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The Alabama Murders - Part 2: Coon Dog Cemetery Road
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This is an iHeart podcast. Malcolm Glabel here. I'm excited to share that Revisionist History is a Signal Awards finalist in two categories. The Signal Awards recognize the top podcasts that define culture. Our episode the Joe Rogan Intervention is up for best Conversation Starter and our episode Running Hot is up for best writing. We're thrilled to be nominated and from now until October 9th, you can help us win by voting for us. Vote@vote.signalaward.com that's vote.signal S I G N A L award.com we're thankful for your support. 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. Sign up on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin FM plus. Pushkin subscribers can access ad free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges and bonus content for all Pushkin shows. Previously on Revisionist History. Was he a good preacher? Evidently. He must have been charismatic. Yes, I would say very charismatic. 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. He worked very hard to make sure nobody knew. Outside that tight circle of biological family, when someone says I'm a member of the Church of Christ, that means that they are members of the true church. That's not a denomination, that's not Protestant, it's not Catholic. It's just the true church. We're now into the hills. We're now into the Alabama hills of we're in a. We're on a long, winding two lane road following an F150 pickup truck. Like much of this corner of Alabama, it's really gorgeous countryside. We are way out in. I mean, we haven't passed a house in quite some time. On one of our trips to the Shoals, my colleague Ben Nadaff Haffray and I drove out to find the house where Charles and Elizabeth Sennett lived. We didn't have a precise address, just the name of their road, which turned out to be a long, winding gravel track that runs high along a mountain ridge. Coon Dog Cemetery Road. Then arrive at your destination. We're all the best Coon dogs arrived find their final resting place. Oh my God. It's an actual because we couldn't find the Senate house, we ended up at the cemetery. There were headstones, lots of American flags. There's a little sign with a coon dog on it only cemetery of its kind in the world. Troop First Dog laid to rest here September 4, 1937. Then we met an older couple who gave us directions. We drove back the way we came and finally found it here. This is the driveway and there's the gate. Okay. There's the drain pipe. The drain pipe. I think I see the remains. So it's just an overgrown gate with some postage signs. The house is gone now is a double wide trailer burned down a couple years. A couple years ago. There's a pond back there. It's. If we hadn't have met that guy, we would have had no idea. Yeah. You would not have identified this as a. I guess there's. The only thing is the gate that says private property. It's all overgrown now. If you wanted to hide, let's just say this is a very good place to hide. Nobody's gonna trouble. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. This is the Alabama Murders. I talked in the last episode about the notion of the failure cascade. A crisis that does not resolve itself, but rather accelerates in a way that we neither anticipate nor desire. In this episode we're going to go deep into the crime that took place on the morning of March 18, 1988 that kicked off the cascade and tore the Sennett family apart before it accelerated and spread to countless others. 35 years. That's how long Elizabeth Senate's family waited for justice to occur. 35 long years. This is the Attorney General of Alabama, Steve Marshall, at a press conference in 2022 when, by the way, the Senate case still wasn't over. When it still had one final grotesque act to come. To give some perspective, almost half of Alabama's population wasn't even born when this malicious crime was committed. The well known axiom is true, justice delayed is justice denied. No, what the Senate case teaches us is that justice delayed is what justice is in the world we have chosen for ourselves. The question is why? How does a crime turn into a Cascade? Episode 2 Coon Dog Cemetery Road so then, have you seen pictures of this family of Charles Sennett and Liz? So actually Charles Sennett kind of looked like a 1980s TV evangelist. This is Lacey Kennamer, whose husband was one of the many lawyers drawn into the Senate case. He was handsome, dark headed, kind of had that southern. A little bit, little bit redneck. But look, she was homely as a mud fence. I mean and everything that I've read about him and what I've. What was that phrase? Homely as mud fence. I've never Heard that. Homely as a mud fence. Yeah. I've never heard of. I don't even heard of a mud fence. What. What you can imagine. Yes. It depends on. So what I remember, what I recall about this was the fact that 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? And then they lived. They lived out on what's called Coondog Cemetery Road, which is in rural part of Culvert County. And when I say rural, it. It's frighteningly rural, which makes me wonder about this guy. I mean, it had to be Kundal Cemetery Road if you were on. Out on it. He had to live 32 miles from his church building and a long