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Was he a good feature?

Evidently he must have been charismanic, Yes, very charis many flawreence.

You don't get here by accident, and so the idea that someone was in this framework do something like Charles Sennett did was very disruptive.

He worked very hard to make sure nobody knew outside that tight circle of biological family.

When someone says I'm a member of the Church of Christ, that means that they are members of the True Church.

That's not a denomination, that's not Protestant, it's not Catholic, it's just.

The true Church.

We're now into the hills.

We're now into the Alabama hills of We're We're in a long, winding two lane road following an F one fifty pickup truck.

Like much of this corner of Alabama, it's it's gorgeous countryside.

We are way out in.

I mean, we haven't passed up a house in quite some time.

On one of our trips to the shoals, my colleague Ben Adaf Halfrey and I drove out to find the house where Charles and Elizabeth Sennett 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 your destination.

We're all all the best coon dogs alive find their final resting place.

Oh my god, it's an actual Because we couldn't find the Senate house, we ended up at the cemetery.

There were headstones, lots of American flags.

There's a little sign with a coon dog on it.

Only cemetery was kind in the world.

Troop first Dog late to rest here September fourth, nineteen thirty seven.

Then we met an older couple who gave us directions.

We drove back the way we came and finally found it.

Here.

This is the driveway and there's the gate.

Oh yeah, there's the drain pipe, the drain pipe.

I think I see the remains.

So it's just an overgrown gate with some posted signs.

The house is gone now as it's a double wide trailer burned down a couple of years a couple of years ago.

There's a pond back there.

It's a.

If we hadn't met that that guy, we would have had no idea.

Yeah, you would not have identified this as I guess.

There's the only thing is the gate that says private property.

It's all overgrown.

Now if you wanted to hide, let's just say this is a very good place to hide.

Nobody's going to trouble you.

My name is Malcolm Gladwell.

This is the Alabama Murders.

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 in the morning of March eighteenth, nineteen eighty eight, that kicked off the cascade and tore the Senate family apart before it accelerated and spread to countless others.

Thirty five years.

That's how long Elizabeth Sennatt'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 twenty twenty two.

By the way, the senecase 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, the justice delayed is justice denied.

No.

What the senecase 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?

Episode two, Coon Dog Cemetery Road.

So, then, have you seen pictures of this family of Charles Senate and Liz So Actually, Charles Senate kind of looked like a nineteen eighties TV evangelist.

This is Lacy Kennemer, whose husband was one of the many lawyers drawn into the Senate case.

He was hadsome, dark headed, kind of had that southern a little bit, a little bit redneck, but look, she was hungly as a mud fence, I mean, and and everything that I've read about him, and what I've never heard humly as a mud fence, I've never heard.

You can imagine.

Yes, So what I remember, what I recall about this was 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 Kungdaks Cemetery Road, which is in rural part of Colver County.

And when I say rule it, it's frighteningly rule, which makes me wonder about this guy.

I mean, it had to be Kungdal Cemetery Road if you were on out on it.

He had to live thirty two miles from his church building and a long way from his parishioners.

I think the guy was crazy.

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 dorleyan Senate.

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, 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 to the carport, 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 Sennett's body was lying.

He reached for a pulse, couldn't find one.

Thought she was dead, but when the ambulance arrived a few minutes later, one of the paramedics found a faint pulse.

Chuck and Mike Sennet, their two sons were twenty five and twenty three years old at the time.

Mom was just the homemaker, kind, nurturing boiler 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.

Laddy called me work.

Yeah, Chuck called me at work, said something happened to Mom at the farm.

Get out here quick.

Elizabeth Sennet 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 Sennate 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 aorda on the chance that the fluid would fill her heart chamber.

We sat there for a while and then they invite you up to the second floor, which is where they delivered the bad news.

Elizabeth Senate was pronounced dead at two five in the afternoon.

Lacey kennemer knew one of the nurses who was there at the hospital when Elizabeth was brought in that day.

So she's and the er, it's the doctor and the and miss 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.

I walked out of the emergency room room and went to him and tell him.

And he was astounded.

He said, that cannot be.

Wow.

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 Orlean.

