The Alabama Murders - Part 2: Coon Dog Cemetery Road

0:00If there was a big red button that would just demolish the internet, I would smash that button with my forehead. From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:57slash plus. Pushkin Plus subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows. Previously on Revisionist History.

1:14Malcolm Gladwell:Was he a good preacher? Evidently, he must have been... Charismatic. Yes, I would say so. Very charismatic. Florence, you don't get here by accident. And so the idea that someone within this framework could do something like Charles Sennett did was very disruptive. He worked very hard to make sure nobody knew outside that tight circle of biological family. When someone says, I'm a member of the Church of Christ, that means that they are members of the true church. that's not a denomination, that's not Protestant, it's not Catholic, it's just the true church.

2:11We're now into the hills. We're now into the Alabama hills of... Um, we're on a long, winding two-lane road following an F-150 pickup truck. Like much of this corner of Alabama, it's really gorgeous countryside. We are way out in, I mean, we haven't passed up a house in quite some time. On one of our trips to the Shoals, my colleague Ben Nadeff-Haffrey and I drove out to find the house where Charles and Elizabeth Sennett lived. We didn't have a precise address, just the name of the road, which turned out to be a long, winding gravel track that runs high along a mountain ridge. Coondog Cemetery Road.

3:04Then arrive at your destination. We're all the best coondogs. Arrived. find their final resting place. Oh, my God, it's an actual... Because we couldn't find the Senate House, we ended up at the cemetery. There were headstones, lots of American flags. There's a little sign with a coon dog on it. Only cemetery of this kind in the world. Troop. First dog laid to rest here, September 4th, 1937. Then we met an older couple who gave us directions. We drove back the way we came and finally found it. Here, this is the driveway. And there's the gate. Okay, there's the... Drain pipe. The drain pipe. I think I see the remains.

3:55So it's just an overgrown gate with some posted signs. The house is gone now. It's a double-wide trailer. It burned down a couple years ago. There's a pond back there. It's, if we hadn't have met that guy, we would have had no idea. Yeah, you would not have identified this as a, I guess there's the only thing is the gate that says private property. It's all overgrown now. If you wanted to hide, let's just say this is a very good place to hide.

4:33Nobody's going to trouble you.

4:41My name is Malcolm Gladwell. This is The Alabama Murders. I talked in the last episode about the notion of the failure cascade, a crisis that does not resolve itself, but rather accelerates in a way that we neither anticipate nor desire. In this episode, we're going to go deep into the crime that took place on the morning of March 18, 1988, that kicked off the cascade and tore the Senate family apart before it accelerated and spread to countless others.

5:12Malcolm Gladwell:35 years. That's how long Elizabeth and its family waited for justice to occur. 35 long years. This is the Attorney General of Alabama, Steve Marshall, at a press conference in 2022. When, by the way, the Senate case still wasn't over. when it still had one final grotesque act to come. To give some perspective, almost half of Alabama's population wasn't even born when this malicious crime was committed. The well-known axiom is true. The justice delayed is justice denied. No. What the Senate case teaches us is that justice delayed is what justice is in the world we have chosen for ourselves. The question is why?

6:08How does a crime turn into a cascade?

6:14Episode 2, Coondog Cemetery Road.

6:23So then, have you seen pictures of this family, of Charles, Sennett, and Liz? So actually, Charles Sennett kind of looked like a 1980s TV evangelist. This is Lacey Kenimer, whose husband was one of the many lawyers drawn into the Senate case. He was handsome, dark-headed, kind of had that Southern, a little bit redneck. But look, she was homely as a mud fence. I mean, and everything that I've read about him. What was that phrase? Homely as a mud fence. I've never heard that. Homely as a mud fence.

7:10Malcolm Gladwell:Yeah. I've never heard of it. I don't even remember of a mud fence. Well, you can imagine. Yes, it's a picture. So what I remember, what I recall about this was the fact that he was having an affair with a parishioner. There weren't 70 people that went to that church. How did they not know that this was going on? And then they lived out on what's called Kung Dog Cemetery Road, which is in rural part of Colbert County. And when I say rural, it's frighteningly rural, which makes me wonder about this guy. I mean, it had to be Kundal Cemetery Road, if you were out on it. He had to live 32 miles from his church building and a long way from his parishioners.

