The Alabama Murders - Part 2: Coon Dog Cemetery Road

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Speaker 2 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.

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Speaker 39 Pushkin.

Speaker 40 Hello, hello, Malcolm here.

Speaker 28 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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Speaker 1 Previously on revisionist history.

Speaker 46 Was he a good preacher?

Speaker 47 Evidently, he must have been

Speaker 48 charismatic. Yes, I would say.
Very charismatic.

Speaker 49 Florence, you don't get here by accident.

Speaker 50 And so the idea that someone within this framework could do something like Charles Sennett did was very disruptive.

Speaker 50 He worked very hard to make sure nobody knew outside that tight circle of biological family.

Speaker 51 When someone says, I'm a member of the Church of Christ,

Speaker 53 that means that they are members of the true church.

Speaker 51 That's not a denomination, that's not Protestant, it's not Catholic, it's just the true church.

Speaker 28 We're now into the hills.

Speaker 54 We're now into the Alabama hills of

Speaker 54 we're on a long winding two-lane road following an F-150

Speaker 57 pickup truck. Like much of

Speaker 57 this corner of Alabama,

Speaker 57 it's really gorgeous countryside.

Speaker 28 We are way out and

Speaker 58 I mean, we haven't passed

Speaker 26 a house in quite some time.

Speaker 22 On one of our trips to the Shoals, my colleague Ben Nadaf Haffrey and I drove out to find the house where Charles and Elizabeth Sennett lived.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 62 Coondog Cemetery Road. Then arrive at your destination.

Speaker 57 Where all the best coondogs arrived find their final

Speaker 57 resting place.

Speaker 58 Oh my god, it's an actual. It's a real place.

Speaker 22 Because we couldn't find the Senate House, we ended up at the cemetery.

Speaker 8 There were headstones.

Speaker 29 Lots of American flags.

Speaker 39 There's a little sign with a coondog on it.

Speaker 12 Only cemetery of its kind in the world.

Speaker 56 Troop.

Speaker 57 First dog laid to rest here, September 4th, 1937.

Speaker 28 Then we met an older couple who gave us directions.

Speaker 37 We drove back the way we came and finally found it.

Speaker 63 Here, this is the driveway.

Speaker 63 And there's the gate.

Speaker 64 Oh, yeah, there's the

Speaker 63 drain pipe. The drain pipe.

Speaker 63 I think I see the remains.

Speaker 63 So it's just an overgrown gate with some posted signs.

Speaker 63 The house is gone now.

Speaker 57 It's a double-wide trailer.

Speaker 28 Burned down a

Speaker 57 couple years ago.

Speaker 63 There's a pond back there.

Speaker 64 It's

Speaker 28 if we hadn't have met that

Speaker 18 guy, we would have had no idea.

Speaker 63 Yeah, you would not have identified this as a... I guess there's the only thing is the gate that says private property.

Speaker 39 It's all overgrown now.

Speaker 18 If you wanted to hide,

Speaker 57 let's just say this is a very good place to hide.

Speaker 63 Nobody's going to trouble you.

Speaker 40 My name is Malcolm Globwell.

Speaker 28 This is the Alabama Murders.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 41 In this episode, we're going to go deep into the crime that took place on the morning of March 18th, 1988, that kicked off the cascade and tore the Senate family apart before it accelerated and spread to countless others.

Speaker 40 35 years.

Speaker 69 That's how long Elizabeth Sennett's family waited for justice to occur.

Speaker 69 35 long

Speaker 70 years.

Speaker 13 This is the Attorney General of Alabama, Steve Marshall, at a press conference in 2022.

Speaker 6 When, by the way, the Senate case still wasn't over, when it still had one final grotesque act to come.

Speaker 69 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.

Speaker 69 The justice delayed is justice denied.

Speaker 45 No, What the Senate case teaches us is that justice delayed is what justice is in the world we have chosen for ourselves.

Speaker 41 The question is why?

Speaker 62 How does a crime turn into a cascade?

Speaker 71 Episode 2, Coondog Cemetery Road.

Speaker 72 So then have you seen pictures of this family, of Charles Sennett and Liz?

Speaker 72 So, actually, Charles Sennett kind of looked like

Speaker 72 a 1980s TV evangelist.

