The Sinners All Bow

Murder Most Foul

On a cold winter day in 1832, Sarah Maria Cornell wasfound 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 asuicide...or something much darker?

Determined to uncover the real story, Victorian writer Catharine Read Arnold Williams threw herself into theinvestigation as the trial was unfolding and wrote what many claim to be the first American true-crime narrative, entitled Fall River.

The murder divided the country and inspired NathanielHawthorne’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 KateWinkler Dawson travels back in time to nineteenth-century small-town America, emboldened to finish the work Williams started nearly two centuries before.

And it is my pleasure to welcome Kate Winkler Dawson toMurder Most Foul.