Pod Insights Revisionist History The Alabama Murders - Part 2: Coon Dog Cemetery Road About this episode Florence, Alabama. 1988. After a horrifying murder takes place, an anonymous caller names three young men as suspects. But speculation swirls about the victim’s husband.
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0:28 Malcolm Gladwell? This is a paid message from Apple Card. It's easy, I think, in the hubbub of our lives to lose track of our spending. We pay the bills and move on, and don't understand the deeper patterns in our spending, the many different decisions we're making knowingly or unknowingly. You have to understand where your money is going in order to make better decisions about it. That's one reason Apple Card stands out to me. You can earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase you make. I also appreciate the simplicity. Apple Card doesn't have annual, late, or over the limit fees. No fees ever. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet,
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2:42 Speaker 00 Hello, hello. Malcolm here. Before we get to the episode, I want to let you know you can get this entire season now, ad-free, by subscribing to Revisionist History on Pushkin Plus. Sign up on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus. Pushkin Plus subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows.
3:12 Speaker 02 Previously on Revisionist History.
3:15 Malcolm Gladwell? Was he, was he a good preacher?
3:17 Speaker 03 Evidently, he must have been.
3:20 Speaker 04 Charismatic.
3:21 Speaker 03 Yes, I would say.
3:22 Speaker 04 Very charismatic.
3:24 Speaker 05 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.
3:38 Speaker 05 He worked very hard to make sure nobody knew outside that tight circle of biological family.
3:44 Speaker 03 When someone says, "I'm a member of the Church of Christ," that means that they are members of the true church.
3:53 Speaker 03 That's not a denomination. That's not Protestant, it's not Catholic, it's just the true church.
4:12 Malcolm Gladwell? We're now into the hills. We're now into the Alabama hills of...
4:20 Malcolm Gladwell? 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.
4:37 Malcolm Gladwell? We are way out in... I mean, we haven't passed a house in quite some time.
4:46 Malcolm Gladwell? On one of our trips to the Shoals, my colleague Ben Nadaf Hafrin and I drove out to find the house where Charles and Elizabeth Senate 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: Coon Dog Cemetery Road.
5:05 Speaker 06 We've arrived at your destination.
5:08 Speaker 06 We're all... All the best Coon Dogs Arrived. Find their final resting place.
5:15 Malcolm Gladwell? Oh my God, it's an actual...
5:17 Speaker 06 It's a real...
5:18 Malcolm Gladwell? Because we couldn't find the Senate House, we ended up at the cemetery. There were headstones, lots of American flags. There was a little sign. It was a Coon Dog on it. Only cemetery of his 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.
5:44 Speaker 06 Here, this is the driveway. And there's the gate.
5:48 Malcolm Gladwell? Okay, there's the...
5:50 Speaker 06 Drainpipe.
5:51 Malcolm Gladwell? The drainpipe. I think I see the remains. So, it's just an overgrown gate with some posted signs.
6:02 Malcolm Gladwell? The house is gone now. It was a double-wide trailer, burned down a couple of years ago. There's a pond back there. It's a... If we hadn't have met that guy, we would have had no idea.
6:17 Speaker 06 Yeah, you would not have identified this as a... I guess the only thing is the gate that says "private property."
6:22 Malcolm Gladwell? It's all overgrown now.
6:26 Malcolm Gladwell? If you wanted to hide, let's just say this is a very good place to hide.
6:34 Malcolm Gladwell? Nobody's gonna trouble you.
6:42 Malcolm Gladwell? My name is Malcolm Gladwell. This is The Alabama Murders.
6:48 Malcolm Gladwell? 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.
7:14 Malcolm Gladwell? Thirty-five years. That's how long Elizabeth Sennett's family waited for justice to occur. Thirty-five long years. This is the Attorney General of Alabama, Steve Marshall, at a press conference in 2022, when, by the way, the Sennett 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: "If justice delayed, is justice denied."
7:59 Malcolm Gladwell? No. What the Sennett case teaches us is that justice delayed is what justice is in the world we have chosen for ourselves. The question is why? How does a crime turn into a cascade?
8:15 Malcolm Gladwell? Episode 2, Kundog Cemetery Road.
