Join Dr. Bruce Dorsey, author of Murder in a Mill Town: Sex, Faith, and the Crime That Captivated a Nation as he discusses the first true crime obsession of United States history: the explosive 1832 murder of a woman in Tiverton.
In December 1832 a farmer found the body of a young, pregnant woman hanging near a haystack outside a New England mill town. When news spread that Methodist preacher Ephraim Avery was accused of murdering Sarah Maria Cornell, a factory worker, the case gave the public everything they found irresistible: sexually charged violence, adultery, the hypocrisy of a church leader, secrecy and mystery, and suspicions of insanity. Murder in a Mill Town tells the story of how a local crime quickly turned into a national scandal that became America’s first “trial of the century.”
Dorsey will examine the case, as well as how it helped create an obsession with lurid stories within American culture.
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