The Sinners All Bow: Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne - Hardcover

Dawson, Kate Winkler

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593713613 ISBN 13: 9780593713617

Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Acclaimed journalist, podcaster, and crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson tells the chilling true story of a young woman whose scandalous life was rumored to be Nathaniel Hawthorne’s inspiration for The Scarlet Letter—and whose shocking death inspired the first true-crime book published in America.

On a cold winter day in 1832, Sarah Cornell was found hanging in a barn, four months pregnant, after a disgraceful liaison with a charismatic Methodist minister, Reverend Ephraim Avery. Some (Avery’s lawyers) claimed her death was suicide…but others weren’t so sure. Determined to uncover the real story, intrepid Victorian writer Catharine Williams threw herself into the investigation and wrote what many claim is the first American true-crime narrative, Fall River. The case and Williams’ book became a sensation—one that 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 19th century small town America, emboldened to finish the work Williams started nearly two centuries before. Using modern investigative advancements—such as “forensic knot analysis” to determine cause of death, the prosecutor’s notes from 1833, and criminal profiling which was invented 55 years later with Jack the Ripper—Dawson fills in the gaps of Williams’ research to find the truth. Along the way she also examines how society decides who is the “right kind” of crime victim and how America’s long history of religious evangelism may have clouded the facts both in the 1830s and today. Ultimately, The Sinners All Bow brings 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.

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Kate Winkler Dawson is a seasoned documentary producer, podcaster, and true-crime historian whose work has appeared in The New York Times, WCBS News and ABC News Radio, PBS NewsHour, and Nightline. She is the creator of two hit podcasts: Tenfold More Wicked and Wicked Words, and the cohost of the Buried Bones podcast on the Exactly Right network. She is the author of American Sherlock, Death in the Air, All That Is Wicked, and is a professor of journalism at The University of Texas at Austin.

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CHAPTER ONE

The Durfee Farm

It was July 1, 1833, and the moon was just beginning to rise over the small town of Tiverton, Rhode Island. Catharine Read Arnold Williams stepped onto the wooden front porch and rapped on the door of the old home. It swung open, and a tall, thin man in a top hat greeted the writer, steeling himself for what he was certain would be a solemn visit.

The man who answered the door, John Durfee, nodded respectfully to Catharine as she stood in the darkness. The farmer was known for his hospitality, and Catharine was familiar with his reputation. She was grateful that he had agreed to this meeting, morbid as it seemed. Both hoped to gain some understanding of what had happened on his farm the previous December. Durfee closed the door and stepped outside.

The thirty-five-year-old Durfee was an important, anxious witness-he had been the first person to find Sarah Maria Cornell's body that cold day half a year earlier. Catharine was determined to record Durfee's story accurately, so she reported to his farm that night for a tour.

This property was owned by Richard Durfee II, John's seventy-five-year-old father, who was a well-liked deacon and a retired captain with the Rhode Island militia. But it was John who ran the day-to-day operations. John Durfee was a profitable farmer, a justice of the peace, a widely respected town councilman, and a member of one of the most influential families in the area. Because of Durfee's seemingly sincere benevolence, the town leaders had appointed him "Overseer of the Poor." The overseer, a position originally created in England and later adopted by governments in the fledgling American colonies, was tasked with protecting the destitute in their parishes. Traditionally, the overseer would control a small budget for this purpose funded by collecting a tax from residents, but his duties also included distributing food and money and managing the local poorhouse.

As the pair stood together, Catharine inquired about John's family. His father, as well as his mother, Patience, would remain inside the house this evening, along with John's wife, Nancy, and their six children. The Durfee family had been in this area since the mid-1600s, beginning with Richard Durfee Sr., a descendent of several passengers on the Mayflower. Eventually, John's father married Patience Borden-a member of the later infamous Borden clan. (That family plays a prominent role in this story too, as you'll read later.) The Durfees and the Bordens, Catharine wrote, were two of the three families who had established Tiverton.

"The land in this vicinity belonged principally to the families of Borden, Bowen, and Durfee," she wrote in her 1833 book, Fall River, about this tragedy, "three families from whom the principal part of the stationary inhabitants sprung." It was a prosperous, fertile area; "so flourishing has business been there, that there is scarce a mechanic, trader, or even labourer, who has been there for any length of time, who has not acquired an estate of his own," Catharine wrote.