way from his parishioners. I think the guy was crazy. On March 18, 1988, just before noon, Charles Sennett returned home from a morning in town. His house was ransacked. The living room was a mess. A coffee table had been turned upside down, its legs broken. Wood fragments were everywhere. A stereo and VCR were missing. And lying on the floor of the den in a pool of blood was his wife, Elizabeth Dorlean Sennett. She'd been stabbed repeatedly. A white and blue afghan covered her face and torso. Sennett called the Colbert County Sheriff's Office. An investigator named Ronnie Mae answered the phone. Senate was hysterical, and May couldn't understand him at first. Didn't even know whether he was speaking to a man or a woman. May said, calm down. Then again, calm down. Senate said, I've just come home. My house has been broken into and my wife has been killed. May said, stay where you are. We'll be right there. May and his officers drove out to Senate's house. It was raining heavily. As he walked in through the carport, Sennett came running towards him, wrapped his arms around him and said, ronnie, Ronnie, they've killed her. They've killed her. Ronnie Mae walked into the den where Elizabeth Sennett's body was lying. He reached for a pulse, couldn't find one. Thought she was dead. But when the ambulance arrived a few minutes later, one of the paramedics found a faint pulse. Chuck and Mike Sennett, their two sons, were 25 and 23 years old at the time. Mom was just a homemaker, kind, nurturing. We 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. Daddy called Me at work? Yeah. Chuck called me at work, said something happened to mom at the farm. Get out here quick. Elizabeth Sennett was taken by ambulance to Helen Keller Hospital in Sheffield. In the er, the medical staff tried frantically to keep her alive. The doctors started cardiac resuscitation, put in an iv, gave her fluid, put in a breathing tube. They took Elizabeth Senna to the operating room, opened her chest, found no blood in her heart or vascular system. In one last attempt to save her life, they put a clamp across her aorta on the chance that the fluid would fill her heart chamber. We sit there for a while, and then they invite you up to the second floor, which is where they deliver the bad news. Elizabeth Sennett was pronounced dead at 2:05 in the afternoon. Lacy Kennemer knew one of the nurses who was there at the hospital when Elizabeth was brought in that day. So she's in the ER with the doctor and the. And. And Ms. Senate. And the doctor said, please go out and tell her husband. She is still hanging on. She's still with us. She said, I walked out of that. I will never forget as long as I live. I walked out of that emergency department. I walked out of the emergency room room and went to him and told him, and he was astounded. He said, that cannot be. Wow. It wasn't long before the speculation began. I'm just really curious about when the news broke about what had happened to Elizabeth or Elizabeth Dorlean. Can you tell me about what that was like? I can tell you every minute of that one. This is Charlie Bill, who went to Charles Sennit's church. When we stopped by to visit at the church the last time, where he was preaching on the way home to visit our parents, he backhanded his child. I don't know what the child had done. My husband was furious because he said, you just don't do that to a child across its face. You might hit its ear and causes the hearing to be gone. So he was really mad about it. So when we heard the news on the radio one morning at breakfast, Charles Senate's wife has been murdered. My husband looked right straight at me and he said, he did it. That's how convinced he was over that slapping, that the viciousness was there, that he could do something like that, I don't know. But that's where we heard it first. Was sitting at the breakfast table. Carl Rhoden, a member of Senate's congregation, spoke to Senate on the morning of the murder and drove him to the hospital, picked him up at Highway 72 and 247. He was in ambulance. And he got out and got in the car with me and I brought him on to the hospital. The only thing he ever said after, you know, you look back, he said, they shouldn't have done her that way. Didn't really mean nothing at the time. Her funeral was the following Sunday at the west side Church of Christ, her husband's church. Roden watched Senna walk out of the service 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. 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. It looked put on. Rhoden lives in a small white house right down the street from the old west side Church of Christ, now empty, but still with the very Church of Christ message on the sign outside, time is precious. Are you spending time with the God who made you? As we were talking with Roden, he told us about a friend, someone who'd worked the case when it first broke. You say his name is Mickey? Ricky. Ricky. Ricky Miller. Ricky Miller. And he was one of the deputies investigating the case. And he's the one you really need to talk with. And so Roden called Ricky up. When did you say come today or tomorrow? I don't know right now if we want to stay. Okay, get it over with. We'll be there. And he's. They're. Now. They're filming and everything. Get your hair combed. It won't be a movie to get your hair combed. You got a haircut