Speaker 1: Pushkin Hello, hello Malcolm. Here, Before we get to the episode,
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Speaker 1: Was he a good feature?
Speaker 3: Evidently he must have been charismanic, Yes, very charis many flawreence.
Speaker 4: You don't get here by accident, and so the idea
Speaker 4: that someone was in this framework do something like Charles
Speaker 4: Sennett did was very disruptive. He worked very hard to
Speaker 4: make sure nobody knew outside that tight circle of biological family.
Speaker 5: When someone says I'm a member of the Church of Christ,
Speaker 5: that means that they are members of the True Church.
Speaker 5: That's not a denomination, that's not Protestant, it's not Catholic,
Speaker 5: it's just.
Speaker 6: The true Church.
Speaker 1: We're now into the hills. We're now into the Alabama
Speaker 1: hills of We're We're in a long, winding two lane
Speaker 1: road following an F one fifty pickup truck. Like much
Speaker 1: of this corner of Alabama, it's it's gorgeous countryside. We
Speaker 1: are way out in. I mean, we haven't passed up
Speaker 1: a house in quite some time. On one of our
Speaker 1: trips to the shoals, my colleague Ben Adaf Halfrey and
Speaker 1: I drove out to find the house where Charles and
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Sennett lived. We didn't have a precise address, just
Speaker 1: the name of the road, which turned out to be
Speaker 1: a long, winding gravel track that runs high along a
Speaker 1: mountain ridge. Coon Dog Cemetery.
Speaker 6: Road your destination.
Speaker 5: We're all all the best coon dogs alive find their
Speaker 5: final resting place.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, it's an actual Because we couldn't find
Speaker 1: the Senate house, we ended up at the cemetery. There
Speaker 1: were headstones, lots of American flags. There's a little sign
Speaker 1: with a coon dog on it. Only cemetery was kind
Speaker 1: in the world. Troop first Dog late to rest here
Speaker 1: September fourth, nineteen thirty seven. Then we met an older
Speaker 1: couple who gave us directions. We drove back the way
Speaker 1: we came and finally found it.
Speaker 7: Here.
Speaker 3: This is the driveway and there's the gate.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, there's the drain pipe, the drain pipe. I
Speaker 1: think I see the remains. So it's just an overgrown
Speaker 1: gate with some posted signs. The house is gone now
Speaker 1: as it's a double wide trailer burned down a couple
Speaker 1: of years a couple of years ago. There's a pond
Speaker 1: back there.
Speaker 2: It's a.
Speaker 1: If we hadn't met that that guy, we would have
Speaker 1: had no idea.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you would not have identified this as I guess.
Speaker 2: There's the only thing is the gate that says private property.
Speaker 1: It's all overgrown. Now if you wanted to hide, let's
Speaker 1: just say this is a very good place to hide.
Speaker 1: Nobody's going to trouble you. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 1: This is the Alabama Murders. I talked in the last
Speaker 1: episode about the notion of the Failure cascade, a crisis
Speaker 1: that does not resolve itself, but rather accelerates in a
Speaker 1: way that we neither anticipate nor desire. In this episode,
Speaker 1: we're going to go deep into the crime that took
Speaker 1: place in the morning of March eighteenth, nineteen eighty eight,
Speaker 1: that kicked off the cascade and tore the Senate family
Speaker 1: apart before it accelerated and spread to countless others.
Speaker 9: Thirty five years.
Speaker 10: That's how long Elizabeth Sennatt's family waited for justice to occur.
Speaker 10: Thirty five long years.
Speaker 1: This is the Attorney General of Alabama, Steve Marshall, at
Speaker 1: a press conference in twenty twenty two. By the way,
Speaker 1: the senecase still wasn't over when it still had one
Speaker 1: final grotesque act to come.
Speaker 10: To give some perspective, almost half of Alabama's population wasn't
Speaker 10: even born when this malicious crime was committed. The well
Speaker 10: known axiom is true, the justice delayed is justice denied.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: What the senecase teaches us is that justice delayed is
Speaker 1: what justice is in the world we have chosen for ourselves.
Speaker 1: The question is why, how does a crime turn into
Speaker 1: a cascade? Episode two, Coon Dog Cemetery Road.
