"The Sinners All Bow" with Kate Winkler Dawson

0:00 We are, we Are. We are Cultivate, Cultivate, Cultivate, Cultivate, Cultivate, Cultivate, we Are Cultivate. 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, 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.

1:12 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 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 investigation as the trial was unfolding, and wrote what many claim to be the first American true crime narrative, Fall River.

2:01 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 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 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.

2:53 Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. So before we kind of dive into the book, what got you into writing? 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, 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 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?

3:50 For sure? 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. 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 want to do this. I'm not going to screw it up by doing something stupid exactly.

4:36 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. 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 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 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 what's best for her child, and she is demanding rights, and then she ends up dead. And we know that

6:07 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 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, 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 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.

7:14 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. 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 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 she was vindictive defense.

8:12 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. 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 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, 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 eighteen thirty three that she's going to take up this case.

9:32 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 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 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.

10:28 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 the time the notes from the prosecutor were released, so I had information she didn't have. 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? And then I no, I'm reading this story. I was. 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.

11:17 Like which as there would have would. Have been super shocking coming from like a Puritan lens as well. So it's so it's like night and day. 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 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 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, and she said that the sign is a very old sign.

12:31 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. Way back in the day. They were ragers. 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. The description's crazy. 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.

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 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 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 very threatened. 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?

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 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 this guy out of trouble, this Methodist minister out of trouble.

15:56 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 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 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 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. 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 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 Print are gifted at you know, like weaving and selling.

18:25 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 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 autoistic woman. She gave a lot of money to the Methodist church, you know, to a church that ultimately turned on her.

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. 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, 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 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 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 that she kept that show somebody said, come to this place, we need to talk, presumably the father of the child.

21:26 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 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 with her. I saw them together. They could just kind of offer vague assurances and there was not very much else.

22:09 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. 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. 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.

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 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 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, 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 to have a certificate of good standing, and you know,

24:39 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, 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 attacking a guy who did nothing wrong except had some standards.

25:22 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. So what media then or now would not want to report on that story? 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.

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 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 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, 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.

27:19 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, 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, 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.

28:09 That's not what she said. She was scared of dying during the procedure. And then she revealed to her doctor 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 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 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?

29:19 I don't want to go double check my author? Yeah, and I have to because I didn't trust her. By the middle of the book, I couldn't trust her. 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. 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.

30:03 And so it's receiving because there's all this crossover. And then I had a friend of mine, Bill Brands, who 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, 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 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. 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.

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 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 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 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.

32:58 So it was all. It was all very traumatizing for a lot of very traditional people in New England. And when it comes to cases involving sexual assault survivors, how does her trial compare to others of its? 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 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 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 before trial. They're not entered into evidence because they're not consequential.

34:21 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 those cases to today. 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? 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, 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 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

35:54 for someone like Sarah Maria Cornell, she really had visions of putting the baby to daycare during her work as 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. So she was protecting her own child when she died. How important was it for you to share Sarah's story? I think it's incredibly important because you know, Sarah Maria Cornell is women today, I mean, you are there is.

36:44 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 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 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, and they really want these stories to be told with respect.

37:48 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 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. 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?

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 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, 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.

39:31 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 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. This is a suicide. And so that's the way this went down. And man, does that happen now? You know? 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.

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, 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. 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.

41:04 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, 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 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 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 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,

42:36 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 letters say so much, you know. Yep. And you did mention that in the book, by the way. Oh good. 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. 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 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, 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 Maria Cornell's mother made a terrible decision about who she married,

44:06 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 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. 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 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 go with her.

45:38 You know, just yeah, But I mean. Would we even be talking about it? 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 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, 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.

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. 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 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?

47:21 Yep? You know, so that's the goal. Well, on that note, as always, I'm Lindsey and we'll see you next time with another tale as old as Crime.