Speaker 34 This is Lacey Kennemer, whose husband was one of the many lawyers drawn into the Senate case.

Speaker 72 He was handsome, dark-headed, kind of had that

Speaker 72 southern,

Speaker 72 a little bit,

Speaker 72 a little bit redneck, but look, she was homely as a mud fence.

Speaker 74 I mean, and

Speaker 72 everything that I've read about him, and what I've

Speaker 75 homely as a mud fence.

Speaker 70 I've never heard of that.

Speaker 72 Homely as a mud fence.

Speaker 56 Yeah, I've never heard of that. I don't even ever heard of a mud fence.
Mud fence.

Speaker 72 Well, you can imagine.

Speaker 57 Yes,

Speaker 57 it paints a picture.

Speaker 74 So, what I remember, what I recall

Speaker 72 about this

Speaker 72 was

Speaker 72 the fact that he was having an affair with a parishioner.

Speaker 72 There weren't 70 people that went to that church. How did they not know that this was going on? And then

Speaker 72 they lived out on what's called Kung Dog Cemetery Road, which

Speaker 72 is in a rural part of Cobra County. And when I say rural, it's frighteningly rural,

Speaker 72 which makes me wonder about this guy. I mean, it had to be Kundal Cemetery Road, if you were on out on it.

Speaker 72 He had to live 32 miles from his church building

Speaker 72 and

Speaker 72 a long way from his parishioners.

Speaker 49 I think the guy was crazy.

Speaker 76 On March 18th, 1988, just before noon, Charles Sennett returned home from a morning in town.

Speaker 25 His house was ransacked.

Speaker 28 The living room was a mess.

Speaker 22 A coffee table had been turned upside down, its legs broken.

Speaker 52 Wood fragments were everywhere.

Speaker 25 A stereo and VCR were missing.

Speaker 64 And lying on the floor of the den, in a pool of blood, was his wife, Elizabeth Dorlene Sennett.

Speaker 12 She'd been stabbed repeatedly.

Speaker 21 A white and blue Afghan covered her face and torso.

Speaker 45 Sennett called the Colbert County Sheriff's Office.

Speaker 34 An investigator named Ronnie Mae answered the phone. Sennett was hysterical and May couldn't understand him at first, didn't even know whether he was speaking to a man or a woman.

Speaker 27 May said, calm down.

Speaker 58 Then again, calm down.

Speaker 78 Sennett said, I've just come home.

Speaker 26 My house has been broken into and my wife has been killed.

Speaker 64 May said, stay where you are.

Speaker 39 We'll be right there.

Speaker 13 May and his officers drove out to Senate's house.

Speaker 34 It was raining heavily.

Speaker 20 As he walked in through the carport, Sennett came running towards him, wrapped his arms around him, and said, Ronnie, Ronnie, they've killed her.

Speaker 64 They've killed her.

Speaker 34 Ronnie Mae walked into the den where Elizabeth Sennett's body was lying.

Speaker 61 He reached for a pulse, couldn't find one, thought she was dead.

Speaker 37 But when the ambulance arrived a few minutes later, one of the paramedics found a faint pulse.

Speaker 79 chuck and mike sennett their two sons were 25 and 23 years old at the time mom was just a homemaker kind nurturing was there every day after school you know growing up you know we never missed a time with her and daddy they later gave an interview to the local news about that day chuck got the news before I did.

Speaker 79 Daddy called me at work.

Speaker 79 Yeah, Chuck called me at work, said something happened to mom at the farm. Get out here quick.

Speaker 25 Elizabeth Sennett was taken by ambulance to Helen Keller Hospital in Sheffield.

Speaker 22 In the ER, the medical staff tried frantically to keep her alive.

Speaker 29 The doctors started cardiac resuscitation, put in an IV, gave her fluid, put in a breathing tube.

Speaker 41 They took Elizabeth Sennett to the operating room, opened her chest.

Speaker 13 Found no blood in her heart or vascular system.

Speaker 64 In one last attempt to save her life, they put a clamp across her aorta on the chance that the fluid would fill her heart chamber.

Speaker 79 We sit there for a while and then they invite you up to the second floor, which is where they deliver the bad news.

Speaker 6 Elizabeth Sennett was pronounced dead at 2.05 in the afternoon.

