The Alabama Murders

0:06Pushkin.

0:10Maybe you remember it. August 2003. Everything went dark. A couple of trees on the East Lake transmission line outside of Cleveland grew a little bit too tall, and the electrical line at that precise point, perhaps because of the summer heat, sagged a little bit more than usual, and touch the trees. Contact caused a short. The short caused the power that used to run along that line to be rerouted along another line, which overloaded that line, causing an even bigger electrical surge to be rerouted to another line, and on and on, leading to a series of failures that rippled across the entire northeastern grid, leaving 50 million people without electricity.

0:57The great northeastern blackout is what's called a failure cascade. One small mishap leads to a second bigger problem and a third even bigger problem, and finally, at the end of the chain, catastrophe.

1:20I want to tell you a story about a moral failure cascade. It began with what looked like a robbery gone wrong. A woman murdered in her home in an area of northwestern Alabama known as the Shoals. But that crime would soon attract a crowd, a host of others who would get caught up in the Cascade as it picked up momentum. Onlookers, participants, people trying to stop the unfolding catastrophe. For 30 years, people wittingly or unwittingly feeding it until it consumed them too.

2:05Was he a good preacher? Charismatic. Yes, I would say so. Very charismatic. There was this joke that said that it was easier to get forgiveness in the Church of Christ for murdering somebody than it was to be divorced. I think he just got home from work, and he called me, and he said, Well, Mom, can you come? He said, The police are here. There's no sense in even having a jury if you're going to be able to overturn the jury, if a judge can overturn the jury. He said, But I was involved, and that's a horrible thing I was involved in. I've been in prison 24, 25 years, and that's probably not long enough.

2:50I didn't kill them. They get burned from the inside, and then blood just pours into the lungs. And I'm sorry as I'm saying this, it's awful. And this is how lethal injection actually kills you. Here's what I don't understand. Nobody noticed this till you? Apparently not. 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 would have this little practice. To the right, I'm sorry. To the left, I love you.

3:31From Revisionist History, this is The Alabama Murders, a special seven-episode series in which we investigate why this case went on for as long as it did, why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way, and maybe the most important question, why have we created a system that in trying to respond to suffering, all too often makes suffering worse. The amount of damage this man did is incalculable. It's still damaging all of us. It still hurts us to think about it.

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