Revisionist History - The Alabama Murders

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

Florence, Alabama. 1988. A preacher has an affair. A woman is murdered. One death cascades into more, stretching across decades and leaving no one untouched — victims, bystanders, perpetrators, and those just trying to help. Eventually, the consequences lead to the center of a hot national debate on who should be allowed to live, who should die, and how the state should execute them. On The Alabama Murders, Malcolm Gladwell asks: why, in our efforts to alleviate suffering, do we so often make it worse? Tune in to the seven-part series on October 2, 2025. Pushkin+ subscribers can binge the entire season of Revisionist History: The Alabama Murders early and ad-free. Sign up on the Revisionist History show page or at pushkin.fm/plus.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. Maybe you remember it, August 2003. Everything went dark. 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 point, perhaps because of the summer heat, sagged a little bit more than usual,

and touch the trees. Contact causes 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 and on, leading to a series of failures that rippled across the entire northeastern grid, leaving 50 million people without electricity. The great northeastern blackout

is what's called a failure cascade. One small mishap leads to a second bigger problem and a third even bigger problem and finally at the end of the chain, catastrophe. I want to tell you a story about a moral failure cascade. It began with what looked like a wrong. gone wrong. A woman murdered in her home in an area of northwestern Alabama known as the shoals.

But that crime would soon attract the crowd, a host of others who would get caught up in the cascade as it picked up momentum. Onlookers, participants, people trying to stop the unfolding catastrophe. For 30 years, people wittingly or unwittingly feeding it until it consumed them too. Was he a good preacher? Charismatic. Yes, I would say. Very charismatic. 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. Thank you just got home from work and they come and he said, well, Mom, can you come? He said, the police are. here. There's no sense in even having a jury if you're going to be able to overturn

the jury, if a judge can overturn the jury. He said, but I was involved. And that's a horrible thing I was involved in. I've been in prison 24, 25 years. That's probably not long enough. I didn't kill them.

They get burned from the inside, and then blood just pours into the lungs. And I'm sorry as I'm saying this, it's awful. And this is what, this is how lethal injection actually kills you. Here's what I don't understand. Nobody notices this till you? Apparently not.

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 had this little practice, to the right, I'm sorry, to the left, I love you. From revisionist history, this is The Alabama Murders, a special seven-episode series in which we investigate why this case went on for as long as it did, why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way. And maybe the most important question. Why have we created a system that in trying to respond to suffering all too often make suffering worse? The amount of damage this man did is incalculable. It's still damaging all of us.

It still hurts us to think about it. Subscribe to Pushkin Plus to binge the entire season of Revisionous History, The Alabama Murders, Early and Ad-Free. As a Pushkin Plus subscriber, you also get bonus episodes full audiobooks and binges from your favorite Pushkin hosts and authors. Find Pushkin Plus on the revisionist history show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.