From Revisionist History: The Alabama Murders

0:00Hey everyone, Sarah here. One of the things we talk about a lot on this show is how our justice system isn't only flawed, but performative. It looks like justice, but when the layers are peeled back to see the cracks. That's why I want to share with you a powerful new series from Revisionist History, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell's podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. The new series, The Alabama Murders, looks at the ethical and emotional layers of a criminal case, providing a thoughtful interrogation of the structures that allow injustice to persist. The series tells the story of Charles Sennett, an Alabama Church of Christ minister who was having an affair with a parishioner, and rather than facing the shame of divorcing his wife, arranged for three men to kill her.

0:49This decision would lead to unexpected consequences, including the disturbed, botched execution of one of the hitmen, Kenny Smith, that would trickle down for decades. Examining the systems we've created, systems that led to moral, legal, and institutional failures, Malcolm asks, why in our efforts to alleviate suffering do we so often make it worse. In the episode you're about to hear, Malcolm speaks with a psychologist who worked with Kenny Smith when he was on death row. Kenny's story would lead Malcolm down to Alabama to learn about the crime that landed him in prison, the church leader that set the crime in motion, and the cascading effect that one action would have for years to come.

1:31I think this series will speak to you, and hope you like this episode. If you want to hear the full story, find Revisionist history, available wherever you get podcasts.

1:48Bushkin.

1:51A little while ago, a friend of mine told me, you have to meet this person I know, Kate Porterfield. She's got the strangest job in America. So I did. We got together, Porterfield and I in a little conference room in Manhattan. I just want to understand how you ended up where you are. So you're kind of viewing as we're just talking, you're thinking about whether there's something here that will, that'll evolve over time that you would imagine being, putting in the podcast. Is that, is that kind of what you're thinking? Yeah. Porterfield is a psychologist. We talked for a few hours, then again and again, one conversation leading to another, until she began to talk about a case that had affected her deeply.

2:39Although she doesn't use the word case. She says, person, a man on death row. When I first went to see Kenny, so now it had been two months since the execution attempt, He wanted to talk for the first probably two hours of our visit about how beautiful his goodbyes were and the love he received from his family as he was going into the execution. That's what he wanted to start with. And I found this so powerful and also fascinating, honestly, as a clinician, because what I first thought was, oh, he's avoiding, right? He can't talk about the execution. He talked to me about love for probably two, two and a half hours.

3:24To the point where I had to say, you know, this is incredible and I'm so happy you're sharing it and I'm not surprised. I also thought I want to know what happened.

3:38What happened was a botched execution. Punishment for a crime that took place over 30 years before. A river of blood that had already claimed the lives of three others. Kate Porterfield told me her version of events. Then I went out and got other people's versions of what happened. And that's where the story I'm about to tell you comes from. I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did. Why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way. And the other question, maybe the more important question, is why have we created a system that in trying to respond to suffering, all too often makes suffering worse?

4:20He made me really pause and think a lot. Watching someone only start from a place of love after something so horrible, I had never seen that before. Welcome to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is a special seven-episode series, The Alabama Murders.

4:45Episode 1, The True Church.

4:57So we're now in, are we in Florence here? Yes. This story takes place in northwestern Alabama, in an area called the Shoals. The so-called Alabama Black Belt, the broad, flat swath of fertile farmland where the old antebellum cotton plantations were established, is several hours' drive to the south. This is Rolling Hills, Appalachia, Not the Mississippi Delta. Four towns on either side of the Tennessee River. Sheffield, Tuscumbia, Muscle Shoals, and Florence. Sheffield is working class, struggling. Muscle Shoals is a spiritual home of rhythm and blues. Tuscumbia is famous for being the birthplace of Helen Keller.

5:38Florence is the largest. A graceful town of beautiful pre-war buildings with a Frank Lloyd Wright house downtown. You know, there's no interstate that runs through Florence. There's no major airport. So it's a little bit of a closed society almost. It's really neat. I started going to Alabama after talking to Kay Porterfield. And on one of my first trips, I met a man named Grant Asbel, a preacher, early 40s, big beard, baseball cap, though not on Sunday morning, of course. He was my guide to Florence. You know, there's good music, there's good art, there's good food. But you just don't happen here.

6:15You have to want to come to Florence. This is the place where it all started, with a personal transgression, a matter of the heart, by another preacher, a man named Charles Sennett. I was only seven years old when it happened. But I remember it being really disconcerting because if you're in this group, and this area in particular, I mean, you've been to Florence. 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. It was talked about kind of in hushed tones. I was talking to our local, he goes to church with us here.