today? Well, you don't got your hair cut. No, they just writing us story or something. I don't really know. Yeah, they pretty good. Old Joe's. Anyway, they are Yankees. Hey, how many of them is it? It's just two of them with a microphone. Wow. Okay. Be there in 10 minutes. They be there in 10 minutes. Okay, bye so much. Thank y'. All. Appreciate it. Yeah, good luck. Foreign this episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. October 10th is World Mental Health Day. And this year, let's flip the script and focus the attention on thanking the therapists who have made an impact on people's lives. Thank you, therapists. As it turns out, as a therapist who's made an enormous impact on my life, my mom, who I'm happy to say, put all of her considerable training and expertise in the service of giving me and my brothers a happy home when we were kids and who I have watched over her 94 years enrich and support the lives of countless other people. So mom, in honor of World Mental Health Day, thank you for being so kind and understanding and a reminder of how much value and love therapists can bring to the world. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, Having served over 5 million people globally and it works with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. This World Mental Health Day, we're celebrating the therapists who helped millions of people take a step forward. If you're ready to find the right therapist for you, BetterHelp and can help you start that journey, our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com Gladwell that's better. H-E-L-P.com Gladwell Malcolm Glabel here. I'm excited to share that Revisionist History is a Signal Awards finalist in two categories. The Signal Awards recognize the top podcasts that define culture. Our episode, the Joe Rogan Intervention Is is up for best conversation Starter and our episode Running Hot is up for best writing. We're thrilled to be nominated and from now until October 9th, you can help us win by voting for us. Vote@vote.signalaward.com that's vote.signal S I G N A L award.com we're thankful for your support. Carl Rhoden's friend Ricky Miller lives in a small, immaculate house in a quiet part of Muscle Shoals. He's retired after a long career as an investigator in the District Attorney's office. Handsome, quiet, recently widowed, still had a law enforcement haircut. I assisted the sheriff's department in investigating the case and it got interesting. You know, the more you got into it, the more interesting it got. He was part of the team that went out to the Senate's property after the murder to search the pond. They drained it, found a survival knife, a fireplace poker, and a fireplace brush. There were so many leads and stuff. We followed and followed. But at the time, the crime stopper's phone for our county was in my office and I answered the call and I got all the information on who done it, who, who was all involved in all the particulars. The anonymous caller named three young men, all in their teens and early 20s. Billy Gray Williams, John Forrest Parker, and Kenny Eugene Smith. The caller had details right down to the location of key pieces of evidence. The caller said they had taken a VCR and the call I received even told me where the VCR was being used. And it was on Kenneth Smith's tv. Said it's sitting there right now. He's using it. And come to find out that was accurate. All three of the young men were arrested. All three confessed. Kenny Smith explained that he'd been approached by Billy Williams a month earlier. He knew Williams from high school. The two of them had talked out on his front porch. Smith said, quote, billy said he knew someone that wanted somebody hurt. Billy said the person wanted to pay to have it done. Billy said the person would pay $1,500 to do the job. I think I told Billy I would think about it and get back with him. Smith then says he agrees to do it and recruits John Parker to help. Two weeks later, Smith met with the man Williams had been in contact with. He didn't identify himself and they had no idea who he was. The man said he wanted someone taken care of. A woman. The man said the woman would be at home, that she never had any visitors. The man said that the house was out in the country. They all met again at a coffee shop. The man drew a diagram of the house. It was supposed to look like a burglary that went bad. The man said they could take whatever they wanted. On the morning of the 18th, Parker and Smith met up at 8:30. Parker brought a black handled survival knife. The two of them drove out to Coondog Cemetery Road in Parker's Pontiac Grand Prix. Smith told investigators, John and I got to the senate house around 9:30. I think. I knocked on the door. I told Mrs. Sennett that her husband had told us that we could come down and look around the property to see about hunting on it. John and I looked around the property for a while, then came back into the house. John and I went back to the door. We told Mrs. Sennett we needed to use the bathroom and she led us inside. I went to the bathroom nearest the kitchen. And then John went to the bathroom. I stood at the edge of the kitchen talking with Mrs. Sennett. Mrs. Sennett was sitting at a chair in the den. Then I heard John coming through the house. John walked up behind Mrs. Sennett and started hitting her. John was hitting her with