Speaker 11: So, then, have you seen pictures of this family of
Speaker 11: Charles Senate and Liz So Actually, Charles Senate kind of
Speaker 11: looked like a nineteen eighties TV evangelist.
Speaker 1: This is Lacy Kennemer, whose husband was one of the
Speaker 1: many lawyers drawn into the Senate case.
Speaker 11: He was hadsome, dark headed, kind of had that southern
Speaker 11: a little bit, a little bit redneck, but look, she
Speaker 11: was hungly as a mud fence, I mean, and and
Speaker 11: everything that I've read about him, and what I've never
Speaker 11: heard humly as a mud fence, I've never heard. You
Speaker 11: can imagine. Yes, So what I remember, what I recall
Speaker 11: about this was the fact that he was having an
Speaker 11: affair with a parishioner. There weren't seventy people that went
Speaker 11: to that church. How did they not know that this
Speaker 11: was going on? And then they lived. They lived out
Speaker 11: on what's called Kungdaks Cemetery Road, which is in rural
Speaker 11: part of Colver County. And when I say rule it,
Speaker 11: it's frighteningly rule, which makes me wonder about this guy.
Speaker 11: I mean, it had to be Kungdal Cemetery Road if
Speaker 11: you were on out on it. He had to live
Speaker 11: thirty two miles from his church building and a long
Speaker 11: way from his parishioners. I think the guy was crazy.
Speaker 1: On March eighteenth, nineteen eighty eight, just before noon, Charles
Speaker 1: Sennett returned home from a morning in town. His house
Speaker 1: was ransacked. The living room was a mess. A coffee
Speaker 1: table had been turned upside down its legs. Broken wood
Speaker 1: fragments were everywhere. A stereo and VCR were missing and
Speaker 1: lying on the floor. Of the den. In a pool
Speaker 1: of blood was his wife, Elizabeth dorleyan Senate. She'd been
Speaker 1: stabbed repeatedly. A white and blue afghan covered her face
Speaker 1: and torso. Senate called the Colbert County Sheriff's office. An
Speaker 1: investigator named Ronnie May answered the phone. Senate was hysterical
Speaker 1: and May couldn't understand him at first, didn't even know
Speaker 1: whether he was speaking to a man or a woman.
Speaker 1: May said, calm down, then again, calm down. Senate said,
Speaker 1: I've just come home. My house has been broken into
Speaker 1: and my wife has been killed. May said, stay where
Speaker 1: you are, we'll be right there. May and his officers
Speaker 1: drove out to Senate's house. It was raining heavily. As
Speaker 1: he walked in to the carport, came running towards him,
Speaker 1: wrapped his arms around him and said, Ronnie, Ronnie, they've
Speaker 1: killed her. They've killed her. Ronnie May walked into the
Speaker 1: den where Elizabeth Sennett's body was lying. He reached for
Speaker 1: a pulse, couldn't find one. Thought she was dead, but
Speaker 1: when the ambulance arrived a few minutes later, one of
Speaker 1: the paramedics found a faint pulse. Chuck and Mike Sennet,
Speaker 1: their two sons were twenty five and twenty three years
Speaker 1: old at the time.
Speaker 2: Mom was just the homemaker, kind, nurturing boiler every day
Speaker 2: after school, you know, growing up.
Speaker 7: You know, we never missed a time with her and Daddy.
Speaker 1: They later gave an interview to the local news about
Speaker 1: that day.
Speaker 7: Chuck got the news before I did.
Speaker 2: Laddy called me work.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Chuck called me at work, said something happened to
Speaker 7: Mom at the farm. Get out here quick.
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Sennet was taken by ambulance to Helen Keller Hospital
Speaker 1: in Sheffield. In the er, the medical staff tried frantically
Speaker 1: to keep her alive. The doctors started cardiac resuscitation, put
Speaker 1: in an IV, gave her fluid, put in a breathing tube.
Speaker 1: They took Elizabeth Sennate to the operating room, opened her chest,
Speaker 1: found no blood in her heart or vascular system. In
Speaker 1: one last attempt to save her life, they put a
Speaker 1: clamp across her aorda on the chance that the fluid
Speaker 1: would fill her heart chamber.
Speaker 7: We sat there for a while and then they invite
Speaker 7: you up to the second floor, which is where they
Speaker 7: delivered the bad news.
