Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer,
and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my
experience as the brother of a murder victim to help
other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book
on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders and I'm the co
administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 3: My name is Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 4: I'm a writer, a researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate,
as well as the social media manager and co administrator
for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime, Bill Thomas.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Mind Over Murder.
Speaker 2: I'm Kristin Dilly and I'm Bill Thomas.
Speaker 3: We're joined today by author Kate Winkler Dawson here to
talk to us about the Sinners All bow To Authors,
One Murder and the Real Hester Prinn. Kate, thank you
for joining us today.
Speaker 5: Thanks for having me. I'm excited.
Speaker 3: You are a very accomplished author with three titles under
your belts already. So before we get into your latest work,
why don't you tell us about the subjects that you
have previously covered.
Speaker 5: Oh my goodness, they run the gamut. Let's see. So
my first book, which you flashed at me nicely before
we started recording, is called Death.
Speaker 3: In the Air.
Speaker 5: What I've done with my career is I've started in
nineteen fifty two with Death in the Air and I
just keep getting backwards, going backwards and backwards in time,
which is how we land in Fall River, Massachusetts in
eighteen thirty two. So Death in the Air is set
in nineteen fifty two. And if you are a woman
who is probably about forty or older, you've probably seen
the Crown. It's and it's about the Great Smog of
nineteen which seems like an awful disaster on the Crown,
but and the reality was as it quietly killed about
twelve thousand people, and the government covered it up. It
And amongst the people who are suffering are the real
people who I interviewed for my book. And someone I
didn't interview was a serial killer, nam Joe Reginald Christie,
who was trapped in his house for five days with
his wife when nobody knew he was a serial killer.
The second book was American Sherlock, which is what I
think I'm probably at this point best known for, and
that's about a forensic scientist who worked in the nineteen
twenties in Berkeley, California, and he just worked on the craziest,
wildest cases and innovated a lot of really good forensic
techniques and some pretty lousy ones too. And then the
third book was called All That Is Wicked, which is
based on my first season of one of my podcasts,
which is tenfold more wicked. That was about Edward Ruloff,
who was a genius in linguistics. He was just this
gifted academic, but he also killed his wife and his child,
and his brother in law and her child, and then
created a crime ring in New York City during the
Gilded Age, and you know, ultimately ends up killing someone else.
What's interesting about that book is his brain became sort
of the beginning of comparative anatomy in the United States
because people were so fascinated with this guy who was
so intelligent and yet seemingly so evil that he was
the first brain purchased in the very first brain museum
in the United States. And he studied pretty extensively, so
then that leads us to the Ghost Club, which is
when I say I have books at four and a
half books. The Ghost Club is a is it probably
about a six hour audio book, exclusively a book on
audible and that is about a men's club in London
that was started with Charles Dickens in the eighteen hundreds
and all of these men from around the world would
get together and eat French food and talk about their
families and ghosts and goblins and witches and mediums, and
a lot of them would try to debunk bad mediums
who we're builking money out of people. Then we come
to Listeners All about which takes place in eighteen thirty two.
Speaker 2: So you are you're working backwards through history.
Speaker 5: I know, okay, nineteen fifty two, and then the next
book was nineteen twenties. Then the next book, All That
It Was, All That Is Wicked was eighteen seventies, and
then Ghost Club is a little bit further back in
the origin of the Ghost Club. And then of course
I can't I'm not sure I can get any older
than eighteen thirty three. I can, but I don't know.
At some point you run out of sources that are
reliable so this is the oldest one for sure.
Speaker 2: What made you decide to run Ghost Club as an
audio book as opposed to a traditional print book.
Speaker 5: That's a great question. My publisher, I believe, had never
done that before, so they were very confused because it
was like, I think one of the questions was, so
do we publish this as a pamphlet? What happens with this?
Because my books are usually ninety thousand words. In the
Ghost Club's thirty thousand, it's a third the size. And
I look at these projects like I'm getting ready to
pitch a slew of audible books because I really want
stay in nonfiction. But it takes years to write a
good nonfiction book an audiobook. It's just it's a shorter commitment.
The New York Times will still review you. They now
review audio books. You still get great press, and it's satisfying.
When I looked at Ghost Club, I did not think
it was going to end. My editor agreed would not
be a great ninety thousand word length because the Ghost
Club was an oddity. It was a club that influenced leaders,
but I don't think it was ground shifting in the world.
And I look for big books for me that are
like ground shifting, like the beginning of forensics, or the
biggest air pollution disaster in the world, or the beginning
of neurology. And the center is all about the inspiration
for one of theirs, the world's greatest novels, and the
Ghost Club wasn't that. It was just a really good, spooky,
weird story that involved the world's best known ghost hunter
and he spent the night in this really creepy house
in the and so it's a good ghost story. But
for me, it wasn't going to pass muster for a
ninety thousand word book. That's what's great about these audible
books is it's great to have that way to go.
But it definitely confused my publisher for just like a
hot minute, Wait what okay, how do we do this?
Nobody believes me. Everybody was messaging me, wait, okay, can
I buy this? No, you can buy the audio, you
can't buy there's no print out of this. So yes,
it's been a great experience though.
Speaker 3: As most of our listeners will know, my day job
is as an American literature teacher, and of course the
title of this book captured my attention right away, especially
because I had just finished teaching The Scarlet Letter a
couple of weeks ago our school library and actually reached
out to me. She goes, have you heard about this book?
Do you want me to order it for the library?
And I was like, yes, It's been on my Amazon
list forever and she goes, oh, I'll order it. You'll
get it the day that it comes out, and sure
enough shed and that was when I decided, Okay, I
need to reach out to Kate's pubbl assistancy if I
can get her on the podcast. I love the connection
to The Scarlet Letter because I teach it every year
and it's one of the bits of American literature that
my AP students really actually seem to enjoy, because s
a Puritan level soap opera pretty much is for anybody
who might not be familiar. There might be some people
out there who aren't familiar. Who was Hester Prinne And
why are we connecting Sarah Maria Cornell the Victim to
Hester print?
Speaker 5: I will say, the easiest thing is actually for you
to give the shortest little summary of The Scarlet Letter
from your point of view, and then I'll say where
it is, because I think you're going to do a
much better job of defining the most epic heroine in
the history of liter I think, in the history of literature.
But can you do for me a tiny little summary
just to let everybody know?
Speaker 3: Sure? Yeah, wow, I feel weird. I don't normally get
asked questions on my own plod.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're a bigger Yeah.
Speaker 5: I think you know about the book even more than
I do. Certainly, No, I love it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. This Scarlet Letter is from Nathanael Hawthorne, who is
I think one of our greatest Romantic Sledge Gothic writers,
and it is the story of Hester Prynne, a very
independent woman, I would say, almost an early feminist hero
who after she has a relationship with the minister of
the town, Arthur Dimmesdale, she becomes pregnant, and as an
appropriate punishment for her adultery and having an illegitimate child
out of wedlock, she is sentenced to wear a scarlet
letter on her dress for the rest of her life,
and she eventually is like just shunned by the members
of her puritan town, and she refuses to give up
the name of the person who she committed adultery with,
and so it becomes this wonderful morality lesson about what
happens when you let sin and guilt define your life
for Arthur Dimmesdale, and what happens when you you can
accept the things that have happened to you and eventually
grow and prosper past the things that have defined your
life for Hester.
Speaker 5: So when you read The Sinners All about do you
see what I'm doing? And I interview people on my.
Speaker 2: Show, Yeah, I'm feeling the shift here.
Speaker 5: Did you see the parallels pretty clearly?
Speaker 3: Oh? I totally did.
Speaker 5: She's protecting Arthur Dimmesdale and Sarah Maria cornell inexplicably is
protecting her rapist, the man who got her pregnant. And
you see this? For me when I read The Scarlet Letter,
which I'm sorry to say this, but my friend texted
me in the middle of her reading the book and said,
did you really read this again? You read the Scarlet
Letter all?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 5: Did you read it together in high school? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Didn't we all read it in high school?
Speaker 5: Oh my gosh, I really had to reaccustom myself to
the language. For me, the Scarlet Letter, I thought you
summarized it beautifully. But for me, the Scarlet Letter and
Hawthorne really was focusing in on the impossible, incredible feats
that women have to go to satisfy what is our
perceived role in society, And so with the Center's all about.
When I looked at Sarah's story, on the surface, it's simple,
I'll do a very kind of like cursory thing. This
young woman who is a factory worker is found dead
December twenty first, eighteen thirty two, hanging from a pole
on a farm in what was Tiverton, Rhode Island. It's
now Fall River, Massachusetts. It turns out she's pregnant. Most
people thought it was a suicide at first, including her
own doctor. The heroes in my story often are women,
thank goodness, and I'm always looking for women because I'm
constantly writing about men who murder women. And there's a
set of the matrons are heroes in this and we
could talk about that in a little bit. Certainly, her
male doctor is an incredible hero, as is the farm owner.
As this whole story progresses, you see the unraveling of
Sarah's reputation, and it is mostly from women that's life.
The Scarlet Letter. There is a Methodist minister who goes
on trial and a litany of women, just a list
get on the stand, women who Sarah thought were her friends, Methodist,
Fall River workers, farm actually from all over New England,
who step on the stand and clearly lie about her,
call her crazy, vindictive, she took her own life to
frame this guy. They are the villains. So the women
in my story, I think, just like in the Scarlet Letter,
are the heroes and the villains. The coolest comments about Sarah,
slut shaming, victim shaming, doing all this stuff, just saying
what an awful person she was were from women who
she thought liked her. And so I think that to
me when we hear the story of Sarah Cornell and
everything I've read in there's some history books that have
been written about her and this case, it's always like
the Methodists versus the mainstream Protestants in their fight. That's
what it's really about, and that's what made the story
a big deal, And I don't think that's what it is.
I think that much like in the Scarlet Letter, it
is clear I have been saying this. I don't know
if people really know this, but the leading reason why
women who are pregnant die is murder. Wow, it with
Fardam it is murder. And how many cases can you
guys think of every one of these that comes up.
