The Murder of Maria Cornell

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too.

The American obsession with true crime narrative started long before the development of the true crime podcast. In 1833 New England, the true crime that captivated everyone's imagination, in every form from trial report to Broadway review, was the December, 1832 murder of Maria Cornell in Fall River. Sarah Maria Cornell, who would later go by Maria, was born in Vermont on May 3, 1803. Maria's mother, Lucretia Leffingwell Cornell, was the daughter of Connecticut businessman and patriot, Christopher Leffingwell, who had built Connecticut's first paper mill in Norwich, which supplied paper for the Connecticut Gazette newspaper. Maria's father, James, however, was from a less prosperous family. James had met Lucretia when he apprenticed for her father. Maria was the third child born to Lucretia and James. Shortly before her third birthday, The couple separated, divorcing not long after. Maria, her mother, and her siblings were sent to live with different relatives and friends. When Maria's grandfather died, he left his vast estate to his other descendants, leaving Maria's mother with only a meager income. Since Maria Cornell could not depend on her family to support her, she went to work, apprenticing as a tailor just after she turned 17. Within a couple of years, she was working as a tailoress near a cotton factory, making clothes for the factory workers. Shortly thereafter, though, Cornell started working in a cotton factory herself, joining the ranks of the new and growing cohort of factory girls in New England towns. Over the next few years, Cornell moved around frequently from one mill town to the next in search of employment, and community. One place she found community was in the Methodist faith. Cornell had grown up in the Calvinist tradition, and had wanted to follow the example of her cousin Harriet, who, after her conversion experience, had founded a Sunday school and then gone abroad with her husband as a missionary. But after being caught shoplifting, and fleeing to yet another town, Cornell found a new religious group to join, in the fastest growing faith in the United States, Methodism. Cornell wrote to her family, "When I look back upon my past life, it looks dreary. And I feel like a mourner alone on the wide world without one friend to cheer me through this gloomy veil. But when I look forward, it bares another aspect. I have been made to rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. I feel that I have an evidence within my own soul that God has forgiven me. And I have an unshaken trust in God that I would not part with for 10,000 worlds." A few years and a few moves later, in Lowell, Massachusetts, Cornell met a newly arrived Methodist minister, Ephraim Kingsbury Avery. Shortly after Reverend Avery arrived, he was informed by a factory overseer that Maria Cornell was engaging in illicit sexual behavior, for which she was expelled from the church and fired from her job. Moving again, Cornell found that the Reverend Avery's blacklisting from the Methodist Church followed her throughout New England. Cornell pleaded with Avery, and with her Methodist brothers and sisters, to retract their expulsion, so that she could rejoin the community. She even attended a Methodist camp meeting in Thompson, Connecticut, in August, 1832. After the camp meeting, Cornell began to tell people that Avery had forced himself upon her there, and she began to fear that she was pregnant from the encounter. Cornell moved yet again, this time to Fall River, in what was then part of Rhode Island, what is now part of Massachusetts, where she once again went to work in a cotton mill. Around 9am on December 21, 1832, a farmer named John Durfee, as he was beginning his morning farm tasks, discovered the body of Maria Cornell, hanging by a rope from a fence post on his land. A jury was quickly pulled together, and discovering from the local doctor that Maria Cornell was likely pregnant, and that she had said that the father of her child was a married minister, who had coerced her into sex, the jury determined that the death was likely due to suicide. Maria Cornell was buried in the Durfee family cemetery. That might have been the end of the story, but while John Durfee's wife, Nancy, was packing up Maria's possessions to send to her family, she found a note that changed everything. Written on December 20, and signed S. M. Cornell, the note read, "If I am missing, inquire of Reverend Mr. Avery in Bristol. He will know where I am gone." The men of Fall River traveled as a group to Bristol, Rhode Island where Avery lived, and they surrounded his house, demanding that he surrender to them. Cooler heads prevailed, but Avery was eventually indicted and tried in Newport County, Rhode Island for the murder of Maria Cornell. In the 27 day trial, the prosecution led by the Rhode Island Attorney General called 68 witnesses, while the defense team, which had been hired by the Methodist Church, and was led by former United States Senator Jeremiah Mason, the most revered attorney in New England, called 128 witnesses. After a 16 hour deliberation, the 12 man jury, who had not been permitted to take any notes during the lengthy trial, found Reverend Avery not guilty, but public sentiment disagreed, and effigies of Avery were hanged and burned throughout New England. Despite Avery's attempts to regain his good name, including by publishing his own account, he had to leave the ministry and move his family several times, finally, settling in Ohio, where he lived quietly as a farmer. Joining me now to discuss the murder of Maria Cornell, and the shifting cultural milieu of New England in the 1830s, is Dr. Bruce Dorsey, Professor of History at Swarthmore College, and the author of, "Murder in a Mill Town: Sex, Faith and the Crime That Captivated a Nation."