6:59He's actually the historian for the city of Florence. And he was telling me that one of the preachers in one of the churches in town, while that was going on, got up in the pulpit and said, Charles Sennett is a faithful Christian brother. The things that are being said about him are lies. With the idea, right, he is a faithful Church of Christ member and almost incapable of this kind of thing.

7:44In Alabama, the Shoals is the spiritual center of the Protestant denomination known as the Church of Christ. There are many, many Church of Christ congregations within an hour's drive of Florence, and I don't think that any of the things we're going to explore over the course of this series will make sense unless you first understand something about this denomination. If I blindfolded you and put you in an early 1980s Church of Christ congregation, how long would it take you before you knew you were in Church of Christ? I would know in about three minutes or less. This is Lee Camp, who has taught theology for years at Lipscomb University in Nashville, one of the most prestigious of the many universities around the United States affiliated with the Church of Christ.

8:29What would be the tip-off? Well, the singing would be a cappella is the first thing. And so the only place you're going to find a cappella singing is probably either going to be Mennonites or Church of Christ, maybe Church of the Brethren. And then there are going to be certain phrases that are going to get said that would just be a tip-off that, you know, this is where you are. Like what? And the prayers are going to say, Lord, guard, guide, and direct us. I don't know. There would just be language like that that I would immediately know. By the way, for those of you who know something about country music, what do Waylon Jennings, Roy Orbison, Loretta Lynn, Glenn Campbell, Dwight Yoakam, Pat Boone, Crystal Gale, I could go on, all have in common?

9:12They all came out of the acapella tradition of the Church of Christ. It's not Sunday morning. I just take you to a church. It's empty. How long does it take you to know that you're in a Church of Christ? There's no one in there. You look around. What do you see that's a tip-off? No organ. There's no organ, and just the whole architecture is very, very simple. There's lack of pretense. There's certainly no art on the walls. There's no Stations of the Cross. There's pews and there's on the one side at the front is going to be a board that shows attendance, contribution numbers. On the other side is going to be a board that has the hymn numbers that you slide in with the numbers.

10:02And in the middle is going to be a simple pulpit. I know about the Church of Christ because my best friend is the screenwriter Charles Randolph, whose father, Dale, was a Church of Christ minister who went to Lipscomb. And once, when I was visiting Lipscomb, the same school where Lee Camp teaches, a little old lady came up to me and said, Are you Dale Randolph's famous son, Chuck's friend? Yes, I am. And while I'm playing this game, I should point out that halfway through my conversation with Grant Asbel, I discovered that he did his doctorate at Lipscomb with Lee Camp. The point is that the Church of Christ is a very small world.

10:43It's a family. Now, you're from Alabama. I am from Alabama. You were born in? Talladega. Talladega. Not Talladega or Talladega. It's Talladega. Talladega. And you grew up in the Church of Christ. I did. When you say that you belong to the Church of Christ, What are you saying about—what does that mean? How's that different from, I'm a Baptist? Well, it depends on who you're talking to and where they are in their experience of Churches of Christ. But when someone says, I'm a member of the Church of Christ, that means that they are members of the true church that restored New Testament Christianity and everybody else's wrong.

11:34And that this is the true church. that's not a denomination, that's not Protestant, it's not Catholic, it's just the true Church. In the taxonomy of Southern Protestantism, there are the Pentecostals, the singing, the swaying, speaking in tongues, emotion. The Church of Christ isn't that. Then there are the fundamentalists, the Southern Baptists, fire and brimstone. The Church of Christ isn't that either. The Baptists and the Pentecostals can sometimes go on all Sunday afternoon. In a Church of Christ, you're out in an hour. These are the people of the book. There are said to be more advanced degrees in the Church of Christ leadership than any of the Southern denominations.

12:16They're a church of rules and certainties, simplicity and clarity. A church inspired by the idea that anyone who studies the Bible, reads it closely and thoughtfully, can discern the path to salvation. That's the good part, the beautiful part. But the other part, and by the way, no one is more willing to acknowledge the limitations of the Church of Christ than people who belong to the Church of Christ, is that the rules, the certainty, the intimacy can become a straitjacket. I love and hate Church of Christ. I love them and I have hated them.

13:03And, you know, I love them because I've spent my life doing what I've done with my life because of what I learned in my church. You know, I was loved by my church. I was loved by the people in that church.

