Revisionist History - The Alabama Murders - Part 1: The True Church

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

In a small town in the northwest corner of Alabama, a cascade begins with a man and an affair. Get early, ad-free access to the full season of The Alabama Murders by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm. Pushkin+ subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows. Subscribe on Apple: apple.co/pushkinSubscribe on Pushkin: pushkin.com/plus    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Hi, I'm Dave Anthony, host of The Dollop, which I do with my co-host, very funny comedian, Gareth Reynolds. The Dollop is an American history podcast, and every week, I read a story to Gareth from American history that he has never heard before, and we do everything from covering a baseball great Ricky Henderson to the 1908, New York, to Paris car race, to presidents like Hart. to Mike the chicken, who was a chicken without a head that smoke cigarettes.

Topics can be light. They can be serious like Iraq, but we always try to keep it funny. So give the dollop a shot, American history, the dollop where you find podcasts, I guess. 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.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.

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. So you're kind of viewing as we're just talking,

you're thinking about whether there's something here that will evolve over time that you would imagine putting in the podcast? Is that kind of what you're thinking? Yeah, yeah. 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 doesn't use the word case. She says, person, a man on death row. 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 happier you're sharing it, and I'm not surprised. I also, though, I want to know what happened. What happened was a botched execution, punishment for a crime that took place over 30 years before, a river of blood that had already claimed the lives of three others. Kate Porterfield 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 created a system That in trying to respond to suffering all too often makes suffering worse.

He made me really pause and think a lot. Watching someone only start from a place of love after something so horrible was I'd never seen that before. 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? Yes. 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, is several hours drive to the south. This is Rolling Hills, Appalachia, not the Mississippi Delta, four towns on either side of the Tennessee River. Sheffield, Tuscumbia, Muscle Shoals, and Florence. Sheffield is working class, struggling. Muscle Shoals is a spiritual home of rhythm and blues. Tuscumbia 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. 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. It's really neat. I started going to Alabama after talking to Cape Porterfield. And on one of my first trips, I met a man named Grant Asbel, a preacher, early 40s, big beard, baseball cap, though not on Sunday morning, of course.

He was my guide to Florence. 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. This is the place where it all started, with a personal transgression, a matter of the heart, by another preacher, a man named Charles Senate.

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 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 Senate did was very disruptive. It was talked about kind of in hushed 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 and one of the churches in town, while that was going on, got up in the pulpit and said, Charles Senate 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. Hi, I'm Dave Anthony, host of The Dullop, which I do with my co-host, very funny comedian, Gareth Reynolds. The Dullop is an American history podcast, and every week, I read a story to Gareth from American history that he has never heard before.

And we do everything from covering a baseball great Ricky Henderson to the 1908, New York, to Paris car race, to presidents like Harding, to Mike the chicken, who was a chicken without a head? that smoke cigarettes. Topics can be light. They can be serious like Iraq, but we always try to keep it funny. So give the dollop a shot, American history, the dollop where you find podcasts, I guess.

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 1980s Church of Christ congregation, how long would it take you before you knew you were in Church of Christ? I would know in about three minutes, or less. 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. What would be the tip-off?

Well, the singing would be Acapella is the first thing. And so, you know, the only place you're going to find Acapella singing is probably either going to be Mennonites or Church of Christ, maybe 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 where you are. And the prayers are going to say, Lord, Guard, Guide, and direct us. I don't know, there would just be language like that that I would immediately know. By the way, for those of you who know something about country music, what do Whalen Jennings, Roy Orbison, Loretta Lynn, Glenn Campbell, Dwight Yolkham, Pat Boone, Crystal Gale,

I could go on, all have in common? They all came out of the Acapella 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. um you look around what do you see that's the tip of no organ there's no organ and just the whole architecture is very very simple um there's lack of pretense there's certainly no art on the walls

there's no stations of the cross there's uh 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 is going to be a simple pulpit. I know about the Church of Christ because my best friend is the screenwriter Charles Randolph, whose father, Dale, was a Church of Christ minister 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 Asbel, 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. Now, you're from Alabama. I am from Alabama. You were born in Talladega. Talladega. It's not Talladega. or Taladiga. It's Taladiga. Taladiga. And you grew up in the Church of Christ.