Speaker 13 Lacey Kennemer knew one of the nurses who was there at the hospital when Elizabeth was brought in that day.

Speaker 80 So she's in the ER

Speaker 80 with the doctor

Speaker 81 and

Speaker 81 Ms. Sennett.

Speaker 80 And the doctor said, please go out and tell her husband she is still hanging on. She's still with us.

Speaker 81 She said, I walked out of that.

Speaker 80 I will never forget as long as I live.

Speaker 81 I walked out of that. um emergency department i walked out of the emergency room room and went to him and told him and he was astounded.

Speaker 81 He said, that cannot be.

Speaker 81 Wow.

Speaker 29 It wasn't long before the speculation began.

Speaker 47 I'm just really curious about when

Speaker 24 the news broke about what had happened to Elizabeth or Elizabeth Dorlene.

Speaker 49 Can you tell me about what that was like?

Speaker 48 I can tell you every minute of that one.

Speaker 25 This is Charlie Bill, who went to Charles Sennett's church.

Speaker 48 When we stopped by to visit at the church the last time where he was preaching on the way home to visit our parents, he backhanded his child.

Speaker 48 I don't know what the child had done. My husband was furious

Speaker 48 because he said, you just don't do that to a child across its face. You might hit its ear and causes a hearing to be gone.
So he was really mad about it.

Speaker 48 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.

Speaker 48 That's how convinced he was over that slapping.

Speaker 48 That the viciousness was there, that he could do something like that. I don't know.
But that's where we heard it first: sitting at the breakfast table.

Speaker 73 Carl Rodin, a member of Sennett's congregation, spoke to Sennett on the morning of the murder.

Speaker 29 and drove him to the hospital.

Speaker 39 Picked him up at Highway 72 at

Speaker 39 247.

Speaker 39 He was in ambulance and he got out and got in the car with me and I brought him on to the hospital.

Speaker 63 Yeah.

Speaker 39 The only thing he ever said after, you know, you look back, he said, they shouldn't have done her that way.

Speaker 39 It didn't really mean nothing at the time.

Speaker 45 Her funeral was the following Sunday at the Westside Church of Christ, her husband's church.

Speaker 25 Roden watched Senna walk out of the service.

Speaker 39 After the closing prayers and singing and all that, family comes out first. And he has her picture up against his chest with both hands, hugging it.

Speaker 39 And it was just the most fake thing I believe I ever saw. And I told my wife, I said, that's the most funniest thing I've ever saw.
And

Speaker 39 he just, it looked put on.

Speaker 22 Rodin lives in a small white house right down the street from the old Westside Church of Christ, now empty, but still with the very Church of Christ message on the sign outside.

Speaker 14 Time is precious.

Speaker 22 Are you spending time with the God who made you?

Speaker 62 As we were talking with Roden, he told us about a friend, someone who'd worked the case when it first broke.

Speaker 83 You say his name is Mickey?

Speaker 39 Ricky. Ricky.
Ricky Miller. Ricky Miller.

Speaker 63 And he was one of the deputies investigating

Speaker 63 the case.

Speaker 63 And he's... He's the one you really need to talk with.

Speaker 6 And so Roden called Ricky up.

Speaker 39 When do you say come, today or tomorrow?

Speaker 70 I don't know, shit.

Speaker 56 Around now, if we want to stay. Okay, get it over with.

Speaker 39 We'll be there in...

Speaker 75 Now they're feminine and everything. Get your hair combed.

Speaker 75 It's going to be a movie to get your hair combed.

Speaker 75 You got a haircut to me. What's that movie mean?

Speaker 18 Well, you done got your hair cut.

Speaker 70 I don't know, but I don't know. I don't know how no movie.

Speaker 75 No, they just writing a story or something. I don't really know.

Speaker 75 They're pretty good old Joes anyway. They are Yankees.

Speaker 70 Hey, how many of them is it?

Speaker 75 It's just two of them with a microphone.

Speaker 56 Well, they'll bring your your bath to your song.

Speaker 56 Okay.

Speaker 75 I'll be there in ten minutes. They'll be there in ten minutes.

Speaker 39 Okay, bye. Bye.

Speaker 56 Thank you so much.

Speaker 75 Thank y'all.

Speaker 55 Appreciate it, Professor.

