, because they never bothered to take her clothes off because that would be improper. So it's these women who I end one chapter when one woman says to another, what do you think happened? And the other one replies, rash violence. They were the ones
that triggered all of this. They saw the violence and they recognized it.
You talk about the very quick funeral and burial. But then a person like John Durfey comes forward after this and has some startling information, doesn't he.
Yeah, I love the heroes in this story. I mean I always start with the women. I look for female heroes, especially in stories of like I said, men of men killing women. But John Durfey was a big player in this. The owner of the farm, the one who found her, his brother reported, is a man named Williams durfy He reported to him, they both looked at the clove knot, the clove hitch knot. John Durfey thought it was suicide.
At first. The matron, the women said. The matron said, please go to her boarding house, a woman named missus Hathaway. Go to missus Hathaway's house and retrieve clothes, anything, and you know that we can dress and also will you find contacts so that we can tell her family that she's died. And that we're gonna have a funeral the next day. So he goes to missus Hathaway's house and he retrieves a lot of stuff, including a trunk, and turns it all over to Matrons. The Matrons find the
key in her pocket. In Sarah's pocket, they unlock the trunk. They start digging around. They find clothes, and inside a hat box they find a little note and it says something to the effect of, if I have gone missing, ask Ephraim Avery Reverend efhrom Avery right now. It sounds like Catherine believes that this was actually more innocent than
we would think, but it does sound very ominous. It is a note that has echoed throughout the history of mystery novels, which is, if I'm missing, tell my husband. You know my husband did it? Like if I end up dead, this is what happened to me. So he discovers this clue. Well, the Matrons turns this clue over to him. He gets nervous and he starts doing his own investigation. He finds broken combs, he talks to some witnesses. There's a strange man that he saw that other people saw,
who was very tall. So he starts investigating and then a couple of other people get on board with this, and that's when the investigation takes off.
Let's Jesus as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now you say that they launched this investigation. Tell us how that proceeds and what information do they discover in that investigation.
Well, they start interviewing witnesses and they talk to Thomas Wilbert, who is the doctor, her personal doctor. This is where
Catherine Williams and I disagreed. You know, I looked at the trial transcripts, which, by the way, I don't know if any of your listeners have read trial transcripts from the eighteen hundreds, but essentially there are like nine different versions because there are a lot of different court reporters who go and then they're able to sell those transcripts, and so there's like the prosecutor's version, there's the defenses version,
there's a newspaper version. I mean, there's all these different versions. And so I'm not only double checking Catherine, but I'm double checking against each other all of these different court records.
So doctor Wilbur had said that he had met with Sarah three or four times, and Catherine conflated many of these interviews in many of these meetings that he had with her into one or two as a way to sort of add the drama, I think to what was being discovered at these meetings, which was that she was pregnant, which was that the Methodist minister in question had tried to get her to take something called tansy oil, oil of tansy, which was a way to cause a termination
of pregnancy. But also, you know, it could kill you pretty easily still can so I think that, you know, when we have these investigators starting to talk to people, the Methodist minister the Methodist church is very nervous and efilm Avery is informed that she is She has sort of post mortem accused him of, you know, being the
father of her child. He says, I've never even talked to this woman hardly at all, and so everything spills out when you start talking to witnesses that you know, Sarah Maria Cornell worked for from Avery for a while. His wife abooted her out. He denies that that even happened. You know, Catherine starts investigating alongside other investigators and finds out that you know that Ephraim Avery was not a very nice person, and he would kind of persecute other
people in the churches, various churches he went to. That he essentially talked Sarah Maria Cornell into confessing on paper to all of these sins that it doesn't sound like she did, and he did it as a way to blackmail her. So, you know, there is so much that happens throughout the investigation. The issue is is there's not a lot of physical evidence. You know, there's this this series of letters that I mentioned to you by an anonymous writer drawing her to John Durfy's farm that night.
There are witnesses who see a man that nobody can definitively identify. There is f orm Avery's what I would just call a crappy alibi, which is he went on I described as a walk about. He just wandered. He went to Aquittic Park and walked around, and I mean just just sort of like nonsense where he really can't be a pin down during the time of the murder. And you know, then you've got like a broken comb. You've got a lot of interpretation that I think is
just flat out wrong. Physical interpretation from investigators about whether or not she could have taken her own life, how much violence was there. There's no markings on the ground. What does that mean? I mean just stuff where I mean Catherine said, you know, there was a there was her personal handkerchief was on the Sarah's handkerchief was on the ground, and it was wet and it was definitely saliva.