The Durfees and the Bordens would remain pillars of the community for generations. But all families are flawed, and some are plagued with characters with a penchant for brutality. The Bordens, who would come to infamy a few generations later when Lizzie Borden was tried and acquitted of the infamous axe murders that killed her father and stepmother, were clearly not immune to violence.

John Durfee, by all accounts, was prosperous, compassionate, and altruistic, a rare intersection of traits in the 1800s. It was important to Catharine and me to establish both Durfee's reputation and his apparent character because he had been a crucial witness-he had sounded the alarm about Sarah Cornell's death.

Catharine Williams was determined to record everything involving this case, including an extensive interview with John Durfee. The farmer described what he had discovered that frigid December morning. Durfee needed coaxing to recall such a traumatizing sight. He might have felt reticent because such horrid details surely would offend his guest's feminine sensibilities, yet he responded to her questions candidly, starting with a trip he'd taken with his horses early that day.

"On the morning of the 21 of December," began Durfee, "I took my team to go from home to the river, and passing through a lot about 60 rods from my house."

He descended the hill, careful to avoid burrow entrances dug by gophers and groundhogs the summer before. As Durfee approached a haystack, less than a quarter mile from his home, he gasped. "When I arrived within ten yards of the haystack, I discovered the body of a female hanging on a stake." Suspended by a cord, swaying slowly in the wind that blew from Mount Hope Bay, was the body of a young woman. Sarah Cornell was dressed in a long black cloak; her shoes were laid neatly on the ground. In the dim light of the sunrise, he could see that her short, dark hair was frozen to her face and covered in frost. John Durfee cried out and three men responded, including his father, Richard. The woman was young, attractive, and dead-but that's all Durfee knew at the time. The farmer told Catharine that he had never seen the woman before. As the sun began to illuminate the yard, Durfee braced himself.

"After taking more notice how she hung, I attempted to take her from the stake by lifting her up and slipping the line," said Durfee. "I found I could not well do it, at arm's length, and my father said, 'cut her down.' One handed me a knife, and I cut her down, and let her down."

Her body slumped; the cord was still wrapped tightly around her neck.

"I then went after the coroner," Durfee said, "and brought him to my house."

As the first person on the scene, Durfee wasn't just a witness-he was also a de facto investigator. He had initiated his own inquiry by collecting valuable evidence, and the picture that he and the investigators painted was a disturbing story, one Catharine was at the farm to hear about firsthand and examine further.


But first: safer subjects. That evening in 1833, Catharine began peppering John Durfee with queries about the property and its history. He replied as she jotted down notes. He resided on his 57-acre family farm on the main road of Tiverton, about a half mile from the Massachusetts border, across the water and less than two miles from the factory village of Fall River. As I noted earlier, that part of Tiverton was renamed Fall River, Massachusetts, about thirty years later.

The town was located on the Quequechan River, the last tributary at the mouth of the Taunton River, which made it a perfect spot to take advantage of the burgeoning industrial revolution that was sweeping across New England and reshaping the economy and landscape. The river was slow moving, even stagnant, except near downtown Fall River, where it flowed quickly down into Mount Hope Bay-the perfect fuel for textile mills and ironworks.

"Starting as early as 1811, cotton and woolen mills were built and put into operation," reported the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. The Durfees were at least partially responsible for Tiverton's growth as a mill town.

Water is featured in both Sarah Cornell's story and that of Hester Prynne. "Fall River can be understood in relation to . . . The Scarlet Letter," wrote Shirley Samuels in Reading the American Novel, 1780-1865, "as a narrative about an itinerant female laborer whose restlessness and employment depends on the vagaries of water. As the river waters that turn the mill wheels rise and fall, so does the employment of factory girls at the mill's ebb and wane."

Working women in the mid-1800s often needed to be near water. Joseph Durfee had built a simple spinning mill in the area at the turn of the century, and through the first few decades of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593713613
• ISBN 13: 9780593713617
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: G.P. Putnam's Sons; https://www.penguin.com/putnam/; ; 1745 BROADWAY Attn: Madison Forsander; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar