The Sinners All Bow
Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne
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Narrated by:
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Kate Winkler Dawson
About this listen
Acclaimed journalist, podcaster, and true-crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson tells the true story of the scandalous murder investigation that became the inspiration for both Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and the first true-crime book published in America.
On a cold winter day in 1832, Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead in a quiet farmyard in a small New England town. When her troubled past and a secret correspondence with charismatic Methodist minister Reverend Ephraim Avery was uncovered, more questions emerged. Was Sarah’s death a suicide...or something much darker? Determined to uncover the real story, Victorian writer Catharine Read Arnold Williams threw herself into the investigation as the trial was unfolding and wrote what many claim to be the first American true-crime narrative, Fall River. The murder divided the country and inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter—but the reverend was not convicted, and questions linger to this day about what really led to Sarah Cornell’s death. Until now.
In The Sinners All Bow, acclaimed true-crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson travels back in time to nineteenth-century small-town America, emboldened to finish the work Williams started nearly two centuries before. Using modern investigative advancements—including “forensic knot analysis” and criminal profiling (which was invented fifty-five years later with Jack the Ripper)—Dawson fills in the gaps of Williams’s research to find the truth and bring justice to an unsettling mystery that speaks to our past as well as our present, anchored by three women who subverted the script they were given.
©2025 Kate Winkler Dawson (P)2025 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Breakneck pacing, a novelist’s gift for scene-setting, and an edifying analysis of the overlap between the Cornell case and Hawthorne’s novel make this a home run. Readers will be rapt.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A fascinating approach to the story of Sarah Cornell, the woman whose death is said to have inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne to create Hester Prynne in his 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter. . . . Required reading for true-crime aficionados and those fascinated by puritanical New England.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Who killed Hester Prynne? In this haunting true crime investigation, Kate Winkler Dawson pursues justice for the real woman behind Hawthorne's heroine, Sarah Maria Cornell, whose mysterious death was initially ruled a suicide. Applying modern forensic techniques and joining forces with her 19th century counterpart, Catharine Williams, who wrote what is likely the first American true crime narrative, Dawson takes the reader on an intrepid and utterly gripping journey of discovery. Written in shimmering transportive detail, The Sinners All Bow is an exceptional work of historical reportage that resonates all too strikingly today.”—Abbott Kahler, New York Times bestselling author of Eden Undone: A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II
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Story
On February 1, 1910, the vivacious, diamond-adorned music hall performer Belle Elmore suddenly vanished from her home, causing alarm among her friends, the entertainers of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild. Their demands for an investigation would lead to the unearthing of a gruesome secret and trigger a fevered international manhunt for Belle’s husband, medical fraudster Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen.
By: Hallie Rubenhold
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All That Is Wicked
- A Gilded-Age Story of Murder and the Race to Decode the Criminal Mind
- By: Kate Winkler Dawson
- Narrated by: Kate Winkler Dawson
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Edward Rulloff was a brilliant yet utterly amoral murderer—some have called him a “Victorian-era Hannibal Lecter”—whose crimes spanned decades and whose victims were chosen out of revenge, out of envy, and sometimes out of necessity.
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PLEASE STOP The Politicizing of Everything
- By Anonymous on 10-15-22
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The Ghost Club
- A Penguin Audiobook Original
- By: Kate Winkler Dawson
- Narrated by: Kate Winkler Dawson
- Length: 4 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
For more than a century, some of the world’s most important thinkers and leaders—men like Arthur Conan Doyle and William Butler Yeats—gathered once a month and discussed the supernatural at The Ghost Club in London. In the early 1900s the club's chairman was Harry Price, the world’s most well-known ghost hunter. He and other members, like Harry Houdini, sought to debunk the charlatans who preyed on vulnerable people with fake seances, tarot readings, and spiritual encounters.
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í am rather disapointed
- By Ingibjörg Kolbeins on 04-04-23
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American Sherlock
- Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI
- By: Kate Winkler Dawson
- Narrated by: Kate Winkler Dawson
- Length: 10 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Berkeley, California, 1933. In a lab filled with curiosities - beakers, microscopes, Bunsen burners, and hundreds upon hundreds of books - sat an investigator who would go on to crack at least 2,000 cases in his 40-year career. Known as the "American Sherlock Holmes", Edward Oscar Heinrich was one of America's greatest - and first - forensic scientists, with an uncanny knack for finding clues, establishing evidence, and deducing answers with a skill that seemed almost supernatural.