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Senate was pronounced dead at two five in the afternoon.
Speaker 1: Lacey kennemer knew one of the nurses who was there
Speaker 1: at the hospital when Elizabeth was brought in that day.
Speaker 6: So she's and the er, it's the doctor and the
Speaker 6: and miss Senate. And the doctor said, please go out
Speaker 6: and tell her husband. She is still hanging on. She's
Speaker 6: still with us.
Speaker 2: She said.
Speaker 6: I walked out of that I will never forget as
Speaker 6: long as I live. I walked out of that emergency department.
Speaker 6: I walked out of the emergency room room and went
Speaker 6: to him and tell him. And he was astounded. He said,
Speaker 6: that cannot be.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: It wasn't long before the speculation began. I'm just really
Speaker 1: curious about when the news broke about what had happened
Speaker 1: to Elizabeth or Elizabeth Orlean. Can you tell me about
Speaker 1: what that was like.
Speaker 3: I can tell you every minute of that one.
Speaker 1: This is Shirley Bill who went to Charles Sentence Church.
Speaker 3: When we stopped by to visit at the church the
Speaker 3: last time, where he was preaching. On the way home
Speaker 3: to visit our parents, he back handed his child. I
Speaker 3: don't know what the child had done. My husband was
Speaker 3: furious because he says, you just don't do that to
Speaker 3: a child across its face, you might hit its ear
Speaker 3: and causes the hearing to be gone. So he was
Speaker 3: really mad about it. So when we heard the news
Speaker 3: on the radio one morning at breakfast, Charles Sennett's wife
Speaker 3: has been murdered, my husband looked right straight at me
Speaker 3: and he said he did it. That's how convinced he
Speaker 3: was over that slapping, that the viciousness was there, that
Speaker 3: he could do something like that. I don't know, but
Speaker 3: that's where we heard it first. Was that sitting at
Speaker 3: the breakfast table.
Speaker 1: Carl Roden, a member of Sentence Congregation, spoke to Senate
Speaker 1: on the morning of the murder and drove him to
Speaker 1: the hospital.
Speaker 8: Picked him up at Highway seventy two, two forty seven.
Speaker 8: He was an animust and they got out. I got
Speaker 8: in the car with man. I brought him onto the hospital.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 8: The only thing he ever said after, you know, you
Speaker 8: look back. He said, they shouldn't have learned her that way.
Speaker 8: Didn't really mean nothing at the time.
Speaker 1: Her funeral was the following Sunday at the West Side
Speaker 1: Church of Christ, her husband's church. Rodin watched Senate walk
Speaker 1: out of the service.
Speaker 8: After the clothing prayers and singing and all that family
Speaker 8: comes out first, and he has her pictures up against
Speaker 8: his chest with both hands hugging it. And he was
Speaker 8: just most fake thing I believe I've ever saw. And
Speaker 8: I told my wife was that most phoniest thing I've
Speaker 8: ever saw. He just had looked put on.
Speaker 1: Rodin lives in his small white house right down the
Speaker 1: street from the old West Side Church of Christ, now
Speaker 1: empty but still with the very Church of Christ's message
Speaker 1: on the sign outside, Time is precious? Are you spending
Speaker 1: time with the God who made you? As we were
Speaker 1: talking with Rodin, he told us about a friend, someone
Speaker 1: who'd worked the case when I first broke. He said,
Speaker 1: his name is is Mickey Ricky, Ricky, Ricky Miller, Ricky Miller,
Speaker 1: and he was one of the deputies investigating that the case.
Speaker 8: And and he's he's you to talk with.
Speaker 1: And so Rodent called Ricky up.
Speaker 8: When do you say, come from the here tomorrow? I
Speaker 8: don't know ship, Okay, get it over with. We'll be there.
Speaker 8: And he's there now. They're famine and everything. Get your
Speaker 8: hair combed won't be a movie. They get your hair combed.
Speaker 8: It you got a haircut today? Well, you don't got
Speaker 8: your hair cut. But no, they just writing a story
Speaker 8: or something. I don't really know. They pretty good Old
Speaker 8: Joe's any white fir or Yankees. It's just too of
Speaker 8: them with a microphone.
Speaker 1: Wow, okay, and be there in TIMI.