8:19I think the guy was crazy. On March 18th, 1988, just before noon, Charles Sennett returned home from a morning in town. His house was ransacked. The living room was a mess. A coffee table had been turned upside down, its legs broken. Wood fragments were everywhere. A stereo and VCR were missing. And lying on the floor of the den in a pool of blood was his wife, Elizabeth Dorlene Sennett. She'd been stabbed repeatedly. A white and blue afghan covered her face and torso. Sennett called the Culbert County Sheriff's Office. An investigator named Ronnie May answered the phone. Senna was hysterical, and May couldn't understand him at first.

9:06Didn't even know whether he was speaking to a man or a woman. May said, calm down. Then again, calm down. Senna said, I've just come home. My house has been broken into, and my wife has been killed. May said, stay where you are. We'll be right there. May and his officers drove out to Senna's house. It was raining heavily. As he walked in through the carport, Sennett came running towards him, wrapped his arms around him, and said, Ronnie, Ronnie, they've killed her. They've killed her. Ronnie May walked into the den where Elizabeth Sennett's body was lying. He reached for a pulse. Couldn't find one.

9:49Thought she was dead. But when the ambulance arrived, a few minutes later, one of the paramedics found a faint pulse. Chuck and Mike Sennett, their two sons, were 25 and 23 years old at the time. Mom was just a homemaker. Kind, nurturing. We was there every day after school, you know, growing up. You know, we never missed a time with her and Daddy. They later gave an interview to the local news about that day. Chuck got the news before I did. Daddy called me at work. Yeah, Chuck called me at work, said something happened to Mom at the farm. Get out here quick. Elizabeth Sennett was taken by ambulance to Helen Keller Hospital in Sheffield.

10:37In the ER, the medical staff tried frantically to keep her alive. The doctors started cardiac resuscitation, put in an IV, gave her fluid, put in a breathing tube. they took Elizabeth Sennett to the operating room, opened her chest, found no blood in her heart or vascular system. In one last attempt to save her life, they put a clamp across her aorta on the chance that the fluid would fill her heart chamber. We sit there for a while, and then they invite you up to the second floor, which is where they deliver the bad news. Elizabeth Sennett was pronounced dead at 2.05 in the afternoon.

11:23Lacey Kenimer knew one of the nurses who was there at the hospital when Elizabeth was brought in that day. So she's in the ER with the doctor and the Sennett. and the doctor said please go out and tell her husband she is still hanging on she's still with us she said I walked out of that I will never forget as long as I live I walked out of that emergency department I walked out of the emergency room room and went to him and told him and he was astounded he said that cannot be wow It wasn't long before the speculation began. I'm just really curious about when the news broke about what had happened to Elizabeth, or Elizabeth Doreen.

12:21Can you tell me about what that was like? I can tell you every minute of that one. This is Charlie Bill. Who went to Charles Sennett's church? When we stopped by to visit at the church the last time where he was preaching, on the way home to visit our parents. He backhanded his child. I don't know what the child had done. My husband was furious because he said, you just don't do that to a child across its face. You might hit its ear and cause its hearing to be gone. So he was really mad about it. So when we heard the news on the radio one morning at breakfast, Charles Sennett's wife has been murdered.

13:00My husband looked right straight at me and he said, he did it. That's how convinced he was over that slapping. That the viciousness was there, that he could do something like that. I don't know. But that's where we heard it first, was that sitting at the breakfast table. Carl Roden, a member of Senate's congregation, spoke to Senate on the morning of the murder and drove him to the hospital. Picked him up at Highway 72 and 247. He was in the ambulance, and they got out and got in the car with me, and I brought him on to the hospital. The only thing he ever said after, you know, you look back, he said, they shouldn't have done her that way.