But then the doctor said it was tears. And you know, I talked to my co host Paul Holles, who's a forensic investigator, and he said it was probably missed. I mean, none of that is nefarious. So there's just a lot of I think there's a lot of things that they interpreted back then that I think needed another look today just to come to the right conclusion.
In terms of motivation, though there is a there is evidence or at least witnesses to talk, especially her sister, about a camp meeting two months before regarding avery and the accusation by Sarah that there was a rape.
Right Yeah, and that I sort of hinted at before because he had essentially manipulated Sarah into confessing to sleeping with a bunch of men because she had to have this certificate that said I have I am of good character to get a new job. He had said, you've got to leave Lowell, Massachusetts. I don't want you here. My wife doesn't like you. But she needed a certificate of good standing, and so he said, I will write you one, but you have to tell me everything you've
ever done. And then he just sort of convinced her to add more and more things. This convinced him when he had this letter that at this particular camp meeting you're referring to in Thompson, Connecticut, that he could draw her out to he could kind of get her out to the woods alone. And he said, I have this letter, I'm going to destroy it. And he gets her out there and sexually assaults her, and that's how she ends up pregnant. Now when he is accused of murder, there
is a lot about how old the fetus is. They did a I talked to a pathologist who said they actually did a remarkable job figuring out how old the fetus was based on the length and the length of the baby and the weight, and they were pretty spot on. And what it proved was that she was not pregnant before she got to this camp meeting, that she was pregnant after the camp meeting, and that because because those
things are true, he is likely the father. So you know, there was a lot about that, with she being Sarah, being very clearly traumatized about what happened, but wanting to be unfortunately having to be practical and saying the doctor, her doctor said, you must force him to give you child support. You have to do that. She moved to be closer in Rhode Island, to be closer to him in the same state, so that she could legally force him to pay, and then she ended up dead.
It's a very eerie when you read the advice by I believe it's doctor Wilbur to certainly go and confront this person and even threaten him him for exposure if he weren't to offer support. I thought, what a deadly advice.
Well he did, I will say, to defend doctor Wilbert, he did say, don't go by yourself, but she did, and he I mean, I think you're right. I think, And also I would add her sister and brother in law said the same thing, you know, they said, you've got to get an attorney. They went to Rawson Grendel Rawson, her brother in law, who was also a reverend. He was a minister with the Methodist Church. He introduced her
to an attorney, and the attorney. The attorney was the one who said, you need to go move to the state that he's in so you can force this. I will say this, Dan like. One of the things the inconsistencies that bothered me was that when you read an interview with doctor Wilbert that Catherine conducted, he does not talk necessarily about her interest in having the pregnancy terminated, but in the trial transcripts he clearly says she was
interested in determining the pregnancy at first. Now for Catherine's narrative to work that this is that she is the perfect victim and he is a perfect monster. She had to really omit that, because that wouldn't have been acceptable in the eighteen hundreds to have this young woman say I'm going to do this. Now she changed her mind, particularly after he tried to get her to take a deadly dose of oil of tansy so that the baby
would the pregnancy would be terminated. But that was another example to me where I just thought, Okay, you know, now, in twenty twenty five, I think it would be totally reasonable for her to have gone there. In her mind, maybe I should, this is too hard, it's the eighteen hundreds. But for Catherine it was not acceptable. She had to omit that fact or downplay it to a point where it was like, well this she wasn't serious. She was serious. She just changed her.
Mind that Jesus has an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. You talked about that that was a contentious part of this upcoming trial. Let's get to this trial. The coverage and the defense strategy in prosecutor and pardon me and defending against the charges for avery from.
Avery, well, these the defense strategy was disgusting. I mean, it was actually what a lot of academics have called the first instance of victim shaming in a criminal trial.
Right.
And I'll start by saying this and why I think this story is important. I spoke to for the book a woman who is an attorney who represents sexual harassment victims, particularly at work. She's like really specialized as in employment and so so she's done many trials, and so when she reads briefs, when she reads evidence, some of this stuff now these days doesn't get in. But she I sent her the defense's arguments. Sarah was a thief, Sarah
was a slut. Sarah, you know, lied about this out of revenge because he wouldn't give her a certificate of good standing. She killed herself. She took her own life to frame him. That's what a miserable woman this was, even though there's no proof of any of this. And the attorney looked at this and she said, this is what I read every day. She said, it's in different language, this is more flowery, nineteenth century language, but she said the essence is the same. You blame the victim. You
turn it all on the victim. If Sarah Maria Cornell had social media in eighteen thirty two, they would have gotten into her social media and dragged it out. And I spoke to a defense attorney in criminal law firm, and he was a defense attorney, and he said, yeah, we did that all the time. That's your job is to figure out those holes in the victim's stories, the inconsistency. She can't be trusted. And that's exactly what they did. The prosecutor said, this guy is a liar, he's sleazy.
