The Alabama Murders - Part 6: The Porterfield Sessions

Manhattan, NY December. 2022. What do you do, after the state has tried to execute you, but failed? Kenny Smith’s legal team calls Kate Porterfield. A psychologist who specializes in trauma. Get early, ad-free access to the full season of The Alabama Murders by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/revisionist-history-the-alabama-murders/id1119389968 or Pushkin.fm http://pushkin.fm/. Pushkin+ subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows. Subscribe on Apple: apple.co/pushkin http://apple.co/pushkin Subscribe on Pushkin: pushkin.com/plus http://pushkin.com/plus See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. When you're a business owner interested in expanding to new markets, there's a lot to consider and countless questions to answer before making the call. The most important one being, are you ready? That's where ChatGPT comes in. Give it a goal, add your files, and ask chat to help you map out different scenarios for the future of your business. So when growth is on the table, you've got an expansion plan ready to implement. Get started today at chatgpt.com.

• 0:28Malcolm 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,

• 1:10Malcolm 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.

• 1:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 2:03Malcolm Gladwell?

  Pushkin.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Previously on Revisionist History.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  He was taken out of his cell, thinking that his execution was imminent, strapped to a gurney, and he's asking the corrections officers who are with him, what's going on?

• 2:29Speaker 04

  An anesthesiologist in good standing is not going to spend their Wednesdays over at the state corrections, sticking IVs in people for execution. It's not something that we do.

• 2:43Speaker 05

  Because a cold-blooded convicted killer complains about the prodding and poking of a small Abbe line. Really? Prodding and poking with a needle?

• 2:59Speaker 03

  After three and a half or four hours being strapped to a gurney, he was unable to stand, walk, unbutton his shirt, change his clothes, do any of that without assistance.

• 3:28Speaker 06

  They 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, "We have a client who's had this thing happen, he's really struggling. Would you take a look at him and we'll talk to him?"

• 3:44Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, worked for years treating patients at the clinic for torture victims at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. A 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,

• 4:27Malcolm Gladwell?

  and a person she'd been asked to evaluate who had affected her deeply.

• 4:33Malcolm Gladwell?

  Kenny Smith. That's how I learned about the murder of Elizabeth Sennett. Everything in this series began with my conversations with Kate Porterfield.

• 4:46Malcolm Gladwell?

  So tell me about your first visit with Kenny.

• 4:49Speaker 06

  So my first contact with him was a call, actually. It 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. And

• 5:33Speaker 06

  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.

• 5:42Speaker 06

  I'm pretty sturdy, but this really messed me up.

• 5:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  Kate 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.

• 6:22Malcolm Gladwell?

  My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to The Alabama Murders.

• 6:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 6:43Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is episode six, The Porterfield Sessions.

• 6:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  In 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.

• 7:23Speaker 06

  So, this was probably the first person I ever worked with who'd had a mock execution. And it is its own unimaginable horror that leaves a really, really bad physical, physiological, rather, imprint.

• 7:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  Her goal was to gently push him back towards his traumatic experience, to better understand and to help him.

• 7:46Speaker 06

  He was very rigid. And he would sit just really tightly wound in the sessions, really gripping the chair. And I... He didn't want to go there.

• 8:01Malcolm Gladwell?

  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. Why is a mock execution uniquely damaging?

• 8:31Speaker 06

  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.

• 8:59Speaker 06

  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. And 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, 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

• 9:42Speaker 06

  does is it, it becomes imprinted in your body and your memory banks are then linked and hooked up with the fear reaction. So 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.

• 10:04Malcolm Gladwell?

  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. With Kenny Smith, this had just happened.

• 10:34Speaker 06

  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.

• 10:58Malcolm Gladwell?

  How did the guards react?

• 11:02Speaker 06

  You 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 and they-

• 11:30Malcolm Gladwell?

  Trying to get blood to flow.

• 11:31Speaker 06

  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. They 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.

• 12:01Malcolm Gladwell?

  Kenny 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.

• 12:14Speaker 06

  And he said, one of the ways he stayed calm when there was all that dead time was he would, 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.

• 12:45Speaker 06

  They come back in, they begin to untie the tourniquet on his arm and they say, it's over now.

• 12:54Speaker 06

  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.

• 13:03Speaker 06

  So these kinds of moments for Kenny were just, what's the word? Unmanageable afterwards. They were unmanageable moments with other humans.

• 13:17Malcolm Gladwell?

  One minute, they were trying to kill him. Then they weren't trying to kill him.