13:41Didn't really mean nothing at the time. Her funeral was the following Sunday at the Westside Church of Christ, her husband's church. Roden watched Senna walk out of the service. After the closing prayers and singing and all that, family comes out first. And he has her picture up against his chest with both hands, hugging it. and it was just the most fake thing I believe I ever saw. And I told my wife, I said, that's the most phoniest thing I've ever saw. And he just, it looked put on. Rodan lives in a small white house, right down the street from the old West Side Church of Christ, now empty, but still with the very Church of Christ message on the sign outside.

14:24Time is precious. Are you spending time with the God who made you? As we were talking with Rodan, he told us about a friend. Someone who'd worked the case when it first broke. You say his name is Mickey? Ricky. Ricky. Ricky Miller. Ricky Miller. And he was one of the deputies investigating the case. And he's... He's the one you really need to talk with. And so Roden called Ricky up. When do you say come? Today or tomorrow? I don't know, shit. Right now, if we don't stay. Okay, get it over with. We'll be there in... Now, they're feminine and everything. Get your hair combed. They what? It's going to be a movie.

15:06They get your hair combed. You got a haircut today. They don't move at me. Well, you done got your hair cut. I don't know, but I don't know.

15:14Malcolm Gladwell:I don't know. No, they're just writing a story or something. I don't really know. Yeah. They're pretty good old Joes anyway. They are Yankees. Hey, how many of them is it? It's just two of them with a microphone. Wow. The wing of Matthew is on. Okay. They'll be there in 10 minutes. They'll be there in 10 minutes. Okay, bye. Thank you so much. Thank you all. Appreciate it. Good luck.

15:51If there was a big red button that would just demolish the internet, I would smash that button with my forehead. From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

16:25Carl Roden's friend Ricky Miller lives in a small, immaculate house in a quiet part of Muscle Shoals He's retired after a long career as an investigator in the district attorney's office handsome, quiet recently widowed still had a law enforcement haircut I assisted the sheriff's department in investigating the case and it got interesting you know, the more you got into it the more interesting it got. He was part of the team that went out to the Senate's property after the murder to search the pond. They drained it, found a survival knife, a fireplace poker, and a fireplace brush. There were so many leads and stuff.

17:07We followed and followed. But at the time, the Crimestoppers phone for our county was in my office, and I answered the call, and I got all the information on who done it, who was all involved, and all the particulars. The anonymous caller named three young men, all in their teens and early 20s, Billy Gray Williams, John Forrest Parker, and Kenny Eugene Smith. The caller had details, right down to the location of key pieces of evidence. The caller said they had taken a VCR. And the call I received even told me where the VCR was being used. It was on Kenneth Smith's TV. Said, it's sitting there right now.

17:57He's using it. And I come to find out that was accurate. All three of the young men were arrested. All three confessed. Kenny Smith explained that he'd been approached by Billy Williams a month earlier. He knew Williams from high school. The two of them had talked out on his front porch. Smith said, quote, Billy said he knew someone that wanted somebody hurt. Billy said the person wanted to pay to have it done. Billy said the person would pay$1 ,500 to do the job. I think I told Billy I would think about it and get back with him. Smith then says he agrees to do it and recruits John Parker to help.

18:37Two weeks later, Smith met with the man Williams had been in contact with. He didn't identify himself, and they had no idea who he was. The man said he wanted someone taken care of, a woman. The man said the woman would be at home, that she never had any visitors. The man said that the house was out in the country. They all met again at a coffee shop. The man drew a diagram of the house. It was supposed to look like a burglary that went bad. The man said they could take whatever they wanted. On the morning of the 18th, Parker and Smith met up at 8.30. Parker brought a black-handled survival knife.

19:15The two of them drove out to Coondog Cemetery Road in Parker's Pontiac Grand Prix. Smith told investigators, John and I got to the Senate House around 9.30, I think. I knocked on the door. I told Mrs. Sennett that her husband had told us that we could come down and look around the property to see about hunting on it. John and I looked around the property for a while, then came back into the house. John and I went back to the door. We told Mrs. Sennett we needed to use the bathroom, and she let us inside. I went to the bathroom nearest the kitchen, and then John went to the bathroom. I stood at the edge of the kitchen talking with Mrs.

