Kate Winkler Dawson

After almost two centuries, Sarah Maria Cornell is still awaiting justice.

Cornell was a mill worker who was murdered in 1832, in a case that raised more than the usual number of headlines because the accused murderer was a Methodist minister, the Reverend Ephraim Avery. The case raised issues about the moral character of Methodists, the moral character of mill workers -- and, frankly, the nature of adversarial justice. As a result, the case was memorialized in books and in ballads (at least show more four songs and one song-like poem were published about it), and is still remembered today -- there is a substantial Wikipedia page for Cornell, and three books have been published about it in the last half century: David Richard Kasserman's Fall River Outrage, Rory Raven's Wicked Conduct, and now Kate Winkler Dawson's The Sinners All Bow.

Sarah Maria Cornell was a lost soul; her father deserted her mother when she was young, she got in trouble for youthful pilfering of clothing, she had trouble holding a job, and she left the Congregational church for the then-radical Methodists, where she was bounced around from congregation to congregation by a bunch of hypocritical ministers and parishioners. Eventually (let's cut to the truth and leave out all the legalistic words like "allegedly") she made an appeal to one of those ministers, Ephraim Avery. She had written him which confessed to various faults she may or may not have committed, because the Methodists required confession to get back in their good graces. So she confessed -- and probably confessed more than she had actually done. So she wanted him to destroy what she had written.

Instead of burning the letters, he raped her. And got her pregnant. When she tried to get child support out of him, her murdered her, and framed it as a suicide: She was found dead, with a noose around her neck.

After various adventures in which, e.g., he fled the state to escape justice, Avery was put on trial in the longest trial in American history to that time. The defense, instead of offering an alibi for Avery (since he had none) or producing an alternate explanation for the facts (since there was none), spent two weeks and called almost 150 witnesses to portray Cornell as a slut who committed suicide. The jury found Avery not guilty.

Most of the basic facts are well known, but author Dawson tried to gather what additional information she could: she discussed the case with a criminal investigator (who entered some useful cautions about the knowledge of the time -- but nothing that really affected that case), she showed some of Avery's unsigned letters to Sarah to a handwriting expert (who affirmed that they were by Avery), and she talked to Avery's living relatives (who had some thoughts but no actual knowledge that wasn't available to the public). These were good stones to turn, but they didn't add much. They add to the evidence that Avery did it -- but only trivially, and the evidence was already overwhelming. It's just that it didn't result in conviction.

And if Dawson turned stones, she also turned up red herrings. She started her investigations by looking at one of the first books about the case, Catharine Williams's Fall River, An Authentic Narrative. Which turned out to be a tendentious secondary source. Cutting all that out would have benefited the book tremendously.

And Dawson completely missed the strong hints that Sarah Cornell was neurodiverse -- autistic, schizotypal personality disorder, something. As an autistic, I can testify that Sarah's problems with the Methodist church very much resemble the sort of suspicion and shunning that I have suffered from holier-than-thou ministers and churches. She needed help. She got Ephraim Avery instead. Admittedly no earlier author saw this -- but Dawson has had fifteen extra years to find out about neurodiversity.

Finally, Sarah Maria Cornell was not Hester Prynne. All they have in common is getting pregnant by a minister. But Hester lived, and so did her child; Sarah was murdered, with her unborn child being killed at the same time. And Sarah was raped. The whole Nathaniel Hawthorne angle is another red herring. If all it takes is two commonplace similarities, then I'm Albert Einstein, because I, like Einstein, have a physics degree and had trouble adapting to school. Oy.

I can only hope that, if there is a second edition of this book, it will be dramatically shorter. It will benefit from it.

As it is, I really can't recommend this book, even though it has a little new information and is the chattiest of the three modern books. If you want a short summary of Sarah's short life, Raven is better. And if you want full documentation (at some cost in readability), Kasserman is still the best. The amount of good information here just isn't worth the irrelevancies. show less

This is as much an environmental and political history as it is a true crime story, as you can probably guess from the summary, and it’s a solid work of journalism, though perhaps a little padded and trying to fit the facts to a narrative. (As in, there are heroes, there are villains, there are victims, there are rarely people.)