• 13:22Speaker 06

  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. I'm not talking about saved in the execution. I'm saying saved as a man, you know, that 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 were going to die. And then someone bringing God in and saying this sort of generous thing, "I'm going to pray for you." It was, like, the word unmanageable is what I keep coming up with.

• 14:07Speaker 06

  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. You know, the warden taking his head and saying, "This is, this is what's best for you," was another.

• 14:24Malcolm Gladwell?

  Kate 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.

• 15:04Speaker 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.

• 15:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  These days, there are more people than ever telling you how to manage your health, and we've all gone down an internet rabbit hole exploring the latest health trends. Your social media feed is packed with wellness advice telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to health influencers, real people, and most importantly, doctors,

• 16:24Malcolm Gladwell?

  to separate fact from fiction. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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.

• 17:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  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, 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.

• 17:53Malcolm Gladwell?

  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. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 18:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  Kenny Smith's full name was Kenneth Eugene Smith. Both Kenny and his brother Joey were named for their father, a truck driver named Wesley Eugene Smith.

• 18:19Speaker 07

  Did you ever regret naming the matter?

• 18:21Speaker 08

  I didn't.

• 18:24Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 18:26Malcolm Gladwell?

  Linda Smith, Kenny Smith's mom, still lives in the Shoals. She spoke with Lee Hedgesbeth, a local reporter who knew Kenny well and covered his case.

• 18:36Speaker 07

  Has he passed now, Jean?

• 18:39Speaker 08

  Oh, yes. Yeah, he, I think he was 45 when he passed.

• 18:44Malcolm Gladwell?

  Linda and Jean had five children together in quick succession. Kenny was the eldest.

• 18:50Speaker 08

  He didn't really want a child at that, at that point.

• 18:55Speaker 07

  Why do you think that was?

• 18:57Speaker 08

  I just, I don't know. I guess he wouldn't. Through with his wild oats, I guess.

• 19:06Speaker 07

  So tell me about the wild oats.

• 19:08Speaker 08

  Not too much of a drinker, more of like pills. Back then, it was kind of uppers and downers.

• 19:16Malcolm Gladwell?

  Gene was on the road a lot. He 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.

• 19:29Speaker 08

  Oh, yeah. He always did that, just about.

• 19:32Speaker 07

  When did it start?

• 19:33Speaker 08

  I mean, not when we first started dating. It started.

• 19:38Speaker 08

  I guess it started after Kenny was born.

• 19:43Speaker 08

  You know? What I think is he was doing stuff and he was thinking I was, you know?

• 19:54Speaker 07

  Right.

• 19:54Speaker 08

  He was jealous, yeah. And 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 in the floor, slap me.

• 20:18Speaker 08

  Well, see, like I said, he thought that I was, you know, out doing stuff and partying. And like I said, which I wasn't.

• 20:25Speaker 07

  And can you recall, like, for example, the incident with the bottle? Can you tell me what happened then? Do you remember?

• 20:33Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, I didn't know he was coming in that night, which it didn't matter.

• 20:40Speaker 08

  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.

• 20:54Speaker 07

  Do you remember what Kenny's reaction would be when that's happening? How old is Kenny around this time?

• 21:00Speaker 08

  Around that time, he was probably three or four. I mean, he'd just run, get up on the couch and sit.

• 21:09Speaker 08

  Him and Joey and just, you know.

• 21:14Speaker 07

  Do you remember anything that Kenny ever said to you, either when the abuse was happening or afterward?

• 21:21Speaker 08

  Um, yeah. I mean, he would. I mean, you know, hug me and, you know. I guess, you know. I guess he was telling me, you know, everything would be okay.

• 21:40Malcolm Gladwell?

  Kenny would draw pictures and give them to his mom.

• 21:45Malcolm Gladwell?

  At Kenny's sentencing hearing, a series of witnesses testified about Jean's abuse. One was a woman who worked as a waitress with Linda. Jean 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. He would slap her and he would hit her with his fist. I have seen him back her up in the corner and just beating her, and I have seen her when her pocket would be torn on the uniform,

• 22:29Malcolm Gladwell?

  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."

• 22:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  The 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. Question:

• 23:34Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 24:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 high school asked him if he wanted a little quick money roughing someone up. And 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 100 times in his life.

• 24:49Speaker 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.

• 25:26Malcolm Gladwell?

  These days, there are more people than ever telling you how to manage your health. And we've all gone down an internet rabbit hole exploring the latest health trends. Your social media feed is packed with wellness advice, telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to health influencers, real people, and most importantly, doctors, to separate fact from fiction.

• 26:11Malcolm Gladwell?

  Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A business gift is never just a gift. It's a thank you, a milestone, a moment of appreciation. It's a message about how much someone matters and what your brand stands for. At 4imprint, you'll find thousands of customizable options, like premium apparel, branded drinkware, tech totes, and more, each chosen not just for function, but for meaning. You can tailor every detail, your logo, your message, your presentation, so your gift feels personal and on-brand.

• 26:55Malcolm Gladwell?

  And with expert support, dependable service, and thousands without a setup fee, creating something thoughtful doesn't mean making it complicated. Every order is backed by 4imprint's 360-degree guarantee, so you can be 4imprint certain it'll arrive exactly as expected, on time, and with the care your brand deserves. Because when the moment matters, the right gift speaks volumes, and the right partner makes it easy. Explore gifting with purpose and certainty at 4imprint.com. 4imprint, for certain.

• 27:34Malcolm Gladwell?

  Kate 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.

• 27:47Speaker 06

  You know Catherine Harrison? You know who that is? She's a great writer, yeah.

• 27:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 06

  And she, she wrote this incredible memoir about her life with her father, who had disappeared, and then got involved with her in 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." And 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.

• 28:36Speaker 06

  And it doesn't matter that the parents did terrible things to them.

• 28:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  It doesn't matter?

• 28:41Speaker 06

  No, I mean, it matters to who they've become, but in their sense of self.

• 28:44Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh, I see.

• 28:45Speaker 06

  They yearn for that parent. Children have an unconditional... My point is, children have an unconditional love of the parent.

• 28:53Malcolm Gladwell?

  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. But 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?

• 29:38Malcolm Gladwell?

  I think that's another kind of suffering that deserves its own category.

• 29:49Speaker 06

  I 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.

• 30:02Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 30:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:11Malcolm Gladwell?

  Taught you a lot. I want to put my finger on what it taught you.

• 30:13Speaker 06

  I understood child development. I had 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. And so watching again and again, men, grown men, sitting across from me, covered with tattoos, you know, guys who had killed a couple of 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.

• 30:57Speaker 06

  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? He'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.

• 31:34Malcolm Gladwell?

  In this hypothetical, semi-hypothetical case of the guy with the tattoos.

• 31:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 31:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  How often in his life do you think he talked about that childhood abuse to somebody?

• 31:42Speaker 06

  Oh, never. He had never, never talked about it.

• 31:46Malcolm Gladwell?

  More to the point, no one bothered to ask him until she did.

• 31:50Speaker 06

  And then I went and visited his family and interviewed all these relatives. It was 100% known. Everybody knew this older relative, sexually abused kids in the family, and particularly had done so with this, with this child.

• 32:04Speaker 06

  Nothing ever done. Imagine. No treatment, no assessment, no law enforcement, nothing. Now imagine what that does to that kid. Think about the growing sense of yourself. I'm gonna get hurt by this person. Everyone's gonna know. People are terrifying, they hurt you, and there's no recourse, ever, anywhere.

• 32:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  The waitress who worked with Kenny's mother remembered this detail about Kenny's interactions with his dad. At the trial, she said, "You did not see him go to Gene, or like, you know, like a child usually runs up to his daddy and approaches him, that he was glad to see him, or that his daddy was glad to see him." At first, when I read that, I thought she meant that the tragedy of Kenny and Gene was that Kenny didn't want to run up and hug his father. But after talking to Kate Porterfield, I realized, no. It's much worse. It's that he wanted to run up and hug his father, but understood, even at that age, that that was impossible.

• 33:11Malcolm Gladwell?

  Kenny Smith's crime was not committed in isolation. It was a violent act that came at the end of a long cascade.

• 33:21Speaker 06

  We like people to either be victims or bad guys, right? And so victims are people that things happen to. And people who do bad things are just people who do bad things. And what, what, the area that I think we're woefully missing is, especially in criminal justice, is seeing that people who do things that are against the law, or even violent, or even murder, are usually, or frequently, doing that themselves, having suffered really bad harm, hurt, maltreatment, abuse, violence. People have a hard time recognizing that a lot of bad behaviors come out of trauma, too.

• 34:03Malcolm Gladwell?

  At the very beginning of this series, I played an excerpt of part of my conversation with Kate Porterfield. It was about the first time she saw Kenny Smith in person at Holman Prison in December of 2022, about a month after the botched execution. And now I want to play it again because now I think it will make more sense. It will be easier to see why this case, out of the many Kate Porterfield has done, affected her so deeply.

