The Trial Of The Rev. Ephriam Kingsbury Avery



Episode 24 takes place 60 years before Lizzie Borden put the town of Fall River, Massachusetts, on the murder map. The body of Sarah Maria Cornell, a 30-year-old mill worker, was found hanging from a haystack pole in the nearby town of Tiverton, just across the Rhode Island border. The first coroner's jury ruled the death a suicide, but a note later found in the woman's boarding house led to the first of two exhumations of the body and the arrest of the Rev. Ephraim Kingsbury Avery for her murder. It is believed to be one of the first trials of a minister for murder in America, and it was a scandalous one.

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