The Alabama Murders - Part 1: The True Church

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Pushkin.

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.

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A little while ago, a friend of mine told me, you have to meet this person I know, Kate Porterfield.

She's got the strangest job in America.

So I did.

We got together, Porterfield and I, in a little conference room in Manhattan.

I just want to understand how you ended up

where you are.

So you're kind of viewing as we're just talking, you're thinking about whether there's something here that will evolve over time that you would imagine putting in the podcast.

Is that kind of what you're thinking?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Porterfield is a psychologist.

We talked for a few hours, then again and again.

One conversation leading to another until she began to talk about a case that had affected her deeply.

Although she doesn't use the word case, She says person,

a man on death row.

When I first went to see Kenny, so now it had been two months since the execution attempt, he wanted to talk for the first probably two hours of our visit about how beautiful his goodbyes were and the love he received from his family as he was going into the execution.

That's what he wanted to start with.

And I found this so powerful and also fascinating, honestly, as a clinician, because what I first thought was, oh, he's avoiding, right?

He can't talk about the execution.

He talked to me about love for probably two, two and a half hours to the point where I had to say, you know, this is incredible and I'm so happy you're sharing it.

And I'm not surprised.

I also, though, I want to know what happened.

What happened was a botched execution.

Punishment for a crime that took place over 30 years before.

A river of blood that had already claimed the lives of three others.

Kate Porterfield told me her version of events.

Then I went out and got other people's versions of what happened.

And that's where the story I'm about to tell you comes from.

I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did.

Why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way.

And the other question, maybe the important question, is why have we created a system that in trying to respond to suffering all too often makes suffering worse?

He made me really pause and think a lot.

Watching someone only start from a place of love after something so horrible was, I had never seen that before.

Welcome to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

This is a special seven-episode series, The Alabama Murders.

Episode 1, The True Church.

So we're now in...

Are we in Florence here?

Yes.

This story takes place in northwestern Alabama, in an area called the Shoals.

The so-called Alabama Black Belt, the broad flat swath of fertile farmland where the old antebellum cotton plantations were established, is several hours' drive to the south.

This is Rolling Hills, Appalachia.

Not the Mississippi Delta.

Four towns on either side of the Tennessee River.

Sheffield, Tuscumbia, Muscle Shoals, and Florence.

Sheffield is working class, struggling.

Muscle Shoals is a spiritual home of rhythm and blues.

Tuscumbia is famous for being the birthplace of Helen Keller.

Florence is the largest.

A graceful town of beautiful pre-war buildings with a Frank Lloyd Wright house downtown.

You know, there's no interstate that runs through Florence.

There's no major airport.

So it's a little bit of a closed society almost.

It's really neat.

I started going to Alabama after talking to Kate Porterfield.

And on one of my first trips, I met a man named Grant Asbel, a preacher, early 40s.

Big beard, baseball cap.

though not on Sunday morning, of course.

He was my guide to Florence.

You know, there's good music, there's good art.

there's good food,

but you just don't happen here.

You have to want to come to Florence.

This is the place where it all started, with a personal transgression, a matter of the heart, by another preacher, a man named Charles Sennett.

I was only seven years old when it happened, but I remember it being really disconcerting.

Because if you're in this group and like in our, in this area in particular, I mean, you've been to Florence.

Florence, you don't get here by accident.

And so

the idea that someone within this framework could do something like Charles Sennett did was very disruptive.

It was talked about kind of in hushed tones.

I was talking to our local, he goes to church with us here.

He's actually the historian for the city of Florence.

And he was telling me that one of the preachers in one of the churches in town while that was going on got up in the pulpit and said, Charles Sennett is a faithful Christian brother.

The things that are being said about him are lies, with the idea, right, he is a faithful Church of Christ member and almost incapable of this kind of thing.

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In fact, those Olympic Games weren't even games.

It was the Olympic game, as there was only one race, a straight 630-foot sprint.

By 67 AD, chariot racing had become a big event, so big that the Emperor Nero competed.

And even though he was thrown from his chariot and couldn't finish, he was nonetheless declared the winner.

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In Alabama, the Shoals is the spiritual center of the Protestant denomination known as the Church of Christ.

There are many, many Church of Christ congregations within an hour's drive of Florence, and I don't think that any of the things we're going to explore over the course of this series will make sense unless you first understand something about this denomination.

If I blindfolded you and put you in an early 1980s Church of Christ congregation, how long would it take you before you knew you were in Church of Christ?

I would know in about three minutes or less.

