499 // The Mysterious Death of Sarah Maria Cornell w/ Kate Winkler Dawson

Feb 13, 2025

01:00:49

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In this new episode, Tim Pilleri and Lance Reenstierna speak with author and podcaster Kate Winkler Dawson about her new book The Sinners All Bow.

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 Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and the first true-crime book published in America.

On a cold winter day in 1832, 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 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 Catharine 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. 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 Sinners All Bow, 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 knot analysis” and criminal profiling (which was invented fifty-five years later with Jack the Ripper)—Dawson fills in the gaps of Williams’s research to find the truth and bring justice to an unsettling mystery that speaks to our past as well as our present, anchored by three women who subverted the script they were given.

Keep up to date with everything Kate has going on by visiting: https://www.katewinklerdawson.com/.

Check out her Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B00LGQAL0Q/allbooks.

The Sinners All Bow: https://www.amazon.com/Sinners-All-Bow-Authors-Murder-ebook/dp/B0CW1KJLY1.

Follow Kate:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/kwinklerdawson.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katewinklerdawson/.

Listen to Kate's podcasts, Buried Bones and Tenfold More Wicked, part of the Exactly Right Network:

https://www.exactlyrightmedia.com/buried-bones.

https://www.exactlyrightmedia.com/tenfold-more-wicked.

Main Theme by Kevin Macleod. Check out his work at https://incompetech.com/.

Additional music by David Williams. See his work at http://williamsflutes.com.

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