There is no way, based on the physical evidence that anyone can say this is anything but murder, because remember the clove hitch. You can't tie a clove hitch on your own. Somebody else has to do it, which I know is not true. So, you know, there was a lot of from the prosecutor's point of view, there was a lot of physical evidence. There were witnesses, There were people who saw e from Avery. Was an unusual looking man. He was very tall, he was very thin, he had
a pointing nose. He liked to wear very large kind of like top hats and big jackets. And there were people who spotted somebody who looked just like him, but no one who actually knew him. So the prosecutor had evidence, but I would put quotes around the evidence where it's it's really not enough to say definitively that he was there, whereas the defense said, is his alibi squishy?
Eh?
Yes, you know, he had a great marriage, he's never been in trouble before. He's a respected, you know minister in the Methodist church. There's no proof, and she's a slut, And that's really what it came down to. It's like, there's no proof she was a bad person. She took her own life because she was miserable, and that is that, and he's not the father by the way of the baby.
You said, it did become a battle of the forensic experts at trial as well.
Though, Yeah, absolutely, I think you have a lot of argument. I mean, we see this. I saw this with American Sherlock. I think I was with you for American Sherlock too. Yes, you know where you have people dueling experts. And I spoke to that same defense attorney my friend, and I said, you know, when you're hiring an expert, are you looking for the top tier person, the person with the most
expertise as the MOA's letters after their name. And he said, no, I don't care if they have a minimum amount of expertise. He said, I want the best talker. I want the person who is the most convincing of a jury. So they had, you know, various experts on, various doctors on who talked about the length of the fetus she must have been pregnant before you know that, talked about the
clove hitch, not where it was like. So the prosecutor said, okay, even if she could have tied the clove hitch, it's a specialized not where would she have learned it, and the defense, to their credit, called up people who worked with her at the factory and said, we all knew how to do a clove hitch, not that was part of weaving. But my biggest problem, I think with one of the defenses part of this is, you know, I said, I look for heroes in these stories, and I look
for women who are heroes for me. The villain is also women in this story because much like what happened in The Scarlet Letter, which you know, Hester Prinne is the prototype of Sarah Maria Cornell. I mean that Nathaniel Hawthorne used Sarah Maria Cornell as inspiration for Hester Print, one of the most famous you know, characters who has
been victimized over and over again. And I think, you know, you have these women, much like with Hester prinn in The Scarlet Letter, you have these women in Sarah Maria Cornell's case who are just crucifying her. It's awful, who are making up stories that were disproven about her promiscuity, who are making up stories about her suicidal tendencies. I think one of dan the problems with this book is it's really hard for me to figure out who to
believe because I think Catherine is manipulating some things. I certainly think the defense is manipulating some things. It's really hard to know, much like in any criminal case, who is actually telling me the truth?
You have you demonstrate, you say, one of the most disturbing parts of the trial, aside from the barrage of victim blaming and shaming that you mentioned, came when Sarah Worthing, a co worker, took the stand and claimed she had designs, that Sarah had designs on her own brother in law, the Reverend Grendall Rawson.
Yeah, or Rawson. It's awful. Yeah, I'm sure that that was well. I know that that was devastating. You know, Sarah had a very close relationship with her brother in law, who was I mentioned, a reverend with the Methodist Church, and she was very close with her sister Lucretia, who was her older sister. But I think that there are enough inconsistencies that I don't actually know if anything happened
between Grendall Rawson and Sarah. I suspect not, because she stayed with them for months and months and months and didn't seem to have any acrimony. I think that if they're you know, Sarah mentions a lot about gaps in their communication, and I don't interpret the gaps when you hear Lucretia talked to my co author about this. I don't interpret the gaps to be because Sarah was sleeping
with her husband. I think the gaps were I think there was a difficulty about Sarah actually actually had stolen merchandise years earlier, and it had been a real stain on the family's name, and so I think that there is that sort of tension between the families. But when you know, there's a witness who gets on the stand and says that, I mean, god, it was awful. It was.
