Kasserman, Fall River Outrage

[truepenny]

Fall River Outrage: Life, Murder, and Justice in Early Industrial New England by David Richard Kasserman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


It's sad that there are enough of these books to constitute a sub-genre of historical criminology: man with status murders woman without status, is tried for it, and is acquitted, with more or less legal shenanigans accompanying. The absolute bar-none best of them is The Murder of Helen Jewett by Patricia Cohen, but I have a small collection, and really, about all I can say about Fall River Outrage is that it's a perfectly acceptable, middle-of-the-road member of the genre.

I picked it up mostly because I was amused/intrigued by a book about a murder in Fall River, MA, that wasn't about Lizzie Borden; after a kind of rocky start (Kasserman is not good at the--to be fair--quite difficult job of describing the complicated action of the discovery of a body, particularly with the jurisdictional nightmare that Sarah Maria Cornell's murder turned out to be), this is a very interesting slice of mid-nineteenth-century New England sociology and an okay report of the two trials and acquittal of Ephraim Kingsbury Avery for a murder it's pretty clear he committed. (Kasserman is/was an anthropologist who came to the Cornell murder by way of an interest in the New England cotton industry, so that ordering of priorities is not wrong.)

Like all of these books, therefore, it's in some ways a frustrating read. I've never read one of them where I actually had any reasonable doubt about the guilt of the murderer, so watching the son of a bitch get off is maddening. For this book, that's balanced by the panorama it provides of the Methodist Church in New England in 1832--and really, if I'm going to recommend Fall River Outrage, that's what I'm recommending it for.



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Comments

[bghost.livejournal.com]

Okay, so The Murder of Helen Jewett is now on my 'to read list' for the month. And you're right, it's outrageous that there is in fact a sub genre of these fics. (I have one which probably doesn't count, because the man concerned did go to prison, and it wasn't clear exactly whether he was guilty or not. I'm thinking on balance, probably yes - the title gives it away: Murder Most Likely.)

[pnh.livejournal.com]

This is a tad startling, because as it happens I'm also currently reading a book about the death of a New England woman named Cornell and the murder trial that ensued: Elaine Forman Crane's Killed Strangely: The Death of Rebecca Cornell. An affluent widow in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, she was found burned to death in her bedroom in 1673. Based on dreams reported by one John Briggs, who may have been her brother, her son Thomas Cornell, Jr. was charged with her murder, convicted, and hanged. Rebecca Cornell and her son Thomas were both ancestors of Ezra Cornell, whose bequest founded Cornell University. Through his posthumously-born daughter Innocent Cornell (so named by his widow), Thomas Cornell Jr. was also an ancestor of...wait for it...Lizzie Borden.

My spouse is a descendant of dream-testifying John Briggs, who may have been a brother of the burned-to-death Rebecca Cornell--and of John Briggs's wife Sarah Cornell, who was almost certainly a sister of Rebecca Cornell's husband, the senior Thomas Cornell. Paging ahead in Crane's book I see that the 1832 murder of Sarah Maria Cornell is discussed for several pages further on, with circumstantial (although only circumstantial) evidence presented that Sarah Maria, too, was a descendant of Rebecca Cornell and her son Thomas.

Killed Strangely published in 2002 by, of course, Cornell University Press. I really think the only possible conclusion is that time-travellers from the far future have been interfering with history for their own inscrutable aesthetic amusement.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I cannot fault your conclusion.