There was a course of rumor about Gabby Patito being pregnant,
and all of this stuff comes up, and they are
at their most vulnerable, and so this Sarah Cornell and
Hester Prynne happened hundreds of years ago, it is happening now.
It happened, and it will happen. It is very to me,
very simple women who get pregnant. The men who cannot
handle it still, the women try to protect them for
a variety of reasons, because that's the role they've been
told they have to play in society. And then in
Sarah's case, she finally makes a demand, I need the
money you owe me money, I need to raise this child.
You did this. So he agrees, and then she's dead.
And so that's the whole story. And the connections those
are to me, like the really big connections to the
Scarlet Letter. It's the essence of it, the essence of
just women putting their heads down and just getting through life,
the kind of with the society demanding things of them
that are just completely out of reach for any normal person.
Speaker 2: So how does a story from eighteen thirty two end
up on your radar? We laughed about you moving backward
through time here, but how did this story rab you
and make you think I want to spend the next
year researching and writing this book.
Speaker 5: I think there were several steps. One was I had
a listener reach out to me from one of my
podcasts and she said, you need to look at this case.
She was just thinking for my podcast, and it's called
the Haystack Murder. And I said, okay, and I googled it.
A pop the story of Sarah Maria Cornell, and it
pops up because the pole that she's hanging from is
called a haystack pole. She was on John Durfy's farm.
So I googled it and I saw Sarah's story and
I thought, this is interesting. I'm going to look into it.
It actually could be a book because you read that
she's pregnant, you read all of these details. And then
I emailed the listener back and said, hey, thanks for
that tip. I think Sarah's story sounds really interesting. She said,
what are you talking about. That's not the case I
was telling you to look at.
Speaker 2: Oh, it was you talking about?
Speaker 5: A different haystack order, which actually was even more well
known about this looney tune butcher in nineteen twenties Midwest
who found a doppelganger, killed the guy for insurance fraud
to fake his own death, and set his car on
fire next to a haystack so that they would all
go up in flames. And she said, that's what I
was talking about. So actually I just put it on
the we'll talk about it on Buried Bones.
Speaker 2: That actually is a pretty good case.
Speaker 5: And I said thanks anyway, because this is a really
good case. I looked at that and then I thought
this could be a good podcast. Maybe it's a good book.
I wasn't quite sure. And then I've learned about the connection.
I am not the one who made the connection to Hawthorne.
It was half a dozen at least academics who all
recognize this. Because Hawthorne had gone to a wax museum
in Boston and saw the depiction of Sarah and Ephram Avery,
the reverend who was accused of murdering her, and he
comments on it in his journal. He was a huge reader,
big lover of true crime, and a huge reader of newspapers.
I think between those details and those comments. There were
little bits and pieces that the academics put together and said, Okay,
this is clearly his inspiration, and when you read both stories,
it's just an overwhelming amount of details that you pick
up on. I thought, Okay, this is really good. This
could be a book. Because I told you all earlier,
I'm looking for significance. I'm not going to just do
a story that, oh, it's interesting. And I can't even
tell you how many books that I've looked at that
say Crime of the Century are the very first serial killer.
I just wrote about the first serial killer, Lucusta the
Goal from three a D. So everyone who says that
they had the world's first serial killer is wrong. They
go back and back. I really need something more than that.
So I thought, okay, the inspiration for the Scarlet Letter
is amazing, and my editor loved that. But really I
got excited when I discovered Katherine Arnold Williams and her book,
which I know you're probably gonna want to talk about next.
That's what really kind of geared me up for this story.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, my next question essentially is exactly about that.
So thank you for teeing me up for that. You
approached this book with what I think is a very
interesting stylistic conceit, and it's not one that I would
have thought to do in my own writing. So I
really liked this. So you not only discussed the work
of Katherine Williams, who penned America's first widely read true
crime book, Fall River, an authentic narrative, but you refer
to Katherine as your co writer. So how did you
become familiar with Catherine? Why do you feel like she
was the most worthy person to be considered your co
author for this project.
Speaker 5: It's a funny, little funny story because I read her book.
The first thing you do when you're a non fiction author,
and if you guys are doing research, you get a
little folder that says research, and then you start looking
at the usual suspects. Looking at Gutenberg, you're looking at
archive dot org. You're looking at every world cat Org
where you're looking through the World Catalog trying to find
out what where your archives are for the story. You're
looking at all of these different resources and I found,
I think it was through archive dot org. I found
Catherine Williams's book, and I was startled because I'm a
crime historian. I pretty much. I feel like I've almost
read everything out there. And while I think conventional wisdom
is that Truman Capodis in Cold Blood was the mothership
of all true crime books, which I have my own
issues with that book just to begin with, which I
think most people do. I know, yeah, it's a controversial book,
but I go back to the nineteen tens, nineteen twenties
to Edmund Pearson, who would write longer, almost feature length
books about one case. So it's very common in the
eighteen hundreds to read blips or newspaper articles covering a case,
but not a full length book. So I thought it
began with Edmund Pearson. And then I see this book
one hundred years earlier, and I was startled because Catherine
was a poet, single mother, she divorced her husband. She
was from a very affluent the Arnold family, very affluent family,
but became separated when she made the decision to leave
her husband, and she solely raised her child in the
eighteen twenties and eighteen thirties based on being a poet
and a biographer, so she for me, it was very
mysterious why she picked up this story. She was so
passionate about Sarah's case, and she became just a huge
source for me, so big of a source. When I
realized everything she had that I said to my editor,
I think I'm going to have to credit this lady.
