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The Sinners All Bow also draws on hundreds of pages of unpublished material. There are more than a dozen accounts during that time period of the case, including letters from family and friends, reports by investigators, and notes from the prosecutor. There are also letters between Sarah Cornell and Ephraim Avery, offering an inside look at their tortured relationship. Sidney S. Rider's biographical essay about Catharine Williams included her own memoir, in which she detailed her struggle as a single mother and an emerging writer in a male-dominated field.

Catharine Williams and Sarah Cornell were confined by the still-powerful vestiges of Puritanism in their society: propriety, devotion to the church, the commitment to marriage.... But Catharine was able to disentangle a few of those knots. She dared to divorce a man from a respectable family in New England, an affront to the traditional norms of the times. She persevered and eventually gained a level of respect offered to few women in New England in the early nineteenth century. Both Catharine and Sarah made a choice for independence, despite the consequences. Sarah Cornell dared to gain autonomy through mill work, and she refused to settle with a husband and raise a family; she had been devoted to a church that seemed to contradict the restrained roles of women that much of America subscribed to.

Together, Catharine Williams and I will rewrite the tale of Sarah Cornell and Reverend Ephraim Avery—and this version, drawing on the conventions and fact-checking of twenty-first-century crime reporting, will present the reader with all the facts, no matter the conclusion. It will serve as a reckoning for all true crime writers: how to avoid the mistakes of the past and how to move forward by respecting the victim, no matter their background.

Catharine Williams crafted a new genre: a victim-centric, story-driven, fact-checked narrative meant to bewitch an audience and shift their belief system about women and their burgeoning independence. She believed that women could protect one another—and she demonstrated that in her own life, because, after her marriage, she shunned all dependence on men. A narrative focused primarily on the victim was unique—and her commitment to thorough reporting was exceptional.

But Catharine's own troubling history with men, along with her rigid religious ideology, posed a problem for our project because those factors might have influenced her judgment; this was a narrative she had framed as "authentic," starting with the title. But Catharine Williams despised one of the central characters—the vitriol she had reserved for Reverend Ephraim Avery litters the pages of Fall River. She viewed him as little more than a despicable predator; a greedy, venal man stalking the young women of New England; a brute who was halted only because of his connection to Sarah's death. He murdered Sarah, she declared in her pages.

Catharine refused to investigate alternate theories, but a journalist who offers readers a nonfiction narrative must examine all sides of the investigation, and a controversial story demands a responsible, unbiased pen. I offer that pledge to my readers and my listeners: if you trust me, I will do my best to provide you with the full story in this case, no matter the outcome. Did Sarah Cornell die by her own hand, or was she the victim of a killer? And if she was murdered,

who was the killer? Catharine Williams was stubbornly, foolishly steadfast in her conclusion, well before all the available evidence was submitted. But I'll offer a more complete picture of one of the most important cases in American history&that you've likely never heard of. Will Catharine and I arrive at the same conclusion?

CHAPTER ONE

THE DURFEE FARM

It was July 1, 1833, and the moon was just beginning to rise over the small town of Tiverton, Rhode Island. Catharine Read Arnold Williams stepped onto the wooden front porch and rapped on the door of the old home. It swung open, and a tall, thin man in a top hat greeted the writer, steeling himself for what he was certain would be a solemn visit.

The man who answered the door, John Durfee, nodded respectfully to Catharine as she stood in the darkness. The farmer was known for his hospitality, and Catharine was familiar with his reputation. She was grateful that he had agreed to this meeting, morbid as it seemed. Both hoped to gain some understanding of what had happened on his farm the previous December. Durfee closed the door and stepped outside.

The thirty-five-year-old Durfee was an important, anxious witness—he had been the first person to find Sarah Maria Cornell's body that cold day half a year earlier. Catharine was determined to record Durfee's story accurately, so she reported to his farm that night for a tour.

This property was owned by Richard Durfee II, John's seventy-five-year-old father, who was a well-liked deacon and a retired captain with the Rhode Island militia. But it was John who ran the day-to-day operations. John Durfee was a profitable farmer, a justice of the peace, a widely respected town councilman, and a member of one of the most influential families in the area. Because of Durfee's seemingly sincere benevolence, the town leaders had appointed him "Overseer of the Poor." The overseer, a position originally created in England and later adopted by governments in the fledgling American colonies, was tasked with protecting the destitute in their parishes. Traditionally, the overseer would control a small budget for this purpose funded by collecting a tax from residents, but his duties also included distributing food and money and managing the local poorhouse.