This is Lee Camp, who has taught theology for years at Lipscomb University in Nashville, one of the most prestigious of the many universities around the United States affiliated with the Church of Christ.

What would be the tip-off?

Well, the singing would be a cappella is the first thing.

And so, you know, the only place you're going to find a cappella singing is probably either going to be Mennonites or Church of Christ.

Maybe Church of the Brethren.

And then there are going to be certain phrases that are going to get said that would just be a tip-off that, you know, this is where they go.

And the prayers are going to say, Lord, guard, guide, and direct us.

I don't know.

There'd just be language like that that I would immediately know.

By the way, for those of you who know something about country music, what do Wayland Jennings, Roy Orberson, Loretta Lynn, Glenn Campbell, Dwight Yoakum, Pat Boone, Crystal Gale, I could go on, all have in common?

They all came out of the acapella tradition of the Church of Christ.

It's not Sunday morning.

I just take you to a church.

It's empty.

How long does it take you to know that you're in a church of Christ?

There's no one in there.

You look around.

What do you see that's the tip of?

No organ.

There's no organ, and just the whole architecture is very, very simple.

There's a lack of pretense.

There's certainly no

art on the walls.

There's no stations of the cross.

There's there's pews and there are, there's on the one side at the front is going to be a board that shows attendance contribution numbers.

On the other side is going to be a board that has the hymn numbers that you slide in with the numbers.

And in the middle is going to be a simple pulpit.

I know about the Church of Christ because my best friend is the screenwriter Charles Randolph, whose father, Dale, was a Church of Christ minister who went to Lipscomb.

And once, when I was visiting Lipscomb, the same school where Lee Camp teaches, a little old lady came out to me and said, Are you Dale Randolph's famous son, Chuck's friend?

Yes, I am.

And while I'm playing this game, I should point out that halfway through my conversation with Grant Asbel, I discovered that he did his doctorate at Lipscomb with Lee Camp.

The point is that the Church of Christ is a very small world.

It's a family.

Now you're from Alabama.

I am from Alabama.

You were born in Talladega.

Talladega.

Not Talladega or Talladega.

It's Talladega.

Talladega.

And you grew up in the Church of Christ.

I did.

When you say that you are

that you belong to the Church of Christ, what are you saying about...

What does that mean?

How's is that different from, I'm a Baptist?

Well, it depends on who you're talking to and where they are in their experience of churches of Christ.

But when someone says, I'm a member of the Church of Christ,

that means that they are members of the true church that restored New Testament Christianity and everybody else is wrong.

And that this is the true church.

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

In the taxonomy of Southern Protestantism, there are the Pentecostals, the singing, the swaying, speaking in tongues, emotion.

The Church of Christ isn't that.

Then there are the fundamentalists, the Southern Baptists, fire and brimstone.

The Church of Christ isn't that either.

The Baptists and the Pentecostals can sometimes go on all Sunday afternoon.

In a Church of Christ, you're out in an hour.

These are the people of the book.

There are said to be more advanced degrees in the Church of Christ leadership than any of the southern denominations.

They're a church of rules and certainties, simplicity and clarity.

A church inspired by the idea that anyone who studies the Bible, reads it closely and thoughtfully, can discern the path to salvation.

That's the good part, the beautiful part.

But the other part And by the way, no one is more willing to acknowledge the limitations of the Church of Christ than people who belong to the Church of Christ.

Is that the rules, the certainty, the intimacy can become a straitjacket?

Like, I love and hate Church of the Christ.

You know, I love them and I have hated them.

And, you know, I love them because

I've spent my life doing what I've done with my life because of what I learned in my church.

You know, I was loved by my church.

I was loved by the people in that church.

And yet, at the same time,

the traditions in the latter part of the 20th century have done a lot of damage to a lot of people, including me.

There's a sense of fear.

And there's always the danger that you'll be

kind of cut off.

And so it was kind of fear of just saying, you're not okay.

You know, you don't toe the line.

And so the church would practice this sort of, on occasion, would practice this sort of misfellowshipping, we called it,

where you could literally be socially

estranged, socially disciplined publicly.

And then apart from some sort of public statement of repentance, you couldn't be a member of good standing in the church.

You cannot divorce your wife unless there is a documented case of adultery.

Full stop.

Women cannot participate in a church service.

Full stop.

Singing must be a cappella.

Instruments are a frivolity.

You've got all these taboos around no dancing, because if you dance, you're going to lust.

And if you lust, you're going to go to hell.

You know, no mixed bathing, we called it, which means you're not swimming around people of the opposite sex because if you do, you're going to lust and you'll go to hell.