If I were going to do that with some David
Muir for ABC or some reporter and a newspaper art,
I I'd have to approach them and say, listen, I'm
using so much of your stuff.
Speaker 3: Do you want to write this together?
Speaker 5: And I said, I think she should be on the
cover Kate Winkle Dawson with Catherine read Williams. And my
editor said, I think there could be legal issues with that, but.
Speaker 2: So that that did not end up happening, but it
was discussed as you were developing the project.
Speaker 5: Oh, fair is fair. And so the reason her book
is significant because that was a very long explanation, Kristen.
Speaker 3: For what you were asking me.
Speaker 5: And the reason that her book was significant was that
she had just access I would never in a million
years be able to get Sarah's family. Her sister and
her mother and her brother in law all spoke essentially
exclusively to Catherine. She was given letters that nobody had
ever read. I'm not even sure the prosecutor had access
to all her letters. Catherine got into all of these
factories where Sarah worked with the permis of the factory owners.
She interviewed just an incredible amount of Sarah's friends and
family she went to the trial. She interviewed her personal
physician to figure out he was the one who knew
about the pregnancy. Basically, almost aside from her family, the
only one who knew about it. She interviewed her landlady.
It was just like a dream come true. I never
thought that would be possible for a story set in
the early eighteen hundreds. But the purpose of her book
is what was the issue. I read the book and
I thought, this is incredible. But if you are a
Bill Thomas and you are picking up Catherine's book and
no one else's book on the case of Sarah Cornell,
within the first few pages, Bill would say he's guilty.
Every Ma Averne's guilty. That's it. Yeah, case closed.
Speaker 3: It.
Speaker 5: Because that's what Catherine really believed. She was parting this
book to be even handed. I'm going to give you
all of the evidence, but it was all of the
evidence that she believed convicted him, and it was not fair.
It was not the way I was going to approach
the book, and I thought, I joke about this, but
I have enough of a problem policing myself when I
write a book. Am I staying fair? Am I staying accurate?
I'm now I got this lady to deal with, who
is not? She's very accurate. Her reporting was incredible and
I had no less than nine trial transcript versions to
look at to compare, so her reporting was spot on.
But she was really sneaky. She was doing things like
Sarah got into trouble when she was very young for thieving.
She stole things on several different occasions. Catherine in the
book conflated them into one essentially because one could be
dismissed as a youthful indiscretion. But if habitual ceiling was
a capital crime in New England in this time period,
so Catherine very clearly wanted to advocate for Sarah. She
very clearly desperately needed Sarah to be the perfect victim.
Never slept with men. I don't know if she did
or not. Sarah said she didn't. She was assaulted, I
believe by frame. But Catherine had to craft a narrative
that number one, This man was guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
And number two that Sarah was a gift that was
drifted off from earth by this man and nobody else
could have done it. And that is not the book
I was going to write. I wanted to re examine
this case using forensic experts from the twenty first century,
including Paul Holes, you know who is my co host
on Baried Bones. And I wanted to look at the
case again because I did not trust Catherine, and you
know her book was so popular. I was concerned about it,
and I wanted to make sure history was told correctly.
Sarah was not perfect. She certainly did not deserve what
happened to her. But the big question is does what
happened with E. F ram Avery and his trial is
it the right thing? And why or why not would
it be? And so that was the question I had
to answer.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be right back
after this word from our sponsors, We're back here at
Mind over Murder.
Speaker 3: You brought up in cold Blood where there is very
clearly also authorial bias there, and I love the fact
that you set out for the reader, very clearly for
anybody who isn't familiar with the idea that, like people
who write true crime books a lot of times do
have an authorial bias, whether it is absolutely set out
there at a pody or let Catherine read, or whether
it's just intentional and they don't police themselves as well.
You were talking about that idea of having a police yourself.
But I love that you were really straightforward about that
and pointed out, here are the times when Catherine was
not being unbiased. This is the times when she was
being dishonest or misleading, or you'd even pointed out a
time or two when she was being pretentious with her language.
And I appreciated that you were willing to call her
and be like, you know what, she wasn't reporting this right,
and that's not fair.
Speaker 5: What that does, which is being totally selfish on my part,
Besides of course being honest with the reader, it also
gives the reader an opportunity to realize that I am
doing the very best I can with checks and balances
on myself and on her, and I don't think you
get that. Sometimes you have to just trust that if
the person says they're a journalist or a cop on
a podcast, that they are examining all of the information
and giving you. As a journalist, my job is to
take in all of this information and spit it back
out to you in a narrative so you can make
your own decision. And that's what my goal was. I'm
very uncomfortable with the idea in any of my books
of having to take a stand at the end of
the book, because that's not what I'm supposed to be doing.
I'm just supposed to be giving you all your options.