Speaker 8: So much, thank you appreciate.
Speaker 1: Carl Ruden's friend, Ricky Miller, lives in a small, immaculate
Speaker 1: house in a quiet part of Muscle Shoals. He's retired
Speaker 1: after a long career as an investigator in the District
Speaker 1: Attorney's office. Handsome quiet recently widowed, still had a law
Speaker 1: enforcement haircut.
Speaker 2: I assisted the Sheriff's department and investigating a case and
Speaker 2: it got interested. You know, the more you got into it,
Speaker 2: the more instant it got.
Speaker 1: He was part of the team that went out to
Speaker 1: the sentenced property after the murder to search the pond.
Speaker 1: They drained it found a survival knife, a fireplace poker,
Speaker 1: and a fireplace brush.
Speaker 2: There were so many leads and stuff we followed and followed,
Speaker 2: but at the time, the crime stopper's phone for our
Speaker 2: county was in my office and I entered the call
Speaker 2: and I got all the information on who done it,
Speaker 2: who was all involved in all the particulars.
Speaker 1: The anonymous caller named three young men, all in their
Speaker 1: teens and early twenties, Billy Gray Williams, John Forest Parker,
Speaker 1: and Kenny Eugene Smith. The caller had details right down
Speaker 1: to the location of key pieces of evidence. The caller
Speaker 1: said they had taken a VCR.
Speaker 2: And the call I received even told me whether the
Speaker 2: VCR was being used, and it was on Kenneth Smiths
Speaker 2: TV said it's sitting there right now, he's using it
Speaker 2: and come to find out that was racrate.
Speaker 1: Te of the young men were arrested. All three confessed.
Speaker 1: Kenny Smith explained that he'd been approached by Billy Williams
Speaker 1: a month earlier. He knew Williams from high school. The
Speaker 1: two of them had talked out on his front porch.
Speaker 1: Smith said, quote, Billy said he knew someone that wanted
Speaker 1: somebody hurt. Billy said the person wanted to pay to
Speaker 1: have it done. Billy said the person would pay fifteen
Speaker 1: hundred dollars to do the job.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 1: I told Billy I would think about it and get
Speaker 1: back with him. Smith then says he agrees to do
Speaker 1: it and recruits John Parker to help. Two weeks later,
Speaker 1: Smith met with the man Williams had been in contact with.
Speaker 1: He didn't identify himself and they had no idea who
Speaker 1: he was. The man said he wanted someone taken care
Speaker 1: of a woman. The man said the woman would be
Speaker 1: at home, that she never had any visitors. The man
Speaker 1: said that the house was out in the country. They
Speaker 1: all met again at a coffee shop. The man drew
Speaker 1: a diagram of the house. It was supposed to look
Speaker 1: like a burglary that went bad. The man said they
Speaker 1: could take whatever they wanted. On the morning of the eighteenth,
Speaker 1: Parker and Smith met up at eight thirty. Parker brought
Speaker 1: a black handled survival knife. The two of them drove
Speaker 1: out to Koondog Cemetery Road in Parker's Pontiac Grand Prix.
Speaker 1: Smith told investigators John and I got to the Senate
Speaker 1: house around nine thirty. I think I knocked on the door.
Speaker 1: I told Missus Sennet that her husband had told us
Speaker 1: that we could come down and look around the property
Speaker 1: to see about hunting on it. John and I looked
Speaker 1: around the property for a while, then came back into
Speaker 1: the house. John and I went back to the door.
Speaker 1: We told Missus Sennet we needed to use the bathroom.
Speaker 1: And she led us inside. I went to the bathroom
Speaker 1: nearest the kitchen, and then John went to the bathroom.
Speaker 1: I stood at the edge of the kitchen talking with
Speaker 1: Missus Senet. Missus Sennet was sitting at a chair in
Speaker 1: the den. Then I heard John coming through the house.
Speaker 1: John walked up behind Missus Sennet and started hitting her.
Speaker 1: John was hitting her with his fist. I started getting
Speaker 1: the VCR while John was beating Missus Sennet. John hit
Speaker 1: Missus Sennet with a large cane and anything else he
Speaker 1: could get his hands on. John went into a frenzy.