Speaker 55 Good luck.

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Speaker 25 October 10th is World Mental Health Day.

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Speaker 25 The Olympic Games have come a long way since the first one in 776 BC.

Speaker 7 In fact, those Olympic Games weren't even games.

Speaker 84 It was the Olympic game, as there was only one race, a straight 630-foot sprint.

Speaker 26 By 67 AD, chariot racing had become a big event, so big that the Emperor Nero competed.

Speaker 43 And even though he was thrown from his chariot and couldn't finish, he was nonetheless declared the winner.

Speaker 88 It's good to be king.

Speaker 36 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.

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Speaker 2 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.

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Speaker 8 With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 8 That's your business, supercharged.

Speaker 16 Learn more at supermobile.com.

Speaker 7 Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.

Speaker 9 where you can see the sky.

Speaker 12 Best business plan based on a combination of advanced network performance, coverage layers, and security features.

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Speaker 13 Carl Roden's friend Ricky Miller lives in a small, immaculate house in a a quiet part of Muscle Shoals.

Speaker 73 He's retired after a long career as an investigator in the district attorney's office.

Speaker 60 Handsome, quiet, recently widowed.

Speaker 25 Still had a law enforcement haircut.

Speaker 44 I assisted the sheriff's department in investigating the case.

Speaker 91 And

Speaker 18 it got interesting.

Speaker 44 You know, the more you got into it, the more interesting it got.

Speaker 25 He was part of the team that went out to the Senate's property after the murder to search the pond.

Speaker 45 They drained it, found a survival knife, a fireplace poker, and a fireplace brush.

Speaker 44 There were so many leads and stuff we followed and followed.

Speaker 42 But

Speaker 44 at the time,

Speaker 44 the Crime Stoppers phone for our county was in my office. And I answered the call, and I got all the information on who done it.
who was all involved, and all the particulars.

Speaker 73 The anonymous caller named three young men, all in their teens and early 20s, Billy Gray Williams, John Forrest Parker, and Kenny Eugene Smith.

Speaker 83 The caller had details, right down to the location of key pieces of evidence.

Speaker 13 The caller said they had taken the VCR.

Speaker 44 And the call I received even told me where the VCR was being used, and it was on Kenneth Smith's

Speaker 42 TV.

Speaker 44 Said it's sitting there right now. He's using it.

Speaker 42 And come to find out, that was accurate.

Speaker 34 All three of the young men were arrested.

Speaker 25 All three confessed.

Speaker 34 Kenny Smith explained that he'd been approached by Billy Williams a month earlier. He knew Williams from high school.

Speaker 25 The two of them had talked out on his front porch.

Speaker 13 Smith said, quote, Billy said he knew someone that wanted somebody hurt.

Speaker 6 Billy said the person wanted to pay to have it done.

Speaker 45 Billy said the person would pay $1,500 to do the job.

Speaker 13 I think I told Billy I would think about it and get back with him.

Speaker 84 Smith then says he agrees to do it and recruits John Parker to help.

Speaker 34 Two weeks later, Smith met with the man Williams had been in contact with.

Speaker 13 He didn't identify himself and they had no idea who he was.

Speaker 6 The man said he wanted someone taken care of, a woman.

Speaker 34 The man said the woman would be at home, that she never had any visitors.

Speaker 13 The man said that the house was out in the country.

Speaker 34 They all met again at a coffee shop.

Speaker 22 The man drew a diagram of the house.

Speaker 52 It was supposed to look like a burglary that went bad.

Speaker 34 The man said they could take whatever they wanted.

Speaker 34 On the morning of the 18th, Parker and Smith met up at 8.30.

Speaker 64 Parker brought a black-handled survival knife.

Speaker 73 The two of them drove out to Koondag Cemetery Road in Parker's Pontiac Grand Prix.

Speaker 71 Smith told investigators, John and I got to the Senate House around 9.30, I think.

Speaker 28 I knocked on the door.

Speaker 10 I told Mrs.

Speaker 28 Sennett that that her husband had told us that we could come down and look around the property to see about hunting on it.

Speaker 13 John and I looked around the property for a while, then came back into the house. John and I went back to the door.

Speaker 71 We told Mrs.

Speaker 13 Sennett we needed to use the bathroom and she led us inside.