Hi, Bruce. Thanks so much for talking with me today.

Dr. Bruce Dorsey  10:40  
Thanks, Kelly. I'm just delighted to be here and have an opportunity to sing out a story of mine that constitutes unsung history.

Kelly Therese Pollock  10:48  
Yes, I am also really excited to speak with you. I want to hear first, just how you first got interested in this story of this murder?

Dr. Bruce Dorsey  10:58  
Yes, well, I've always been fascinated by episodes that reveal many facets of the past in one moment in time. And that's what really attracted me to this case, and still does and still will always do so. The trial reporter at the time of this murder trial, referred to it as the most extraordinary of all extraordinary cases, because of everything that it touched on. He joke that you could find something for every occupation, whoever might have been there and, and at the same time for the historian it was also something that was about every aspect of of history, almost a kitchen sink version of history in a way. It was the beginning of women in the wage earning workforce. It was about gender and masculinity and sex and medicine and bodies and criminal justice in a new democracy, conspiracy, politics, fake news, popular culture. Those things give you an opportunity to both tell a story but reveal what its meaning is in so many, multiple layers. So that's that's where the interest began. But also, I soon discovered that there was something particularly useful about looking at the breach that happens in a violent crime, that murder cases in particular are rich sources for historians that produce something that doesn't happen otherwise. People tend to murder people they know, rather than strangers. It's a result of something went wrong in some form of a social relationship that existed, whether its family, friends, workers, and so on. And then murder cases and murder trials bring out and bring to life, numerous people, and give them an opportunity to let their voice be heard in the courtroom when they otherwise would never appear in the historical record. And in my particular case, in the trial of the Reverend Ephraim Avery, 250 Witnesses are brought to the to speak in this trial. And so therefore, storytelling became a centerpiece of this trial. A major part of way I structured the discussion of the trial is how crucial it is that this the trials are places where stories are told. Sometimes defense attorneys and prosecutors feel like they can construct a story that they have control over. But every moment they bring someone to the stand, they lose their grip on that that story. And they have to tell those stories. What became fascinating to me was that the those people who took the stand, they had already been telling these stories, to variety of types of listening communities. That could be the corner coffee shop. That could be across the neighbor's fence, but more often it was in places such as political meetings that they might have, or religious gatherings where they might tell these stories as confession or surveillance of immoral behavior or a variety of things. And I want to see how those stories that are told outside the courtroom get retold inside inside the courtroom.

Kelly Therese Pollock  14:01  
So let's talk a little bit about sources. You wouldn't expect the life of a working class girl in 1833 to be well documented, but we know so much about her life because of the the sources we have. So can you talk a little bit about the variety of things you could draw on in telling this story?

Dr. Bruce Dorsey  14:20  
Yeah, this is a case in which there is an enormous amount of source material about some things and almost nothing about other other parts of this. And that becomes the challenge for me in some way. So we do end up having some record of her, her voice, her perspective, her life, because long after the trial was over, six months later, a scandal's emerging and a woman writer decides to write a true crime narrative and includes the letters that the family had saved, her mother and sister had saved from Maria Cornell's letters back to them. But we don't have the originals of those. I have to trust that this woman, who sometimes verged between fact and fiction, recorded those letters correctly. I have to take on assumption that they're, there. But I did much more further research. I read and deeply into the family papers of where she came from. I read the many writings and personal and and public of other similar young women, especially similar young women who decided have independent lives as workers and also were attracted to evangelical religion and become converts at that. And, and I write and use those sources as a kind of parallel stories that allow me to be able to tell the story of of what was the experiences of the young woman who was in the leading edge of a new women led workforce at the beginning of industrialization.

