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As the pair stood together, Catharine inquired about John's family. His father, as well as his mother, Patience, would remain inside the house this evening, along with John's wife, Nancy, and their six children. The Durfee family had been in this area since the mid-1600s, beginning with Richard Durfee Sr., a descendant of several passengers on the Mayflower. Eventually, John's father married Patience Borden—a member of the later infamous Borden clan. (That family plays a prominent role in this story too, as you'll read later.) The Durfees and the Bordens, Catharine wrote, were two of the three families who had established Tiverton.

"The land in this vicinity belonged principally to the families of Borden, Bowen, and Durfee," she wrote in her 1833 book, Fall River, about this tragedy, "three families from whom the principal part of the stationary inhabitants sprung." It was a prosperous, fertile area; "so flourishing has business been there, that there is scarce a mechanic, trader, or even labourer, who has been there for any length of time, who has not acquired an estate of his own," Catharine wrote.

The Durfees and the Bordens would remain pillars of the community for generations. But all families are flawed, and some are plagued with characters with a penchant for brutality. The Bordens, who would come to infamy a few generations later when Lizzie Borden was tried and acquitted of the infamous axe murders that killed her father and stepmother, were clearly not immune to violence.

John Durfee, by all accounts, was prosperous, compassionate, and altruistic, a rare intersection of traits in the 1800s. It was important to Catharine and me to establish both Durfee's reputation and his apparent character because he had been a crucial witness—he had sounded the alarm about Sarah Cornell's death.

Catharine Williams was determined to record everything involving this case, including an extensive interview with John Durfee. The farmer described what he had discovered that frigid December morning. Durfee needed coaxing to recall such a traumatizing sight. He might have felt reticent because such horrid details surely would offend his guest's feminine sensibilities, yet he responded to her questions candidly, starting with a trip he'd taken with his horses early that day.

"On the morning of the 21 of December," began Durfee, "I took my team to go from home to the river, and passing through a lot about 60 rods from my house."

He descended the hill, careful to avoid burrow entrances dug by gophers and groundhogs the summer before. As Durfee approached a haystack, less than a quarter mile from his home, he gasped. "When I arrived within ten yards of the haystack, I discovered the body of a female hanging on a stake." Suspended by a cord, swaying slowly in the wind that blew from Mount Hope Bay, was the body of a young woman. Sarah Cornell was dressed in a long black cloak; her shoes were laid neatly on the ground. In the dim light of the sunrise, he could see that her short, dark hair was frozen to her face and covered in frost. John Durfee cried out and three men responded, including his father, Richard. The woman was young, attractive, and dead—but that's all Durfee knew at the time. The farmer told Catharine that he had never seen the woman before. As the sun began to illuminate the yard, Durfee braced himself.

"After taking more notice how she hung, I attempted to take her from the stake by lifting her up and slipping the line," said Durfee. "I found I could not well do it, at arm's length, and my father said, 'cut her down.' One handed me a knife, and I cut her down, and let her down."

Her body slumped; the cord was still wrapped tightly around her neck.

"I then went after the coroner," Durfee said, "and brought him to my house."

As the first person on the scene, Durfee wasn't just a witness—he was also a de facto investigator. He had initiated his own inquiry by collecting valuable evidence, and the picture that he and the investigators painted was a disturbing story, one Catharine was at the farm to hear about firsthand and examine further.

*  *  *

But first: safer subjects. That evening in 1833, Catharine began peppering John Durfee with queries about the property and its history. He replied as she jotted down notes. He resided on his 57-acre family farm on the main road of Tiverton, about a half mile from the Massachusetts border, across the water and less than two miles from the factory village of Fall River. As I noted earlier, that part of Tiverton was renamed Fall River, Massachusetts, about thirty years later.

The town was located on the Quequechan River, the last tributary at the mouth of the Taunton River, which made it a perfect spot to take advantage of the burgeoning industrial revolution that was sweeping across New England and reshaping the economy and landscape. The river was slow moving, even stagnant, except near downtown Fall River, where it flowed quickly down into Mount Hope Bay—the perfect fuel for textile mills and ironworks.