8:25 Speaker 06 So 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.
8:40 Malcolm Gladwell? This is Lacy Kenimer, whose husband was one of the many lawyers drawn into the Sennett case.
8:46 Speaker 06 He was handsome, dark-headed, kind of had that southern a little bit.
8:55 Speaker 06 A little bit redneck, but look, she was homely as a mud fence. I mean, and, and everything that I've read about him and what I- What was that phrase, homely as a- Mud fence. I've never heard that. Homely as a mud fence, yeah. I've never heard of it. I only have ever heard of a mud fence. Well, you can imagine. Yes, it depends, it depends, it depends. So, what I remember, what I recall about this
9:25 Speaker 06 was
9:29 Speaker 06 the fact that he was having an affair with a parishioner. There weren't seventy people that went to that church. How did they not know that this was going on? And then they lived, they lived out on what's called Kung Dog Cemetery Road, which
9:50 Speaker 06 is in rural part of Concord County. And when I say rural, it, it's frighteningly rural. Um,
10:01 Speaker 06 which makes me wonder about this guy. I mean, it had to be Kung Dog Cemetery Road. If you were owned out on it,
10:11 Speaker 06 he had to live thirty-two miles from his church building. And a long way from his parishioners. I think the guy was crazy.
10:24 Malcolm Gladwell? On March eighteenth, nineteen eighty-eight, 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 Doreen Sennett. She'd been stabbed repeatedly. A white and blue afghan covered her face and torso. Senate called the Colbert County Sheriff's Office. An investigator named Ronnie May answered the phone. Senate was hysterical, and May couldn't understand him at first.
11:07 Malcolm Gladwell? Didn't even know whether he was speaking to a man or a woman. May said, "Calm down." Then again, "Calm down." Senate 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 Senate's house. It was raining heavily. As he walked in through the carport, Senate 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 Senate's body was lying. He reached for a pulse. Couldn't find one.
11:50 Malcolm Gladwell? Thought she was dead. But when the ambulance arrived a few minutes later, one of the paramedics found a faint pulse. Chuck and Mike Senate, their two sons, were 25 and 23 years old at the time. Mom was just a homemaker. Kind, nurturing. 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.
12:34 Malcolm Gladwell? Elizabeth Senate was taken by ambulance to Helen Keller Hospital in Sheffield. In 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 Senate 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.
13:11 Malcolm Gladwell? Which is where they deliver the bad news.
13:17 Malcolm Gladwell? Elizabeth Senate was pronounced dead at 2:05 in the afternoon.
13:24 Malcolm Gladwell? Lacy Kenner knew one of the nurses who was there at the hospital when Elizabeth was brought in that day.
13:30 Speaker 02 So she's in the ER with the doctor and the Senate. 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, walked out of the emergency room room and went to him and told him. And he was astounded. He said, that cannot be. Wow.
14:08 Malcolm Gladwell? 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 Dorlene. Can you tell me about what that was like?
14:24 Speaker 04 I can tell you every minute of that one.
14:28 Malcolm Gladwell? This is Charlie Bill, who went to Charles Senate's church.
14:32 Speaker 04 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 causes a 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 Senate's wife has been murdered. My husband looked right straight at me and he said, he did it.
15:06 Speaker 04 That's how convinced he was over that slapping.
15:10 Speaker 04 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 sitting at the breakfast table.
15:18 Malcolm Gladwell? Carl Roden, a member of Senate's congregation, spoke to Senate on the morning of the murder and drove him to the hospital.
15:26 Speaker 06 Picked him up at Highway 72 and.
15:30 Malcolm Gladwell? Two forty-seven. He was in an ambulance and he got out and got in the car with me and I brought him onto the hospital. Yeah. The only thing he ever said after, you know, you look back, he said, "They shouldn't have done her that way." Didn't really mean nothing at the time. Her funeral was the following Sunday at the West Side 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, um, he just, it looked put on.
