The Alabama Murders - Part 6: The Porterfield Sessions

Transcript

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Speaker 1 Pushkin.

Speaker 1 Previously on revisionist history.

Speaker 21 He was taken out of his cell thinking that his execution was imminent, strapped to a gurney, and he's asking, you know, the corrections officers who are with him what's going on.

Speaker 22 You know, an anesthesiologist in good standing is not going to spend their Wednesdays over at the state corrections sticking IVs in people for execution. It's not something that we do.

Speaker 23 Because a cold-blooded convicted killer complains about the prodd and poking of a small IV line.

Speaker 23 Really?

Speaker 23 Potting and poking with a needle?

Speaker 21 After three and a half or four hours being strapped to a gurney,

Speaker 21 you know, he was unable to

Speaker 21 stand, walk,

Speaker 21 unbutton his shirt, you know, change his clothes, do any of that without assistance.

Speaker 1 They attempted to kill him on November 17th. His lawyers called me, I think, 10 days later.
I didn't know them. They didn't know me.

Speaker 1 And they said, you know, we have a client who's had this thing happen. He's really struggling.

Speaker 1 Would you take a look at him? I'm going to talk to him.

Speaker 2 In the months after his botched execution, Kenny Smith had a confidant, Kate Porterfield, a psychologist who specializes in trauma.

Speaker 2 She has consulted on dozens of death row cases in her career, spent a lot of time at the U.S.

Speaker 2 military prison at Guantanamo Bay, worked for years treating patients at the clinic for torture victims at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan.

Speaker 2 A very good friend of mine, Stephen, knows her well and told me one day, you have to meet my friend Kate. She has the strangest job in America.

Speaker 2 So I called her up and we began to talk, with no real plan or agenda.

Speaker 2 And in one of our conversations, she told me about a case that I'd never heard about before and a person she'd been asked to evaluate who had affected her deeply.

Speaker 2 Kenny Smith.

Speaker 2 That's how I learned about the murder of Elizabeth Sennett. Everything in this series began with my conversations with Kate Porterfield.

Speaker 2 So tell me about your first

Speaker 2 visit with Kenny.

Speaker 1 So my first contact with him was a call, actually.

Speaker 1 It was remarkably

Speaker 1 pleasant. Kenny was a very resilient man.
He was, you know, he had been on death row for 34 years. This was a man used to living on death row and used to being in prison.

Speaker 1 And one of the things he said to me is, you know, he used to call me Doc. He'd say, Doc, I am very institutionalized.
I know how to do this. I've made a life here.

Speaker 1 I have a very good set of friends here and I have really good relationships on the outside. He had been married.
he had children from before he went in, and he had relationships with his children.

Speaker 1 So he said to me,

Speaker 1 I'm very institutionalized. I've been through a lot, but I'm actually pretty stable.
And he said, but I'm falling apart right now from what happened.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think what now, what I think is he was signaling to me,

Speaker 1 I'm pretty sturdy, but this really messed me up.

Speaker 2 Kate Porterfield would end up spending many hours with Kenny Smith over the next year, talking to him on the phone, visiting him at home in prison, trying to understand what happened to him in that execution chamber on the night of November 17th, 2022,

Speaker 2 trying to figure out how damaged he'd been by the experience,

Speaker 2 writing an assessment of his condition that could be used by his legal team in court, and most of all,

Speaker 2 just trying to understand who he was.

Speaker 2 My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to the Alabama Murders.

Speaker 2 In this installment, I want to look at Kenny Smith through the eyes of Kate Porterfield to see the Kenny Smith that she saw in those many encounters between the end of 2022 and the long winter of 2023.

Speaker 2 This is episode 6:

Speaker 2 The Porterfield Sessions.

Speaker 2 In my third conversation with Kate Porterfield, well before we got to Kenny Smith, she told me about a patient she'd seen many years ago. An older man.

Speaker 2 This is when she was working at the torture clinic at Bellevue. He was a refugee from a war-torn country.
He'd been imprisoned, tortured, and at one point he'd been subjected to a mock execution.