So, let’s start with the pollution story because I actually found that more interesting than the serial killer. (You’ve seen one pathetic middle-aged man who show more gets off on murder, you’ve sort of seen them all, and I’d only heard about the Great Smog, but didn’t know details.) Dawson does a good job explaining context of how it came to be, how much smog and London were tied, what made this smog worse than the others, and what the medical affects were, and she’s clearly done a lot of research to build a big, clear picture of what it was like. I appreciated seeing through the eyes of average people at the time, though her descriptions of the smog itself were often a little removed and unemotional. There were photos though, which helped!

I also liked that Dawson carried the smog story through to its end in legislation, and didn’t just leave it “and thousands of people died”. That increased the impact of that thread for me, a lot, though that’s where most of my fitting-a-narrative complaint comes in. There’s one MP who’s clearly been slotted into the hero role, and another who’s the chief villain of the debate, and yeah. It works, but I couldn’t help wondering if rough edges had been shaved off.

Now on to John Christie, our murderer… He’s a nasty piece of work, as they often are, and fits a very familiar profile. (White, middle-aged, didn’t fit in but could be charming, angry at women, preys on sex workers and transients, escalates over time….) Dawson goes into his life, follows him from before his first murder right up to being caught and then on to the hanging, and gives each of his victims personalities and lives, though rarely much more than a sketch. She walks you through his M.O. and brings scenes to life at enough distance that you get his thoughts but don’t get put off by graphic depictions or anything.

My biggest critique of the murder sections is that the story isn’t totally linear. She’ll give a scene in 1952, then backtrack to the 1940s, then allude to his capture, then run through a victim’s life before dropping us into Christie’s daily life in 1952 again. It’s sometimes a little hard to follow, though I’m not sure that a strictly linear story wouldn’t have had its flaws also. I also felt like some of those choices, and the choice to work in cliffhangery sentences when possible, were also for the sake of narrative drama and not much else.

I did like that Dawson spent a fair bit of time on another murder in the same building that Christie may or may not have been involved with, because that was an interesting twist and it brought in another parallel—smog that smothers people with carbon monoxide, and a killer who did; and now, two stranglers who were chronic liars and submitted multiple confessions along the lines of, “well, no, actually.” It helps that that case comes back at the end, in Christie’s trial, too, and is interesting all over again then.

Overall, though, I found the smog story more frightening and intriguing, because government apathy and greed in the face of rampant pollution is still very much a thing, and it was horrifying to me that a government would look at those death and illness statistics and then utterly discount them. (Yes, I know it still happens. No, I’m not less horrified and angry.) And with how awful dying by smog sounds, too! By about halfway, I was reading mostly for the pollution and not the murders, but your mileage may vary. There is a lot of post-Smog politicking that could get dull.

So: perfectly good and satisfying true crime/history book, but a little too “for the drama” for my taste, and not as interesting of a killer as I’d been hoping for. Glad I read it, especially now that I know about the Smog, but it’s also not a book that’s really going to stick with me over time, I don’t think.

7/10

To bear in mind: Contains a serial killer of women with racist beliefs (but not a killer of women of colour), mild descriptions of asphyxiation, and an apathetic, greedy government. show less

"American Sherlock," by Kate Winkler Dawson, is the true story of a genius, Edward Oscar Heinrich (known to his friends as Oscar), one of the most versatile and influential forensic scientists in the United States from the early twentieth century until he died in 1953, at the age of seventy-two. Dawson gained access to Heinrich's massive archives at UC Berkeley, and she offers fascinating details about her subject's challenging childhood and impressive professional accomplishments. Oscar show more Heinrich was a complex man who struggled with insecurity, anxiety, obsessive compulsive personality disorder, and an inability to live within his means. Although he was anxious to prove himself right, he was not infallible. For example, in the Arbuckle matter discussed below, Heinrich's dislike of immoral Hollywood types and their hangers-on affected his ability to remain impartial.