She was saying that Grendel actually had preferred Sarah over Lucretia and just ended up marrying Lucretia instead, and that Sarah, you know, had carried on an affair with her brother in law, and you know, then Grendel has to get back on the stand at some point, and so does Lucretia and defend themselves to a certain extent. I don't know if anybody believed it, but that was the strategy digging up particularly women that was so disconcerting for me.
These women who were so willing to throw her under the bus because her church told him to. I mean, I just could. I was it was. I was in disbelief with a lot of this testimony.
Yes, you showcase or the book ends up being showcased for Richard Randolph's aggressive lawyering. To say the least, you talk about that the jury was out for only seventeen hours and came back with a not guilty verdict.
Yes, I think that. You know, after all the digging around that I did, and I hired experts and handwriting experts and everything that I kind of uncovered, I came to some conclusions. One is that Catherine's motives were not benevolent necessarily. I think she really believed that Sarah Maria Cornell was a true victim. But I think that she sort of massaged the facts and manipulated the facts to frame her as as I had said before, like a martyr almost, And so you know, that made me distrust
Catherine a little bit. I think Afram Avery was a complete sleeves bag. I think he was a total jerk. I think it's probably pretty clear that he murdered her. And you know, I don't usually mind spoiling books. I would say, you know that the handwriting expert that I hired said it's definitive. I think that he was the anonymous letter writer that drew her out to John Durfy's farm. So if you put all of these things together, he's guilty. Is he legally guilty? No. I think the jury made
the right decision. And it kind of comes down to things I have said to my students for years and years and years. It does not matter what you think. It matters what you can prove, and that's it. And they could not prove that he did it. I think everybody thinks he did. I think he did. Certainly Catherine thought he did. But legally he was not going to be convicted. Now we would have CCTV and credit card receipts, and I mean, I think it would be a pretty
different story. DNA, you know, all kinds of stuff like you know, forensic botany, there's all kinds of things that they could have used. But you know, back then that was the right decision. I mean, it was a frustrating decision by the jury.
But tell us just briefly about Catherine William's legacy with this book. Pall River an authentic narrative before we talk about The Sinner's All about.
You know, I think her legacy is has been lost and I'm hoping to resurrect it. She was posthumously inducted into the Rhode Island kind of writers Hall of Fame, which was amazing, and I think that as a guide moving forward, she her ability to fuse facts with narrative was pretty amazing. Again, you know, I was skeptical that I had to read through a lot of things, and I found some stuff that I didn't particularly like, but there was no doubt that she did a good job
writing this narrative. So for me, her legacy is both negative and positive. I think the negative part of it is always looking for somebody's motivation. I tell my students that, you know, I listen to and consume a lot of true crime, and I think we're at an inflection point with this genre where you have a fiercely, fiercely passionate group of people who listens to true crime and who reads about true crime. Right they're advocates, mostly they're women,
many of them are survivors. And then you have I can't even tell you how many yahoos out there with two hundred bucks, who can spew crap about victims, who can knock on doors and harass families, and who glorify criminals. And so Catherine didn't do any of that. What she did do was make me look more closely at everything I consume regarding to crime. Why are you doing this story? Why did you call it that? You know? How much are you talking about the killer of versus the victims?
Are you like fangirling or fanboying over Israel Keys because you think he's a brilliant killer. So it was a stark reminder about thinking about why do we think this person is doing this? Because true crime is not sports, true crime is not sci fi. This is very very real. These are real people in pain.
Absolutely. I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about your incredible The Sinners all bout two authors, One Murder and the Real Hester Prynn Kate Winkler Dohnson. Can you tell us about your podcast and if you have a website and do you do any social media?
Sure you can go to Katewinkler Dawson dot com and get a little bit more information about my books social media. I'm definitely on it. Not on X but I'm definitely on Instagram, Facebook, and I have three shows. One has been kind of archived tenfold more Wicked I have twelve seasons, but we're done making that show. I have a show called Wicked Words, which is similar to yours, where I interview authors. And then probably the most well known show
is Buried Bones with forensic investigator Paul Holes. He's the guy who helps solve this Golden State killer case and Buried Bones we look at old cases. I tell him the story and he tells me what they did wrong, what they did right, and sometimes he says, maybe we can solve this right now.
Sounds great. Thank you so much, Kate Winkler Dawson for coming on and talking about the Sinners all Bow. Thank you so much. You have a great evening.
Thank you to you.
Thanks Dan, thank you