Speaker 2 He had been made to believe by his captors that he he was about to die.

Speaker 1 So, this was probably the first person I ever worked with who had had a mock execution, and it is its own

Speaker 1 unimaginable horror that leaves a really, really bad physical, physiological rather imprint.

Speaker 2 Her goal was to gently push him back towards his traumatic experience to better understand and to help him.

Speaker 1 He was very rigid, and

Speaker 1 he would sit just really tightly wound in the sessions really gripping the chair and I

Speaker 1 he didn't want to go there

Speaker 2 it took a very long time to draw him out she would go on to work with five or six other patients who had gone through something similar a gun they thought was loaded put to their head only to realize it was empty being held underwater almost long enough and even in one case being left in a cage with a lion

Speaker 2 She came to believe that this kind of experience deserved its own category. Why is a mock execution uniquely damaging?

Speaker 1 Let me say it this way. When someone says you're about to die, you know, you're terrified and terrorist doesn't even capture, right?

Speaker 1 Most people lose control in some part of their body, maybe their bladder or bowel. You know, there's usually incredible exclaiming of horror.
You know,

Speaker 1 it's not good to think you're about to die. I mean, I've seen six people or whatever try to describe it to me and they all fall apart.

Speaker 1 It's like I've never had someone say it the first time and not really fall apart, like collapse.

Speaker 1 And different ways, I had a guy who had been kidnapped and

Speaker 1 the soldiers came in and said, if we don't get the ransom, you know, we're going to kill you. And then they came in the next day and they had a gun and they put it to his head.

Speaker 1 This man was the most put together, disciplined, you know, kind of controlled guy.

Speaker 1 And when he tried to tell that moment, he just fell down in his chair and grabbed his head. And he was like, My head's hurting, my head's hurting.
I can't, I can't.

Speaker 1 There's just this incredible physiological,

Speaker 1 you know, probably hormonal dump into his system of the same thing that happened, you know,

Speaker 1 when the mock execution took place. So essentially, what trauma does is it becomes imprinted in your body.

Speaker 1 And your memory banks are then linked and hooked up with the fear reaction. So So that's the problem.
It's a bad linkage.

Speaker 1 And so when you think about being told, I'm about to kill you, and then you try to tell it, your body just goes, it goes right into that state of terror.

Speaker 2 This is the first thing that Kate Porterfield saw when she sat down with Kenny Smith, that he was in that special category. But his experience, in some ways, was even more overwhelming.

Speaker 2 This was not a mock execution. It was a botched execution.
Meaning, it it wasn't a trick. They were actually intending to execute Kenny.
They just didn't manage to pull it off.

Speaker 2 And Kate wasn't treating someone years after it had occurred with Kenny Smith. This had just happened.

Speaker 1 This was different.

Speaker 1 You know, this was this very orchestrated, slow,

Speaker 1 systematic process being done by these guys all in this room who he knew.

Speaker 1 Guys who had been his guards for like some of them, some of them he knew, some he didn't, but you know, guys he's known for a lot of years, trying to kill him.

Speaker 1 Very hard to wrap your brain around.

Speaker 2 How do the guards react?

Speaker 1 You know, I think that he believed they got very rattled and he watched it on their faces, but no one could do anything. And it's a scary narrative then of what people will do with orders, right?

Speaker 1 Like, I mean, there was a point after all these poking of him with needles going around his feet, his arms, where they took the gurney and inverted it upwards with his feet up and left him there for, I have to look, but I think it was upwards of 20 minutes, 30 minutes.

Speaker 2 They came back in and they're trying to get blood to flow to him.

Speaker 1 So then they started poking on his collarbone. So they took this man, they tipped him upside down so that the blood would rush to a part of his body.

Speaker 1 They came back in, they injected him with something which he believes and we believe was probably a painkiller. And then they started going on his neck, you know, around his collarbone.
I mean,

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, but

Speaker 1 I don't imagine that a a person who's doing that and witnessing it can walk away from that unscathed themselves.