Kelly Therese Pollock  15:53  
So let's talk about that, that shift that's happening in New England at this time, and the way that women are coming much more into the public sphere, into the workforce, the shifts that are happening in family dynamics. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Bruce Dorsey  16:09  
Yeah, certainly, I like to frame it is that every every woman who has to make the choice, as I say, to walk through the doors of a factory and begin that employment, faces a personal and familial crisis of some some form. Factory work was looked down upon. It was thought to potentially have the possibility of leading to vice and immoral behavior, that the reputation of a young woman who's starting to become an independent worker is a dangerous thing. And many family members didn't necessarily wish this upon the young women. So they, they took that level of personal risk. But as they tried to navigate their lives, and Marie Cornell is an interesting example of this, she does, she's both typical and atypical of working women in the in the mills at that time. The typical myth of a person who would work perhaps in Lowell, Massachusetts, which is the premier industrial city, and Maria makes her way there. The myth is that a woman would leave a farm, young woman work for a few months to a few years at most in Lowell, save some money and return back and marry and, and live a somewhat domesticated life as a mother, a wife and mother. And that may have been true myth, in part true, but many other women needed to spend the rest of their lives surviving based upon the wages that they would earn. And that was the case for for Maria Cornell, whose family story starts with the abandonment of her father, the displacement of her mother's circumstance. So she, she had to figure out how do you survive, what's the network of people you would rely upon to ensure that you could get employed, that you'd have a boarding house that would accept you, that you would still remain in that town and not get blacklisted from the employment. And she also wanted to live on her own, be independent. She wanted to have an independent world of of love and desire as well. So she clearly had evidence that she had various forms of romantic and sexual relationships with men that ended up being her downfall. She was  excluded from the church community that she wanted to be in and fired from the mills. And this sets up the crisis. So all of those things are part of the dilemma so that they're both opportunities for a new and independent life and the vulnerabilities that one might encounter in the acceptance of that life.

Kelly Therese Pollock  18:39  
You mentioned that she's looking for community in a way to have both a home both physical home and you know, spiritual home. And she finds that, of course in Methodism, so let's talk about the Methodist religion at this moment, because what people might think about Methodists today might not be very reflective of the the kinds of things that they were doing in 1830s in New England. So could you talk a little bit about that, and the the way that Maria both is able to find a spiritual home there, but also it doesn't quite fit?

Dr. Bruce Dorsey  19:12  
Yeah, so this is by the time of Maria's lifetime, the Methodists are one of the various different evangelical groups that are growing, but it is the most popular and fastest growing religious denomination in the United States. By the time of her death, there's about a half a million Methodists. Within a decade, there'll be a million of them. It's growing rapidly. It's spreading across the across the country, and part of the reason it is is that it's a religion that appeals to ordinary people with no distinctions among them. The preachers who are accepted to preach and so on are just ordinary men with little education. They didn't go to universities and seminaries and they speak a new religion that we would oftentimes talk about as a religion of democracy. I make this point that Maria's letters give us a real insight into those those moments though, the way in which her formerly Calvinist sort of viewpoint on religion that, that everything was in control of an all powerful God and she had little agency in her life other than what the final outcomes might be, changes when she converts to Methodism. And she starts to write about in language that's deliberate that I, I feel I have a relationship with God. I was a sinner, and I found a savior and I, I make this point that that one single pronoun "I" creates a theological revolution. And that Ralph Waldo Emerson once described this as, "the era of the first person singular." And this is true for people everywhere in this society, because it's true for how they're thinking about the possibilities for their economic advancement and new entrepreneurship and new new social mobility that is happening in places and moving around the, around the early republic. It's happening in the political world is, is increasingly more and more white men are, are have access to voting and to having this participation and, and that world is open for, for Maria to to be involved in. And she embraces it, she wants to be part of it. She wants every part of the deep, emotional spiritual experience. And that includes those gatherings in the woods called camp meetings that Methodists are famous for. And oftentimes historians refer to those as some somewhat like the Woodstock of of that, that time, in which people went for a week at a time to a location in the woods to hear preaching and ministers and to have an emotional religious experiences that oftentimes went beyond just those emotional experiences to deep physical ones, people crying, fainting, having falling into trances and a number of those things and, and it brought a great deal of anxiety to those people who were fearful of this, that this was religion, that it got out of control that this was something that was beyond. But for the true believers, this was this was empowering to them. Unfortunately, for Maria, it's also the location of, of the worst experience that she has where she's coerced, in her telling of the story, she's coerced by this minister who had excommunicated her from the Methodist Church to get back in good graces if he can force her to have sex. And that's what resulted in her being pregnant and, and the time she's found, discovered dead on a farm outside of Fall River, Massachusetts.