13:22and yet at the same time the traditions in the latter part of the 20th century have done a lot of damage to a lot of people including me there's a sense of fear and there's always the danger that you'll be

13:41kind of cut off and so it was kind of fear of just saying you're not okay. You know, you don't toe the line. And so the church would practice this sort of, on occasion, would practice this sort of disfellowshipping, we called it, where you could literally be socially, you know, estranged, socially disciplined publicly. And then apart from some sort of public statement of repentance, you couldn't be a member of good standing in the church. You cannot divorce your wife unless there is a documented case of adultery. Full stop. Women cannot participate in a church service. Full stop. Singing must be a cappella.

14:26Instruments are a frivolity. You've got, you know, all these taboos around no dancing, because if you dance, you're going to lust, and if you lust, you're going to go to hell. You know, no mixed bathing, we called it, which means you're not swimming around people of opposite sex, because if you do, you're going to lust and you'll go to hell. And one of my favorite stories about kind of illustrating this was that we were on a youth group trip in another town, and we were pulling out of the church to go to lunch break, and the preacher driving the van full of impressionable 14-, 15-year-olds, he looks to the left, and there's this guy jogging down the sidewalk.

15:10in his jogging shorts. And we were not permitted to wear shorts in public because of the lust thing, you know. And this guy's jogging down the sidewalk, and the preacher looks at him and he says, he looks real nice in those jogging shorts. He'll look real nice in hell. This is the world Charles Sennett, the man at the center of our story, belonged to. He was born in West Virginia. His father was a Church of Christ preacher. He got married to Elizabeth Doreen in 1962. She was the picture of a preacher's wife. They had two sons together. And by the time she was in her early 40s, Elizabeth was already a grandmother.

15:47There are still lots of people in the Shoals who remember the sentence. She was a typical, love my grandbabies, let me run home, make chocolate chip cookies and keep them over the weekend. With their family, their parents are going to go out and have a date at night. This is Susan Mosley, a nurse at a local weight loss clinic who became close with Elizabeth. You know, brought them babies with her a lot of times, and I made a little thing in there, and that little exercise, we're in a little cable and chair, we're coloring books, so they can sit there and color like she was living. Charles got a doctorate in divinity in the 1970s, became the preacher at a church of Christ in Jasper, Alabama, a small town two hours south of the Shoals.

16:27He was good. In a few years, he tripled the size of the church. He was handsome, dynamic, a wonderful singing voice, in the best Church of Christ tradition. At some point in his thirties, at the point his career seemed ascendant, things began to go sideways for Charles Sennett. There were rumors of some indiscretion at the Church of Christ in Jasper, an affair. The elders fired him. If you want to trace the precise moment at which things began to unravel, perhaps it was here. Because there was a version of events in which he could have stayed in Jasper for his whole career, built upon his success there.

17:06To be a minister at a successful Church of Christ is a position of real status. There's a kind of free market in that world. When there's a hot young preacher in town, people will leave their churches and join the rising star. Senet was that rising star, but then he lost it all. He was despondent. His family came upon him one night, curled up in a ball on the couch. He'd had a nervous breakdown. He became suicidal. He ended up spending weeks in a psychiatric hospital in Birmingham. This is the summary from the medical records of the psychiatric facility where he was hospitalized. Exam reveals an unkempt, hostile, rebellious white male.

17:49His thought content is preoccupied, his psychomotor agitated, and his affect labile. His mood is depressed, his sensorium confused, and his tension level tense. His insight is lacking, and his judgment is poor. He found another job, then another, moved to the Shoals, and became the preacher at the Westside Church of Christ in Sheffield. Small, working-class congregation, little white church. Not Jasper, a step down. Starting over. A lot of this that I know is hearsay amongst us all. Yeah. You know how it passes from person to person. It gets bigger or gets smaller. Yeah. Take everything I tell you with a grain of salt, because it was all here today.

18:34This is Charlie Bill and her son, Eric. They were members of Charles Sennett's church. And was he a good preacher? Evidently, he must have been... Charismatic. Yes, I would say so. Very charismatic. Yeah, yeah. To the point, my mother called him a ladies' man. Oh, really? Oh, your mother had a... She had a—did she mean that in— Mother had a way of labeling people. Did she mean that in a positive way or in a negative way? If my grandmother said it, it was negative. Yeah. She was very conservative and very—yeah. Yeah, see, that would have been a very negative thing to say about somebody. Maybe I could say it's about as pure Church of Christ as you can get.

19:26There were whispers about a woman in the Westside congregation, Doris. We heard the, you know, connected rumors that she was involved. Her husband was having some serious issues. I don't know. Reading on it, I almost would think she was seeking, I think he was probably her minister. Because I think she went to Westside, wasn't it? Yeah, I think so at the time. That's my understanding. I don't know therefore. I would almost say she was probably seeking some counseling from him. Charles Sennett was in love with a woman who was not his wife. He had a book of poems in his office called Memories of the Heart with Doris' picture in it.

