The Alabama Murders - Part 1: The True Church

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Speaker 1: Pushkin Hello, hello Malcolm.

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Speaker 2: Here.

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Speaker 1: 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 dot fm, slash Plus. Pushkin Plus subscribers can access ad free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows. A little while ago, a friend of mine told me, you have to meet this person I know, Cape Porterfield. She's got the strangest job in America. So I did. We got together Porterfield and I in a little conference room in Manhattan. I just want to understand how you ended up where you are.

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Speaker 3: So you're kind of viewing us. We're just talking. You're thinking about whether there's something here that will that'll evolve over time that you would imagine being putting in the podcast.

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Speaker 4: Was that kind of everything?

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Speaker 1: Yeah?

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Speaker 5: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: Porterfield is a psychologist. We talked for a few hours, then again and again, one conversation leading to another, until she began to talk about a case that had affected her deeply. Although she hasn't used the word case, she says person a man on death row.

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Speaker 3: When I first went to see Kenny, so now it had been two months since the execution attempt. He wanted to talk for the first probably two hours of our visit about how beautiful his goodbyes were and the love he received from his family as he was going into the execution. That's what he wanted to start with. And I found this so powerful and also fascinating, honestly as a clinician, because what I first thought was, Oh, he's avoiding, right, he can't talk about the execution. He talked to me about love for probably two two and a half hours, to the point where I had to say, you know, this is incredible and I'm so happy you're sharing it, and I'm not surprised. I also though, I want to know what happened.

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Speaker 1: What happened was a botched execution punishment for a crime that took place over thirty years before, a river of blood that had already claimed the lives of three others. Kate Porderfield told me her version of events. Then I went out and got other people's versions of what happened, and that's where the story I'm about to tell you comes from. I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did, why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way, And the other question, maybe the more important question, is why have we quitted a system that, in trying to respond to suffering all too often makes suffering worse.

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Speaker 3: He made me really pause and think a lot, watching someone only start from a place of love after something so horrible was I have never seen that before.

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is a special seven episode series, The Alabama Murders, Episode one, The True Church. So we're now in Are we in Florence here?

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Speaker 6: Yes?

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Speaker 1: This story takes place in northwestern Alabama, in an area called the Shoals, the so called Alabama black Belt, the broad flat swath of fertile farmland where the old Antebellum cotton plantations were established. Hours drive to the south. This is Rolling Hills, Appalachia, not the Mississippi Delta. Four towns on either side of the Tennessee River, Sheffield, Discumbia, Mussel Shoals, and Florence. Sheffield is working class, struggling Muscle Shoals is a spiritual home of rhythm and blues. Discumbia is famous for being the birthplace of Helen Keller. Florence is the largest, a graceful town of beautiful pre war buildings with a Frank Lloyd Wrighthouse downtown.

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Speaker 6: You know, there's no interstate that runs through Florence, there's no major airport, so it's a little bit of a closed society almost.

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Speaker 7: It's really neat.

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Speaker 1: I started going to Alabama after talking to Cape Porterfield, and on one of my first trips, I met a man named Grant Asbell, a preacher early forties, big beard baseball cap, though not on Sunday morning. Of course. He was my guide to Florence.

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Speaker 6: You know, there's good music, there's good art, there's good food, but you just don't happen here. You have to want to come to Florence.

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Speaker 1: This is the place where it all started with a personal transgression, a matter of the heart, by another preacher, a man named Charles Sennate.

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Speaker 6: I was only seven years old when it happened, but I remember it being really disconcerting because if you're in this group and like it in this area in particular, I mean, you've been to Florence, Florence, you don't get here by accident, and so the idea that someone within this framework could do something like Charles Sennett did was very disruptive. It was talked about kind of in hush tones. I was talking to our local he goes to church with us here. He's actually the historian for the city of Florence, and he was telling me that one of the preachers in one of the churches in town. While that was going on, got up in the poolpit and said, Charles Sennett is a faithful Christian brother. The things that are being said about him are lies with the idea right. He is a faithful Church of Christ member and almost incapable of this kind of thing.

00:06:38
Speaker 1: In Alabama, the Shoals is the spiritual center of the Protestant denomination known as the Church of Christ. There are many many Church of Christ congregations within an hour's drive of Florence. And I don't think that any of the things we're going to explore over the course of this series will make sense unless you first understand something about this denomination. If I blindfolded you and put you in an early nineteen eighties Church of Christ congregation, how long would it take you before you knew you were in Church of Christ.

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Speaker 5: I would know in about three minutes or less.

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Speaker 1: This is Lee camp who has taught theology for years at Lipscomb University in Nashville, one of the most prestigious of the many universities around the United States affiliated with the Church of Christ. Would what would be the tip off?

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Speaker 5: Well, the singing would be acappella is the first thing, and so you know, the only place you're going to find a cocapel singing is probably either going to be Mennonites or Church of Christ. It may be Church of the Brethren. And then there are going to be certain phrases that are going to get said that would just be a tip off that you know, this is what in the prayers are going to say, Lord, guard, guide and direct us. I don't know, there just be language like that that I would immediately know.

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Speaker 1: By the way, for those of you who know something about country music, what do willn Jennings, Roy Orbison, Loeurete Olinn, Glenn Campbell, Dwight Yoakam, Pat Boon, Crystal Gale, I could go on, all have in common. They all came out of the a cappella tradition of the Church of Christ. It's not Sunday morning. I just take you to a church. It's empty. How long does it take you to know that you're in a Church of Christ. There's no one in there. You look around, what do you see? That's a tip of no organ?

00:08:25
Speaker 5: There's no organ, and just the whole architecture is very, very simple. There's lack of pretense. There's certainly no art on the walls. There's no stations for the cross. There's pews and there are there's on the one side at the front is going to be a board that shows attendance contribution numbers. On the other side, it's going to be a board that has the hymn numbers that you slide in with the numbers. And in the middle it's going to be a simple poolpit.

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Speaker 1: I know about the Church of Christ because my best friend is the screenwriter Charles Randolph, whose father Dale was a Church of Christ, who went to Lipscomb. And once when I was visiting Lipscomb, the same school where Lee Camp teaches, a little old lady came out to me and said, are you Dale Randolph's famous son Chuck's friend. Yes, I am. And while I'm playing this game, I should point out that halfway through my conversation with Grant asboll I discovered that he did his doctorate at Lipscomb with Lee Camp. The point is that the Church of Christ is a very small world. It's a family.

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Speaker 5: Now, you're from Alabama, I am from Alabama. You were born in Talladega, Telladega and not Talladega or Talladega, it's Taladia Telladigga.

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Speaker 1: And you grew up in the Church of Christ.

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Speaker 5: I did.

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Speaker 1: When you say that you are that you belong to the Church of Christ, what are you saying about? What does that mean? How's that different from I'm a Baptist.

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Speaker 5: Well, it depends on who you're talking to and where they are in their experience of Churches of Christ. But when someone says I'm a member of the Church of Christ, that means that they are members of the true Church that restored New Testament Christianity, and everybody else is wrong, and that this is the true Church. That's not a denomination, that's not Protestant, it's not Catholic, it's just the true Church.

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Speaker 1: In the taxonomy of Southern Protestantism, there are the Pentecostals, the singing, the swaying, speaking in tongues emotion. The Church of Christ isn't that. Then there are the fundamentalists, the Southern Baptists, fire and Brimstone. The Church of Christ isn't that either. The Baptists and the Pentecostals can sometimes go on all Sunday afternoon. In a Church of Christ, You're out in an hour. These are the people of the book. There is said to be more advanced degrees in the Church of Christ's leadership than any of the Southern denominations. There are a church of rules and certainties, simplicity and clarity, a church inspired by the idea that anyone who studies the Bible, reads it closely and thoughtfully, can discern the path to salvation. That's the good part, the beautiful part. But the other part, and by the way, no one is more willing to acknowledge the limitations of the Church of Christ than people who belong to the Church of Christ, is that the rules, the certainty, the intimacy can become a straight jacket.

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Speaker 5: Like I love and hate Church to Christ. You know I love them and I have hated them, and you know I love them because I've spent my life doing what I've done with my life because of what I learned in my church. You know, I was loved by my church, loved by the people in that church. And yet at the same time that the traditions in the latter part of the twentieth century have done a lot of damage to a lot of people, including me. There's a sense of fear, and there's there's always the danger that you'll be kind of cut off, and so that it was kind of fear of just saying you're not okay, you know, you don't toe the line. And so the church, the church would practice this sort of on occasion, would practice is sort of just fellowshipping, we called it, where you could literally be socially you know, estranged, socially disciplined publicly, and then apart from some sort of public statement of repentance, you could be a member of good standing in the church.

00:13:09
Speaker 1: You cannot divorce your wife unless there is a documented case of adultery. Full stop. Women cannot participate in a church service. Full stop. Singing must be a cappella. Instruments are a frivolity.

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Speaker 5: You've got, you know, all these taboos around no dancing, because if you dance you're gonna lust, and if you lest, you're going to go to hell. You know, no mixed bathing we called it, which means you're not swimming around in people of opposite sex, because if you do, you're gonna ust and you'll go to hell. And one of my favorite stories about kind of illustrating this was that we were on a youth group trip and in another town and we were pulling out of the church to go to launch break and the preacher driving the van van full of you know, impressionable fourteen fifteen year olds, he looks to the left and there's this guy jogging down the sidewalk and his jogging shorts. And we were not permitted to wear shorts in public because of the last thing, you know, And this guy's jogging down the sidewalk and the preacher looks at him and he says, he looks real nice in those jigging shorts. He'll look real nice in hell.

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Speaker 1: This is the world. Charles Sennett, the men at the center of our story belonged to He was born in West Virginia. His father was a Church of Christ preacher. He got married to Elizabeth do Lean in nineteen sixty two She was the picture of a preacher's wife. They had two sons together, and by the time she was in her early forties, Elizabeth was already a grandmother. There are still lots of people in the Shoals who remember the sentence she.

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Speaker 4: Was a chippable low my grandbaby.

00:14:48
Speaker 8: Let me run home mate, chocolate chip bookies and keep them over weekend with their family.

00:14:52
Speaker 4: Their parents gonna go out have a day.

00:14:54
Speaker 8: Not.

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Speaker 1: This is Susan Moseley, a nurse at a local weight loss clinic who became close with Elizabeth, you.

00:15:01
Speaker 8: Know, brought them babies with her a lot of times, and they and I'm a little thing in there in that little exercise running, little cabin chair, color and books.

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Speaker 1: So leg I said, there and fell the Bacchus with Charles. Got a doctorate in divinity in the nineteen seventies, became the preacher at a Church of Christ in Jasper, Alabama, a small town two hours south of the Shoals. He was good. In a few years he tripled the size of the church. He was handsome, dynamic, a wonderful singing voice in the best Church of Christ tradition. At some point in his thirties, at the point his career seemed ascendant, things began to go sideways for Charles Sennett. There were rumors of some indiscretion at the Church of Christ in Jasper, an affair. The elders fired him. If you want to trace the precise moment at which things began to unravel, perhaps it was here, because there was a version of events in which he could have stayed in Jasper for his whole career built upon his success there. To be a minister at a successful Church of Christ is a position of real status. There's a kind of free market in that world. When there's a hot young pature in town, people will leave their churches and join the rising star. Senate was that rising star. But then he lost it all. He was despondent. His family came upon him one night, curl up in a ball on the couch. He'd had a nervous breakdown. He became suicidal. He ended up spending weeks in a psychiatric hospital in Birmingham. This is the summary from the medical records of the psychiatric facility where he was hospitalized. Exam reveals an unkempt, hostile, rebellious white male. His thought content is preoccupied, his psychomotor agitated and his affect labile. His mood is depressed, his sensorium confused and his tension level tense. His insight is lacking, and his judgment is poor. He found another job, then another, moved to the Shoals and became the preacher at the West Side Church of Christ in Sheffield, small working class congress gation, little white church, not jasper, a step down starting over.

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Speaker 4: A lot of this that I know was hearsay amongst Usaul.

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Speaker 8: Yeah, you know how it passes from person to person, gets bigger or gets smaller. So yeah, take everything. I tell you what the grain of salt, because it was all your day.

00:17:28
Speaker 1: This is Charlie Bill and her son Eric. They were members of Charles Sennen's church. And was he Was he a good preacher?

00:17:37
Speaker 9: Evidently he must have been.

00:17:41
Speaker 4: Charismatic, Yes, I would say, very charismatic.

00:17:44
Speaker 7: Yeah.

00:17:45
Speaker 8: Yeah, the point my mother called him a lady's man.

00:17:49
Speaker 1: Oh really, Oh, your mother had a she had a.

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Speaker 4: Did she mean it not a way of labeling people?

00:17:58
Speaker 1: Did she Did she mean it in a positive way or in a negative way?

00:18:03
Speaker 4: My grandmother said it was negative.

00:18:07
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:18:08
Speaker 9: She was very conservative and very uh yeah, yeah, see that would have been a very very negative thing to say about somebody.

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Speaker 8: My back, I say it is about as pure church or Christ as you can get.

00:18:20
Speaker 1: There were whispers about a woman in the West Side Congregation, Doris.

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Speaker 9: We heard the you know, connected rumors that she was involved her husband was having some serious issues.

00:18:36
Speaker 4: I don't know.

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Speaker 9: I reading on it, I almost would think she was seeking I think he was probably her minister, because I think she went to a West Side one.

00:18:48
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think so at the time, and that's my understanding.

00:18:51
Speaker 9: I don't know that for I would almost say she was probably seeking some counseling from him.

00:18:56
Speaker 1: Charles Sennett was in love with a woman who is not his wife. H had a book of poems in his office called Memories of the Heart with Doris's picture in it. There were rumors someone saw Valentine Charles a given Dora. I talked with another from a member of the West Side Church, Carl Rodin. We sat in his living room. He hit a dog on his lap. I'm just curious. Was was he a goode?

00:19:21
Speaker 2: It was a nice little year won't be around? He was nice? Yeah, I mean you just couldn't hard a beat him. Somebody see he'd be the first one there was some food nursing home, he'd be the first one there was something to eat, or you know.

00:19:38
Speaker 1: Was he a good preacher?

00:19:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, I just want to say he had a split person out the best I can tail.

00:19:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, do you remember uh he had been It came out during the trial and he had been Uh he had been at a church in Jasper and had been fired from that job because he was the same thing, having an affair with someone in the church.

00:20:01
Speaker 2: We see, they should have told us when they fired him, but didn't. Nobody sent him back to him. Yeah, all over Wilsley. Yeah, there was.

00:20:10
Speaker 1: No way of there was he just do you remember anything about how he came to the church and first of.

00:20:15
Speaker 2: All, you know, I'll just remember there not Yeah, I don't know, Yeah, I don't know. They got to hold over anything.

00:20:24
Speaker 1: So he was really popular.

00:20:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he was an aspho. Well, like I said, he'd be the first one at somebody's house with food, you know, or he was just an ask guy. That's all you might got to Nobody never thought that, that's what you know, he would doing something like that.

00:20:43
Speaker 1: In the winter of nineteen eighty eight, Charles and his wife, Elizabeth, fought she wanted a divorce, and they both knew what that meant. He shouted at her, I won't lose another church. He was one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in debt from failed business ventures, This on a preacher's salary. His behavior grew erratic. The walls began to close in. He had a secret he could not share a marriage that was to integrating demons he was desperately trying to keep at bay. He still goes to preach every Sunday, but no one knows the full story of his life. No one, that is, except the only person who would have mattered for Charles Sennett, and that was God. One thing I don't understand is he seems completely ill suited for the ministry. He seems volatile. He's having an affair with a congregant, his finances are a mess, he's abusive to his wife's I'm just curious, how does he How would someone like that enter and survive in the ministry, particularly in a world where people are as conscious of conduct as the Church of Christ community is.

00:22:11
Speaker 7: He worked very hard to make sure nobody knew outside that tight circle of biological family.

00:22:17
Speaker 1: I asked the Church of Christ minister named Rodney Plunkett about the case he knew Charles Senate.

00:22:22
Speaker 7: That's not a typical, but yeah, they mask.

00:22:27
Speaker 1: And the amount of effort that must have gone into masking.

00:22:32
Speaker 7: That enormous Malcolm is absolutely enormous.

00:22:38
Speaker 1: I asked my theologian friend Lee Camp the same question. One of the things I'm trying to understand is we have this man Church of Christ, minister Charles Senate in little town, northwestern Alabama, who is having an affair and his wife has decided to divorce him. And you know, I'm wander were he you know, night or were he a Muslim or whatever, all those all those traditions would have would shape his his dysfunction in some way. And I'm curious how does his How does his tradition shape his dysfunction? That's what I'm trying to get at, what's going on inside his head as he processes the kind of his affair, his wife's decision it is, and the chaos of his own life. And he's he's the pastor of this this little white Clapper church in a corner of Sheffield.

00:23:43
Speaker 5: I mean, who knows, right, But you know, I would make up that the sense of shame is overwhelming, and when you're in a context of overwhelming shame, it can do terrifying things to the psyche. And in the absence of any sort of constructive grace. And I don't mean by that some flabby sense of all everything's okay, you know, grace, but some sort of constructive sense of grace, you know, it can quickly lead you to all sorts of madness.

00:24:29
Speaker 1: Christian grace, God's unmerited favor and loving kindness, a gift freely given to humanity, unearned and undeserved, a spontaneous act of generosity on God's part, extended to all humanity, regardless of their sin. What Camp was saying, and what many others in the Church of Christ came to believe, was that their church, particularly their church in that era forty fifty years ago, did not understand grace. Grand Aswald told me about his uncle, the song leader in a Church of Christ congregation, who once talked a little bit too much about grace and forgiveness at Sunday school, and so was let go. The church elder wouldn't even let him finish out his contract. Because if you had deciphered the rules of the Bible, the logic of the Christian text, then there shouldn't be any deviation should there It was all crystal clear. And if you started to grant forgiveness for those who strayed from that narrow path, then what incentive did people have to follow the narrow path? That was thinking And it's where the shame that Lee Camp was talking about came from, because in the absence of grace, there is no relief from transgression. People like Aswell and Lee Camp had been trying to push their church in a more forgiving direction to bring grace into their religious experience. But in the nineteen eighties in a small town in Alabama, this is what Asbel said.

00:25:54
Speaker 6: The idea behind that is this idea that if you want to one day be judged faithful, you have to have kept these rules and even to the point where if you break one of the rules, you can ask forgiveness. But the way that it felt as a kid was if you fell out of an airplane and you said a cuss word on the way down, and you didn't have a chance to repent of that word before you hit the ground, then you might your soul might be lost to the da Nation for Eternity.

00:26:32
Speaker 1: When Lee Kemp said I have loved my church and I have hated my church, this was the part he hated. I mean, I think it's interesting that you said. You know, when we think, when we imagine what is going through the mind of someone who's marriage is in trouble, who is in love with another woman, one possible interpretation is that their motivation is genuine in the sense that they have fallen out of love with their wife and in love with someone else and see the possibility for a greater happiness and are willing to do or a certain amount of pain and heartbreak to get to that greater happiness. But that's not I'm not imagining that's what it is. It's he is in love with another woman and is consumed with shame over his predicament.

00:27:27
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, there's certainly, so far as his church context would be concerned, there's no viable route to a greater happiness with the other woman, because it's simply not going to be permitted unless you leave the community that you probably think it is the community that you have to be a part of if you're not going to go to hell. I mean, it's that's simple. Really Again, I don't want to speculate about what he's thinking, but I would conjecture, given all that we know, you know that I know about that experience, that there's it would be plausible that something like that's going on.

00:28:04
Speaker 1: You know, Which is a which is he's in a terrifying for him, a terrifying place.

00:28:14
Speaker 5: Sure, as I'm sure was his wife. There was this joke that said that it was easier to get forgiveness in the Church of Christ for murdering somebody than it was to be divorced.

00:28:38
Speaker 1: There is a proverb that dates back to the Middle Ages that I'm sure you've heard in one version or another, for want of a nail. The shoe was lost for want of a shoe. The horse was lost for want of a horse. The rider was lost for want of a rider. The message was lost for want of a message. The battle was lost for want of a battle. The kingdom was lost all for the want of a nail. The proverb of a lost nail is what's called a failure cascade. One small misstep or mishap leads to a second big problem, and a third even bigger problem, and finally, at the end of the chain catastrophe. The Northeastern blackout in August of two thousand and three, one of the biggest blackouts in history, was a failure cascade. A couple of trees on the East Lake transmission line outside of Cleveland grew a little bit too tall, and the electrical line at that precise moment, perhaps because of the summer heat, sagged a little bit more than usual and touched the trees. The contact caused a short. The short caused the power that used to run along that line to be rerouted along another line, which overloaded that line, causing an even bigger electrical surge to be rerouted to another line, and on an on, leading to a series of failures that rippled across the entire Northeastern grid, leaving fifty million people without electricity. For want of a chainsaw, the power was lost. The Alabama murders is about a classic failure cascade. Only were the ever widening ripples were caused not by mechanical or institutional defects, but failures of character, of justice, of compassion. Coming up on the Alabama murders, that.

00:30:48
Speaker 8: The viciousness was there that he could do something like that, I don't know.

00:30:53
Speaker 6: I entered the call, and I got all the information on who done it, who was all involved in all the particulars.

00:31:02
Speaker 4: It was having an affair with a parishioner. There were seventy people that went to that church. How did they not know that this was going on.

00:31:13
Speaker 7: I don't know which one of them, Kilber, I really don't.

00:31:16
Speaker 2: And I think both of them got what they probably deserved legally and morally.

00:31:24
Speaker 6: And at the time, we had had an execution from now Alabama for a very long time.

00:31:29
Speaker 4: And I said, sure, Well, you know, I didn't know what I was getting in through what is taught either at nursing school or as an emt or as a doctor.

00:31:37
Speaker 1: Cannot be lifted into the death chamber, like it's not the same place.

00:31:44
Speaker 3: 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 him. So he would have this little practice to the right, I'm sorry, to the left, I love you.

00:32:01
Speaker 1: Provision's history is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Bend A. Daff Hyffrey, and Nina Bird Lawrence. Additional reporting by bend ad aff Haffrey and Lee Hedgepeth. Our editor is Karen Chukerji, fact checking by Kate Furby. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Production support from Luke Clemond, Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence, Original scoring by Luis Guerra with Paul Brainard and Jimmy Bodd. Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorsky. I'm Malcolm Glaba.