Speaker 1: Missus Sennet was yelling just stop. We could have anything
Speaker 1: we wanted. As John was beating up Missus Sennet, I
Speaker 1: messed up some things in the house to make it
Speaker 1: look like a burglary. The last place I saw Missus Sennet,
Speaker 1: she was lying near the fireplace, covered with some kind
Speaker 1: of blanket. I had gone outside to look in the
Speaker 1: storage buildings when I saw John run out to the
Speaker 1: pond and throw some things in it. End quote. The
Speaker 1: next morning, the two of them read the newspapers and
Speaker 1: learned that the woman they had attacked was dead and
Speaker 1: that her name was Elizabeth Sennet. Did you at what
Speaker 1: point in the investigation did you come to suspect that
Speaker 1: Charles Senntt might be involved?
Speaker 2: The first thing that called our tension, the best I
Speaker 2: can remember, was he made too many alibis. You know,
Speaker 2: if you go about your casual day, you might run
Speaker 2: into one, maybe two people. But he had a pattern
Speaker 2: everywhere he went was to make him alibi. And when
Speaker 2: he won by Carl's house, Carlson said, told me you'd
Speaker 2: never been to his house except that one time.
Speaker 1: Eight to eight thirty Chill Kendrick eight thirty to nine,
Speaker 1: Sam Garrett Junior nine o'clock, Billy Alexander nine fifteen, Missus
Speaker 1: Louise Island sees them leave Westside Church nine thirty to ten,
Speaker 1: Carl roadin ten, Teresa Hall ten point fifteen, a phone
Speaker 1: call with Tammy Sue Wright, eleven am with Brenda sprayed
Speaker 1: on Woodmontre even Tscumbia, and on and on.
Speaker 2: He made too many of it. It was overkilled. You know.
Speaker 2: He stopped to see people that had never seen and
Speaker 2: that just threw up a red flag to us. Why
Speaker 2: is he seeing all these people for the first time
Speaker 2: that had to be at the time his wife's being murdered,
Speaker 2: you know, and even on his way home. I don't
Speaker 2: know if you're familiar where it happened at out in
Speaker 2: the county. Have you ever been there?
Speaker 1: Sat koondomps in the road, and.
Speaker 2: It's a good ways out there. People along the way,
Speaker 2: even on the highway two forty seven, Gord, they said
Speaker 2: he had stopped and said he had never stopped here before.
Speaker 2: He could tell you every time, everything, every day. Well
Speaker 2: it had my wife just been murdered in my home.
Speaker 2: I couldn't tell you nothing. My mind's gone, but he
Speaker 2: knew everything in detail. That's a red flag.
Speaker 1: So it's And then Carl told us that in the
Speaker 1: car Carl takes him to the hospital that night, he
Speaker 1: says said that Senate said to him they beat her
Speaker 1: up pretty bad or something like that. They shouldn't have
Speaker 1: done it that way. How does he know there's two.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, when you use a word bay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: I understand that. When Senate is he tells the story
Speaker 1: about how it comes back to the house, he sees
Speaker 1: his wife's body, and then they said, well what did
Speaker 1: you do? And he said, I didn't touch her, even
Speaker 1: though he was trained and surely that was another red flag.
Speaker 1: His wife was lying mortally wounded a few feet away.
Speaker 1: He didn't touch her. And this was a man who
Speaker 1: was trained in CPR.
Speaker 2: That was a question where I wonder, first thing you're
Speaker 2: going to do is go to your wife. If it
Speaker 2: had been my wife laying there plunging bloody and now,
Speaker 2: first thing I would have done was checked her, grabbed her.
Speaker 2: I would have had some kind of evidence on me
Speaker 2: that I had made contact with. He lived sixteen miles out,
Speaker 2: It's going to take him a while to get there.
Speaker 2: So what are you doing the whole time? Are you
Speaker 2: just standing there looking at her? Then you're not going
Speaker 2: to check her? That's a red flag.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 2: There would have been some kind of evidence that you
Speaker 2: were to check your why.
Speaker 1: That he did not. In The Brothers Grim telling of
Speaker 1: Little Red riding Hood, a fairy tale beloved by small
Speaker 1: children for centuries, Little Red riding Hood is tricked by
Speaker 1: a wolf dressed as her grandmother and eating. She's in
Speaker 1: saved by a hunter who cuts open the wolf's belly,
Speaker 1: glimpses her red cap, and pulls her out.