Speaker 2 Kenny wanted to apologize to the Senate family and say goodbye to his own family, but he was all alone with the execution team. He thought they were killing him before the witnesses could get there.

Speaker 1 And he said one of the ways he stayed calm when there was all that dead time was

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, to the left, I love you. And he said that kind of helped him pass the time, which also was like remarkable to me.

Speaker 1 He was thinking, thinking about how you're managing, like how you're going to choreograph this.

Speaker 1 They come back in, they begin to untie the

Speaker 1 tourniquet on his arm, and they say, it's over now.

Speaker 1 And then one of the people on the team who he didn't know says to him, it's over and I'll be praying for you.

Speaker 1 So these kinds of moments for Kenny were

Speaker 1 just,

Speaker 1 what's the word?

Speaker 1 Unmanageable afterwards. They were unmanageable moments with other humans.

Speaker 2 One minute they were trying to kill him, then they weren't trying to kill him.

Speaker 1 It's very confusing. And then the man, you know, references God.

Speaker 1 Kenny's, you know, most core

Speaker 1 faith, right, is his belief in God and his belief that because of his faith, you know, he had really been saved.

Speaker 1 I'm not talking about saved in the execution. I'm saying saved as a man.
You know, his faith saved him.

Speaker 1 So this collision of people trying to kill you, your body being in something that we don't really understand unless you've had, unless you thought you were going to die, and then someone bringing God in and saying this

Speaker 1 sort of generous thing, I'm going to pray for you, it was, it like, the word unmanageable is what I keep coming up with. He, he couldn't grasp it and he couldn't, he couldn't deal with it after.

Speaker 1 I mean, there were many things that made him distress, but that was one.

Speaker 1 You know, the warden taking his head and saying, this is, this is what's best for you, was another.

Speaker 2 Kate Porterfield would end up having 17 marathon phone sessions with Kenny Smith, and she would twice fly down to Alabama to meet with him in person.

Speaker 2 And after he had told her the story of what happened on November 17th, he told her the story of his life in the years leading up to the murder of Elizabeth Sennett.

Speaker 2 That's after the break.

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Speaker 2 Learn more at supermobile.com. Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.
where you can see the sky.

Speaker 2 Best business plan based on a combination of advanced network performance, coverage layers, and security features. Best network based on analysis by OOCHLA of SpeedTest Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

Speaker 3 You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

Speaker 4 You've got your core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side.

Speaker 7 The point is, you're engaged with your investments, and public gets that.

Speaker 10 On public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul.

Speaker 9 Go to public.com and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.

Speaker 17 Brokerage services for U.S.-listed registered securities, options, and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member Finrun SIPC.

Speaker 19 Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash.

Speaker 12 Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures.

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Speaker 2 Kenny Smith's full name was Kenneth Eugene Smith. Both Kenny and his brother Joey were named for their father, a truck driver named Wesley Eugene Smith.

Speaker 24 Did you ever regret naming the match? I did.

Speaker 2 Linda Smith, Kenny Smith's mom, still lives in the Shoals. She spoke with Lee Hedgepeth, a local reporter who knew Kenny well, and covered his case.

Speaker 24 Has he passed now,

Speaker 24 Gene? Oh, yes. Yeah, he, um,

Speaker 24 I think he was 45 when he passed.

Speaker 2 Linda and Gene had five children together in quick succession. Kenny was the eldest.

Speaker 24 He didn't really want a child

Speaker 24 at that point. Why do you think that was?

Speaker 24 I just don't know.

Speaker 24 I guess he wouldn't

Speaker 24 through with his wild oats, I guess.

Speaker 24 So tell me about the wild oats.

Speaker 24 Not too much of a drinker, more of like pills. Back then, it was kind of uppers and downers.

Speaker 2 Gene was on the road a lot. He had another relationship.
Linda says it was with an underage girl. Gene got her pregnant, but he still came around to see Linda, to sleep with her, or just to hit her.

Speaker 24 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 24 He always did that. Just about.
When did it start? I mean, not when we first started dating. It started.