Speaker 6 I went to the bathroom nearest the kitchen and then John went to the bathroom.

Speaker 12 I stood at the edge of the kitchen talking with Mrs.

Speaker 22 Sennett.

Speaker 18 Mrs. Sennett was sitting at a chair in the den.

Speaker 34 Then I heard John coming through the house.

Speaker 28 John walked up behind Mrs.

Speaker 25 Sennett and started hitting her.

Speaker 7 John was hitting her with his fist.

Speaker 9 I started getting the VCR while John was beating Mrs.

Speaker 7 Sennett.

Speaker 6 John hit Mrs.

Speaker 29 Sennett with a large cane and anything else he could get his hands on.

Speaker 33 John went into a frenzy.

Speaker 27 Mrs. Sennett was yelling, just stop.

Speaker 33 We could have anything we wanted.

Speaker 27 As John was beating up Mrs.

Speaker 7 Sennett, I messed up some things in the house to make it look like a burglary.

Speaker 29 The last place I saw Mrs. Sennett, she was lying near the fireplace, covered with some kind of blanket.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 64 End quote.

Speaker 28 The next morning, the two of them read the newspapers and learned that the woman they had attacked was dead and that her name was Elizabeth Sennett.

Speaker 28 Did you,

Speaker 67 at what point during the investigation, did you come to suspect that Charles Sennett might be involved?

Speaker 44 The first thing that caught our attention, the best I can remember, was he made too many alibis.

Speaker 44 You know, if you go about your casual day, you might run into one, maybe two people,

Speaker 42 but he had a pattern.

Speaker 44 Everywhere he went was to make make an alibi.

Speaker 44 And when he went by Carl's house, Carl said, told me he'd never been to his house, except that one time.

Speaker 59 8 to 8.30, Joel Kendrick.

Speaker 78 8.30 to 9, Sam Garrett Jr.

Speaker 83 9 o'clock, Billy Alexander.

Speaker 28 9.15, Mrs.

Speaker 13 Louise Allen sees him leave Westside Church.

Speaker 43 9.30 to 10, Carl Roden.

Speaker 70 10.

Speaker 64 Teresa Hall.

Speaker 21 10.15, a phone phone call with Tammy Sue Wright.

Speaker 28 11 a.m.

Speaker 22 with Brenda Sprague on Woodmont Drive in Tuscumbria.

Speaker 28 And on and on.

Speaker 44 He made too many of it. It was overkill.

Speaker 44 You know, he stopped to see people that had never seen.

Speaker 44 And that just threw up a red flag to us. Why is he seeing all these people for the first time? It happened to be at the time his wife's being murdered.
You know?

Speaker 44 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?

Speaker 42 Coomed on Cemetery Road. Yeah.

Speaker 44 And it's a good ways out there. People along the way, even on the highway, 247 going up there, said he had stopped and said he'd never stopped here before.

Speaker 44 He could tell you every time, everything, every day. Well, had my wife just been murdered in my home? I couldn't tell you nothing.
My mind's gone.

Speaker 44 But he knew everything in detail.

Speaker 68 That's a red flag.

Speaker 68 So it's.

Speaker 91 And then Carl told us that in the car, Carl takes him to the hospital

Speaker 42 that night.

Speaker 67 He

Speaker 22 said that Senate said to him,

Speaker 67 They beat her up pretty bad, or something like that.

Speaker 58 They shouldn't have done her that way.

Speaker 22 They shouldn't have done her that way.

Speaker 67 How does he know there's two?

Speaker 44 Yeah.

Speaker 44 Yeah, when you use the word they,

Speaker 44 yeah.

Speaker 91 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 68 I understand that when

Speaker 29 Sennett is,

Speaker 67 he tells the story about how he comes back to the house, he sees his wife's body,

Speaker 67 and then they say, well, what did you do? And he said, I didn't touch her, even though he was trained in,

Speaker 67 surely that was another red flag.

Speaker 30 His wife was lying mortally wounded a few feet away.

Speaker 73 He didn't touch her.

Speaker 29 And this was a man who was trained in CPR.

Speaker 44 That was a question we all wondered. First thing you're going to do is go to your wife.
If it had been my wife laying there,

Speaker 44 blunging, bloody, and all, first thing I would have done was checked her, grabbed her. I would have had some kind of evidence on me that I had made contact with.
He lives 16 miles out.

