The Alabama Murders - Part 6: The Porterfield Sessions

0:00Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok. vaccines are poison then your yoga teacher says that sex trafficked children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals but it's all okay the great awakening is coming what is happening every week on Conspirituality Podcast we explore the fever dreams that suck friends, family and wellness gurus down the right wing cult spiral in a search for salvation

0:36Bushkin.

0:45Previously on Revisionist History. He was taken out of his cell thinking that his execution was imminent, strapped to a gurney. and he's asking, you know, the corrections officers who are with him, what's going on? You know, an anesthesiologist in good standing is not going to spend their Wednesdays over at the, you know, state corrections sticking IVs in people for execution. It's not something that we do. Because a cold-blooded convicted killer complains about the prodding and poking of a small Ivy line. Really? Potting and poking with a needle? After three and a half or four hours being strapped to a gurney, you know, he was unable to stand, walk, unbutton his shirt, you know, change his clothes, do any of that without assistance.

2:02They attempted to kill him on November 17th. His lawyers called me, I think 10 days later. I didn't know them. They didn't know me. And they said, you know, we have a client who's had this thing happen. He's really struggling. Would you take a look at him? I'm going to talk to him. In the months after his botched execution, Kenny Smith had a confidant. Kate Porterfield, a psychologist who specializes in trauma. She has consulted on dozens of death row cases in her career, spent a lot of time at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, worked for years treating patients at the Clinic for Torture Victims at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan.

2:42A very good friend of mine, Stephen, knows her well, and told me one day, you have to meet my friend Kate. She has the strangest job in America. So I called her up and we began to talk, with no real plan or agenda, and in one of our conversations, she told me about a case that I'd never heard about before and a person she'd been asked to evaluate who had affected her deeply. Kenny Smith. That's how I learned about the murder of Elizabeth Sennett. Everything in this series began with my conversations with Kate Porterfield. So tell me about your first visit with Kenny. So my first contact with him was a call, actually.

3:26It was remarkably pleasant. Kenny was a very resilient man. He was, you know, he had been on death row for 34 years. This was a man used to living on death row and used to being in prison. And one of the things he said to me is, you know, he used to call me Doc. He'd say, Doc, I am very institutionalized. I know how to do this. I've made a life here. I have a very good set of friends here and I have really good relationships on the outside. He had been married. He had children from before he went in and he had relationships with his children. So he said to me, I'm very institutionalized. I've been through a lot, but I'm actually pretty stable.

4:06And he said, but I'm, I'm falling apart right now from what happened. I mean, I think what now, what I think is he was signaling to me, I'm pretty sturdy, but this really messed me up.

4:26Kate Porterfield would end up spending many hours with Kenny Smith over the next year, talking to him on the phone, visiting him at home in prison, trying to understand what happened to him in that execution chamber on the night of November 17th, 2022. trying to figure out how damaged he'd been by the experience, writing an assessment of his condition that could be used by his legal team in court, and, most of all, just trying to understand who he was. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to The Alabama Murders. In this installment, I want to look at Kenny Smith through the eyes of Kate Porterfield, to see the Kenny Smith that she saw in those many encounters between the end of 2022 and the long winter of 2023.

5:17This is Episode 6, The Porterfield Sessions.

5:30In my third conversation with Kate Porterfield, well before we got to Kenny Smith, she told me about a patient she'd seen many years ago. An older man. This is when she was working at the torture clinic at Bellevue. He was a refugee from a war-torn country. He'd been imprisoned, tortured, and at one point he'd been subjected to a mock execution. He'd been made to believe by his captors that he was about to die. So this was probably the first person I ever worked with who had had a mock execution and it is its own unimaginable horror that leaves a really, really bad physical, physiological rather, imprint.

6:12Her goal was to gently push him back towards his traumatic experience to better understand and to help him. He was very rigid, and he would sit just really tightly wound in the sessions, really gripping the chair, and he didn't want to go there. It took a very long time to draw him out. She would go on to work with five or six other patients who had gone through something similar, a gun they thought was loaded, put to their head, only to realize it was empty, being held underwater almost long enough, and even, in one case, being left in a cage with a lion. She came to believe that this kind of experience deserved its own category.