Speaker 24 I guess it started after Kenny was born.

Speaker 24 You know,

Speaker 24 what I think is he was doing stuff and

Speaker 24 he

Speaker 24 was thinking I was, you know.

Speaker 24 Right. He was jealous, yeah.
But I wasn't, you know.

Speaker 24 I had a kid to raise.

Speaker 24 I mean, he would just hit me in the head and, I mean, I've still got a scar right there where he threw a bottle at me.

Speaker 24 And right here, it may have been gone now, but it would just, you know, hit me. knock me in the floor, slap me.

Speaker 24 Well, see, like I said, he thought that I was, you know, out doing stuff and partying. And like I said, which I wasn't.

Speaker 24 And

Speaker 24 can you recall, like, for example, the incident with the bottle? Can you tell me what happened then? Do you remember it?

Speaker 24 Yeah, I mean, I mean, I didn't know he was coming in that night, which it didn't matter.

Speaker 24 But I was at home, you know, and a friend of mine from work was just there with me. And Kenny was there.

Speaker 24 And he just came in and he was just in a a rage that night.

Speaker 24 Do you remember what Kenny's reaction would be when that's happening? How old is Kenny around this time?

Speaker 24 Around that time, he's probably three or four.

Speaker 24 I mean it'd just run, get up on the couch and sit.

Speaker 24 Him and Joey and just you know

Speaker 24 Do you remember anything that Kenny ever said to you, either when the abuse was happening or afterward?

Speaker 24 Um, yeah, I mean, he would. I mean, you know, and hug me and,

Speaker 24 you know,

Speaker 24 I guess, you know,

Speaker 24 I guess he was telling me, you know, everything would be okay.

Speaker 2 Kenny would draw pictures and give them to his mom.

Speaker 2 At Kenny's sentencing hearing, a series of witnesses testified about Jean's abuse. One was a woman who worked as a waitress with Linda.
Jean would come into the restaurant when Linda was working.

Speaker 2 This is what she said.

Speaker 2 Well, he would take what money Linda had made in tips, and if she did not make what he thought he needed, she would get slapped and beat around right in the restaurant.

Speaker 2 He would walk in and he would tell her he needed to talk to her.

Speaker 2 Well, she would walk off into a private place with him, which was around the corner in the hall, and the next thing you know, you would hear this commotion, and he would be beating her.

Speaker 2 He would slap her, and he would hit her with his fist.

Speaker 2 I have seen him back her up in a corner and just beating her, and I have seen her when her pocket would be torn on the uniform where he had taken the money out of it.

Speaker 2 Question:

Speaker 2 And how often would he come around?

Speaker 2 Well, at least three, two to three times a week that happened. He always made a point to hit her around the eyes.

Speaker 2 The fifth of the children Linda and Jean had together was Michael, who died a few hours after birth. His lungs never developed.

Speaker 2 In testimony, Kenny's brother Joey said, quote, Well, he blamed mother for it and said it was her fault.

Speaker 2 And pretty soon, you know, she felt bad, even kind of accepted the blame, and started drinking real heavy. Question, does your mom drink now today?

Speaker 2 Answer, no.

Speaker 2 Kenny, Joey said in his testimony, was the one taking care of her.

Speaker 2 He would be in there with a cold rag on her head, cleaning up the vomit out of the floor when she missed the commode, and trying to wrestle her up out of the floor to get her in the bed because she was a big woman.

Speaker 2 Question. How old do you think Kenny was the first time that you saw him picking your mama up and talking to her and wiping her? How old do you think he was?

Speaker 2 Probably eight or nine. Question.

Speaker 2 Did there ever come a time when you saw your brother turn to drinking? Answer, oh yes. Question.
Do you remember how old he was? Answer. He was 16.

Speaker 2 Question. Did there ever come a time when you saw your brother start to drink too much? Answer.
Yes.

Speaker 2 Kenny met a woman. They had a child together, Michael, named for Kenny's brother who died.
They moved to a house in Florence.