But I had to do that. So with Catherine, every
time I would say she's being sneaky and she's doing
something incorrectly here, it was an opportunity for me to
show how to do it correctly, which just validates me
as an author. But I threw her under the bus
because she deserved it. She was hired, we find out
at the end of the book. I don't think it's
a huge spoiler, but she was hired by the factory
owners to just skewer for Avery. Now do I think
he was morally guilty, Oh, God, of course absolutely, And
there's a lot of evidence for me. We could talk
about why I think that she was hired. It would
be like being hired by the White House to write
an unbiased piece and it's only your point of view
and their point of view, and that's it. So she
was a very convincing I think, in some ways like
a provocateur of this story, and for Mavery didn't ever
get a fair shake, and everybody deserves it. I tell
my students, if you're stopped by the police, call an attorney.
Innocent people call attorneys no matter what they say. At
the beginning of the book, I had to say, I
don't know if this guy's guilty or innocent, but we're
going to work it through together and see what happens.
Speaker 2: But that happens a lot. In other words, people come
in to any number of I was about to say literature,
but it's far beyond that. Come in with a perspective
and a point of view. I think it sounds like
you were trying to play it fair and down the
middle and present just the facts. That clearly wasn't what
Catherine was doing almost two hundred years ago. As you said,
it comes late in the book that she's actually hired
to do this, because when you were talking a moment
ago Kate about the level of access that she had,
I thought to myself, that's two hundred years ago. How
does an author, a reporter, if you will, and a
woman get that level of access where she's able to
go everywhere?
Speaker 5: Right? Why would Sarah's family talk to her almost exclusively?
She had an awful lot of witnesses that she could
talk to, so that never took the stand for the
prosecutor because he must have thought they were unreliable who
were really saying some pretty nasty things about from avery,
which frankly I believed. I think he was a terrible person,
but I agree I wouldn't have put them on the
stand either. It's all hearsay. Cavin didn't have the ability
to go track all these people down. She had a
little kid at home, and she was a woman, and
she was not just a woman, just a pious with
three underlines under the word pious woman who I think
it would have been a real, really difficult for her
to do all of the leg work that clearly went
into making this book. I don't have a doubt that
she talked to all these people. I don't have a
doubt that she went to all of the trial. I
don't have a doubt that she read through every little,
tiny piece there was. I think that a lot of
people were brought to her though. I just don't see
any other explanation. I mean, she talked to dozens of people,
and one person would not really in that time period,
would not really be able to do that. Where would
you even look? The factories were filled with Methodist women
who were protecting from avery. Those are the ones who
all got on the stand. These people were cherry picked
for sure that she was speaking to.
Speaker 3: Let's get into the forensic experts that you used for
the twenty first century. First, explain the podcast that you
have with Paul Hols. Because I know that we have
a lot of fans out there who are always looking
for good new podcasts. Please take a moment to plug
your project with Paul.
Speaker 5: Luckily, it's a good explanation for how Paul gets involved
with the book.
Speaker 3: For me.
Speaker 5: Paul Hols is a forensic investigator. I used to say retired,
but he's not. He works active cases and he works
for a DNA lab also and works cases with them.
Speaker 3: He's so interesting.
Speaker 5: I said, what do you do for this lab? And
he said, sometimes I'll just tell them they'll give me
a case. Because he's not a DNA analyst. He's an investigator,
and he said, I'll tell him where to look for DNA.
Why don't you try under the hood right about over
here kind of stuff. Paul isn't incredibly smart, and he
was one of the people who cracked the Golden State
killer case. And he became well known because he's an
attractive man apparently, and so there's a moniker ashtag hot
for holes for Paul. He's so humble. And I had
known Paul for a few years and I thought we
would be great co hosts. And so I came up
with this concept of a show called Buried Bones, which
is on the exactly right network. Our mothership is my
favorite murder, And essentially I pick a case. Paul has
no clue about the case to begin with. I used
to send him a prep document, but sometimes the title
would give away what was happening, and so it'd send
him some simple questions. But now I'd ask him stuff
on the fly. So I'll pick a case. For instance,
we taped one about a man who had attacked women.
It was in nineteen seventy and he had sexually assaulted
some women. And I'll unspool it as a mystery, this
is what happened, This is how they figure out who
he is. And we get into the case, and I
think he knowices in that show that I started asking
him a lot of questions about interrogation techniques, and I
always have a point of why I'm picking a particular story,
And I said, what about the rights of the workers?
And are the people who are being called in? What
about their rights? And he stopped. It just annoyed me
and he stopped and he said, I know exactly what
case this is because I said, it's a landmark case
and it's Miranda. The guy's last name is Miranda Randa,
origin of Miranda Rights. A lot of times these are
cases where I try to fool him. There was a
case about the whole family that's murdered except for two brothers,
and I tell him about this person who was roaming
around the house with an axe, what order they go into?
The access to the house. It's in the eighteen hundreds.
It was creepy. And then we get to he's trying
to say, oh, it's a stranger of this and how
do they get in? And then we get to the reveal,
which is that one of the surviving brothers, comes face
to face with his oldest brother who's covered in blood
and holding the axe. Then it changes the story completely.
