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

Missing

Crawlspace Media

True Crime, News, Society & Culture

3.8 • 3.3K Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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. Follow Missing: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@missingcsm. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/missingcsm. IG: https://www.instagram.com/MissingCSM/. Twitter: https://twitter.com/MissingCSM. FB: https://www.facebook.com/MissingCSM. Follow Crawlspace: Twitter: https://twitter.com/crawlspacepod . Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Crawlspacepodcast . Instagram: https://www.Instagram.com/Crawlspacepodcast. TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@crawlspacepodcast. Check out our entire network at http://crawlspace-media.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The Welcome back to missing. I am Tim here today with Lance.
0:37.9	Lance, how are you today?
0:39.3	I'm doing fantastic today, Tim.
0:41.2	I'm so happy that we're being joined again by someone who we spoke with a little while ago.
0:46.7	She's so talented, a great author, a great historian, a great guest.
0:51.9	But Tim, before we get to that, how are you today? I'm doing great. Thanks a lot.
0:57.2	And yeah, today we are speaking again with Kate Winkler Dawson. She is a podcaster and a great
1:04.9	author as well. She's written a new book that was just published in January of 2025.
1:17.5	It is called The Sinners All Bow, two authors, one murder, and the real Hester Prynne.
1:25.3	And this is a fascinating conversation about her work and how she sort of chooses her work and what she finds interesting.
1:31.4	And yeah, we just, you know, it's really cool because she dives into these historical mysteries.
1:35.3	And I think that interests us in a lot of ways.
1:42.7	Yeah, it definitely does, especially when the topic can be applied to anything that's going on today, something that's relevant to today.
1:44.7	And that is the case with this particular writing. And she's examining the death of Sarah Maria Cornell from 1832. And Tim,
1:52.8	you had said that this was two authors. Now, Kate Winkler-Dawson is the primary author, but she has
1:59.9	this really cool, unique approach where she is using some of the work and some of the interpretations of this potential crime that Victorian writer Catherine Reed Arnold Williams had come up with way back in the 1830s.
2:19.3	Additionally, Williams was probably the first author to create a true crime account
2:28.0	in the work that she composed called Fall River.
2:33.3	So Kate Winkler-Dawson is bringing in the true crime genre.
2:38.1	She's introducing this character who tells the story along with her.
2:42.6	So she's working off of the information that Williams had and making determinations
	...

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