7:00Why is a mock execution uniquely damaging? Yeah. Let me say it this way. When someone says you're about to die, you know, you're terrified. And terror doesn't even capture, right? You know, most people lose control in some part of their body, maybe their bladder or bowel. You know, there's usually incredible exclaiming of horror. You know, it's not good to think you're about to die. I mean, I've seen six people or whatever try to describe it to me, and they all fall apart. It's like I've never had someone say it the first time and not really fall apart, like collapse. And different ways. I had a guy who had been kidnapped, and the soldiers came in and said, if we don't get the ransom, you know, we're going to kill you.

7:43And then they came in the next day and they had a gun and they put it to his head. This man was the most put together, disciplined, you know, kind of controlled guy. And when he tried to tell that moment, he just fell down in his chair and grabbed his head. And he was like, my head's hurting, my head's hurting. I can't, I can't. There's just this incredible physiological, you know, probably hormonal dump into his system of the same thing that happened, you know, when the mock execution. took place. So essentially what trauma does is it becomes imprinted in your body and your memory banks are then linked and hooked up with the fear reaction.

8:25So that's the problem. It's a bad linkage. And so when you think about being told, I'm about to kill you, and then you try to tell it, your body just goes. It goes right into that state of terror. This is the first thing that Kate Porterfield saw when she sat down with Kenny Smith, that he was in that special category. But his experience, in some ways, was even more overwhelming. This was not a mock execution. It was a botched execution. Meaning, it wasn't a trick. They were actually intending to execute Kenny. They just didn't manage to pull it off. And Kate wasn't treating someone years after it had occurred.

9:05With Kenny Smith, this had just happened. This was different. You know, this was this very orchestrated, slow, systematic process being done by these guys all in this room who he knew. Guys who had been his guards for like some of them. Some of them he knew, some he didn't. But, you know, guys he's known for a lot of years. Trying to kill him. Very hard to wrap your brain around. How did the guards react?

9:36you know, I think that he believed they got very rattled and he watched it on their faces, but no one could do anything. And it's a scary narrative then of what people will do with orders, right? Like, I mean, there was a point after all these poking of him with needles going around his feet, his arms, where they took the gurney and inverted it upwards with his feet up and left him there for, I have to look, but I think it was upwards of 20 minutes, 30 minutes. They came back in. Trying to get blood to float. Yes. So then they started poking on his collarbone. So they took this man, they tipped him upside down so that the blood would rush to a part of his body.

10:12They came back in, they injected him with something which he believes and we believe was probably a painkiller. And then they started going on his neck, you know, around his collarbone. I mean, I'm sorry, but I don't imagine that a person who's doing that and witnessing it can walk away from that unscathed themselves.

10:35Kenny wanted to apologize to the Senate family and say goodbye to his own family, but he was all alone with the execution team. He thought they were killing him before the witnesses could get there. And he said one of the ways he stayed calm when there was all that dead time was he would say to himself, turn to the right to the victim's family and apologize, turn to the left, tell my family I love them. So he had this little practice, to the right, I'm sorry, to the left, I love you. And he said that kind of helped him pass the time, which also was like remarkable to me. He was thinking, thinking about how you're managing, like how you're going to choreograph this.

11:19They come back in, they begin to untie the tourniquet on his arm and they say it's over now. And then one of the people on the team who he didn't know says to him, it's over and I'll be praying for you. So these kinds of moments for Kenny were just, what's the word? Unmanageable afterwards. They were unmanageable moments with other humans. One minute they were trying to kill him, then they weren't trying to kill him. It's very confusing. And then the man, you know, references God. Kenny's, you know, most core faith, right, is his belief in God and his belief that because of his faith, you know, he had really been saved.

12:15I'm not talking about saved in the execution. I'm saying saved as a man. You know, his faith saved him. so this collision of people trying to kill you your body being in something that we don't really understand unless you've had unless you thought you're gonna die and then someone bringing god in and saying this sort of generous thing i'm gonna pray for you it was it like the word unmanageable is what i keep coming up with he he couldn't grasp it and he couldn't he couldn't deal with it after i mean there were many things that made him distressed but that was one And, you know, the warden taking his head and saying, this is what's best for you, was another.