his fist. I started getting the VCR. While John was beating Mrs. Sennett, John hit Mrs. Sennett with a large cane and anything else he could get his hands on. John went into a frenzy. Mrs. Sennett was yelling, just stop. We could have anything we wanted. As John was beating up Mrs. Sennett, I messed up some things in the house to make it look like a burglary. The last place I saw Mrs. Sennett, she was lying near the fireplace, covered with some kind of blanket. I had gone outside to look into storage buildings when I saw John run out to the pond and throw some things in it. End quote. The next morning, the two of them read the newspapers and learned that the woman they had attacked was dead and that her name was Elizabeth Sennett. Did you. At what point during in the investigation did you come to suspect that Charles Sennett might be involved? The first thing that caught our attention, the best I can remember, was he made too many alibis. You know, if you go about your casual day, you might run into one, maybe two people. But he had a pattern. Everywhere he went was to make an alibi. And when he went by Carl's house, Carl said told me he'd never been to his house except that one time. 8 to 8:30. Joel Kendrick. 8:30 to 9. Sam Garrett Jr. 9 o'. Clock. Billy Alexander. 9:15. Mrs. Louise Allen sees him leave Westside Church. 9:30 to 10. Carl Rhoden. 10. Teresa Hall. 10:15. A phone call with Tammy Sue Wright. 11am With Brenda Spray down Woodmont Drive in Tuscumbia. And on and on. He made too many out about it. It was overkill, you know, he stopped to see people they'd never seen. 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, 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? Coombedog Cemetery Road. Yeah. And it's a good ways out there. People along the way, even on the Highway 247. Gwenathouse said he had stopped and said he'd never stopped here before. 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. But he knew everything in detail. That's a red flag. So it's. And then Carl told us that in the car. Carl takes him to the hospital that night. He says Senate said to him, they beat her up pretty bad or something like that. They shouldn't have done her that way. They shouldn't have done her that way. How does he know there's two. Yeah, yeah. When you use the word they. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I understand that when Sennett is. He tells the story about how he comes back to the house, he sees his wife's body and then they say, well, what did you do? And he said, I didn't touch her. Even though he was trained and surely that was another red flag. His wife was lying mortally wounded a few feet away. He didn't touch her. And this was a man who was trained in cpr. That was a question we all wondered. First thing you're going to do is go to your wife. If it had been my wife laying there, blungeoned 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. It's going to take them a while to get there. So what are you doing the whole time? Are you just standing there looking at her? Then you're not going to check her? That's a red flag. You know, there would have been some kind of evidence that you would have checked your why he did not. Malcolm Glabel here. I'm excited to share that Revisionist History is a Signal Awards finalist in two categories. The Signal Awards recognize the top podcasts that define culture. Our episode the Joe Rogan Intervention is up for best conversation starter, and our episode Running Hot is up for best writing. We're thrilled to be nominated and from now until October 9th, you can help us win by voting for us. Vote@vote.signalaward.com that's vote.signal S I G N A L award.com we're thankful for your support. In the Brothers Grimm 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. She's then saved by a hunter who cuts open the wolf's belly, glimpses her red cap and pulls her out. Ah, how frightened I have been. How dark it was inside the wolves. Little Red Riding Hood, however, quickly fetched great stones with which to fill the wolf's belly. And when he awoke, he wanted to run away, but the stones were so heavy that he collapsed at once and fell dead. Then another wolf stalks her, jumps on the roof of her grandmother's house, and Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother foil him by putting a pot of sausage flavored water in front of their house. Then the smell of the sausages reached the wolf and he sniffed and peeped down and at last stretched out his neck so far that he could no longer keep his footing and began to slip and slipped down from the roof Straight into the great trough and was drowned. But little Red Cap went joyously home, and no one ever did anything to harm her again. Why do children so cheerfully indulge in a story that is about, let's be clear, a pedophile. Because the wolf gets his comeuppance in the end. It's the same principle that explains everything from Sherlock Holmes to the television show Law and Order to countless tabloidy true crime podcasts. We are more than happy to wallow in stories of madness and depravity, so long as order is restored in the end. Crime stories are exercises in moral assurance. With the Senate case, it's enormously tempting to tell a story this way. The case is pure Southern gothic. I mean, a preacher who's lost his way, a house on a lonely mountain road called for goodness sake, Coon