Secrets and Sins at Fall River
by M.P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
Most historical accounts favor the notorious 1892 axe murders of Fall River, Massachusetts, attributing the grim deeds to Lizzie Borden. Yet, an equally heinous crime choked the region sixty years prior.
The Discovery at Tiverton
On a bitter morning in 1832, laborers discovered the body of thirty-year-old Sarah Maria Cornell suspended from a stake-pole on the Tiverton, Rhode Island farm of Captain Durfee, just south of Fall River village.
The initial consensus pointed to suicide. Rumors suggested the shame of an unwed pregnancy drove Sarah to self-destruction. The town quickly buried her, but she did not remain at rest for long.
Sarah had last appeared alive at 6:00 p.m. the previous evening, walking away from her station at the Fall River Manufactory. During those dark hours, a passing teamster heard muffled groans rising from the Durfee pastures; assuming a dying animal caused the distress, he continued along his path without investigating.
Whispers soon rippled through the congregation. Gossip implicated a prominent Methodist minister, the Reverend Ephraim Avery, suggesting he either drove Sarah to despair or strangled her to protect his reputation from a ruinous scandal.
Authorities exhumed the body, revealing unmistakable marks of violence:
The Knot: A slender cord encircled her neck, bound in an intricate knot that cut deeply into her flesh—a configuration impossible to achieve by one’s own hand.
The Facial Bruising: Severe bruising marred her cheek, indicating the killer had pressed a knee or foot into her face to secure leverage while tightening the cord.
The Trail: Stripped skin on her legs proved someone had dragged her corpse across the frozen earth before suspending it from the hay-pole.
A Drifting Life
Sarah descended from a comfortable ancestry, though discord fractured her childhood home. Her mother, Lucretia Leffingwell, belonged to a genteel family in Woodstock, Connecticut. In 1796, against her family’s explicit warnings, Lucretia eloped with James Cornell, a paper-cutter in her father’s employ. She realized too late that she had wed a fortune hunter.
Over the next six years, the union produced three children: James, Lucretia, and Sarah. At her husband’s prompting, Lucretia repeatedly begged her father for funds until he severed all financial ties. Promptly thereafter, Cornell abandoned his family on the Leffingwell doorstep and fled toward the Ohio frontier, never to be heard from again.
The Leffingwell family never forgave Lucretia’s rebellion. Relatives took in the older children; James became a merchant, and Lucretia married a tailor named Grindal Rawson. Only the infant, Sarah, remained with her mother until age eleven, when she relocated to live with her Aunt Joanna.
By the 1820s, Sarah worked as a seamstress but soon discovered higher wages as a weaver in the textile mills multiplying across New England. Lacking a husband and increasingly desperate, she turned to petty theft, destroying her social standing. She drifted from town to town, seeking solace in brief trysts with various men. She adopted aliases to outrun her past, yet indiscretion followed her. In an era when a solitary woman walking with a man invited ruin, the Methodist Church expelled Sarah for “bad character.” She spent her remaining years desperately seeking reinstatement.
Recognizing the permanence of her stigma, Sarah attempted to reconcile with her mother and sister. She frequented the emotional tent revivals of the Congregational and Episcopal Methodist churches, seeking redemption.
In 1828, she arrived in the industrial hub of Lowell, Massachusetts. She carried a coveted certificate of Methodist membership—a document that dictated whether a displaced woman starved or found shelter in a factory boarding house. Yet, familiar whispers hounded her.
The Shadow of the Minister
Ephraim Kingsbury Avery was born in 1799 to Amos and Abigail Avery. He eventually married Sophia Wells, fathering six children. Shunning his father’s agricultural lifestyle, Avery briefly sampled medical training, worked in a general store, and taught school before finding his calling as a minister. The Methodist Church required no formal theological degree, valuing raw preaching charisma and strict adherence to discipline above all else. Avery possessed a handsome visage that easily swayed female converts.