Dawson outlines the significant features of Heinrich's most intriguing investigations: In northern California, a twenty-eight-year-old wife and mother, Allene Lamson, bled out in her bathtub. She had severe head injuries, but did her wounds result from a tragic fall or was she viciously assaulted by her husband? In another incident, three brothers botched a train robbery, killed four eyewitnesses, and then disappeared. The most sensational case of all was the Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle scandal—a glamorous woman, Virginia Rappe, died in the silent film star's hotel room. Rappe's death caused a sensation and fed the tabloids' insatiable hunger for salacious stories. Using the tools of his trade, including specialized microscopes, test tubes, scales, and an encyclopedic knowledge of handwriting analysis, chemistry, biology, ballistics, mathematics, and geology, Heinrich worked tirelessly to sift through the clues and perform whatever tests he deemed necessary. Unless he was completely stymied, he offered the likeliest conclusion based on the available evidence. Even while his fame grew, Oscar was never financially secure, and he supplemented his income by teaching and writing academic texts.

This is a fascinating work of non-fiction in which Dawson recreates the turbulent atmosphere of the Roaring Twenties when, ironically, prohibition helped fuel an increase in aberrant behavior, and publishers sold newspapers by printing spicy and sometimes inaccurate stories, using "lewd bits of gossip disguised as facts" to arouse the public's interest. Members of juries, then as now, were often swayed by witnesses who deliberately lied or, for some other reason, failed to convey what they actually saw and heard. Much to Heinrich's frustration, jurors were frequently bewildered, bored, and/or unconvinced by his expert testimony. "American Sherlock" is an engrossing, disturbing, meticulously researched, and candid assessment of how forensic science can be used and, in some cases, misused by prosecutors and defense attorneys. In fact, Dawson emphasizes that commonly accepted methodologies, such as blood spatter analysis and fingerprint identification can be misleading. If Heinrich were alive today to see what CSIs are able to do, he would likely be astonished. He might also be proud of his pioneering role in recognizing the enormous potential of a specialty that, in the early part of the twentieth century, was still in its infancy. show less

"Death in the Air," by Kate Winkler Dawson, is a vivid account of a toxic miasma that plagued London's men, women, and children for five days. It began on December 5, 1952, when an anticyclone and windless conditions prevented the air from circulating. The murk blocked out the sun, temperatures plummeted, and a combination of putrid smoke, soot, and fog seeped into buildings and lungs. Since London's atmosphere was usually acrid from the burning of cheap coal and other fuels, few could have show more foreseen the danger posed by this perfect storm of concentrated pollution.

At the beginning of every chapter, the author quotes haunting passages by such authors as R. L. Stevenson, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, and Oscar Wilde on the subject of London's fog. Here is one by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: "We saw the greasy, heavy brown swirl still drifting past us and condensing in oily drops upon the window-panes…." Fog may be poetic and picturesque, but there is nothing lovely about gunk that sticks in people's throats, clogs their breathing passages, and makes it difficult to take in enough oxygen to sustain life. Dawson adds weight to her doom-laden narrative by describing the horrifying deeds of John Reginald Christie, a deranged but innocuous-looking man who stalked his neighborhood and preyed on vulnerable women. After strangling his victims, he buried or hid their corpses. Had the police been more insightful and observant, they might have stopped Christie's killing spree much sooner. Unfortunately, they were fooled by this villain's deceptively unthreatening demeanor.

"Death in the Air" is a meticulously researched and exceptionally well-written blend of meteorological, historical, economic, sociological, legal, psychological, and political elements. This work of non-fiction reads like a novel, with richly delineated characters that include arrogant and indifferent government officials; housewives forced to use cheap fuel to cook and fend off the biting cold; and horrified relatives who stand helplessly by as their love-ones develop a hacking cough, choke, and die. The smog is, in some ways, a metaphor for human blindness: to the chemicals spewed into the air; to the psychopaths among us who feign normalcy but go on to commit horrific deeds; and to the poverty that breeds illness, domestic violence. Although the smog may have ultimately killed up to twelve thousand people, Britain's leaders greatly underestimated the death toll in an effort to deflect blame from themselves. show less