Dog Cemetery Road, and then two local killers for hire speeding back to Florence with a VCR in the backseat. You want that version, you can find it online. This is the story of a God fearing family who preach, sing and pray together through good times and bad. But behind church doors and wholesome music looms betrayal and deceit and a murder that will rock a small town Alabama community to its core. But let's be clear, the Little Red Riding Hood model is an illusion. You don't return home happily and safely after fighting off a violent predator. You spend the rest of your childhood recovering. The actual NYPD is nowhere near as effortlessly effective as the fictional NYPD of Law and Order. And as much as everyone involved in the Senate case wanted it to end neatly and tidily, as all the classic crime stories do, it didn't end. It kept going. So tell me about when this. When the Senate case breaks, when we first hear about it, what impact does it have on the town? Well, of course, abject horror throughout the whole community. And it of course made the gory headlines for days and days, especially because they didn't know who had murdered the minister's wife. And, and as long as they're on the run, then, then everybody's frightened. They don't know the motive. Billy Warren, the Florencetown historian. They don't know at that point that the minister has hired these young men. They don't know anything. So it, it was gripping, really, for the whole community because there was so much unknown 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? Why did Charles Sennett do Such a bad job of covering his own tracks. Billy Gray Williams, the man he first approached with his scheme, was his tenant, for goodness sake. The sheriff's deputy, Ronnie May, recognized 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. And you know where he found the money to pay his hitman, his lover. It's as if he wasn't even trying. Like he turned himself in before he'd even committed his crime. When I try to imagine what was going through his mind in the days after his wife's death, I can't help but think of what the theologian Lee Camp said in the last episode about how Sennett's original transgression, his affair with a woman in his church, would have filled him with shame. And remember the joke he told that for us in the Church of Christ, it's easier to get forgiveness for murdering someone than it was for divorce. The point of the joke is that we are the most rigorous of Christian communities and we will cast you out for a second degree transgression like cheating on your wife, as surely as for a first degree transgression like arranging for her murder. The acts are very different, but the consequences are the same. So why would Charles 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. From the moment he cheated on his wife, he was already beyond redemption. Charles Sennett was called in for questioning. He admitted to the affair, but he denied any involvement with his wife's death. He said he suspected a black man from Cherokee, Alabama, a town not far from his house, who he said had an ongoing feud with his son. The police called Senate back for another round of questioning. One of the officers mentioned the name Kenny Smith, and Sennett turned beet red. Senate left the police station. He drove to his son Michael's house. You know, he said, you know, I failed a lie detector test. He said, you know, I've been involved with somebody else, and we're. We're taking all this in. Can't believe it. Charles Sennett left the house, got in his Chevy truck, picked up a.22. Pow. You hear it? Firecracker. He's in his truck where he shot himself. That was seven days after mom. Mom got killed. Friday to Friday. Yeah. Lost them both in seven days. Yeah. 1 don't know how much you can take until you go through something like that. In the neat and tidy version of the Senate story, this is the ending. The killers have confessed and are in custody. The master criminal has shot himself. The victim is buried. A crime, a culprit, a mystery, a resolution, a beginning, an end. But we're not telling that version of the story. We're just getting started. Coming up on the Alabama murders, the trial of John Forrest Parker. 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. I've had, you know, other cases that technically were probably factually more complex, but this is, yeah, this is the one that I will is still on my mind, even without Chop County. 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. Revisionist History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Ben Nadaff Haffrey and Nina Byrd Lawrence. Additional reporting by Ben Nadaff Haffrey and Lee Hedgebeth. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Fact checking by Kate Furby. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Engineering by Nina Byrd Lawrence. Production support from Luke Clemond. 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. The Signal Awards recognize the top podcasts that define culture. Our episode the Joe Rogan Intervention is up for best conversation starter. And our episode Running Hot is up for best writing. We're thrilled to be nominated and from now until October 9th, you can help us win by voting for us. Vote@vote.signalaward.com that's vote.signal S I G N A L award.com we're thankful for your support. This is an iHeart podcast.