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Always use a professional Editor and Reader
- By Steven F. Schroeder on 02-19-20
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Death in the Air
- The True Story of a Serial Killer, the Great London Smog, and the Strangling of a City
- By: Kate Winkler Dawson
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A real-life thriller in the vein of The Devil in the White City, Kate Winkler Dawson's debut, Death in the Air, is a gripping, historical narrative of a serial killer, an environmental disaster, and an iconic city struggling to regain its footing. In winter 1952, London automobiles and thousands of coal-burning hearths belched particulate matter into the air. But the smog that descended on December fifth of 1952 was different; it was a type that held the city hostage for five long days.
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Interesting
- By irene on 11-27-17
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Killer Colt
- By: Harold Schechter
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this masterful account, renowned true-crime historian Harold Schechter takes you into the life and crimes of convicted murderer John Caldwell Colt, drawing parallels between John's rise to notoriety and his brother Samuel Colt's rise to fame as the inventor of the legendary revolver. With a killing that made headlines around the nation, John Colt became a cultural touchstone whose shocking villainy inspired and provoked such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville.
By: Harold Schechter
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Story of a Murder
- The Wives, the Mistress, and Dr. Crippen
- By: Hallie Rubenhold
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On February 1, 1910, the vivacious, diamond-adorned music hall performer Belle Elmore suddenly vanished from her home, causing alarm among her friends, the entertainers of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild. Their demands for an investigation would lead to the unearthing of a gruesome secret and trigger a fevered international manhunt for Belle’s husband, medical fraudster Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen.
By: Hallie Rubenhold
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All That Is Wicked
- A Gilded-Age Story of Murder and the Race to Decode the Criminal Mind
- By: Kate Winkler Dawson
- Narrated by: Kate Winkler Dawson
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Edward Rulloff was a brilliant yet utterly amoral murderer—some have called him a “Victorian-era Hannibal Lecter”—whose crimes spanned decades and whose victims were chosen out of revenge, out of envy, and sometimes out of necessity.
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PLEASE STOP The Politicizing of Everything
- By Anonymous on 10-15-22
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Trial by Ambush
- Murder, Injustice, and the Truth About the Case of Barbara Graham
- By: Marcia Clark
- Narrated by: Marcia Clark
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Unwanted and neglected from birth, Barbara Graham had to overcome the odds just to survive. Her beauty was both a blessing and a curse—offering her too many options of all the wrong kind. Her innate sensitivity left her vulnerable to the harsh realities of the street, where she was left to fend for herself before she reached double digits. Her record of petty crimes spoke to a life that constantly teetered on the brink of disaster. But in 1953, a catastrophic twist of fate would catapult her out of obscurity and into the headlines.
By: Marcia Clark
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Murderland
- Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers
- By: Caroline Fraser
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body dumps, in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest. But in the 1970s and ’80s, Bundy was just one perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder across the region. Why so many? Why so weirdly and nightmarishly gruesome? Why the senseless rise and then sudden fall of an epidemic of serial killing?
By: Caroline Fraser
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The Mother Next Door
- Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy
- By: Andrea Dunlop, Mike Weber
- Narrated by: Andrea Dunlop
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
No bond is more sacred than the one between a mother and child. And no figure is more sympathetic than a mother whose child faces a life-threatening illness. But what if the mother is the reason for the illness? What if the sympathy is the point? With help from some of the top MBP experts in the world, Dunlop and Weber uncover the complex maze of psychological, systemic, and cultural issues that compound MBP and offer solutions for how we might find our way out.
By: Andrea Dunlop, and others
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Raised by a Serial Killer
- Discovering the Truth About My Father
- By: April Balascio
- Narrated by: April Balascio
- Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
One evening in 2009, April Balascio was searching online, as she had been every night, for unsolved murders in the towns her family had lived growing up, when she stumbled across the latest investigations into the “Sweetheart Murders” cold case. All at once, the buried memories of her father’s dark history were awakened, and she knew she had to take action. She picked up the phone to call a detective and the rest is infamous true crime history. In her unflinching memoir, Balascio bravely reveals an astonishing tale of a lifetime of manipulation, unexplained upheavals, and silent fear.
By: April Balascio
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The Lady in the Lake
- By: Jeremy Craddock
- Narrated by: Mark Elstob
- Length: 7 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A body in a lake. A wife missing for 21 years. A husband's denial of murder. A crime reporter who was there revisits the shocking crime 25 years on. The Lady in the Lake is a real-life murder mystery and true crime memoir that flows like a thriller. A dark secret resurfaces after 21 years in the English Lake District to devastate a family. With powerful themes of murder and denial, the story spans five decades, from the 1970s to the present day.