Speaker 9: Ah, how frightened I have been? How dark it was
Speaker 9: inside the wolf's. Little Red riding Hood, however, quickly fetched
Speaker 9: great stones with which to fill the wolf's belly, and
Speaker 9: when he awoke, he wanted to run away, but the
Speaker 9: stones were so heavy that he collapsed at once and
Speaker 9: fell dead.
Speaker 1: Then another wolf stalks her jumps on the roof of
Speaker 1: her grandmother's house, and Little Red riding Hood and her
Speaker 1: grandmother foil him by putting a pot of sausage flavored
Speaker 1: water in front of her house.
Speaker 9: Then the smell of the sausages reached the wolf, and
Speaker 9: he sniffed and peeped down, and at last stretched out
Speaker 9: his neck so far that he could no longer keep
Speaker 9: his footing, and began to slip and slip down from
Speaker 9: the roof straight into the great trough and was drowned.
Speaker 9: But Little Red riding Hood went joyously home, and no
Speaker 9: one ever did anything to harm her again.
Speaker 1: Why do children so cheerfully indulge in a story that
Speaker 1: is about, let's be clear, a pedophile because the wolf
Speaker 1: gets his come upance in the end. It's the same
Speaker 1: principle that explains everything from Sherlock Holmes to the television
Speaker 1: show Law and Order to countless Tablady true crime podcasts.
Speaker 1: We are more than happy to wallow in stories of
Speaker 1: madness and depravity so long as order is restored in
Speaker 1: the end. Crime stories are exercises in moral assurance. With
Speaker 1: the Senate case, it's enormously tempting to tell a story
Speaker 1: this way. The case is pure Southern Gothic. I mean
Speaker 1: a preacher who has lost his way, a house on
Speaker 1: a lonely mountain road called for goodness sake, Coon Dog
Speaker 1: Cemetery Road, and then two local killers for hire, speeding
Speaker 1: back to Florence with a VCR in the backseat. You
Speaker 1: want that version, you can find it online.
Speaker 12: This is the story of a god fearing Fai family
Speaker 12: who preach, sing and pray together through good times and
Speaker 12: bad but behind church doors and wholesome music, Bloom's betrayal
Speaker 12: and deceit and a murder that will rock a small
Speaker 12: town Alabama community to its core.
Speaker 1: But let's be clear, the Little Red riding Hood model
Speaker 1: is an illusion. You don't return home happily and safely
Speaker 1: after fighting off a violent predator. You spend the rest
Speaker 1: of your childhood recovering. The actual MIPD is nowhere near
Speaker 1: as effortlessly effective as the fictional NPD of law and order,
Speaker 1: and as much as everyone involved in the Senate case
Speaker 1: wanted it to end neatly and tidily, as all the
Speaker 1: classic crime stories do, it didn't end. It kept going.
Speaker 1: So tell me about when this when the Senate case breaks,
Speaker 1: when we first hear about it, what impact does it
Speaker 1: have on the town.
Speaker 13: Well, of course, abject horror throughout the whole community, and
Speaker 13: it of course made the gory headlines for days and days,
Speaker 13: especially because they didn't know who had murdered the minister's wife.
Speaker 13: And as long as they're on the run, then everybody's frightened.
Speaker 9: They don't know the.
Speaker 1: Motive, Billy Warren, the Florencetown historian.
Speaker 13: They don't know at that point that the minister has
Speaker 13: hired these young men. They don't know anything. So it
Speaker 13: was gripping really for the whole community because there was
Speaker 13: so much unknown.
Speaker 1: In the middle of this is Senate himself under suspicion,
Speaker 1: but still at large, trying and failing to play the
Speaker 1: role of the grieving husband and becoming increasingly aware that
Speaker 1: his treachery was Why did Charles Sennett do such a
Speaker 1: bad job of covering his own tracks? Billy Gray Williams,
Speaker 1: the man he first approached with his scheme was his tenant.