12:58Kate Porterfield would end up having 17 marathon phone sessions with Kenny Smith, and she would twice fly down to Alabama to meet with him in person. And after he had told her the story of what happened on November 17th, he told her the story of his life in the years leading up to the murder of Elizabeth Sennett. That's after the break.

13:47satanic liberals, but it's all okay. The Great Awakening is coming. What is happening? Every week on Conspirituality Podcast, we explore the fever dreams that suck friends, family, and wellness gurus down the right-wing cult spiral in a search for salvation.

14:11Kenny Smith's full name was Kenneth Eugene Smith. Both Kenny and his brother Joey were name for their father, a truck driver named Wesley Eugene Smith. Did you ever regret naming the matter? I did.

14:28Linda Smith, Kenny Smith's mom, still lives in the Shoals. She spoke with Lee Hedgespeth, a local reporter who knew Kenny well, and covered his case. Has he passed now, Gene? Oh, yes. Yeah, he, I think he was 45 when he passed. Linda and Gene had five children together in quick succession. Kenny was the eldest. He didn't really want a child at that point. Why do you think that was? I just, I don't know. I guess he wasn't through with his wild oats, I guess. So tell me about the wild oats. Not too much of a drinker, more of like pills. Back then, it was kind of uppers and downers. Gene was on the road a lot.

15:19He had another relationship. Linda says it was with an underage girl. Gene got her pregnant. But he still came around to see Linda, to sleep with her, or just to hit her. Oh, yeah. He always did that, just about. When did it start? I mean, not when we first started dating. It started, I guess it started after Kenny was born. You know, what I think is he was doing stuff and he was thinking I was, you know. Right. He was jealous. Yeah. But I wasn't, you know. I had a kid to raise. I mean, he would just hit me in the head. And I've still got a scar right there where he threw a bottle at me. and right here it may have been gone now, but it would just, you know, hit me, knock me on the floor, slap me.

16:19We'll see. Like I said, he thought that I was, you know, out doing stuff and partying. And like I said, which I wasn't. And can you recall, like, for example, the incident with the bottle? Can you tell me what happened then? Do you remember? Yeah. I mean, I didn't know he was coming in that night, which it didn't matter. But I was at home, you know, and a friend of mine from work was just there with me. And Kenny was there. And he just came in, and he was just in a rage that night. Do you remember what Kenny's reaction would be when that's happening? How old is Kenny around this time? Around that time, he's probably three or four.

17:06I mean, it was run, get up on the couch and sit. Him and Joey and just, you know. Do you remember anything that Kenny ever said to you, either when the abuse was happening or afterward? Yeah, I mean, he would. I mean, you know, hug me and, you know, I guess, you know, I guess they'd just tell me, you know, everything would be okay.

17:42Kenny would draw pictures and give them to his mom. At Kenny's sentencing hearing, a series of witnesses testified about Gene's abuse. One was a woman who worked as a waitress with Linda. Gene would come into the restaurant when Linda was working. This is what she said. Well, he would take what money Linda had made in tips, and if she did not make what he thought he needed, she would get slapped and beat around right in the restaurant. He would walk in and he would tell her he needed to talk to her. Well, she would walk off into a private place with him, which was around the corner in the hall, and the next thing you know, you would hear this commotion, and he would be beating her.

18:22He would slap her and he would hit her with his fist. I have seen him back her up in a corner and just beating her, and I have seen her when her pocket would be torn on the uniform where he had taken the money out of it. Question. And how often would he come around? Answer. Well, at least three, two to three times a week that happened. He always made a point to hit her around the eyes.

18:51The fifth of the children Linda and Jean had together was Michael, who died a few hours after birth. His lungs never developed. In testimony, Kenny's brother Joey said, quote, Well, he blamed mother for it and said it was her fault. And pretty soon, you know, she felt bad, even kind of accepted the blame, and started drinking real heavy. Question, does your mom drink now today? Answer, no. Kenny, Joey said in his testimony, was the one taking care of her. He would be in there with a cold rag on her head, cleaning up the vomit out of the floor when she missed the commode and trying to wrestle her up out of the floor to get her in the bed because she was a big woman.