Kelly Therese Pollock  22:34  
You talked earlier about storytelling and the importance of storytelling in the trial. But the storytelling is also important in Maria's life, in the way that she's interacting with her Methodist faith, in the way that she's interacting with other women around her. Could you talk some about that? And, you know, it seems like her storytelling is one of the things that starts to get her into trouble as she's trying to sort of get herself out of trouble. So could you talk a little bit about that, that tension?

Dr. Bruce Dorsey  23:04  
Yeah, well, she trusts in them in the Methodist way of, of building a faith community. It was built on a every day form of what we might call confessions or narratives of conversion. It was important to say, how far you down you had gone how, what was the full extent of the sins of your life to show how great that was that you had been saved from those encounters. That was a regular part of what were the meetings that Methodist gathered for. They even called the quarterly meetings that they sat together and talked about these kinds of things called they call them "love feasts," to give you some sense of what they what they got out of this. And, and so she wanted in those moments when she was in the greatest crisis, where she felt as though she was about to be excommunicated from that she was excommunicated from the Methodist Church. And this would devastate her possibility from for earning an income and in the mills of New England, that she went back and began to confess and talk and tell these stories to her Methodist sisters and co workers. And so there's a crucial moment in time in the, in this Act Two of the book that's called, "The Trial," in which I have scenes that I call "sex talk and bad stories." And they they revolve around exactly why it is that mill women, especially Methodists, wanted to hear these stories, asked for and elicit these stories from Maria, even though they refer to them oftentimes as bad stories, which is a great sort of terminology to refer to stories, not that were poorly told or uninteresting. But instead they were intriguing and captivating, but they were filled with the kind of confessions and what's fascinating is the conflation of the then and now in those in the hearers of those stories. Maria would tell a story about what had been past sins. Sometimes she was in her early life caught shoplifting because of the temptations of goods she could get in the new cities that she was encountering. And she had at times told people she had been attempted to commit suicide. And when she retold those stories, the tellers of those tales in the courtroom began to say, as if that was happening at the moment that it was she was telling the story rather than recounting something that might have happened 10 years earlier, as the state of where she was. So this is blurring of what, "Are you confessing as a current behavior or long since past one?" gets gets muddied in that storytelling, and it changes the reputation, even the outcome of trial and in some way.

Kelly Therese Pollock  25:47  
So let's talk some about that trial, then. There's a lot that's familiar in the justice system, then that, you know, we still have now. There's judges and jury and lawyers and all of that. But it you know, there's obviously differences as well. So could you talk a little bit about the trial? What made it unique for its time, what things we might and might not recognize today?