And one of my favorite stories about kind of illustrating this was that

we were on a youth group trip

in another town, and we were pulling out of the church to go to lunch break, and

the preacher driving the van, van full of, you know, impressionable 14, 15-year-olds, he looks to the left, and there's this guy jogging down the sidewalk in his jogging shorts.

And we were not permitted to wear shorts in public because of the lust thing, you know.

And this guy's jogging down the sidewalk and the preacher looks at him and he says, he looks real nice in those jogging shorts.

He'll look real nice in hell.

This is the world Charles Sennett, the man at the center of our story, belonged to.

He was born in West Virginia.

His father was a Church of Christ preacher.

He got married to Elizabeth Dorlene in 1962.

She was the picture of a preacher's wife.

They had two sons together.

And by the time she was in her early 40s, Elizabeth was already a grandmother.

There are still lots of people in the Shoals who remember the sentence.

She was a typical, love my grandbaby, let me run home, make chocolate chip cookies, and keep them over weekend with their family, their parents, and go out and have a date night.

This is Susan Mosley.

a nurse at a local weight loss clinic who became close with Elizabeth.

You know, brought them babies with her a lot of times.

And they, and I made a little thing in there and that little exercise we're in, a little table chair, we're coloring books so they can sit there and tell her like she was doing.

Charles got a doctorate in divinity in the 1970s, became the preacher at a Church of Christ in Jasper, Alabama, a small town two hours south of the Shoals.

He was good.

In a few years, he tripled the size of the church.

He was handsome, dynamic, a wonderful singing voice in the best Church of Christ tradition.

At some point in his 30s, at the point his career seemed ascendant, things began to go sideways for Charles Sennett.

There were rumors of some indiscretion at the Church of Christ in Jasper, an affair.

The elders fired him.

If you want to trace the precise moment at which things began to unravel, perhaps it was here.

Because there is a version of events in which he could have stayed in Jasper for his whole career, built upon his success there.

To be a minister at a successful Church of Christ is a position of real status.

There's a kind of free market in that world.

When there's a hot young preacher in town, people will leave their churches and join the rising star.

Sennett was that rising star, but then he lost it all.

He was despondent.

His family came upon him one night, curled up in a ball on the couch.

He'd had a nervous breakdown.

He became suicidal.

He ended up spending weeks in a psychiatric hospital in Birmingham.

This is the summary from the medical records of the psychiatric facility where he was hospitalized.

Exam reveals an unkempt, hostile, rebellious white male.

His thought content is preoccupied, his psychomotor agitated, and his affect labile.

His mood is depressed, his sensorium confused, and his tension level tense.

His insight is lacking, and his judgment is poor.

He found another job, then another, moved to the Shoals, and became the preacher at the Westside Church of Christ in Sheffield.

Small working-class congregation, little white church, not Jasper, a step down, starting over.

A lot of this that I know is hearsay amongst us all.

You know how it passes from person to person, gets bigger or gets smaller.

So

take everything I tell you with a grain of salt because it was all hearsay.

This is Charlie Bill and her son Eric.

They were members of Charles Sennett's church.

And

was he a good preacher?

Evidently, he must have been

charismatic.

Yes, I would say.

Very charismatic.

Yeah.

Yeah.

At that point, my mother called him a ladies man.

Oh, really?

Oh, your mother had a, she had a,

did she mean that?

My mother had a way of labeling people.

Did she mean that in a positive way or in a negative way?

My grandmother said it, it was negative.

She was very conservative and very,

yeah.

Yeah, that would have been a very, a very negative thing to say about somebody.

Maybe I could say it's about as pure Church of Christ as you can get.

There were whispers about a woman in the Westside congregation, Doris.

We heard the,

you know,

the connected rumors that she was involved.

Her husband was having some serious issues.

I don't know.

Reading on it, I almost would think she was seeking, I think he was probably her minister because I think she went to Westside, wasn't it?

Yeah, I think so at the time.

That's my understanding.

I don't know, therefore, I would almost say she was probably seeking some counseling from him.

Charles Sennett was in love with a woman who was not his wife.

He had a book of poems in his office called Memories of the Heart with Doris' picture in it.

There were rumors.

Someone saw a Valentine Charles had given Doris.

I talked with another former member of the Westside Church, Carl Rodin.

We sat in his living room.

He had a dog on his lap.

I'm just curious,

was he a good...

He was a nice fellow you ever wanted to be around.

He was what?

Nice.

Yeah.

I mean, you just couldn't hardly beat him.