19:53Sennett. Mrs. Sennett was sitting at a chair in the den. Then I heard John coming through the house. John walked up behind Mrs. Sennett and started hitting her. John was hitting her with his fist. I started getting the VCR while John was beating Mrs. Sennett. John hit Mrs. Sennett with a large cane and anything else he could get his hands on. John went into a frenzy. Mrs. Sennett was yelling, Just stop. We could have anything we wanted. As John was beating up Mrs. Sennett, I messed up some things in the house to make it look like a burglary. The last place I saw Mrs. Sennett, she was lying near the fireplace, covered with some kind of blanket.

20:36I had gone outside to look in the storage buildings when I saw John run out to the pond and throw some things in it. End quote. The next morning, the two of them read the newspapers and learned that the woman they had attacked was dead, and that her name was Elizabeth Sennett.

21:02Did you, at what point in the investigation did you come to suspect that Charles Sennett might be involved? The first thing that caught our attention, the best I can remember, was he made too many alibis. You know, if you go about your casual day, you might run into one, maybe two people. that he had a pattern. Everywhere he went was to make an alibi. And when he went by Carl's house, Carl said, told me he'd never been to his house except that one time. 8 to 8.30, Joel Kendrick. 8.30 to 9, Sam Garrett Jr. 9 o 'clock, Billy Alexander. 9.15, Mrs. Louise Allen sees him leave Westside Church. 9.30 to 10, Carl Roden.

21:5610, Teresa Hall. 10.15, a phone call with Tammy Sue Wright. 11 a.m. with Brenda Spray, Don Woodmont Drive in Tuscumbia. And on and on. He made too many out of it. It was overkill. You know, he stopped to see people they'd have never seen. And that just threw up a red flag to us. Why is he seeing all these people for the first time and happened to be at the time his wife's being murdered, you know? And even on his way home, I don't know if you're familiar where it happened at, out in the county. Have you ever been there? Coomdom Cemetery Road?

22:36Malcolm Gladwell:Yeah. And it's a good way he's out there. People along the way, even, on the highway, 247 going up there, said he had stopped and said he'd never stopped here before. He could tell you every time, everything, every day. Well, had my wife just been murdered in my home, I couldn't tell you nothing. My mind's gone. But he knew everything in detail. That's a red flag. So it's... And then Carl told us that in the car, Carl takes him to the hospital that night. He says, said that, Senate said to him, they beat her up pretty bad or something like that. They shouldn't have done her that way. They shouldn't have done her that way.

23:20How does he know there's two? Yeah. Yeah, when you use the word they. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I understand that when Senate is, he tells a story about how he comes back to the house, he sees his wife's body, and then they say, well, what did you do? And he said, I didn't touch her, even though he was trained in. Surely that was another red flag. His wife was lying mortally wounded a few feet away. He didn't touch her. And this was a man who was trained in CPR. That was a question we all wondered. First thing you're going to do is go to your wife. If it had been my wife laying there, blunding, bloody, and all, first thing I would have done was checked her, grabbed her.

24:10I would have had some kind of evidence on me that I had made contact with. He lives 16 miles out. It's going to take them a while to get there. So what are you doing the whole time? Are you just standing there looking at her? Then you're not going to check her? That's a red flag. You know, there would have been some kind of evidence that you would have checked your wife, and he did not.

24:48If there was a big red button that would just demolish the internet, I would smash that button with my forehead. From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

25:45dark it was inside the wolves. Little Red Riding Hood, however, quickly fetched great stones with which to fill the wolf's belly, and when he awoke, he wanted to run away, but the stones were so heavy that he collapsed at once and fell dead. Then another wolf stalks her, jumps on the roof of her grandmother's house, and Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother foil him by putting a pot of sausage-flavored water in front of their house. Then the smell of the sausages reached the wolf, and he sniffed and peeped down, and at last stretched out his neck so far that he could no longer keep his footing, and began to slip, and slipped down from the roof straight into the great trough, and was drowned.

26:29But little Red Riding Hood went joyously home, and no one ever did anything to harm her again.