Before there was “Fleabag,” the clergyman who most heated the public imagination was Arthur Dimmesdale of “The Scarlet Letter.” In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel, the Puritan minister’s smoldering eyes and self-scourging sermons electrify his female parishioners, including the married needlewoman Hester Prynne, whose affair with him produces a child. Outraged citizens force the adulterous Hester to wear the letter “A” on her chest to broadcast her disgrace.
Did Hawthorne base these characters on the Rev. Ephraim Avery and his young congregant Sarah Maria Cornell, whose gruesome death in 1832 in Fall River, 50 miles south of Boston, shocked all of New England? So argues Kate Winkler Dawson in “The Sinners All Bow.”
Cornell was a factory girl — part of the wave of single women who found work in the mills of the Industrial Revolution. Avery, a married father of four, was a minister in the fledgling denomination of Methodism — whose “racy” fervor and “raucous” revivals appalled conservative Christians. In 1832, Avery (allegedly) raped Cornell, then (allegedly) murdered her after learning she was pregnant, disguising her death as a suicide.
It’s certainly true that Hawthorne visited a waxwork show of murderers and their victims 12 years before he wrote “The Scarlet Letter.” In his journal, he described the effigy of Avery as “an ugly devil, said to be a good likeness.” Compared with Dimmesdale, Avery was a not-so-hot priest, but Cornell found him “captivating” enough. Cornell was not as refined and compelling as Hester Prynne, but she was a seamstress who had been impregnated by a clergyman and publicly shamed (albeit for shoplifting). Still, while it’s plausible that the case inspired Hawthorne, it’s a bit of a red herring.
Fans of true crime know Dawson as a prolific podcaster and author, practiced in dissecting historical cases “that need to be viewed through a 21st-century lens.” Her real purpose here is to shear off the moralizing drapery of 19th-century literary language, submit the facts of the victim’s cruel fate to journalistic scrutiny and mull the forensic tools, like “CCTV footage, GPS coordinates, even Fitbit data,” that might have convicted Avery, had they existed.
Despite her presentism, Dawson makes it clear that the steam-age sleuths passed down a rich trove of evidence. On the morning of Dec. 21, 1832, a farmer found the body of a woman hanging from a pole by a haystack. Her gloved hands were tucked inside her cloak, her shoes lay “neatly” on the grass beside her dangling feet. A cord was wrapped so tightly around her neck that it cut half an inch into her flesh.
Men from Fall River identified the deceased as Sarah Maria Cornell. One was her Methodist pastor, Ira Bidwell. Another was Thomas Wilbur, her doctor — who knew that Cornell was pregnant. Ephraim Avery had assaulted her, she had told him.
Bidwell rushed off to warn Avery. The coroner’s jury delivered a verdict of suicide, and Cornell was buried the next afternoon.
But when farm matrons prepared the body for burial, they discovered “rash violence”: bruises, scratches and large hand marks at the hips. In a trunk of Cornell’s belongings, anonymous letters were found that arranged secret meetings; and, inside a hat box, a scrap of paper read: “If I am missing enquire of the Rev. E.K. Avery.” These findings prompted a second coroner’s jury. The body was exhumed and a new verdict delivered: murder, by strangling.
In 1833, Avery stood trial. For nearly a month, his defense team dragged Cornell’s reputation through the mud. This was, according to a scholar Dawson cites, perhaps the first time that a victim was “put on trial in order to exonerate her murderer.” Avery was pronounced not guilty.
Two main archives explain the profusion of detail. One is the trial transcript. By far the larger source is “Fall River: An Authentic Narrative,” published in 1833 by Catharine Read Arnold Williams. Dawson calls it the “first narrative book of macabre murder in America.”
Williams was not an investigative journalist (that profession did not yet exist); she was a popular writer on patriotic and religious subjects. But she attended Avery’s trial, and was incensed by the “odious” tactics used “to prove the deceased a perfect fiend.” Soon after the acquittal, she traveled to Fall River to investigate the true facts of the “unhappy affair” and interviewed more than 300 people in an effort to posthumously defend the victim’s honor. Williams’s narrative was “moving and harrowing,” and “impeccably” reported, Dawson writes, but it was not objective: “Catharine’s book aimed to be persuasive, while mine is journalistic,” she declares.
Objective or no, Williams’s words appear on virtually every page of “The Sinners All Bow”; without them, this book could not exist. Making a virtue of this necessity, Dawson fancifully designates Williams her “co-author” and “reliable companion-researcher,” as if the two of them were detective buddies on a hot case. “Catharine and I would interview Sarah’s family and her close friends,” Dawson explains at the outset, “though, admittedly, Catharine was granted greater access than I (luckily for us).” This was indeed a lucky break; even the most up-to-date C.S.I. units can’t interrogate people who’ve been dead 200 years.
The effect of this conceit can be jarring. When you read, “Catharine and I wandered beneath the graceful branches of the magnificent maple tree that summer,” you feel like you’re reading a book off a Ouija board.
What you’re really reading is a podcast on paper, in which the dead and the living collaborate and compare notes, becoming, in combination … captivating enough. Dawson is no more able than Williams to definitively establish what happened to Cornell on that dreadful night, so long ago. But this narrative does prove that the factory girl does not need fiction’s quill to excite sympathy and interest, nor to have her story fairly told.
The post A Hot Priest, a Cold Case and a Long-Dead Co-Host appeared first on New York Times.