Somebody be sick, he'd be the first one there with some food.

Nursing home, he'd be the first one there with something to eat or, you know.

Was he a good preacher?

Yeah.

That's what he had a split personality, best I can tell.

Yeah.

Do you remember

he had been, it came out during the trial that

he had been,

he had been at a church in Jasper

and had been fired from that job because he was the same thing, having an affair with someone in the church.

See, they should have told us

when they fired him, but didn't nobody say nothing back to him.

Yeah.

It was all over.

You might as well say.

Yeah.

There's no way of, there was, he just, do you remember anything about how he came to the church in the first place?

You don't?

I just remember there, and I don't.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Yeah.

I don't know how they got a hold of him or anything.

So he was really popular.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He was a nice fellow.

Like I say, he'd be the first one at somebody's house with food, you know, or

he was just a nice guy.

That's all you can make out of.

Nobody would ever have thought this, that's what, you know, he would have done something like that.

In the winter of 1988, Charles and his wife Elizabeth fought.

She wanted a divorce, and they both knew what that meant.

He shouted at her, I won't lose another church.

He was $150,000 in debt from failed business ventures, this on a preacher's salary.

His behavior grew erratic.

The walls began to close in.

He had a secret he could not share, a marriage that was disintegrating, demons he was desperately trying to keep at bay.

He still goes to preach every Sunday, but no one knows the full story of his life.

No one, that is, except the only person who would have mattered for Charles Sennett, and that was God.

The Olympic Games have come a long way since the first one in 776 BC.

In fact, those Olympic Games weren't even games.

It was the Olympic game, as there was only one race, a straight 630-foot sprint.

By 67 AD, chariot racing had become a big event, so big that the Emperor Nero competed.

And even though he was thrown from his chariot and couldn't finish, he was nonetheless declared the winner.

It's good to be king.

One thing that hasn't changed is the importance of quality sleep to an athlete's performance, which is why Satva is so proud to have been named the official mattress and restorative sleep provider for the U.S.

Olympic and Para-Olympic teams.

No one knows more about restorative sleep than Satva.

Each one of their mattresses is designed to provide the kind of sleep elite athletes need to perform at their peak.

Of course, you don't have to be an elite athlete to benefit from sleeping well.

Being human is the only requirement.

Visit SAFA.com slash Gladwell to save up to $200 on a $1,000 or more purchase.

That's S-A-A-T-V-A.com slash Gladwell.

In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

T-Mobile knows all about that.

They're now the best network, according to the experts at OoCla Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

With SuperMobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged.

With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

That's your business, supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.

where you can see the sky.

Best business plan based on a combination of advanced network performance, coverage layers, and security features.

features.

Best network based on analysis by OOCLA of SpeedTest Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

Malcolm Glabwell here.

This October, I'll be spending a few days in California and then back across the country to Florida.

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Florida, It's so warm you forget it's fall.

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One thing I don't understand is he seems completely ill-suited ill-suited

for the ministry.

He seems volatile.

He's having an affair with a congregant.

His finances are a mess.

He's abusive to his wife.

I'm just curious, how does he,

how would someone like that enter and survive in the ministry, particularly

in a world where people are as conscious of conduct as

the Church of Christ community is?

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

I asked a Church of Christ minister named Rodney Plunkett about the case.

He knew Charles Sennett.

That's not atypical.

Yeah,

they mask.

And the amount of effort that must have gone into masking that.

Enormous.

Malcolm, it's absolutely enormous.

I asked my theologian friend Lee Camp the same question.

One of the things I'm trying to understand

is we have this man, Church of Christ minister, Charles Sennett,

in

Littletown, northwestern Alabama,

who is

having an affair and his wife has decided to divorce him.

And,

you know, I'm wondering, were he a, you know,

a Mennonite or were he a Muslim or whatever,

all those those traditions would have, would shape

his dysfunction in some way.

And I'm curious,

how does his tradition shape his dysfunction?

That's what I'm trying to get at.

What's going on inside his head as he processes the kind of

his affair, his wife's decision,

and the chaos of his own life?

And he's the pastor of this

little white clapper church in a corner of Sheffield.

Yeah.

I mean, who knows, right?

But,

you know, I would make up that

the sense of shame is

overwhelming.

And

when you're in a context of overwhelming shame,

it can do terrifying things to the psyche.

And

in the absence of any sort of

constructive grace, and I don't mean by that some flabby sense of, oh, everything's okay, you know, grace, but some sort of constructive sense of grace.

You know, it can quickly lead you to all sorts of madness.