So I think of him as a cop who I
meet up on the scene and I give him a
rundown of what's happening, and he gives me advice along
the way. And it's been a successful show because Paul
it's so interesting for him to talk about. I'll talk
to him about a case from I think the latest
one was maybe, or the earliest one was like sixteen eighty,
and he'll say, I worked a case just like that
ten years ago. And it's an illustration of what I
always try to say. The reason people killed in three
AD has not changed in thousands of years. It's all
the same. It's the same emotions most of the time.
Speaker 3: It's fear.
Speaker 5: We learn from history. It just repeats over and over again.
It's the point with my book, Sarah Cornell, pregnant, vulnerable,
demanding money, she ends up dead, And this happened, I'm
sure yesterday in some country, and it will happen. It's
a repeating pattern. We're humans, that's what happens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel like I see reports now. Obviously we
can't follow every case, but when you're in the true
crime space, you read a lot about true crime and
about new cases as well as older, particularly unsolved on
and I feel like I hear that story over and
over again.
Speaker 5: Ye shnan Anne Watts, Chris Watts, who killed two little girl,
she was pregnant, Lacy Peterson, she was pregnant. It just
goes on and on, and it really is there's I
think there are things that are common in citing incidents
for people who are killers, and having a pregnant partner
is one of those things if they're hiding something, and
so it's yeah, it's really it's interesting to see that
pattern repeat itself over and over again, and we learned
things from that show. There was an episode from the
seventeen hundreds about a woman who was in a terrible
marriage and she ends up having an affair with a
young revolutionary soldier who's walking past her house essentially, and
he's an older teenager. They have an affair, he gets
her pregnant. The woman says, he's my husband's going to
find out because we haven't slept together in probably a year,
so they have to kill him. They feel like there's
absolutely no other choice. But killed the husband because she's pregnant.
It's going to happen. And Paul and I were talking
about it, and I said, I see it. She felt
like she had no choice because she would have been executed,
run out of town, all sorts of terrible things if
she had a child with somebody other than her husband.
So it was like self preservation. I'm not saying it
was the right thing to do, but I think he
was totally clueless about how serious that would have been
in the seventeen hundreds and it's still serious in places today.
Speaker 3: Did you treat the work on this with Paul the
same way that you do one of your podcast episodes
where you just said, I'm going to spill a case
for you. I want you to give me your interpretation.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and during certain points, So if I were having
to poor Paul, he would be there for hours and
hours listening to me. And actually we've done that in
a more casual setting in person. Talked to him about cases,
but I gave him the highlights and I would ask
specific questions. One part is, hopefully I'm not jumping ahead here,
but when Sarah is discovered and the men cut her
down and there's a coroner's jury who was all of course,
and I think everybody knows Corner's juries. You don't have
to have any medical expertise at all, and in this
time period, I think you just had to own an
acre of land.
Speaker 3: Maybe.
Speaker 5: So these men show up, they don't take her clothes off.
She's dressed in a bonnet. Her shoes were lying next
to her. Her knees were barely off the ground. She would
have been tall enough to tie this twine on the
top of the hook. Her physician said she was pregnant.
She was probably very upset. This is probably a suicide.
When the matrons undress her, which is what their job
was in the eighteen hundreds and the seventeen hundreds, all
the way back, the women in the town, the most
respected women in the town. Their task was when a
woman died, to privately undress her, wash her off, redress her,
get it ready for burial. And so when they did that,
and they saw just incredible violence all over her body.
Handmarks on either side of her hips, which I suspect
was trying to force a termination of the pregnancy, skin knees,
just awful. This would have been a suicide had it
not been for the women saying eventually she was buried
when they said it, they didn't say anything until after
she was buried, But then when they raised the alarm
about that was a really big thing. And so I
talked to Paul about that, and by the end of
my conversation, he said, do you think these would be women?
He was questioning whether or not they would be able
to recognize violence versus maybe someone who was struggling and
had decided against taking their own life, or some old
wounds from a boyfriend from two weeks ago. And he said,
would they have recognized violence? And I said, probably most
of this woman had experienced violence in the lifetime, and yes,
and they had dressed enough women who were victims of
domestic violence to know what a bruise looks like, what
a recent bruise looks like. And so he said, then
they're your best source. So clearly this was she was
in some sort of a violent fight. So it was
interesting because he then said, when you put it into context,
he'll often say, this corner sounds like he knows what
he's doing. I'm going to trust his judgment. And then
other times he'll say, this pathology sounds like a total quack.
I don't think we can trust his judgment, so it
depends on the circumstances. But he really felt pretty strongly
that the matrons knew what they were talking about. I
was able to talk to him about knots. There's a
big controversy the kind of knot that was tied around
Sarah's neck. It was called a clove hitch It was
something that Dennis Raider BTK used, which is why some people.
Speaker 3: Have heard of it before.
Speaker 5: The contention from Catherine and from everybody on the scene
immediately was this is a mariner's knot. It has to
be tied with two hands. She couldn't have done it herself.
Case closed.
Speaker 3: This is murder.
Speaker 5: And that's really what I think Catherine hung her hat on.
Was that clove hitch knot. And when I talked to
Paul and a forensic non expert who had worked on
these cases, they both said a clove hitchcock not could
have been tied accidentally. Paul said, he I have what
he says in the book, but he says, I came
on a scene where it looked like it happened accidentally.