Dr. Bruce Dorsey  26:09  
Yeah. And part of this has to do with how unique this trial is itself. So the the way in which a trial takes place, the lawyers, the judges, the marshaling of evidence, rules of evidence, are in place at that time. But it's how one knows about and experiences and has a record of those. There were no court stenographers. There was nobody sitting there, recording word for word what happened as the official transcript, but instead a group of lawyers and journalists arrived, the first day of this, this trial, and they wish to keep their records of this. And they produced what was a growing and emerging kind of genre of reading that was popular for people, called, "The Trial Report." And Avery's case produce more of these than any other trial had before and probably pretty close to none it had anywhere near it throughout the 19th century. There's somewhere in the range of about six to eight of these trial reports that are produced, they range in length from some place, sometimes only 30, or 40 pages to hundreds of pages of a full and complete accounts. And so what we learn from that is a sense of exactly the dialogues that happen, what can what can be told and not told, we hear, fortunately, even the readers of those reports got to hear something that the packed courtroom in Newport, Rhode Island never got to hear: the crossbar conversation sidebar conversations that were taking place between the lawyers and the judges and what they were debating over this, that were not in the ears of the jurors or the or the courtroom. And so these documents made the trial, a living experience for 1000s of people across the whole country as they become best sellers, and people begin to read this and experience this trial in multiple places and spaces. And what's fascinating about this case that it's the only case I know, and I still haven't found any other example in which the actual reading of these trial reports is the accusation for another murder that takes place in a farm community in New Hampshire, where a young tenant laborer who's living in a farm family murders the wife of the farmer, while the farmer is sitting in his living room, reading the trial report at the Avery case. And the argument is that they spent so much time talking and thinking and reading about this, that it prompts this, this murder that took place. But I found another instance, one of three violent deaths that happened as a result of this case. Another time, a fight breaks out between two laborers about 600 miles away in upstate New York, in which two laborers fight over the outcome of the case and whether whether they agree or disagree with the verdict, and one stabs, the other, and murders him in the process.

Kelly Therese Pollock  28:59  
So people might expect that there weren't things like fingerprints at the time, certainly not DNA. But what was really fascinating to me is there's not even agreement on time, what time things might have happened because time might be different from one place to another. Can you talk about that?

Dr. Bruce Dorsey  29:15  
Yes, it's a case that's built on circumstantial evidence. The murder that happens at night, though that's not unusual. In fact, most people don't murder people in broad daylight in front of a crowd of people. Instead, it's taking place in someplace secretive. So the question really is, was the accused murderer capable of being there to have motive and means and was he in this location? So there is this competing alibis? He clearly the Reverend Ephraim Ephraim Avery lived in a neighboring town in Bristol, Rhode Island. He left the day of of Maria Cornell's death, to in his telling of the story, to take a journey, a jaunt through the countryside of the island of Aquidneck Island in Rhode Island around Portsmouth, and to wander and walk and to see sights and to do some other things. And so there's a whole story of what that happens. But there's a group of people in the in the town farm town Tiverton, outside of Fall River, Massachusetts, and in the town of Fall River, Massachusetts, where people saw a tall stranger that looked like a Methodist minister, moving his way from from the Bristol ferry to Fall River and being near the site of where the murder takes place. But the key is, how did they record it? How do they think about time in that moment in time, and that's what's amazing about these documents that they reveal is that it indicated a particularly fascinating moment about time consciousness that emerges with industrialization. But in this farm town, there were people who were still talking about time in old fashioned ways, traditional ways, the sun was a half hour nigh, which meant that to the sunset, you know, the sun was just on the horizon about to drop down, or they made other references to the kind of place of the sun in the sky or the amount of work that or a task. One farmer determined time by how long it took him to stack firewood against the side of his of his farmhouse as a measurement of time. But at the same time, there are new people who are being exposed to time and being controlled by time in different ways. Factory workers, these factory girls, they their lives were dictated by a time scheduled and bells went off that told them they had to be at work. They were in the control of the factory owned time. And in this factory town, however, there were lots of young entrepreneurial men who didn't want to be controlled by this. And they purchased and bought their own clocks and watches. They intentionally which is part that I found most fascinating, they intentionally set their clocks on a different time than the factory's time, because they did not want to be controlled by it. And then they provided evidence that the factory, of course, sometimes manipulated that time to get extra work out of the women. And that the ability to tell the story was all kind of fascinating. And even the Methodists as a group had their own time consciousness is they were the most disciplined in their approach to all their meetings and all the rest of their approach to time. But they also became a good religious group of for the laborers and invest in an industrializing world.

Kelly Therese Pollock  32:20  
One of the ways that this becomes important, you mentioned the alibi, but the Methodists are also covering for Avery, perhaps just providing real alibi, perhaps covering for him. But their use of time in the camps this day that he perhaps assaulted Maria, it's interesting. Can you talk about that, too, because the way that they're talking about time and how, you know, of course, it must have happened at the same time, it always happens, because that's what we do are Methodist, was was a fascinating insight into into their culture as well.