Speaker 1: For goodness sake, the sheriff's deputy, Ronnie May recognized Senate
Speaker 1: because there had been a murder not long before at
Speaker 1: a gas station, and Senate had come to the crime
Speaker 1: scene uninvited and hung around as if he was studying
Speaker 1: police procedure. And you know where he found the money
Speaker 1: to pay his hitmen his lover. It's as if he
Speaker 1: wasn't even trying, like he turned himself in before he'd
Speaker 1: even committed his crime. When I try to imagine what
Speaker 1: was going through his mind in the days after his
Speaker 1: wife's death, I can't help but think of what the
Speaker 1: theologian Lee Camp said in the last episode about how
Speaker 1: Senate's original transgression, his affair with a woman in his church,
Speaker 1: would have filled him with shame. And remember the joke
Speaker 1: he told that for us in the Church of Christ,
Speaker 1: it's easier to get forgiveness from murdering someone than it
Speaker 1: was for divorce. The point of the joke is that
Speaker 1: we are the most rigorous of Christian communities, and we
Speaker 1: will cast you out for a second degree transgression like
Speaker 1: cheating on your wife as surely as for a first
Speaker 1: degree transgression like arranging for her murder. The acts are
Speaker 1: very different, but the consequences are the same. So why
Speaker 1: would Charles Sennet act as if he was indifferent to
Speaker 1: whether he got caught, Because maybe, in his own tangled mind,
Speaker 1: the leap from an affair to a killing wasn't a
Speaker 1: leap at all. From the moment he cheated on his wife,
Speaker 1: he was already beyond redemption. Charles Senna was called in
Speaker 1: for questioning. He admitted to the affair, but he denied
Speaker 1: any involvement with his wife's death. He said he suspected
Speaker 1: a black man from Cherokee, Alabama, a town not far
Speaker 1: from his house, who he said, at an ongoing fel
Speaker 1: with his son. The police called Senate back for another
Speaker 1: round of questioning. One of the officers mentioned the name
Speaker 1: Kenny Smith, and Senate turned beat red. Senate left the
Speaker 1: police station. He drove to his son, Michael's house.
Speaker 7: You know, he said, you know, I failed a light
Speaker 7: to take your test. He said, you know, I've been
Speaker 7: involved with somebody else, and uh, we're taking all this
Speaker 7: inn can't believe it.
Speaker 1: Charles Senate left the house, got in his Chevy truck,
Speaker 1: picked up at twenty two.
Speaker 7: Pyle, you're here, Hark.
Speaker 2: He's in his truck.
Speaker 7: Where he shot itself.
Speaker 12: That was.
Speaker 7: Seven days after mom and mom got killed Friday to Friday. Yeah,
Speaker 7: lost them both in seven days. Yeah. One don't know
Speaker 7: how much that you can take until you go through
Speaker 7: something like that.
Speaker 1: In the Need and Tidy version of the Senate story,
Speaker 1: this is the ending. The killers have confessed and are
Speaker 1: in custody. The master criminal has shot himself, the victim
Speaker 1: is buried. A crime, a culprit, a mystery, a resolution,
Speaker 1: a beginning, an end. But we're not telling that person
Speaker 1: of the story. We're is getting started coming up on
Speaker 1: the Alabama murders, the trial of John Forest Parker.
Speaker 7: I just don't think some of these people that were
Speaker 7: on the jury, they didn't want that to be on
Speaker 7: their conscious the rest of their life, putting somebody into
Speaker 7: the death penalty.
Speaker 14: I've had other cases that technically, we're probably factually more complex,
Speaker 14: but this is, you know, this is the one that
Speaker 14: I is still on my mind even without chopping.
Speaker 8: He was a chief of police in Florence.
Speaker 4: He hererives really early on that you know.
Speaker 6: That that it wasn't like it was like it was
Speaker 6: supposed to be Looking Like It.
Speaker 13: Was h.
Speaker 1: Revisionous History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Bend Daph Haffrey
Speaker 1: and Nina Bird Lawrence. Additional reporting by Ben Da, Daph
Speaker 1: Haffrey and Lee Hedgepeth. Our editor is Karen Schakerji, fact
Speaker 1: checking by Kate Ferby. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.
Speaker 1: Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Production support from Luke LeMond.
Speaker 1: Original scoring by Luis Garra with Paul Brainard and Jimmy Bond.
Speaker 1: Sound design and additional music by Jake Krsky. I'm Malcolm Gardner.