Speaker 44 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? And you're not going to check her?

Speaker 68 That's a red flag.

Speaker 44 You know, there would have been some kind of evidence that you would have checked your why.

Speaker 44 He did not.

Speaker 29 The Olympic Games have come a long way since the first one in 776 B.C.

Speaker 28 In fact, those Olympic Games weren't even games.

Speaker 84 It was the Olympic game, as there was only one race, a straight 630-foot sprint.

Speaker 26 By 67 AD, chariot racing had become a big event, so big that the Emperor Nero competed.

Speaker 43 And even though he was thrown from his chariot and couldn't finish, he was nonetheless declared the winner.

Speaker 88 It's good to be king.

Speaker 85 One thing that hasn't changed is the importance of quality sleep to an athlete's performance.

Speaker 43 Which is why Satva is so proud to have been named the official mattress and restorative sleep provider for the U.S.

Speaker 13 Olympic and Para-Olympic teams.

Speaker 45 No one knows more about restorative sleep than Satfa.

Speaker 85 Each one of their mattresses is designed to provide the kind of sleep elite athletes need to perform at their peak.

Speaker 19 Of course, you don't have to be an elite athlete to benefit from sleeping well.

Speaker 89 Being human is the only requirement.

Speaker 45 Visit Satfa.com/slash Gladwell to save up to $200 on a $1,000 or more purchase.

Speaker 85 That's saatva.com/slash Gladwell.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 11 T-Mobile knows all about that.

Speaker 7 They're now the best network, according to the experts at an 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.

Speaker 82 With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged.

Speaker 10 With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

Speaker 8 With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 8 That's your business, supercharged.

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Speaker 18 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 eaten.

Speaker 89 She's then saved by a hunter who cuts open the wolf's belly, glimpses her red cap, and pulls her out.

Speaker 93 Ah, how frightened I have been! How dark it was inside the wolf's.

Speaker 93 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.

Speaker 28 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-flavoured water in front of their house.

Speaker 93 Then the smell of the sausages reached the wolf.

Speaker 93 and he sniffed and peeped down, and at last stretched out his neck so far that he could no longer keep his footing and began to slip and slipped down from the roof straight into the great trough and was drowned.

Speaker 93 But Little Red Riding Hood went joyously home, and no one ever did anything to harm her again.

Speaker 90 Why do children so cheerfully indulge in a story that is about, let's be clear, a pedophile?

Speaker 73 Because the wolf gets his comeuppance in the end. It's the same principle that explains everything from Sherlock Holmes to the television show Law and Order to countless tabloid-y true crime podcasts.

Speaker 90 We are more than happy to wallow in stories of madness and depravity so long as order is restored in the end.

Speaker 78 Crime stories are exercises in moral assurance.

Speaker 6 With the Senate case, it's enormously tempting to tell a story this way.

Speaker 45 The case is pure southern Gothic.

Speaker 60 I mean, a preacher who has lost his way, a house on a lonely mountain road, called, for goodness sake, Coondog Cemetery Road, and then two local killers for hire speeding back to Florence with a VCR in the back seat.

Speaker 40 You want that version?

Speaker 37 You can find it online.

Speaker 55 This is the story of a God-fearing family who preach, sing, and pray together through good times and bad. But behind church doors and wholesome music

Speaker 55 looms betrayal and deceit, and a murder that will rock a small-town Alabama community to its core.

Speaker 13 But let's be clear, the Little Red Riding Hood model is an illusion.

Speaker 77 You don't return home happily and safely after fighting off a violent predator.

Speaker 73 You spend the rest of your childhood recovering.

Speaker 45 The actual NYPD is nowhere near as effortlessly effective as the fictional NYPD of Law and Order.

Speaker 19 And as much as everyone involved in the Senate case wanted it to end neatly and tidally, as all the classic crime stories do, it didn't end.

Speaker 21 It kept going.

Speaker 37 So tell me about

Speaker 43 when the Senate case breaks,

Speaker 62 when we first hear about it, what impact does it have on the town?

Speaker 94 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

Speaker 94 minister's wife. And as long as they're on the run, then everybody's frightened.
They don't know the motive.

