On the morning of December 21, 1832, a Fall River, Rhode Island, man made a dark discovery while crossing the fields of his farm: The body of 30-year-old mill worker Sarah Cornell hung from a pole near a haystack. Word spread quickly through the New England town, the tragedy amplified by the revelations that the unwed Sarah had been pregnant at the time of her death, and that she had recently accused a local Methodist minister Ephraim Avery of raping her.
The shocking details helped the story spread across the burgeoning United States, catching the attention of two prominent American writers. The first was Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom scholars surmise may have immortalized Sarah in the character of Hester Prynne in his novel The Scarlet Letter. The second was a divorced, Puritan single mother, Catharine Williams, who traveled to Fall River for the minister’s trial and, in 1833, wrote what scholars believe was the first true crime narrative in the United States.
In The Sinners All Bow: Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne, Kate Winkler Dawson calls Williams her “co-author.” In Dawson’s deft hands, true crime and historical narrative intertwine as these two writers work side by side, long after one has died. Dawson relies heavily on Williams’ text, though she bolsters and sometimes contradicts it by consulting with today’s historians of the time and area. The book fully comes to life when Dawson draws upon modern-day forensics experts to examine the evidence left behind and answer the question Williams posed 200 years ago: Did the religious pillar of a small community get away with rape and murder?
It’s a common concern that true crime media puts more focus on the perpetrator than on their victims. Dawson acknowledges this, and avoids this pitfall by granting Sarah Cornell a deep and affecting humanity—mirroring Williams’ approach in her own book. The Sinners All Bow is thus a worthy tribute to the genre’s inception, where true crime texts were both narratives of compassion and rallying cries against injustice.
