The Alabama Murders

Florence, Alabama. 1988. A preacher has an affair. A woman is murdered. One death cascades into more, stretching across decades and leaving no one untouched — victims, bystanders, perpetrators, and those just trying to help. Eventually, the consequences lead to the center of a hot national debate on who should be allowed to live, who should die, and how the state should execute them. On The Alabama Murders, Malcolm Gladwell asks: why, in our efforts to alleviate suffering, do we so often make it worse? Pushkin+ subscribers can binge the entire season of Revisionist History: The Alabama Murders early and ad-free. Sign up on the Revisionist History show page or at pushkin.fm/plus http://pushkin.fm/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.

• 0:11Malcolm Gladwell?

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

• 0:57Malcolm Gladwell?

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

• 1:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  I want to tell you a story about a moral failure cascade.

• 1:27Malcolm Gladwell?

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

• 2:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  Was he, was he a good preacher?

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Charismatic.

• 2:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yes, I would say.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  Very charismatic.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  There was this joke that said that it was easier to get forgiveness in the Church of Christ for murdering somebody than it was to be divorced.

• 2:22Speaker 03

  I think he just got home from work and they called him and he said, "Well, Mom, can you come?" He said, "The police are here."

• 2:30Speaker 04

  There's no sense in even having a jury if you, if you're going to be able to overturn the jury, if a judge can overturn a jury.

• 2:39Speaker 05

  He said, "But I was involved, and that's a horrible thing I was involved in. I've been in prison 24, 25 years. That's probably not long enough. I didn't kill him."

• 2:54Speaker 06

  They get burned from the inside and then blood just pours into the lungs. And I'm sorry as I'm saying this, it's awful. And this is what, this is how lethal injection actually kills you.

• 3:10Malcolm Gladwell?

  Here's what I don't understand. Nobody noticed this till you?

• 3:14Speaker 06

  Apparently not. He would say to himself, "Turn to the right to the victim's family and apologize. Turn to the left, tell my family I love them." So he would have this little practice. To the right, "I'm sorry." To the left, "I love you."

• 3:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  From Revisionist History, this is The Alabama Murders, a special seven-episode series in which we investigate why this case went on for as long as it did, why it took so many bizarre, unsettling turns along the way, and maybe the most important question: Why have we created a system that in trying to respond to suffering, all too often makes suffering worse?

• 3:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  The amount of damage this man did is incalculable.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  It's still damaging all of us. It still hurts us to think about it.

• 4:13Malcolm Gladwell?

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