Dr. Bruce Dorsey  32:53  
Yeah, there was a regimented sense that every single witness who seemed to know where Reverend Avery was at the what they thought would be the day when supposedly he walked off alone with Maria into the woods and coerce her into having sex, that they could account for where he was because they had seen him at these particular times. And they were quite specific. They'd seen him at four o'clock, they'd seen him at noon, they'd seen him at 7:30. And that they known exactly where they were at those particular locations. And only when I kind of dug deeper did I find out that those times were the schedule in the camp meeting, not anybody nope, no one in among that group said, I looked at my watch and saw that it was 7:30, or someone had told me in the tent, looking at a clock that that was the case. They knew that somebody blew a horn at those times, and they trusted the fact that the person who blew the horn was correctly doing so. And they, they believed that their meetings always functionally out operated in those ways. But it was also part of a story they told everyone else, that these wild and dangerous camp meetings were organized and controlled, and under a discipline of such. But once you look deeply and how they describe those meetings, let's say the most important was at 7:30, they started the preaching for the evening, and and it was always over at 8:30. But the description of people who are there describe the kinds of deep emotional trance like experience that people falling on the ground screaming and dancing and so on. And if those things went long into the night, and you realize that it really didn't follow the pattern that would happen and so it was easy in part or it's possible in part that a person could slip away from those meetings and not be seen and be back in another time and and not no one know exactly how long they had been gone. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  34:42  
Yeah. So let's talk pop culture. There's no Twitter at the time. There's no television, but there is a pop culture reaction to this event and this trial. Can you talk some about that? And is is this the start of something new, is it a continuation?  You know, what, what does this look like in the sort of history of the pop culture?

Dr. Bruce Dorsey  35:04  
Yeah, that's a great question. The book begins and this won't give anything away for readers because it's the start of it. It's also been fortunately excerpt and some online locations as well begins at a, at a New York City theatre, the Richmond Hill Theater, that what had been previously the mansion and home of Aaron Burr, and was turned into a theater and, and that's the location and it's the site of at least two major plays that were put on about the about the case in the aftermath of the verdict. One took place in Newport, Rhode Island, another in New York City. And, and it only scratches the surface of some of the pop culture material that was created. There were a numerous songs that were written, that were sold as ballads that people would have, and you would have these ballads and sing them to popular tunes that you might already know, you know, you'd sing it to the tune of Auld Lang Syne or the Star Spangled Banner, or whatever the case might be. And it would be a diddy or a poem about about Reverend Avery and Maria Cornell and warnings to people that might engage in it. But some of the songs had a life that continued on. They sang them in Broadway reviews for for months on end, after this trial was over. Even if the show was a Shakespearean play, there'd be an interlude in between, and someone would call out for that song, and they would sing those, those particular songs. So I became fascinated with the sort of sense in which this episode, whether it was the real life of the trial or the reliving of the trial, in places of popular culture are almost inseparable in this and that what is to me what's new about, about this. There had existed some forms of popular culture then might happen before a preacher might get get up and give an execution sermon that people might hear and that might be passed around in some ways, but, but writing and stories that are printed and available for a growing group of readers at a time period where reading readership is expanding is crucial to this event, and it's also at a time of a communications revolution. There's the the sense that new forms of print media are going are proliferating beyond people's expectation. And within months of the of Avery's trial, the new form of tabloid journalism, the penny press paper, comes into being. The first issue of the New York Sun, the first penny press paper, has on its front page, a little story about Avery, and it is well, so it's, it's connected. And I make the point in the in the book that this is not driven by new technologies of reading, but the appetite that readers have for these kinds of materials. So there is a growing interest in the sensational in the sense that of we often see it as the beginning of a kind of Gothic imagination, so that we see the overlap of certain forms that we're familiar with come into being for the first time. So, for example, what might be considered the first book length true crime book is written about this, about this trial. The first 10 years before Edgar Allan Poe creates a detective tale as a genre of fiction, a lawmen from Fall River who goes on a manhunt for Avery when he goes into hiding, writes his own version of a detective tale where he's the hero of the story, took off chasing him, and I'll leave it for readers to learn more about Harvey Harnden in that manhunt, but that's a an example of detective fiction is coming into being in this case, it's so there are older legacies of material that's there. These are community stories, these are a popular form of kind of being entertained by some event that happens, but it's now coalescing into forms of commercialized forms, new genres of reading, that are happening at exactly the same moment that a new appetite for what will continue on for decades afterwards. They don't have a term for this that they're experiencing, it won't be till about the end of the 19th and throughout the 20th century that we'll eventually come up with it. About every decade some case gets called "the crime of the century." They don't call this case the crime of the century, but it really is the first first one that captivates people's imaginations in ways that are about not only the real life experiences with popular culture and and you know, we're familiar with reality forms of popular culture we know today in terms of reality TV, and particularly the way in which people might look at something and wonder is this true or not true, but also how much they relate to these people that's just everyday ordinary people whose life might be like mine. And that's what I I find most fascinating about this case is that people saw in the life stories of Maria Cornell, even Ephraim Avery, people that seem like they're neighbors, but they're those neighbors were caught in a in very usual circumstances. They wanted love and family and independence and ambition. But their choice of how to get there led to these kinds of tragic results. And that's why they were just constantly willing to go and keep going back to it. I point out that that where I start that case in the play in New York City that audiences came back numerous times to see the same same play, when we're familiar with that in popular culture as well.