Speaker 25 Billy Warren, the Florenc Town historian.

Speaker 94 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.

Speaker 13 In the middle of this is Sennett himself, under suspicion, but still at large, trying and failing to play the role of the grieving husband and becoming increasingly aware that his treachery was transparent.

Speaker 7 Why did Charles Sennett do such a bad job of covering his own tracks?

Speaker 22 Billy Gray Williams, the man he first approached with his scheme, was his tenant, for goodness sake.

Speaker 71 The sheriff's deputy, Ronnie Mae, recognized Sennett because there had been a murder not long before at a gas station, and Sennett had come to the crime scene uninvited and hung around as if he was studying police procedure.

Speaker 34 And you know where he found the money to pay his hitmen?

Speaker 21 His lover.

Speaker 25 It's as if he wasn't even trying, like he turned himself in before he'd even committed his crime.

Speaker 62 When I try to imagine what was going through his mind in the days after his wife's death, I can't help but think of what the theologian Lee Camp said in the last episode, about how Sennett's original transgression, his affair with a woman in his church, would have filled him with shame.

Speaker 13 And remember the joke he told?

Speaker 27 That for us in the Church of Christ, it's easier to get forgiveness for murdering someone than it was for a divorce?

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 65 The acts are very different, but the consequences are the same.

Speaker 27 So why would Charles Sennett act as if he was indifferent to whether he got caught? Because maybe in his own tangled mind, the leap from an affair to a killing wasn't a leap at all.

Speaker 29 From the moment he cheated on his wife, he was already beyond redemption.

Speaker 45 Charles Sennett was called in for questioning.

Speaker 13 He admitted to the affair, but he denied any involvement with his wife's death.

Speaker 65 He said he suspected a black man from Cherokee, Alabama, a town not far from his house, who he said had an ongoing feud with his son.

Speaker 36 The police called Sennett back for another round of questioning.

Speaker 12 One of the officers mentioned the name Kenny Smith, and Sennett turned beat red.

Speaker 18 Sennett left the police station. He drove to his son, Michael's house.

Speaker 79 You know, he said, you know, I failed a lie detector test. He said,

Speaker 79 you know, I've been involved with somebody else.

Speaker 79 And

Speaker 79 we're taking all this thing. Can't believe it.

Speaker 18 Charles Sennett left the house, got in his Chevy truck, picked up a 22.

Speaker 70 Pow, you hear it.

Speaker 79 He's in his truck

Speaker 79 where he shot himself.

Speaker 70 That was

Speaker 79 seven days after

Speaker 79 mom got killed.

Speaker 12 Friday to Friday.

Speaker 79 Yeah, lost them both in seven days. Yeah.

Speaker 79 One don't know how much you can take

Speaker 79 until you go through something like that.

Speaker 18 In the neat and tidy version of the Senate story, this is the ending.

Speaker 25 The killers have confessed and are in custody. The master criminal has shot himself.

Speaker 65 The victim is buried.

Speaker 27 A crime, a culprit, a mystery, a resolution, a beginning, an end.

Speaker 53 But we're not telling that version of the story.

Speaker 59 We're just getting started.

Speaker 25 Coming up on the Alabama murders, the trial of John Forrest Parker.

Speaker 95 I just don't think some of these people that were on the jury, they didn't want that to be on their conscience the rest of their life, putting somebody into the death penalty.

Speaker 44 I've had, you know, other cases that technically were probably factually more complex, but

Speaker 44 this is, you know, this is the one that I will

Speaker 44 is still on my mind, even without child counting.

Speaker 50 He was the chief of police in Florence. He theorized really early on that, you know, that it wasn't like it was like it was supposed to be looking like it was.

Speaker 37 Revisionist History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Ben Nadaf Haffrey, and Nina Bird Lawrence. Additional reporting by Ben Nadaf Haffrey and Lee Hedgesbeth.

Speaker 6 Our editor is Karen Shikurji.

Speaker 41 Fact-checking by Kate Furbee. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

Speaker 34 Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence.

Speaker 88 Production support from Luke Lamond.

Speaker 37 Original scoring by Luis Guerra with Paul Brainard and Jimmy Bod.

Speaker 82 Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski.

Speaker 64 I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

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