By: Jeremy Craddock
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The Highway Murders
- The True Account of the Killer Who Terrorized the Highways
- By: Sourabh Mukherjee
- Narrated by: Chandrahas Shetty
- Length: 4 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In August 2009, a 39-year-old policewoman went missing in Tamil Nadu. A month later, her heavily decomposed body was discovered in a drain by a graveyard. She had been brutally violated and killed. As the investigation started, the police detected a pattern in more than a dozen unsolved rape-and-murder cases with mutilated bodies of women turning up in graveyards, drains and empty fields along the highways. It didn’t take the police too long to find out that the perpetrator was a trucker named M Jaishankar.
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A true inside look at a twisted mind
- By GRivera19 on 09-16-24
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The Peepshow
- The Murders at Rillington Place
- By: Kate Summerscale
- Narrated by: Nicola Walker
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
In this riveting true story, Kate Summerscale mines the archives to uncover the lives of Christie’s victims, the tabloid frenzy that their deaths inspired, and the truth about what happened inside the house. What she finds sheds fascinating light on the origins of our fixation with true crime—and suggests a new solution to one of the most notorious cases of the century.
By: Kate Summerscale
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Scotland Yard
- A History of the London Police Force’s Most Infamous Murder Case
- By: Simon Read
- Narrated by: Harry Myers
- Length: 14 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The idea of Scotland Yard is steeped in atmospheric stories of foggy London streets, murder by lamplight, and fiendish killers pursued by gentleman detectives. From its establishment in 1829 through the eve of World War II, Scotland Yard—the world’s first modern, professional, and centrally organized police force—set new standards for policing and investigating. Based on official case files, contemporary newspaper reporting, trial transcripts, and the first-hand accounts of the detectives on the beat, Scotland Yard tells the tales of some of history’s most notorious murders.
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Super gory, amazingly well researched
- By Jane on 10-05-24
By: Simon Read
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Blood in the Water
- The Untold Story of a Family Tragedy
- By: Casey Sherman
- Length: 11 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
When Nathan Carman, a young man with a complicated past, is miraculously rescued from a lifeboat bobbing in the unforgiving North Atlantic, questions swirl about the fate of his mother, who is presumed to have drowned when their fishing boat sank. Nathan is in remarkably good shape for being lost at sea for a week, and his account of what exactly happened out there on the waves raises questions from family members and law enforcement.
By: Casey Sherman
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Unmasked
- My Life Solving America's Cold Cases
- By: Paul Holes, Robin Gaby Fisher
- Narrated by: Paul Holes
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
I order another bourbon, neat. This is the drink that will flip the switch. I don’t even know how I got here, to this place, to this point. Something is happening to me lately. I’m drinking too much. My sheets are soaking wet when I wake up from nightmares of decaying corpses. I order another drink and swig it, trying to forget about the latest case I can’t shake. Crime solving for me is more complex than the challenge of the hunt, or the process of piecing together a scientific puzzle. The thought of good people suffering drives me to the point of obsession.
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I gave it the old college try
- By Hobbes on 05-06-22
By: Paul Holes, and others
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Karen
- A Brother Remembers
- By: Kelsey Grammer
- Length: 7 hrs
- Unabridged
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Karen by Kelsey Grammer delves into the deeply personal and tragic story of the author's sister, Karen, who was brutally murdered at the age of 18. Kelsey was just 20 years old and studying theater at Juilliard in New York when his younger sister, a recent high school graduate, moved to Colorado Springs, where she was kidnapped by several men who had intended to rob the Red Lobster where she worked. They instead kidnapped Karen, raped her repeatedly, and ultimately stabbed her to death.
By: Kelsey Grammer
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The Witch of New York
- The Trials of Polly Bodine and the Cursed Birth of Tabloid Justice
- By: Alex Hortis
- Narrated by: Erin Bennett
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
The Witch of New York is the first narrative history about the dueling trial lawyers, ruthless newsmen, and shameless hucksters who turned the Polly Bodine case into America’s formative tabloid trial. An origin story of how America became addicted to sensationalized reporting of criminal trials, The Witch of New York vividly reconstructs an epic mystery from Old New York—and uses the Bodine case to challenge our system of tabloid justice of today.
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it was good
- By Dyline on 07-20-24
By: Alex Hortis