Not the suicide, but the way that the knot tied itself.
Happened when this woman was hanging off of the balcony,
and so he said, it's absolutely possible. Do I think
Sarah took her own life? No? Do I need to
acknowledge to the reader that it was possible? Of course
did Catherine? No?
Speaker 2: Hell no, she didn't know, but she had her perspective,
she had a motivation.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, So that's where you're looking at two different
authors with two different motivations.
Speaker 3: Here. I want to take a second and quote yourself
to yourself real quick, because I loved what you had
to say at the end as you're wrapping things up.
Because this is a focus. I think that is very
important for us, in particular as true crime hosts, and
I think it's important to anybody who wants to do
a really good true crime podcast or book or anything else.
You said, true crime should educate, explain, and eliminate, not
simply entertained. Many contemporary readers and critics are making some
long needed demands of true crime creators. Cease glorifying the
criminal and his crimes, respect the victim and their family,
complete due diligence, so there is accurate reporting. True crime
can be insightful, evening, grossing, but it must be truthful
and must of it is not. First of all, thank you,
thank you, We wholeheartedly agree. Is that the main message
that you want people to be taken away from the book?
Speaker 5: Would you say, I think from the true crime part
of it? Yes, I think, and I say this in
the book. We are at a real inflection point in
true crime. And I don't know if everybody sees it,
but I feel it from my listeners. When I hear
from them, we have the ability your kid can go
out with two hundred dollars and create a podcast with
no gatekeepers, no attorneys, no nothing. At least with a
Netflix or with books, there are attorneys there to flag
you on stuff. Although some of the stuff I see
on streamers is pretty questionable. Sometimes I wonder did an
attorney actually look at this before they aired it. The
inflection point is that my audience, and I'm sure your
audience is incredibly intelligent. I hear from them, and when
I say intelligent, I don't mean highly educated. I have PhD,
I have moms working at home, and I have sex
workers who I hear from all the time telling me
their points of view about things. When I hear from
a sex worker who's praising the way that I'm talking
about other sex workers, that makes me feel good because
that's important. These are all human beings. Everybody is a
human being that we're talking about, and they are pissed.
They do not like some of the stuff they're seeing
or reading. Most of them are advocates. I would say
all of them are advocates. Actually most of them are women,
about eighty percent according to our stats. And then many
of them are survivors, and they do not want to
hear sympathy for the killer. And I don't mean I
think it's important to disclose things that have happened to
people in the past. There always needs to be that
caveat of there are many people who go through absolutely
awful things and they don't torture and murder people and
become serial killers. I really felt like I had a
turning point in my thinking when I interviewed an author
who should remain nameless, not for one of my shows,
but for something else, and she was like fangrolling over
a serial killer.
Speaker 2: This is one of my hot button issues here.
Speaker 5: It is considering your background and your personal what's happened
with you can you imagine somebody spending more time talking
about the serial killer and not even that just saying
how brilliant he was and how nobody else could have
pulled this off, versus talking about your sister and her partner.
Speaker 2: But this is something Kristin and I talk about this
frequently on mindover Murder, and we are certainly in touch
with a number of people, many of whom wear the
advocate hat. But the glorification of serial killers is something
that I will criticize till the day I die and
will never understand.
Speaker 5: No, I won't understand it either. I really don't. I
mean buying. I think it was Jeffrey Dalmer's sunglasses that
he wore in prison, get it.
Speaker 3: I don't understand it.
Speaker 5: I think that my audience is really disgusted with some
of the stuff that's out there. They teach a true
crime podcast course, probably about a two and fifteen two
twenty undergrad students every year at the University of Texas
every semester. So I had them listen to good podcasts
and bad podcasts and talk about the ethics. And they
are now really fine tuned into victim shaming, into droning
on and on about the serial killer and having too
much detail when you're describing a crime. And I will say,
I told them something that I thought was really interesting,
and I wonder how what you would think about this bill.
I got an email after I had written about Death
in the Air. So Death in the Air was about
a serial killer caught in this smog. He was a
rapist and he strangled these women. He was like gassing them.
He was he made a contraption where he would tell them,
I'm going to solve your asthma issues.
Speaker 3: I have a certificate in first aid.
Speaker 5: And then he would pump carbon monoxide into a tube
and it would knock them out. And he would sexually
assault them and then kill them and then bury them
in his backyard and in the walls of his kitchen.
And he killed his wife and put her in the
parlor floorboards. And I had this email from this male author,
and I had never received anything like this before. He
emailed me. He said, I read Death in the Air.
I'm getting ready to write my first true crime book.
I'm a journalist. But he said, I'm scared to death
because I have to deal with sexual assaults in this book.
And I'm a guy and I've got this has to
be right. I have to get this right because I
don't want to be that guy who if I say
two or three things wrong, it's going to be interpreted
as someone who is cessatializing or adding too many How
do I know? He was like, he literally was like,
how do I know? How much is too much? And
what I said was in death in the air and
I'm always looking for the strong women. My goal was
to try to have each of these victims be as
strong a character as Nasty John Reginald Christy the serial killer.