20:11There were rumors. Someone saw a valentine Charles had given Doris. I talked with another former member of the West Side Church, Carl Roden. We sat in his living room. He had a dog on his lap. I'm just curious, was he a good... He was a nice fellow who wouldn't be around. He was what? Nice. Yeah. I mean, you just couldn't hardly beat him. Somebody be sick, he'd be the first one there with some food. Nursing home, he'd be the first one there with something to eat or, you know. Was he a good preacher? Yeah. That's why I said he had a split personality, best I can tell. Yeah. Do you remember, he had been, it came out during the trial that he had been, he had been at a church in Jasper and had been fired from that job because he was the same thing, having an affair with someone in the church.

21:07Well see, they should have told us when they fired him, but then nobody sent him back to him. Yeah. It was all over, you might as well say. Yeah, there was no way of, there was, he just, Do you remember anything about how he came to the church in the first place? I was just a member there, and I don't know. I don't know how they got a hold of him or anything. So he was really popular. Yeah. He was a nice fellow. Like I say, he'd be the first one at somebody's house with food. He was just a nice guy. That's all you make out of him. Nobody would have never thought this. He would have done something like that.

21:49In the winter of 1988, Charles and his wife Elizabeth fought. She wanted a divorce, and they both knew what that meant. He shouted at her, I won't lose another church. He was$150 ,000 in debt from failed business ventures, this on a preacher's salary. His behavior grew erratic. The walls began to close in. He had a secret he could not share, a marriage that was disintegrating, demons he was desperately trying to keep at bay. He still goes to preach every Sunday, but no one knows the full story of his life. No one, that is, except the only person who would have mattered for Charles Sennett, and that was God.

22:44One thing I don't understand is he seems completely ill-suited for the ministry. He seems volatile. He's having an affair with a congregant. His finances are a mess. He's abusive to his wife. I'm just curious, how would someone like that enter and survive in the ministry, particularly in a world where people are as conscious of conduct as the Church of Christ community is? He worked very hard to make sure nobody knew outside that tight circle of biological family. I asked a Church of Christ minister named Rodney Plunkett about the case. He knew Charles Sennett. That's not atypical. Yeah, they mask.

23:33And the amount of effort that must have gone into masking that. Enormous. Malcolm is absolutely enormous. I asked my theologian friend Lee Camp the same question. One of the things I'm trying to understand is we have this man, Church of Christ minister, Charles Sennett, in a little town in northwestern Alabama who is having an affair and his wife has decided to divorce him. And, you know, I'm wondering, were he a Mennonite or were he a Muslim or whatever? All those traditions would shape his dysfunction in some way. And I'm curious, how does his tradition shape his dysfunction? That's what I'm trying to get at.

24:29What's going on inside his head as he processes the kind of his affair, his wife's decision, and the chaos of his own life? And he's the pastor of this little white clapper church in a corner of Sheffield. Yeah. I mean, who knows, right? But, you know, I would make up that the sense of shame is overwhelming. And when you're in a context of overwhelming shame, it can do terrifying things to the psyche. and in the absence of any sort of constructive grace, and I don't mean by that some flabby sense of, oh, everything's okay, you know, grace, but some sort of constructive sense of grace, you know, it can quickly lead you to all sorts of madness.

25:34Christian grace, God's unmerited favor and loving kindness, a gift freely given to humanity, unearned and undeserved, a spontaneous act of generosity on God's part, extended to all humanity, regardless of their sin. What Camp was saying, and what many others in the Church of Christ came to believe, was that their church, particularly their church in that era, 40, 50 years ago, did not understand grace. Grant Asbel told me about his uncle, the song leader in a Church of Christ congregation, who once talked a little bit too much about grace and forgiveness at Sunday school, and so was let go. The church elders wouldn't even let him finish out his contract, because if you had deciphered the rules of the Bible, the logic of the Christian text, then there shouldn't be any deviation, should there?

26:24It was all crystal clear. And if you started to grant forgiveness for those who strayed from that narrow path, then what incentive did people have to follow the narrow path? That was thinking. And it's where the shame that Lee Camp was talking about came from. Because in the absence of grace, there is no relief from transgression. People like Asbel and Lee Camp have been trying to push their church in a more forgiving direction, to bring grace into their religious experience. But in the 1980s, in a small town in Alabama, this is what Asbel said. The idea behind that is this idea that if you want to one day be judged faithful, you have to have kept these rules.