Can you tell me about what that was like.

I can tell you every minute of that one.

This is Shirley Bill who went to Charles Sentence Church.

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 back handed his child.

I don't know what the child had done.

My husband was furious because he says, you just don't do that to a child across its face, you might hit its ear and causes the 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 Sennett's wife has been murdered, my husband looked right straight at me and he said he did it.

That's how convinced he was over that slapping, 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 that sitting at the breakfast table.

Carl Roden, a member of Sentence Congregation, spoke to Senate on the morning of the murder and drove him to the hospital.

Picked him up at Highway seventy two, two forty seven.

He was an animust and they got out.

I got in the car with man.

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 learned 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.

Rodin watched Senate walk out of the service.

After the clothing prayers and singing and all that family comes out first, and he has her pictures up against his chest with both hands hugging it.

And he was just most fake thing I believe I've ever saw.

And I told my wife was that most phoniest thing I've ever saw.

He just had looked put on.

Rodin lives in his 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's message on the sign outside, Time is precious?

Are you spending time with the God who made you?

As we were talking with Rodin, he told us about a friend, someone who'd worked the case when I first broke.

He said, his name is is Mickey Ricky, Ricky, Ricky Miller, Ricky Miller, and he was one of the deputies investigating that the case.

And and he's he's you to talk with.

And so Rodent called Ricky up.

When do you say, come from the here tomorrow?

I don't know ship, Okay, get it over with.

We'll be there.

And he's there now.

They're famine and everything.

Get your hair combed won't be a movie.

They get your hair combed.

It you got a haircut today?

Well, you don't got your hair cut.

But no, they just writing a story or something.

I don't really know.

They pretty good Old Joe's any white fir or Yankees.

It's just too of them with a microphone.

Wow, okay, and be there in TIMI.

So much, thank you appreciate.

Carl Ruden'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.

I assisted the Sheriff's department and investigating a case and it got interested.

You know, the more you got into it, the more instant it got.

He was part of the team that went out to the sentenced property after the murder to search the pond.

They drained it found a survival knife, a fireplace poker, and a fireplace brush.

There were so many leads and stuff we followed and followed, but at the time, the crime stopper's phone for our county was in my office and I entered the call and I got all the information on who done it, who was all involved in all the particulars.

The anonymous caller named three young men, all in their teens and early twenties, Billy Gray Williams, John Forest 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.

And the call I received even told me whether the VCR was being used, and it was on Kenneth Smiths TV said it's sitting there right now, he's using it and come to find out that was racrate.

Te 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 fifteen hundred dollars 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.

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.

On the morning of the eighteenth, Parker and Smith met up at eight thirty.

Parker brought a black handled survival knife.

The two of them drove out to Koondog Cemetery Road in Parker's Pontiac Grand Prix.

Smith told investigators John and I got to the Senate house around nine thirty.

I think I knocked on the door.

I told Missus Sennet 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 Missus Sennet we needed to use the bathroom.

And she led us inside.

I went to the bathroom nearest the kitchen, and then John went to the bathroom.

I stood at the edge of the kitchen talking with Missus Senet.

Missus Sennet was sitting at a chair in the den.

Then I heard John coming through the house.

John walked up behind Missus Sennet and started hitting her.

John was hitting her with his fist.

I started getting the VCR while John was beating Missus Sennet.

John hit Missus Sennet with a large cane and anything else he could get his hands on.

John went into a frenzy.

Missus Sennet was yelling just stop.

We could have anything we wanted.

As John was beating up Missus Sennet, I messed up some things in the house to make it look like a burglary.

The last place I saw Missus Sennet, she was lying near the fireplace, 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.

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 Sennet.

Did you at what point in the investigation did you come to suspect that Charles Senntt might be involved?

The first thing that called our tension, 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 him alibi.

And when he won by Carl's house, Carlson said, told me you'd never been to his house except that one time.

Eight to eight thirty Chill Kendrick eight thirty to nine, Sam Garrett Junior nine o'clock, Billy Alexander nine fifteen, Missus Louise Island sees them leave Westside Church nine thirty to ten, Carl roadin ten, Teresa Hall ten point fifteen, a phone call with Tammy Sue Wright, eleven am with Brenda sprayed on Woodmontre even Tscumbia, and on and on.