Speaker 2 And one day, A friend of his from high school asked him if he wanted a little quick money roughing someone up.

Speaker 2 And off he and John Parker went in Parker's Pontiac Grand Prix with a hunting knife and a fifth of wild turkey on the console between them to do what he had seen people do a hundred times in his life.

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Speaker 2 With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Learn more at supermobile.com. Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the US where you can see the sky.

Speaker 2 Best business plan based on a combination of advanced network performance, coverage layers, and security features. Best network based on analysis by UCLA of SpeedTest Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

Speaker 3 You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

Speaker 4 You've got your core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side.

Speaker 7 The point is, you're engaged with your investments, and Public gets that.

Speaker 10 On Public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul.

Speaker 9 Go to public.com and earn an uncapped uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.

Speaker 17 Brokerage services for U.S.-listed registered securities, options, and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC.

Speaker 19 Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash.

Speaker 12 Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures.

Speaker 2 Over the years, there have been some radical technique changes that have led to better results at the Olympics.

Speaker 2 The spinning start to the shock put, for example, resulted in significantly longer throws. Flip turns in swimming dramatically reduced race times.

Speaker 2 And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the Fosbury flop, a technique where a high jumper jumps headfirst with their back towards the bar.

Speaker 2 Jump heights steadily increased as more jumpers started flopping. But it wasn't until recently that elite athletes embraced a technique which has been linked to better performance.

Speaker 2 The technique is called

Speaker 2 sleeping well, which is why SATFA is so proud to be named Official mattress and restorative sleep provider for the U.S. Olympic and Para-Olympic teams.

Speaker 2 Every Sattva mattress is designed to provide the kind of sleep that's essential to an elite athlete's performance.

Speaker 2 Of course, you don't have to be an elite athlete to benefit from flopping onto a Sattva mattress each night. Being human is the only requirement.

Speaker 2 Visit Satva.com/slash Gladwell to save up to $200 on $1,000 or more. That's S-A-A-T-V-A.com/slash slash Gladwell.

Speaker 2 Kate Porterfield and I sometimes digressed into more personal subjects. We talked a lot about our kids and parenting, what she had learned as the mother of three daughters.

Speaker 2 And there was something she said at one point that I can't stop thinking about.

Speaker 1 You know Catherine Harrison? You know who that is? She's a great writer, yeah. And she

Speaker 1 wrote this incredible memoir about her life with her father, who had disappeared and then got involved with her in an incredibly inappropriate way and it was really it's a beautiful very painful memoir very brave and she has a line in there I'm gonna get it wrong but where she says we think that parenting is about unconditional love and what we mean by that is that the parents have unconditional love towards the children but what you learn as you grow and as you have kids is that actually the unconditional love is coming from the child to the parent

Speaker 1 And I will say I see that all the time in my patients who got abused as children, which is they love their parents. They're hungry for their parents.

Speaker 1 They yearn for the memory of their parent to be the good parts. And it doesn't matter that the parents did terrible things to them.
It doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 No, I mean, it matters to who they've become, but in their sense of self.

Speaker 2 Oh, I see.

Speaker 1 They yearn for that parent. Children have an unconditional...
My point is children have an unconditional love of the parent.

Speaker 2 When Kate Porterfield was just out of college, she'd been attacked by a stranger. He took her by surprise and beat her up.
She suffered from what she now realizes was PTSD.

Speaker 2 It took her years to recover. That experience was one of the reasons she developed such an interest in treating trauma.
She had no connection to her attacker, though, no reason to return to him.

Speaker 2 It was possible to understand ultimately that this was just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Speaker 2 But what if he wasn't a stranger? What if you loved your attacker?

Speaker 2 And what if your love was so powerful and instinctual that you couldn't help yourself, that you kept coming back again and again, hoping things might be different?

Speaker 2 I think that's another kind of suffering that deserves its own category.

Speaker 1 I can't tell you how many of the moms of my clients were sexually abused. I can't tell you.
It's incredible. You know?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 you just go, it's just perpetrating and perpetrating and perpetrating through generations.