And with those first victims, I wrote from their point
of view based on all the information I had. When
they breathe in the gas and they hear his voice,
they go black, which is we know. I talked to
a pathologist and he said that's what exactly what would
happen is basically they would go black. That's it. Do
I really have to explain what a sexual assault is
to my audience now?
Speaker 2: I mean, I understand it.
Speaker 5: If your goal is to terrify somebody, it's worse to
not explain it. Frankly, in each of those chapters, when
I'm describing this, that scene is done and the next
thing we know their bodies piled into the kitchen, and
then I describe with one of the first women, she
is buried.
Speaker 3: I'm sure, Christen, you've got to this point.
Speaker 5: She is buried and he's freaking planting flowers above her.
And the only reason I know that is because I
have a photo of when they found her vertebrae. There
was a bush root wrapped all through the vertebrae, so
she had been down there long enough for the plant
to grow. And by keeping it from her point of view,
and I told him this, it gave me the opportunity
to step back empower the victim. There is no need
to explain even what it was like for her to
be choked out, let alone being sexually assaulted. He really
wanted to take that tactics. I'm going to do as
little as possible. And I said, you're not going to
lose a reader because you're not graphic. And I just
don't think people understand, or they maybe they don't give
a shit. I don't know. I don't know why people
describe things the way they do.
Speaker 2: One question, we'd be remiss if we didn't ask this
before we get to a close. How in the world
do you find enough time to do multiple podcasts, multiple books,
and teach and be a mom of teenagers. Yeah, how
does all that work?
Speaker 5: I ignore my family first of all.
Speaker 3: In the bather room.
Speaker 5: I do not ignore them, you know. I just I'm
I've always been. This is probably gonna sound pretty haughty,
but I've always been at work smarter, not harder person.
I'm really good at just buckling. Of course, I will
tell you. ADHD medicine is very helpful for me. I
didn't get done, so I know it's crazy. I didn't
get diagnosed in told about a year and a half ago,
and I just it's a Christmas miracle that I even
got through the first three books with no ADHD medicine.
It helps because I need I literally have to sometimes
Bill assign myself a word count every day. I'm just
gonna do it, five hundred words. I've just got to
get it done, even if it's the crappiest, shittiest five
hundred words anyone could ever write. I do it. I
do it because I'm so satisfied with checking off on
my Google Keep that I've done a task. It's very
that dope it is, and it's I'm a zero inbox
person like I have four emails in my inbox right now,
drives me crazy, and I'm probably gonna address them for
my next podcast. And I'm just that kind of person.
But I will say when I got diagnosed with ADHD,
the psychologist who tested me and he said, so it's conclusive.
You're definitely on the higher end of ADHD. And I said, okay,
when he was explaining options, and then he said, but uh,
look at how many jobs you have. Of course you
have ADHD. No first stopping in the next I know
is do you ever finish one thing? Ever? And I said,
it's not easy, but maybe I'll be able to at
some point. So I don't know if that's a good answer.
I just juggle a lot of different things, and when
I get bored, it's I'm just gonna sit around and
eat popcorn all day pretty much.
Speaker 3: So this is a better alternative. I love this, and
I really I want to take your podcasting true crime
podcasting class.
Speaker 5: I have moms that come in all the time. It's
so sweet. Get a really cute little email from one
of my students of this. My mom's a fan, Can
she come in? I always tell those students bring in
anybody you want.
Speaker 3: I don't care.
Speaker 5: They can't post anything, they can't do any of our posts,
but come in, have them sit and hang out. So
you need to make your way down to Austin, Texas.
Speaker 3: It is on my list. We're supposed to actually, we're
supposed to go to Houston to visit ofthrom and we
know Paul is going to be there. We're headed in
the Texas area at some point or another. Yeah, okay,
where can everybody find your book and your podcasts?
Speaker 5: Everywhere? Both the answers for that are everywhere. You can
go to exactly right network and that's where at three shows.
One that's been finally retired after twelve seasons because it
was killing me slowly. I felt like by the time
I was doing with twelve seasons at Templemore Wicked, it's
like a documentary series. It's a lot to do, and
I always said I felt like I looked like President
Obama at the end of eight years. I quit me
at the beginning of four years of Tenfold because it's
I'm just traveling all over the world. So now I
have I'm happily at home and I have wicked words
and then buried bones and we're on the exactly right network.
Speaker 3: But if you just plug in my name, it'll pop
up amazing. The book is The Sinner's All About to
authors One Murder and The Real Hester Prinn, available now
wherever books are sold. Kate, thank you so much for
joining us today. We really appreciate it.
Speaker 5: Thank you, guys. I loved it. It was a good conversation.
Speaker 3: Thank you. That is going to do it for this
episode of mind Ever Murder. Thank you so much for listening.
We'll see you next time.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.
Speaker 1: Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois.
Speaker 2: Our theme music is by Kevin McLoud.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is distributed in partnership with crawl Space Media.
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Speaker 1: You can also follow our page on the Colonial Parkway
Murders on Facebook.
Speaker 2: And finally, you can follow Bill Thomas on Twitter at
Bill Thomas five six.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.