Kelly Therese Pollock  40:25  
It's easy to imagine if there had been podcasters back then that there would have been 12 True Crime podcasts about just this one event.

Dr. Bruce Dorsey  40:32  
Yes, exactly. I've imagined what what a podcast might be if it was done in as if that existed in that time, it would be wonderful to hear it. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  40:42  
Yeah. So everybody at the time thought they knew what had happened. Is it possible now to actually know what happened? We've got the trial reports, we know that he was acquitted. We know lots of people thought he was guilty. Is it possible to even know?

Dr. Bruce Dorsey  41:00  
Definitively? No, because because a crime that was without an eyewitness, is happens, and there's no way to completely confirm that. And there's reasons why one would understand why a jury of 12 men who had to listened for a month to 1000 pages of testimony, might not be able to get all the details correct in making a decision and might gravitate towards certain narratives that make sense to them; that a, a woman whose sexual morality was questionable for the time, who might be thought to be a disreputable woman, might want to end her life through shame and suicide rather than death, and that you can trust the moral reputation of a preacher over a factory girl. And those kinds of things are understandable. There are certain parts of the evidence that make it most difficult and compelling to sort of make sense of, one of which is the the knot that he that she dies, and it's called the clove hitch it is a sailor's knot that's being tied. But the fascinating thing about it wasn't a slip knot, or a noose that one would put around one's neck and then your weight of your falling would hang yourself, which would be how someone, unfortunately might end their life. It was the kind of knot you had to pull on both sides to tighten it. And one had she she would have had to both strangle herself and tie herself to a stake at the same time. Readers can figure out whether they believe that's a believable story or not. And it became came down for many people, that that was the case there was even a popular song called, "The Clove Hitch," just for those reasons.

Kelly Therese Pollock  42:41  
Well, it's a fascinating story. Anyone who loves reading mystery novels, like I do, will probably really enjoy this book. Can you tell listeners how they can get a copy?

Dr. Bruce Dorsey  42:53  
Yes, readers and listeners can find "Murder in a Mill Town" in all the usual places. You can find a link to order the book directly from bookshop.org. if you go to my author's website, which is BruceDorsey.net. But the book is available on Amazon, it's on Kindle, it's on Apple books, and you can find the audio book on audiobooks.com. But if you have time, do me a favor and support two of my favorite places. Ask your local bookstore to order you a copy or ask your local library that you can order one that you can read for free.

Kelly Therese Pollock  43:28  
Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talked about?

Dr. Bruce Dorsey  43:31  
I'm hoping, in many ways I'm inviting readers to enter a world where there's a story that they're going to find fascinating, but a history that's rich and meaningful for that moment in time as well as for our own.

Kelly Therese Pollock  43:44  
Bruce, thank you so much. I loved reading the book and I've really enjoyed speaking with you.

Dr. Bruce Dorsey  43:48  
Thank you, Kelly. It's been great being here.

Teddy  45:06  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on twitter or instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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