On a freezing morning in December 1832, a woman named Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead on a local farm – but was it murder, or suicide?
The farm owner, John Durfee, didn’t recognize her. She was one of many itinerant mill workers who were largely anonymous and interchangeable in northeast America’s industrial revolution. Thousands of people, many of them women, who would have been relegated to farm- and housework in or near their hometown were now travelling to mill towns springing up along rivers in New England. While it offered a modicum of independence, it was hardly a glamorous life. Wages were meager, hours were long, machinery was dangerous, and the living conditions afforded by the salary were humble. Still, it was an option for widows, or other women that had few choices. and it hadn’t existed 20 years previously.
Sarah was one of these mill workers and when the townspeople began to look into her death, they found a number of tantalizing clues. She had kept letters in a locked trunk. It became clear that she attended a number of Methodist revival camps and was carrying on a secret correspondence with a Reverend Avery.
Author Kate Winkler Dawson has an incredible talent for finding mysteries and laying them out (see my review of American Sherlock). The reason this case, is particularly intriguing is that Dawson is not the first true crime writer to try to find answers. That title belongs to Catharine Read Arnold Williams, who covered the trial, then interviewed witnesses, and visited locations, including the Durfee Farm (at night, so it would be as similar to the crime’s setting as possible). An outspoken supporter of women’s suffrage and a woman who left her dreadful husband, she published Fall River in 1833, just months after Cornell was found. She noted that this small town was curiously afflicted with gruesome murder, citing the infamous Borden killings. As well as being the first published American true crime narrative, Williams’ account is often credited as the inspiration for Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.
Yet even with this acclaim and dedication, Dawson seeks to dig deeper and perhaps uncover some of the things Williams missed — or didn’t want to see. She positions herself as a fellow detective who has access to newer tools and better information gathering capability. At the same time, she acknowledges that any contemporaneous evidence that we have at all is because of Williams.
As Catharine Williams and John Durfee talked under the light of the moon, the silhouettes of the massive oak trees faded while the cobalt summer sky darkened; their thick branches veiled the sleeping finches and robins. Durfee whispered as she nodded and scribbled notes on her pad in pencil. It was an unorthodox time to survey the property, but it was important to Catharine to visit the scene around the time of night that is was estimated Sarah Cornell had died.
This was an impulse that I, as a fellow true crime writer, could understand. After all, here I was, almost two hundred years later, at the exact same spot. As I surveyed the slope of the old Durfee farm, just as Catharine Williams had done two centuries earlier, I sighed. The breeze was sill cool off the water and gently tugged at the massive maple trees. The space between that night in July 1833 and my visit in 2021 seemed to melt away. ~Loc. 382
Dawson does an excellent job of providing context and history while allowing the narrative to unfold like an investigation. Much like her predecessor Williams, we are brought along to view each new clue as the defining lynchpin, the ah-ha moment. Then something else pops up. Dawson is a solid companion and keeps us on track while we puzzle out the last few days of Sarah Cornell’s life.
My thanks to Putnam Books for the review copy. Read via Edelweiss.
Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons (January 7, 2025)
Language: English
Hardcover: 320 pages
ISBN-10: 0593713613