19:35Question. How old do you think Kenny was the first time that you saw him picking your mama up and talking to her and wiping her? How old do you think he was? Answer. Probably eight or nine. Question. Did there ever come a time when you saw your brother turn to drinking? Answer, oh yes. Question, do you remember how old he was? Answer, he was 16. Question, did there ever come a time when you saw your brother start to drink too much? Answer, yes. Kenny met a woman. They had a child together, Michael, named for Kenny's brother who died. They moved to a house in Florence. And one day, a friend of his from a high school asked him if he wanted a little quick money roughing someone up.

20:22And off he and John Parker went, in Parker's Pontiac Grand Prix, with a hunting knife and a fifth of wild turkey on the console between them, to do what he had seen people do a hundred times in his life.

20:50Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok. Vaccines are poison. Then your yoga teacher says that sex-trafficked children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals. But it's all okay. The Great Awakening is coming. What is happening? Every week on Conspirituality Podcast, we explore the fever dreams that suck friends, family, and wellness gurus down the right-wing cult spiral in a search for salvation.

21:24Kate Porterfield and I sometimes digressed into more personal subjects. We talked a lot about our kids and parenting, what she had learned as a mother of three daughters. And there was something she said at one point, that I can't stop thinking about. You know, Katherine Harrison, you know who that is? She's a great writer, yeah. And she wrote this incredible memoir about her life with her father who had disappeared and then got involved with her in an incredibly inappropriate way. And it was a beautiful, very painful memoir, very brave. And she has a line in there, I'm going to get it wrong, but where she says, we think that parenting is about unconditional love.

22:02And what we mean by that is that the parents have unconditional love towards the children. But what you learn as you grow and as you have kids is that actually the unconditional love is coming from the child to the parent. And I will say I see that all the time in my patients who got abused as children, which is they love their parents. They're hungry for their parents. They yearn for the memory of their parent to be the good parts. And it doesn't matter that the parents did terrible things to them. It doesn't matter. No, I mean, it matters to who they've become, but in their sense of self. Oh, I see.

22:34They'll yearn for that parent. Children have an unconditional, my point is children have an unconditional love of the parent. When Kate Porterfield was just out of college, she'd been attacked by a stranger. He took her by surprise and beat her up. She suffered from what she now realizes was PTSD. It took her years to recover. That experience was one of the reasons she developed such an interest in treating trauma. She had no connection to her attacker, though. No reason to return to him. It was possible to understand, ultimately, that this was just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

23:13But what if he wasn't a stranger? What if you loved your attacker? And what if your love was so powerful and instinctual that you couldn't help yourself, that you kept coming back again and again, hoping things might be different. I think that's another kind of suffering that deserves its own category.

23:38I can't tell you how many of the moms of my clients were sexually abused. I can't tell you. It's incredible. You know? And you just go, it's just perpetrating and perpetrating and perpetrating through generations. I'm curious about what it is you said that dealing with these repeated cases of people who had been through this kind of childhood experience taught you a lot. I want to put my finger on what it taught you. I understood child development. I trained in child psychology and I was like, you know, pretty good on it. But when you see it go wrong, you really then understand what it takes for it to go right.

24:13And so watching again and again, men, grown men sitting across from me, covered with tattoos, you know, guys who had killed a couple people maybe, crying, watching these men sobbing when they recounted being eight years old and being, here's one, and I'll frame carefully, but, you know, raped at age eight multiple times by an older family member. and this you know person who had committed homicides no question sobbing talking about it that was so powerful for me in getting me to understand that this guy sitting across from me who is quote unquote scary to everybody in the world and he looks scary right he is a hurt person if you go all the way back he's a hurt little boy and he's now got warrior he's got warrior shit all over himself, right?

25:10He's got armor. He's got tattoos all over his face. He's so badass and he hurts people, right? And it all, if you can kind of back channel it and go back in time, he was a little boy who had happened to him. He was really, really harmed. In this hypothetical, semi-hypothetical case of the guy with the tattoos. Yeah. How often in his life do you think he talked about that childhood abuse to somebody? Oh, never. He had never, never talked about it. More to the point, no one bothered to ask him until she did. And then I went and visited his family and interviewed all these relatives. It was 100 % known.