Christian grace, God's unmerited favor and loving kindness, a gift freely given to humanity, unearned and undeserved, a spontaneous act of generosity on God's part, extended to all humanity, regardless of their sin.

What Camp was saying and what many others in the Church of Christ came to believe was that their church, particularly their church in that era, 40, 50 years ago, did not understand grace.

Grant Asbel told me about his uncle, the song leader in a Church of Christ congregation, who once talked a little bit too much about grace and forgiveness at Sunday school.

and so was let go.

The church elders wouldn't even let him finish out his contract, because if you had deciphered the rules of the Bible, the logic of the Christian text, then there shouldn't be any deviation, should there?

It was all crystal clear.

And if you started to grant forgiveness for those who strayed from that narrow path, then what incentive did people have to follow the narrow path?

That was the thinking.

And it's where the shame that Lee Camp was talking about came from.

Because in the absence of grace, There is no relief from transgression.

People like Asbel and Lee Camp had been trying to push their church in a more forgiving direction to bring grace into their religious experience.

But in the 1980s, in a small town in Alabama, this is what Aspel said.

And the idea behind that is this idea that if you want to one day be judged faithful,

you have to have kept these rules.

And even to the point where if you break one of the rules, you can ask forgiveness.

But the way that it felt as a kid was if you fell out of an airplane and you said a cuss word on the way down and you didn't have a chance to repent of that word before you hit the ground,

then you might, your soul might be lost to damnation for eternity.

When Lee Kemp said, I have loved my church and I have hated my church, this was the part he hated.

I mean, I think it's interesting that you said,

you know, when we think, when we imagine what is going through the mind of someone whose

marriage is in trouble, who is in love with another woman,

one

possible interpretation is that their motivation is genuine in the sense that they have fallen out of love with their wife and in love with someone else and see the possibility for a greater happiness and are willing to endure a certain amount of pain and heartbreak heartbreak to get to that greater happiness.

But that's not,

I'm not imagining that's what it is.

It's he is in love with another woman and is consumed

with shame over his predicament.

Yeah, I mean, there's certainly, so far as his church context would be concerned, there's no viable route to a greater happiness with the other woman.

because it's simply not going to be permitted unless you leave the community

that you probably think is the community that you have to be a part of if you're not going to go to hell.

I mean, it's that simple, really.

Again, I don't want to speculate about what he's thinking, but

I would conjecture, given all that we know, you know, that I know about that experience, that there's, it would be plausible that something like that's going on.

You know,

which is a,

which is a, he's in a terrifying, for him, a terrifying

Sure.

As I'm sure was his wife.

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.

There is a proverb that dates back to the Middle Ages that I'm sure you've heard in one version or another.

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost.

For want of a shoe, the horse was lost.

For want of a horse, the rider was lost.

For want of a rider, the message was lost.

For want of a message, the battle was lost.

For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost.

All for the want of a nail.

The proverb of a lost nail is what's called a failure cascade.

One small misstep or mishap leads to a second bigger problem and a third even bigger problem.

And finally, at the end of the chain, catastrophe.

The Northeastern blackout in August of 2003, one of the biggest blackouts in history, was a failure cascade.

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 moment, perhaps because of the summer heat, sagged a little bit more than usual.

and touched the trees.

The contact caused a 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.

For want of a chainsaw, the power was lost.

The Alabama murders Murders is about a classic failure cascade, only where the ever-widening ripples were caused not by mechanical or institutional defects, but failures of character, of justice, of compassion.

Coming up on the Alabama murders.

That the viciousness was there that he could do something like that.

I don't know.

I answered the call and I got all the information on who done it, who was all involved, and all the particulars.

He was having an affair with a parishioner.

There weren't 70 people that went to that church.

How did they not know that this was going on?

I don't know which one of them killed her.

I really don't.

But I think both of them got what they probably deserved, legally and morally.

And at the time, we hadn't had an execution in Alabama in a very long time.

And I said, sure, well, you know, I didn't know what I was getting into.

What is taught either in nursing school or as an EMT or as a doctor cannot be lifted into the death chamber.

Like it's not the same place.

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.

Revisionist History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Ben Nadaf Haffrey, and Nina Bird Lawrence.

Additional reporting by Ben Nadaf Haffrey and Lee Hedgebeth.

Our editor is Karen Shikurji.

Fact-checking by Kate Ferby.

Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

Production support from Luke Lamond.

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 Gladwell.

Malcolm Glabel here.

I'm excited to share that Revisionist History is a Signal Awards finalist in two categories.

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Vote at vote.signalaward.com.

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