Skip to main content

Kate Winkler Dawson

Biography

Kate Winkler Dawson

Kate Winkler Dawson is a seasoned documentary producer and crime historian whose work has appeared in The New York Times, WCBS News and ABC News Radio, "PBS NewsHour" and "Nightline." She is the creator of two hit podcasts: "Tenfold More Wicked" and "Wicked Words." She is the author of ALL THAT IS WICKED: A Gilded-Age Story of Murder and the Race to Decode the Criminal Mind, AMERICAN SHERLOCK: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI, and DEATH IN THE AIR: The True Story of a Serial Killer, the Great London Smog, and the Strangling of a City. She is a professor of journalism at The University of Texas at Austin.

Kate Winkler Dawson

Books by Kate Winkler Dawson

by Kate Winkler Dawson - History, Nonfiction, True Crime

On a cold winter day in 1832, Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead in a quiet farmyard in a small New England town. When her troubled past and a secret correspondence with charismatic Methodist minister Reverend Ephraim Avery was uncovered, more questions emerged. Determined to uncover the real story, Victorian writer Catharine Read Arnold Williams threw herself into the investigation as the trial was unfolding and wrote FALL RIVER. In THE SINNERS ALL BOW, acclaimed true-crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson travels back in time to 19th-century small-town America, emboldened to finish the work Williams started nearly two centuries before. Using modern investigative advancements Dawson fills in the gaps of Williams’s research to find the truth and bring justice to an unsettling mystery that speaks to our past as well as our present.

by Kate Winkler Dawson - History, Nonfiction, True Crime

Edward Rulloff was a brilliant yet utterly amoral murderer whose crimes spanned decades and whose victims were chosen out of revenge, out of envy and sometimes out of necessity. From his humble beginnings in upstate New York to the dazzling salons and social life he established in New York City, at every turn Rulloff used his intelligence and regal bearing to evade detection and avoid punishment. He could talk his way out of any crime...until one day, his luck ran out. Kate Winkler Dawson draws on hundreds of source materials and never-before-shared historical documents to present one of the first glimpses into the mind of a serial killer through the scientists whose work would come to influence criminal justice for decades to come.

by Kate Winkler Dawson - Biography, Nonfiction, True Crime

Known as the "American Sherlock Holmes," Edward Oscar Heinrich was one of America's greatest --- and first --- forensic scientists, with an uncanny knack for finding clues, establishing evidence, and deducing answers with a skill that seemed almost supernatural. Heinrich was one of the nation's first expert witnesses, working in a time when the turmoil of Prohibition led to sensationalized crime reporting and only a small, systematic study of evidence. However, with his brilliance, and commanding presence in both the courtroom and at crime scenes, Heinrich spearheaded the invention of a myriad of new forensic tools that police still use today. His work, though not without its serious --- some would say fatal --- flaws, changed the course of American criminal investigation.

by Kate Winkler Dawson - History, Nonfiction, True Crime

London was still recovering from the devastation of World War II when another disaster hit: for five long days in December 1952, a killer smog held the city firmly in its grip and refused to let go. Day became night, mass transit ground to a halt, criminals roamed the streets, and some 12,000 people died from the poisonous air. But in the chaotic aftermath, another killer was stalking the streets, using the fog as a cloak for his crimes. Journalist Kate Winkler Dawson braids these strands together into a true crime thriller about a man who changed the fate of the death penalty in the UK, and an environmental catastrophe with implications that still echo today.