On Friday, February 21 at 7:00 pm, a Literary Cocktail Hour presents a very special online event with acclaimed journalist, podcaster, and true-crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson telling 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.
Register here…
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_7vX0p8FiSWGmKbyBR6mfIQ#/
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, 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. Join us for a look at a fascinating story from the early days of true crime!
Kate Winkler Dawson joined the University of Texas at Austin's School of Journalism as an associate professor of practice in 2009. Before then, she was on the faculty of Fordham University's Marymount College for two years. A seasoned documentary producer, news writer and TV news producer, her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post,United Press International in London, WCBS News, ABC News Radio, Fox News Channel, "PBS NewsHour" and "Nightline." She's on the board of the Texas Center for Actual Innocence and lives in Austin, Texas with her family. Her debut book was Death in the Air: The True Story of a Serial, the Great London Smog, and the Strangling of a City.
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