16:16 Malcolm Gladwell? Roden 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. "Time is precious. Are you spending time with the God who made you?" As we were talking with Roden, he told us about a friend, someone who'd worked the case when it first broke. You say his name is, is Mickey? Ricky. Ricky. Ricky Miller. Ricky Miller. And he was one of the deputies investigating the, uh, the case. And, and he's, he's- He's one you really like to talk with. And so Roden called Ricky up. When did you say come? Today or tomorrow?
16:54 Speaker 06 I don't know shit.
16:58 Speaker 06 Right now, we don't stay.
16:59 Malcolm Gladwell? Okay, get it over with. We'll be there in- He's, now they're feminine and everything. Get, get your hair combed.
17:05 Speaker 06 They what?
17:06 Malcolm Gladwell? It's gonna be a movie that get your hair combed. You got a haircut today.
17:10 Speaker 06 They don't make no movie, man.
17:11 Malcolm Gladwell? Well, you done got your hair cut.
17:13 Speaker 06 I don't know, but I don't know.
17:17 Malcolm Gladwell? No, they just writing a story or something. I don't really know. Yeah. They pretty good old Joes anyway, if they are Yankees.
17:23 Speaker 06 Say, how many of them is it?
17:25 Malcolm Gladwell? It's just two of them with a microphone.
17:28 Speaker 06 Well, the winged ass there, so.
17:31 Malcolm Gladwell? Okay. We'll be there in ten minutes. Oh, they'll be there in ten minutes. Okay, bye. Thank you so much. Thank you all. Appreciate it. Yeah. Good, good luck.
17:52 Speaker 00 This is Jacob Goldstein. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask it to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started today at chatgpt.com.
18:29 Malcolm Gladwell? This is a paid message from Apple Card. It's easy, I think, in the hubbub of our lives to lose track of our spending. We pay the bills and move on and don't understand the deeper patterns in our spending, the many different decisions we're making knowingly or unknowingly. You have to understand where your money is going in order to make better decisions about it. That's one reason Apple Card stands out to me. You can earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase you make. I also appreciate the simplicity. Apple Card doesn't have annual, late, or over-the-limit fees. No fees ever. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet, if I do,
19:12 Malcolm Gladwell? my daily cash can grow automatically over time without any extra effort. When you better understand your spending habits, it's easier to make your money work harder for you. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval, variable APRs for Apple Card range from 17.74% to 27.99% based on credit worthiness. Rates as of October 1, 2026. Existing customers can view their variable APR in the Wallet app or card.apple.com. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Member FDIC.
19:56 Malcolm Gladwell? Terms and more at applecard.com. This is Malcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History. In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military.
20:30 Malcolm Gladwell? Carl 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.
20:46 Speaker 03 I assisted the sheriff's department in investigating the case. And it got interesting. Now, the more you got into it, the more interesting it got.
20:59 Malcolm Gladwell? 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.
21:10 Speaker 03 There were so many leads and stuff. We followed and followed. But at the time, the Crime Stoppers 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.
21:33 Malcolm Gladwell? 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.
21:52 Speaker 03 And the call I received even told me where the VCR was being used, and it was on Kenneth Smith's.
21:59 Malcolm Gladwell? TV, said it's sitting there right now, he's using it. And come to find out, that was accurate.
22:08 Malcolm Gladwell? 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. Two 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.
22:50 Malcolm Gladwell? 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.
23:13 Malcolm Gladwell? On the morning of the 18th, Parker and Smith met up at 8:30. Parker brought a black-handled survival knife. The two of them drove out to Coon Dog 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. Senate 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. Senate 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.
23:55 Malcolm Gladwell? I stood at the edge of the kitchen, talking with Mrs. Senate. Mrs. Senate was sitting at a chair in the den. Then I heard John coming through the house. John walked up behind Mrs. Senate and started hitting her. John was hitting her with his fist. I started getting the VCR while John was beating Mrs. Senate. John hit Mrs. Senate with a large cane and anything else he could get his hands on. John went into a frenzy. Mrs. Senate 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,
24:39 Malcolm Gladwell? covered with some kind of blanket. I 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.
24:50 Malcolm Gladwell? 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.
25:07 Malcolm Gladwell? Did you, at what point during the investigation, did you come to suspect that Charles Sennett might be involved?