He made too many of it.

It was overkilled.

You know.

He stopped to see people that had never seen and that just threw up a red flag to us.

Why is he seeing all these people for the first time that had to 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?

Sat koondomps in the road, and.

It's a good ways out there.

People along the way, even on the highway two forty seven, Gord, they said he had stopped and said he had never stopped here before.

He could tell you every time, everything, every day.

Well it 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.

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.

They shouldn't have done it that way.

How does he know there's two.

Yeah, yeah, when you use a word bay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I understand that.

When Senate is he tells the story about how it comes back to the house, he sees his wife's body, and then they said, well what did you do?

And he said, I didn't touch her, even though he was trained and 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 where I wonder, first thing you're going to do is go to your wife.

If it had been my wife laying there plunging bloody and now, 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 lived sixteen miles out, It's going to take him a while to get there.

So what are you doing the whole time?

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 were to check your why.

That he did not.

In The Brothers Grim 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 eating.

She's in saved by a hunter who cuts open the wolf's belly, glimpses her red cap, and pulls her out.

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.

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 her house.

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 slip 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.

Why do children so cheerfully indulge in a story that is about, let's be clear, a pedophile because the wolf gets his come upance in the end.

It's the same principle that explains everything from Sherlock Holmes to the television show Law and Order to countless Tablady 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 Senate case, it's enormously tempting to tell a story this way.

The case is pure Southern Gothic.

I mean a preacher who has 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, speeding back to Florence with a VCR in the backseat.

You want that version, you can find it online.

This is the story of a god fearing Fai family who preach, sing and pray together through good times and bad but behind church doors and wholesome music, Bloom's betrayal and deceit and a murder that will rock a small town Alabama community to its core.

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 MIPD is nowhere near as effortlessly effective as the fictional NPD 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.

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.

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 as long as they're on the run, then everybody's frightened.

They don't know the.

Motive, Billy Warren, the Florencetown historian.

They don't know at that point that the minister has hired these young men.

They don't know anything.

So it was gripping really for the whole community because there was so much unknown.

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 Why did Charles Sennett 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.

It's as if he wasn't even trying, like he turned himself in before he'd even committed his crime.

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 Senate's original transgression, his affair with a woman in his church, would have filled him with shame.

And remember the joke he told that for us in the Church of Christ, it's easier to get forgiveness from murdering someone than it was for 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 Sennet 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.

Charles Senna 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, at an ongoing fel with his son.

The police called Senate back for another round of questioning.

One of the officers mentioned the name Kenny Smith, and Senate turned beat red.

Senate left the police station.

He drove to his son, Michael's house.

You know, he said, you know, I failed a light to take your test.

He said, you know, I've been involved with somebody else, and uh, we're taking all this inn can't believe it.

Charles Senate left the house, got in his Chevy truck, picked up at twenty two.

Pyle, you're here, Hark.

He's in his truck.

Where he shot itself.

That was.

Seven days after mom and mom got killed Friday to Friday.

Yeah, lost them both in seven days.

Yeah.

One don't know how much that you can take until you go through something like that.

In the Need 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.

But we're not telling that person of the story.

We're is getting started coming up on the Alabama murders, the trial of John Forest Parker.

I just don't think some of these people that were on the jury, they didn't want that to be on their conscious the rest of their life, putting somebody into the death penalty.

I've had other cases that technically, we're probably factually more complex, but this is, you know, this is the one that I is still on my mind even without chopping.

He was a chief of police in Florence.

He hererives really early on that you know.

That that it wasn't like it was like it was supposed to be Looking Like It.

Was h.

Revisionous History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Bend Daph Haffrey and Nina Bird Lawrence.

Additional reporting by Ben Da, Daph Haffrey and Lee Hedgepeth.

Our editor is Karen Schakerji, fact checking by Kate Ferby.

Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence.

Production support from Luke LeMond.

Original scoring by Luis Garra with Paul Brainard and Jimmy Bond.

Sound design and additional music by Jake Krsky.

I'm Malcolm Gardner.