Speaker 2 I'm curious about what it is you said that dealing with these repeated cases of people who had been through this kind of childhood experience

Speaker 2 taught you a lot. I want to put my finger on what it taught you.

Speaker 1 I understood child development. I had trained in child psychology and I was like, you know, pretty good on it.

Speaker 1 But when you see it go wrong, you really then understand what it takes for it to go right.

Speaker 1 And so watching again and again, men, grown men sitting across from me, covered with tattoos, you know, guys who had killed a couple people maybe,

Speaker 1 crying, watching these men sobbing when they recounted being eight years old and being,

Speaker 1 here's one, and I'll frame carefully, but, you know, raped at age eight multiple times by an older family member.

Speaker 1 And this, you know, person who had committed homicides, no question, sobbing, talking about it. That was so powerful me

Speaker 1 in getting me to understand that this guy sitting across from me who is quote unquote scary to everybody in the world and he looks scary, right?

Speaker 1 He is a hurt person. If you go all the way back, he's a hurt little boy and he's now got warrior,

Speaker 1 he's got warrior shit all over himself, right? He's got armor, he's got tattoos all over his face, he's so badass and he hurts people, right?

Speaker 1 And it all, if you can kind of back channel it and go back in time, he was a little boy who had happened to him. He was really, really harmed.

Speaker 2 In this hypothetical, semi-hypothetical case of the guy with the tattoos. Yeah.

Speaker 2 How often in his life do you think he talked about that childhood abuse to somebody?

Speaker 1 Never. He had never, never talked about it.

Speaker 2 More to the point, no one bothered to ask him until she did.

Speaker 1 And then I went and visited his family and interviewed all these relatives. It was 100% known.
Everybody knew this older relative sexually abused kids in the family and particularly had done so with

Speaker 1 this child.

Speaker 1 Nothing ever done. Imagine.

Speaker 1 No treatment, no assessment, no law enforcement, nothing.

Speaker 1 Now imagine what that does to that kid. Think about the growing sense of yourself.
I'm going to get hurt by this person. Everyone's going to know.

Speaker 1 People are terrifying. They hurt you.
And there's no recourse ever anywhere.

Speaker 2 The waitress who worked with Kenny's mother remembered this detail about Kenny's interactions with his dad. At the trial, she said,

Speaker 2 You did not see him go to Gene, or like, you know, like a child usually runs up to his daddy and approaches him that he was glad to see him, or that his daddy was glad to see him.

Speaker 2 At first, when I read that, I thought she meant that the tragedy of Kenny and Gene was that Kenny didn't want to run up and hug his father.

Speaker 2 But after talking to Kate Porterfield, I realized, no, it's much much worse. It's that he wanted to run up and hug his father, but understood, even at that age, that that was impossible.

Speaker 2 Kenny Smith's crime was not committed in isolation. It was a violent act that came at the end of a long cascade.

Speaker 1 We like people to either be victims or bad guys, right? And so victims are people that things happen to,

Speaker 1 and people who do bad things are just people who do bad things. And what the area that I think we're woefully missing is,

Speaker 1 especially in criminal justice, is seeing that people who do things that are against the law or even violent or even murder

Speaker 1 are usually and or frequently doing that themselves having suffered really bad harm, hurt, maltreatment, abuse, violence.

Speaker 1 People have a hard time recognizing that a lot of bad behaviors come out of trauma too.

Speaker 2 At the very beginning of this series, I played an excerpt of part of my conversation with Kate Porterfield.

Speaker 2 It was about the first time she saw Kenny Smith in person, at home in prison, in December of 2022, about a month after the botched execution.

Speaker 2 And now I want to play it again, because now I think it will make more sense. It will be easier to see why this case, out of the many Kate Porterfield has done, affected her so deeply.

Speaker 1 When I first went to see Kenny, he wanted to talk for the first probably two hours of our visit about how beautiful his goodbyes were and the love he received from his family as he was going into the execution.