25:17 Speaker 03 The first thing that called 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. But he had a pattern. Everywhere he went was to make an alibi. And when he went by Carl's house, Carl said, "Tell me you've never been to his house, except that one time."
25:45 Malcolm Gladwell? 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 West Side Church. 9:30 to 10, Carl Roden. 10, Teresa Hall. 10:15, a phone call with Tammy Sue Wright. 11 a.m. with Brenda Sprague on Woodmont Drive in Tusconbaya, and on, and on.
26:13 Speaker 03 He made too many alibis. It was overkill. You know, he stopped to see people they'd never seen. And that just threw up a red flag to us.
26:22 Malcolm Gladwell? Why is he seeing all these people for the first time? It hadn't 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? Co- is that Coombes? On C V T Road? Yeah. And it's a good way he's out there. People along the way even, on the highway, two forty seven going up, they 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.
27:07 Malcolm Gladwell? 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.
27:22 Speaker 06 They shouldn't have done it that way.
27:23 Malcolm Gladwell? They shouldn't have done it that way. How does he know there's two?
27:27 Speaker 06 Yeah.
27:28 Malcolm Gladwell? Yeah, when you use the word they. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I understand that when, uh, Senate is, he tells the 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, 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 gonna do is go to your wife.
28:06 Malcolm Gladwell? If it had been my wife laying there, blunging, bloody and all, first thing I would have done was checked her, grabbed her. I would have had some kind of evidence on me that I had made contact with. He lives sixteen miles out. It's gonna take him a while to get there. So what are you doing the whole time?
28:27 Speaker 00 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. He did not.
28:53 Speaker 00 This is Jacob Goldstein. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask it to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started today at chatgpt.com.
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30:34 Malcolm Gladwell? In the Brothers Grimm telling of Little Red Riding Hood, a fairy tale beloved by small children for centuries, Little Red Riding Hood is tricked by a wolf, dressed as her grandmother, and eaten. She's then saved by a hunter, who cuts open the wolf's belly, glimpses her red cap, and pulls her out.
30:53 Speaker 06 Ah, how frightened I have been! How dark it was inside the wolf's! 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.
31:12 Malcolm Gladwell? 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.
31:23 Speaker 06 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. But Little Red Riding Hood went joyously home, and no one ever did anything to harm her again.
31:51 Malcolm Gladwell? Why do children so cheerfully indulge in a story that is about, let's be clear, a pedophile? Because the wolf gets his comeuppance in the end. It's the same principle that explains everything from Sherlock Holmes to the television show Law & Order to countless tabloidy true crime podcasts. We are more than happy to wallow in stories of madness and depravity so long as order is restored in the end. Crime stories are exercises in moral assurance. With the Sennett case, it's enormously tempting to tell a story this way. The case is pure southern Gothic. I mean, a preacher who's lost his way, a house on a lonely mountain road called, for goodness sake, Coon Dog Cemetery Road, and then two local killers-for-hire
32:36 Malcolm Gladwell? speeding back to Florence with a VCR in the backseat. You want that version? You can find it online.
32:43 Speaker 06 This is the story of a God-fearing family who preach, sing, and pray together through good times and bad behind church doors and wholesome music.
32:58 Malcolm Gladwell? Looms betrayal and deceit and a murder that will rock a small-town Alabama community to its core.
33:11 Malcolm Gladwell? But let's be clear, the Little Red Riding Hood model is an illusion. You don't return home happily and safely after fighting off a violent predator. You spend the rest of your childhood recovering. The actual NYPD is nowhere near as effortlessly effective as the fictional NYPD of Law and Order. And as much as everyone involved in the Senate case wanted it to end neatly and tidily, as all the classic crime stories do, it didn't end. It kept going.
33:45 Malcolm Gladwell? So tell me about when this, when the Senate case breaks, when we first hear about it, what impact does it have on the town?
33:56 Speaker 04 Well, of course, abject horror throughout the whole community. And it, of course, made the gory headlines for days and days, especially because they didn't know who had murdered the minister's wife. And, and as long as they're on the run, then, then everybody's frightened. They don't know the motive.
34:18 Malcolm Gladwell? Billy Warren, the Florentstown historian.