In 1830, Sarah sought employment as a domestic servant and applied at the home of Reverend Avery. By then, Avery already commanded a controversial reputation among his flock, notorious for monitoring his parishioners’ moral failings. The church hierarchy granted him the sole authority to issue or withhold the membership certificates necessary for employment.
During the subsequent legal proceedings, Avery denied ever hiring Sarah. However, a witness testified that Avery’s wife dismissed the girl after a single week, disliking the undue attention her husband paid to the servant.
Sarah returned to the clattering looms but continued to solicit a letter of recommendation from Avery. The minister, simultaneously attracted to and repelled by Sarah, demanded a written confession of her sins in exchange for the reference. She complied. Once he possessed her written transgressions, however, Avery used the document to initiate a church trial against her. A sudden outbreak of a sexually transmitted disease forced Sarah to flee the town, armed only with Avery’s certificate. Avery ensured that any inquiring clergyman received a detailed account of Sarah’s past.
Sarah eventually sought refuge with her sister in Woodstock, working as a seamstress for her brother-in-law. She lived in constant terror of the confession letters Avery held over her. She wrote to him repeatedly at his new station in Bristol, Rhode Island.
In August 1832, during a Methodist camp meeting in Thompson, Connecticut, Avery tried frantically to expel Sarah from the grounds. According to Sarah’s private accounts, he later met her in the surrounding woods, where she traded her compliance for the return of her letters.
The pregnancy that followed matched the timeline of that woodland encounter.
The dynamics of the relationship shifted instantly. Sarah held his unborn child, while Avery possessed only the fragile prestige of his pulpit. A legal advisor suggested Sarah relocate to Fall River—within striking distance of Bristol—to negotiate child support. She secured a position at the Fall River Manufactory. When she begged Avery not to denounce her as a harlot, he coldly replied that he had done nothing and that she had brought about her own destruction.
On October 20, 1832, Avery mysteriously vanished from a religious gathering for an hour. Sarah later revealed that he met her to arrange an interview with a local physician, Dr. Thomas Wilbur.
When Dr. Wilbur examined Sarah and questioned the child’s paternity, she dropped a chilling detail: Avery had instructed her to ingest thirty drops of oil of tansy to induce an abortion. Such a potent dose likely would have killed her.
The Trial of the Century
Dr. Wilbur intervened, ensuring the pregnancy continued. For two months, Sarah and her anonymous tormentor exchanged clandestine letters. Following her death, investigators discovered unsigned missives matching Avery’s suspected handwriting. One note arranged a final meeting for December 20, 1832, in Fall River, utilizing the initials “B.H.” to denote Betsey Hill, Avery’s niece.
On that fatal afternoon, Sarah left the mill, ate supper at her boarding house, and pinned a note to her wall: If I should be missing, enquire of the Rev. Mr. Avery of Bristol, he will know where I am. Dec 20th S M Cornell.”
John Durfee went to the boarding house where she lived and found other incriminating evidence against Rev. Avery.
The discovery of her correspondence bandbox shattered the initial verdict of suicide. The unsigned letters instructed Sarah never to address mail directly to Avery’s name, directing her instead to use Betsey Hill, the young relative living under his roof. This arrangement allowed Avery to intercept the mail before anyone else saw it.
Sarah’s final note, combined with Dr. Wilbur’s testimony, pointed directly to the minister. A second inquest returned a devastating charge: Willful murder against Reverend Ephraim K. Avery.
The arrest polarized New England. Investigators interrogated witnesses, including the engineer of the steamboat King Philip, who admitted to hand-delivering a private letter from Avery directly to Sarah. Meanwhile, fellow Methodist ministers who once defended Sarah’s virtue quickly distanced themselves from her memory. Unclaimed by family or church, the Fall River Congregationalist Church buried her in a pauper’s grave on Durfee’s farm.