Speaker 1 That's what he wanted to start with.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 He spent a lot of time telling me the story of everything else: the goodbyes, the phone calls, the last meal, what people said to him.

Speaker 1 I mean, he went through each family member, his grandson, his mom.

Speaker 1 So he told me all about his last visit with her and saying goodbye to her, her walking out of the visiting room and turning back to him, you know, and it was all about love.

Speaker 1 He talked to me about love for probably two, two and a half hours.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 he

Speaker 2 really

Speaker 1 kind of got me.

Speaker 1 He made me really pause and think a lot, Kenny Smith, because watching someone only start from a place of love after something so horrible was, I had never seen that before.

Speaker 2 You don't think he was avoiding the subject?

Speaker 1 Well, I think he was in a way. I think both were true.
And I would, and I ultimately we got to know each other well, and I could tease him a little and say, you know,

Speaker 1 you know, you got the gift of gab, Kenny. You're really good at like keeping me off the stuff that, and he would just laugh and say, Oh, yeah, I don't want to go there.
I don't want to go there, Doc.

Speaker 1 And he would say, I get nauseous, I start sweating, I can't do it, don't make me do it, doc. So, like, we got to a place where we knew what avoidance was, but I don't think that's

Speaker 1 the whole ballgame. I think what really happened is that I got to have this time with this man

Speaker 1 who thought he was about to die and had a pre-death experience of intense love.

Speaker 2 There's a famous quote from the art critic John Ruskin: Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think,

Speaker 2 but thousands can think for one who can see.

Speaker 2 After a lifetime working with people who had suffered great trauma, Kate Porterfield was the one who could see,

Speaker 2 and what she saw was a very different version of Kenny Smith:

Speaker 2 someone in pain over what had happened and what was to come.

Speaker 1 And he was just having severe nightmares of being executed over and over. So he was really tormented at night.
Then during the day, he'd be exhausted. He would have a ton of nausea.

Speaker 1 And he had a lot of images coming back to him over and over again.

Speaker 1 And then on top of that starts the meaning making. And the meaning making started to really be

Speaker 1 dark.

Speaker 1 After, you know, several weeks, he started to really think about what had happened, that these people who he knew had done it to him.

Speaker 1 How could people do this to other people? You know, he started to get really and then he got depressed. He did, he just got full-on depressed.

Speaker 1 He was actually doing pretty, pretty much post-traumatic stress symptoms at first, and then he moved into depression in the spring. And then

Speaker 1 that kind of worsened for a while. And then he sort of came out of the depression.
And then the second execution came up.

Speaker 2 The second execution.

Speaker 2 The state of Alabama wasn't finished with Kenny Smith.

Speaker 2 Coming up on the series finale of the Alabama murders.

Speaker 24 They said, well, mom, they're coming to get me.

Speaker 24 And,

Speaker 24 you know, we said our goodbyes. And,

Speaker 24 you know, the last thing he said was, I love you, you, mom.

Speaker 24 I've had a go.

Speaker 22 So, the theory was that because nitrogen gas was not noxious, it would be, it could be given to someone as a kind of, you know, method of gas execution that would not be so troubling to them because they would breathe it and not know it, and that they would then lose consciousness and die.

Speaker 21 I'm not a medical person. I can't opine

Speaker 21 on what happened. The only one who can tell us if he experienced pain is not here to describe it.

Speaker 21 But what I observed, anyhow, did not look like what Alabama had advertised.

Speaker 2 Revisionist History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Ben Nadaf Haffrey, and Nina Bird Lawrence. Additional reporting by Ben Nadaf Haffrey and Lee Hedgepeth.
Our editor is Karen Shikurji.

Speaker 2 Fact-checking by Kate Furbee. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.
Production support from Luke Lamond. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence.

Speaker 2 Original scoring by Luis Guerra with Paul Brainard and Jimmy Bodd. Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski.

Speaker 2 I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

Speaker 2 You can get this entire season now ad-free by subscribing to Revisionist History on Pushkin Plus. Sign up on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

Speaker 2 Pushkin Plus subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows.

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