34:21 Speaker 04 They don't know at that point that the minister has hired these young men. They don't know anything. So it, it was gripping, really, for the whole community because there was so much unknown.
34:35 Malcolm Gladwell? In the middle of this is Senate himself, under suspicion, but still at large, trying and failing to play the role of the grieving husband and becoming increasingly aware that his treachery was transparent. Why did Charles Senate do such a bad job of covering his own tracks? Billy Gray Williams, the man he first approached with his scheme, was his tenant, for goodness sake. The sheriff's deputy, Ronnie May, recognized Senate because there had been a murder not long before at a gas station, and Senate had come to the crime scene uninvited and hung around as if he was studying police procedure. And you know where he found the money to pay his hitmen? His lover.
35:16 Malcolm Gladwell? It's as if he wasn't even trying, like he turned himself in before he'd even committed his crime.
35:23 Malcolm Gladwell? When I try to imagine what was going through his mind in the days after his wife's death, I can't help but think of what the theologian Lee Camp said in the last episode, about how Sennett's original transgression, his affair with a woman in his church, would have filled him with shame.
35:42 Malcolm Gladwell? And remember the joke he told? That for us in the Church of Christ, it's easier to get forgiveness for murdering someone than it was for a divorce? The point of the joke is that we are the most rigorous of Christian communities, and we will cast you out for a second-degree transgression like cheating on your wife as surely as for a first-degree transgression like arranging for her murder. The acts are very different, but the consequences are the same. So why would Charles Sennett act as if he was indifferent to whether he got caught? Because maybe, in his own tangled mind, the leap from an affair to a killing wasn't a leap at all. From the moment he cheated on his wife, he was already beyond redemption.
36:33 Malcolm Gladwell? Charles Sennett was called in for questioning. He admitted to the affair, but he denied any involvement with his wife's death. He said he suspected a black man from Cherokee, Alabama, a town not far from his house, who he said had an ongoing feud with his son. The police called Sennett back for another round of questioning. One of the officers mentioned the name Kenny Smith, and Sennett turned beet red. Sennett left the police station. He drove to his son, Michael's, house.
37:03 Speaker 03 You know, he said, you know, "I failed a lie detector test." He said, "You know, I've been involved with somebody else." And, uh, we're taking all this thing and can't believe it.
37:19 Malcolm Gladwell? Charles Sennett left the house, got in his Chevy truck, picked up a 22.
37:25 Speaker 03 How? You hear it?
37:28 Malcolm Gladwell? Firecracker.
37:29 Speaker 03 He's in his truck, uh, where he shot himself. That was seven days after mom, uh, mom got killed.
37:40 Malcolm Gladwell? Friday to Friday. Yeah, lost them both in seven days. One don't know how much you can take until you go through something like that.
37:55 Malcolm Gladwell? In the neat and tidy version of the Senate story, this is the ending. The killers have confessed and are in custody. The master criminal has shot himself. The victim is buried. A crime, a culprit, a mystery, a resolution, a beginning, an end.
38:16 Malcolm Gladwell? But we're not telling that version of the story. We're just getting started.
38:24 Malcolm Gladwell? Coming up on The Alabama Murders, the trial of John Forrest Parker.
38:29 Speaker 05 I just don't think some of these people that were on the jury, they didn't want that to be on their conscience, the rest of their life, putting somebody into the death penalty.
38:39 Speaker 03 I've had, you know, other cases that technically were probably factually more complex, but this is, you know, this is the one that I will...
38:53 Speaker 03 It's still on my mind, even without Chalk Town.
38:57 Speaker 03 He was the chief of police in Florence. He theorized really early on that, you know, that it wasn't like it was, like it was supposed to be looking like it was.
39:22 Malcolm Gladwell? Revisionist History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Ben Nadaf Hafry, and Nina Bird Lawrence. Additional reporting by Ben Nadaf Hafry and Lee Hedgesbeth. Our editor is Karen Shikurji. Fact checking by Kate Furby. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Production support from Luke Lomond. Original scoring by Luis Guerra with Paul Brainard and Jimmy Bott. Sound design and additional music by Jake Korski.
39:53 Malcolm Gladwell? I'm Malcolm Gladblatt.
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