Anti-Methodist sentiment boiled over in Fall River. The Congregationalist majority viewed the hierarchical Methodist Episcopal Church with deep suspicion, equating its secrecy with Freemasonry. Avery’s trial commenced in May 1833. The Methodist Church spared no expense, hiring six elite attorneys to defend their minister. The courtroom became a theater of competing testimonies, featuring sixty-eight witnesses for the prosecution and one hundred twenty-eight for the defense.
Avery’s defense team systematically dismantled Sarah’s character, labeling her “utterly abandoned, unprincipled, profligate.” They brought forth witnesses to highlight her past bouts with gonorrhea, her alleged mental instability, and previous threats of suicide. Conversely, the prosecution portrayed the Methodist Church as a dangerous monolith willing to conceal a homicide to protect its institutional reputation.
After sixteen hours of deliberation, the initial jury acquitted Avery.
The Court of Public Opinion
Though cleared by the law, Avery found no safety in the streets. Outraged citizens hanged and burned effigies of the minister, nearly lynching him during a visit to Boston. When investigators discovered an additional letter from Sarah detailing the relationship, a Bristol County deputy sheriff pursued Avery to a hiding place in New Hampshire, dragging him back to face the hostile jurisdiction of Tiverton.
The Methodist Conference again financed a premium defense team. A second exhumation of Sarah’s body revealed evidence of a botched abortion and physical abuse. By the time the final trial opened, the state countered with formidable prosecutors, including Congressman D.J. Pearce, who vacated his seat in Washington to try the case. The trial consumed twenty-one days and heard from two hundred thirty-eight witnesses. The indictment declared that Avery had been “moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil.”
A female witness who helped wash Sarah’s body testified that the victim had been “dreadfully abused.” However, when Dr. Wilbur took the stand to recount Sarah’s deathbed confessions, the defense successfully blocked the testimony as inadmissible hearsay. A defense physician—who happened to be Avery’s personal doctor—countered that Sarah suffered from clinical insanity, while another medical expert claimed the pregnancy was too advanced to match the Thompson meeting.
In his closing argument, an attorney for the defense delivered a blistering summation: “Suicide may almost be called the natural death of the prostitute… If you were to seek some of the vilest monsters in wickedness and depravity, you would find them in the female form.”
The defense maintained that a righteous man of God had fallen victim to a calculated frame-up by a dying woman. The jury again returned a verdict of not guilty. A subsequent internal trial by the Methodist Conference predictably cleared Avery of all ecclesiastical offenses.
Though twice acquitted by the courts, Avery remained eternally condemned by the public. A popular play titled The Factory Girl, or The Fall River Murder, filled theaters across the northeast, fueling rage against both the minister and his denomination.
In 1834, Avery and the Methodist Church published a collaborative pamphlet titled Vindication of the Result of the Trial of Reverend Ephraim K. Avery. Shelved by the Conference in 1833, Avery officially resigned his orders in 1835. He fled to New York to cultivate a quiet life as a farmer. By 1851, he relocated to Pittsfield, Ohio, accompanied by his wife, children, and sister Nabby, where his medical background earned him a position as a local coroner.
Ephraim Avery died in 1869, and Sophia died in 1876. They rest today in the South Cemetery of Pittsfield, Ohio, beneath headstones fading into the grass. Meanwhile, the old Durfee farm where Sarah Cornell met her end has vanished, replaced by the public lawns of Kennedy Park.
After the trial, Captain Durfee reinterred Sarah in Fall River’s Oak Grove Cemetery. He worried she would become a victim of grave robbers due to the notoriety surrounding the scandal. Her headstone is not far from that of Lizzie Borden, a fourth cousin twice removed, and doesn’t attract much attention.
The case inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.
He killed the mother—then the child
What a wicked man was he!
The Devil helped him all the while:
How wicked he must be.
Hang him, hang him on a tree
Tie around him Avery’s knot
Forever let him hanged be
And never be forgot
Source – Fall River Outrage: Life, Murder, and Justice in Early Industrial New England (1986)