Victim-Blaming and a Good Old Rhode Island Christmas Murder

Sunday, December 19, 2021

Edward Renehan

 

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On his 34th birthday – July 4th, 1838 – Nathaniel Hawthorne attended an Independence Day Festival on the Common in his natal place of Salem, Massachusetts. As Hawthorne recalled, the many amusements and attractions included a “show of wax-figures, consisting almost wholly of murderers and their victims.” Among these were the figures of “E. K. Avery and Cornell, – the former a figure in black, leaning on the back of a chair, in the attitude of a clergyman about to pray; an ugly devil, said to be a good likeness.”

Nearly six years earlier, four days before Christmas of 1832, Tiverton, RI farmer John Durfee had made a startling discovery: the frozen corpse of a woman hanging by her neck from a pole supporting a stack of drying hay. The woman, wrapped in a black cape, turned about to be a factory worker from Fall River, Massachusetts: 30-year-old Sarah Maria Cornell.

Investigating what they at first reckoned to be a suicide, constables shortly found an incriminating note in Sarah’s room at a Fall River boarding house. “If I should be missing, enquire of the Rev. Mr. Avery of Bristol [Rhode Island].” They also uncovered correspondence highly suggestive of a sexual relationship between Cornell and Avery, a Methodist minister whose full name was Ephraim Kingsbury Avery. Subsequently, a Fall River physician came forward to say Cornell had been four-months pregnant at the time of her death and had named Avery as the father. A coroner’s jury in Tiverton held to the initial view that Cornell’s death was a suicide but added that she had been influenced to commit the act “by the wicked conduct of a married man.”

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Briefly, the “married man” remained unnamed publicly. However, a second coroner’s jury – this one convened in Bristol after a grisly exhumation from a shallow grave in Durfee’s field, and a formal autopsy – came to a different conclusion. The autopsy not only confirmed Cornell’s pregnancy but also revealed severe bruising to her torso. The second jury unanimously discounted the suicide theory. The jury in turn named Avery as “the principal or accessory” in Cornell’s murder. The well-respected Avery was quickly arrested by the Bristol marshal, but just as promptly released on his own recognizance in time to conduct Christmas services. Meanwhile, some Samaritans re-interred Cornell at a potter’s field in Fall River. The burial happened on Christmas Eve.

In earlier years, during stints working at mills and factories throughout southeastern New England, Cornell had developed a reputation as being mentally unstable, promiscuous, prone to thievery, and in general a person of weak moral character. During the mid-1820s, however, she’d resolved to change her ways and became an active Methodist. It was while working at a Lowell, MA mill in 1828 that she first encountered Reverend Avery, at that time ministering to a Lowell congregation before his removal to Bristol. The two met up again during August of 1832 at a Methodist Camp Meeting in Thompson, CT, where Cornell’s baby was conceived.

In a Newport, RI courtroom during May and early June of 1833, Avery mounted a strong defense headed by a pricey attorney, former New Hampshire Attorney General and United States Senator Jeremiah Mason, who was also a law partner of Daniel Webster. (Mason’s fees were paid through a fund raised by prominent New England Methodist leaders, who were just as intent on defending the reputation of their Church as they were in defending Avery.)

In one of the earliest cases of female “victim-blaming,” Mason made much of Cornell’s past “sins” against both propriety and society, painting her as a provocateur and temptress who’d led a disreputable life overall: a life always destined for some sort of sad and desperate ending. It was also a life, Mason noted, that did not compare well with the righteous record of the devout Reverend Avery. Never mind that Cornell’s body had been heavily bruised; never mind that she herself had named the married Avery as her seducer; never mind that at both inquests substantive doubt had been expressed as to whether it would have been possible for Cornell to tighten the noose about her own neck in the manner found; never mind that Avery had at one point before the trial fled to New Hampshire in an unsuccessful effort to avoid prosecution – a place from which he was returned in cuffs.

Despite all this, the jury wound up finding Cornell guilty of her life story, and Avery not guilty of murder. But being found not guilty in the eyes of the court was not the equivalent of being found innocent in the eyes of the public. Interest in the trial had been widespread throughout the Northeast. Avery was soon being hanged and burned in effigy at dozens of public rallies. At one point he himself was nearly lynched during a visit to Boston.

Public outrage soon mounted to the point where Avery had to resign his ministry. He eventually removed to Connecticut, then New York, and finally Ohio, never again returning to the pulpit. Instead, he supported himself as a farmer. Occasionally he gave lectures during which he sought to exonerate himself. At one point he even published a small pamphlet with the same ambition. But when he finally died in 1869, he did so in disgrace. One year before that, a fund had been raised in Fall River to disinter Cornell one last time and give her a proper burial with a headstone in that city’s Oak Grove Cemetery, where she remains to this day.

 

Edward J. Renehan Jr. lives in Wickford, RI. His latest book is DELIBERATE EVIL: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, DANIEL WEBSTER, AND THE 1830 MURDER OF A SALEM SLAVE TRADER (Chicago Review Press). Learn more at edwardrenehan.com.

 

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