Acclaimed journalist, podcaster, and crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson tells the chilling true story of a young woman whose scandalous life was rumored to be Nathaniel Hawthorne’s inspiration for The Scarlet Letter—and whose shocking death inspired the first true-crime book published in America.
In The Sinners All Bow, acclaimed true-crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson travels back in time to 19th-century small-town America, emboldened to finish the work Williams started nearly two centuries before. Using modern investigative advancements—such as “forensic knot analysis” to determine the cause of death, the prosecutor’s notes from 1833, and criminal profiling, which was invented 55 years later with Jack the Ripper—Dawson fills in the gaps of Williams’ research to find the truth. Along the way, she also examines how society decides who is the “right kind” of crime victim and how America’s long history of religious evangelism may have clouded the facts both in the 1830s and today. Ultimately, The Sinners All Bow brings 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.
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