• 34:32Speaker 06

  When I first went to see Kenny, 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 spent a lot of time telling me the story of everything else, the goodbyes, the phone calls, the last meal, what people said to him. I mean, he went through each family member, his grandson, his mom. So he told me all about his last visit with her and saying goodbye to her,

• 35:17Speaker 06

  her walking out of the visiting room and turning back to him. You know, and it was all about love. He talked to me about love for probably two, two and a half hours. So he really kind of got me. He made me really pause and think a lot, Kenny Smith, because watching someone only start from a place of love after something so horrible was, I had never seen that before.

• 35:46Malcolm Gladwell?

  You don't think he was avoiding the subject?

• 35:48Speaker 06

  Well, I think he was in a way. I think both were true. And I would, and I ultimately, we got to know each other well and I could tease him a little and say, you know, you know, you got the gift of gab, Kenny. You're really good at like keeping me off the stuff that... And he would just laugh and say, oh, yeah, I don't want to go there. I don't want to go there, doc. And he would say, I get nauseous. I start sweating. I can't do it. Don't make me do it, doc. So like, we got to a place where we knew what avoidance was. But I don't think that's the whole ballgame. I think what really happened is that I got to have this time with this man who thought he was about to die and had a pre-death experience of intense love.

• 36:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  There's a famous quote from the art critic John Ruskin. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. After a lifetime working with people who had suffered great trauma, Kate Porterfield was the one who could see. And what she saw was a very different version of Kenny Smith. Someone in pain over what had happened and what was to come.

• 37:01Speaker 06

  And he was just having severe nightmares of being executed over and over. So he was really tormented at night. Then during the day, he'd be exhausted. He had a ton of nausea. And he had a lot of images coming back to him over and over again. And then, on top of that, starts the meaning-making. And the meaning-making started to really be dark after, you know, several weeks. He started to really think about what had happened, that these people who he knew had done it to him. How could people do this to other people? You know, he started to get really... And then he got depressed. He just got full-on depressed. He was actually doing pretty much post-traumatic stress symptoms at first. And then he moved into depression in the spring.

• 37:46Speaker 06

  And then that kind of worsened for a while. And then he sort of came out of the depression. And then the second execution came up.

• 37:55Malcolm Gladwell?

  The second execution.

• 37:59Malcolm Gladwell?

  The state of Alabama wasn't finished with Kenny Smith.

• 38:11Malcolm Gladwell?

  Coming up on the series finale of The Alabama Murders.

• 38:17Speaker 08

  He said, "Well, Mom, they're coming to get me."

• 38:23Speaker 08

  And, you know, we said our goodbyes. And, you know, the last thing he said was, "I love you, Mom. I've got to go."

• 38:36Speaker 04

  So the theory was that because nitrogen gas was not noxious, it would be, could be given to someone as a kind of, you know, method of, of gas execution that would not be so troubling to them because they would breathe it and not know it and that they would then lose consciousness and die.

• 39:02Speaker 03

  I'm not a medical person. I can't opine on the, on what happened. The only one who can tell us if he experienced pain is not here to describe it. But what I observed anyhow did not look like what Alabama had advertised.

• 39:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  Revisionist History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Ben Nadaff-Hafré, and Nina Bird Lawrence. Additional reporting by Ben Nadaff-Hafré and Lee Hedgebeth. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Fact checking by Kate Furby. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Production support from Luke Lomond. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Original scoring by Luis Guerra with Paul Brainard and Jimmy Bott. Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski. I'm Malcolm Gladman.

• 40:13Malcolm Gladwell?

  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. A business gift should do more than check a box. It should reflect your brand and show someone they're appreciated, recognized, and truly seen. That's why teams trust Four Imprint. With thousands of high-quality customizable products like premium apparel,

• 40:55Malcolm Gladwell?

  drinkware, tech, and more, it's easy to create a gift that feels meaningful and on-brand. And with Four Imprint's expert support and their 360-degree guarantee, you can be Four Imprint certain your order will arrive exactly as intended. Explore gifting with confidence at fourimprint.com. Four Imprint, for certain. For I don't know how long, maybe 12, 13 years, I've worn a Whoop band on my wrist. I started doing it because I met the founder of Whoop at a conference. He heard that I was a runner, and he said, "Oh, you'll love this. It's perfect for athletes." And he was right. I've worn one ever since.

• 41:38Malcolm Gladwell?

  Every time I work out, I see how hard I worked, how long I need to recover. I wake up in the morning, and I get a complete picture of how my sleep went, which helps me understand the kinds of things that lead to a bad night and the kinds of things that lead to a good night. It's sleek, long-lasting battery, and now with AI looking at all my numbers and coaching me. Whoop is a winner. New members can try Whoop with a 30-day free trial before committing to a membership. That's whoop.com for your free month of Whoop. 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.

• 42:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.