I did. When you say that you are, that you belong to the Church of Christ, what are you saying about, what does that mean? How is that different from I'm a Baptist? 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 in the taxonomy of Southern Protestantism

there are the Pentecostals the singing a sway 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. Like, I love and hate Church of the 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. I was loved by the people in that church. and yet at the same time that the traditions in the latter part of the 20th 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 um kind of cut off and so it was kind of fear of just saying you're not okay you know you don't tow the line And so the church, the church would practice this sort of, on occasion, would practice this sort of disfellowshiping, 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 couldn't be a member of good standing in the church. You cannot divorce your wife unless there is a document, case of adultery. Full stop. Women cannot participate in a church service. Full stop. Singing must be a cappella. Instruments are a frivolity. You've got, you know, all these taboos around no dancing because if you dance, you're going to lust and if you're going to go to hell. You know, no mixed bathing, we called it, which means you're not swimming around people of the

opposite sex. Because if you do, you're going to lust 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 lunch break and the preacher driving the van van full of you know impressionable 14 15 year olds he looks to the left and there's this guy jogging down the sidewalk in his jogging shorts and we were not permitted to wear shorts in public because of the lust thing and this guy's jogging down the sidewalk and the preacher looks at him and he says

he looks real nice in those jogging shorts he'll look real nice in hell this is the world Charles Senate the man 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 Dorleen

in 1962 she was the picture of a preacher's wife they had two sons together and by the time she was in her early 40s Elizabeth was already a grandmother. There are still lots of people in the shoals who remember the sentence. She was a typical love my grandbaby, let me run home, make chocolate chip cookies

and keep them over weekend with their family, their carrots going to go out and have a date night. This is Susan Mosley, a nurse at a local weight loss clinic who became close with Elizabeth. You know, brought them babies with her a lot of times, and I made a little thing in there, and that little exercise room, little type on chair or color and books so they can sit there and call the box. She was leaving.

Charles got a doctorate in Divinity in the 1970s, 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 30s, at the point his career seemed ascendant, things began to go sideways for Charles Senate. 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 preacher 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, curled 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 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 censorium 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 Westside Church of Christ in Sheffield. Small, working-class congregation, Little White Church, not Jasper, a step down. Starting over.

A lot of this that I know was hearsay amongst us all. You know how it passes from person to person, gets bigger or gets smaller. So, take everything I tell you with the grain of salt because it was all hearsay. This is Charlie Bill and her son, Eric. They were members of Charles Sennon's Church. And was he a good priest?

Peter? Evidently, he must have been charismatic. Yes, I would say. Very charismatic. Yeah, yeah. The point, my mother called him a ladies man. Oh, really? Oh, your mother had a, she had a, did she mean that? Mother had a way of labeling people. Did she, did she mean that in a positive way or in a negative way? If my grandmother said it, it was negative. Yeah. She was very conservative and very, yeah. Yeah, see, that would have been a very negative thing to say about somebody. Maybe I could say it's about as pure church of Christ as you can get.

There were whispers about a woman in the West Side congregation, Doris. We heard the, you know, the connected rumors that she was involved. Her husband was having some serious issues. I don't know. Reading on it, I almost would think she was seeking. I think he was probably her minister, because I think she went to Westside, wouldn't it? Yeah, I think so at the time.

That's my understanding. I don't know therefore. I would almost say she was probably seeking some counseling from him. Charles Sennett was in love with a woman who was not his wife. He had a book of poems in his office. called Memories of the Heart, with Doris' picture in it. There were rumors. Someone saw a Valentine Charles had given Doris.

I talked with another former member of the Westside Church, Carl Rodin. We sat in his living room. He had a dog on his lap. I'm just curious. Was he a good... He just a nice fellow year we won't be around. He was what? Nice.

Yeah. I mean, you just couldn't hardly beat him. Somebody'd be sick. He'd be the first one there with some food. nursing home he'd be the first one there with something to eat or you know was he a good preacher yeah that's once he had a split person out the best i can tell yeah did you remember uh he had been it came out during the trial that 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 let's see they should He should have told us when they fired him, but didn't nobody send him back to him. Yeah. It was all over, he might as well say. Yeah. There was no way of, there was, he just, do you remember anything about how he came to the church in first school? You know. I was just a member there, and I don't know.

Yeah. I don't know how they got to hold him or anything. So he was really popular. Yeah. Yeah. He was a nice fellow. Like I said, he'd be the first one at somebody's house with food. you know, or

he was just a nice guy. That's all you make that out of. Nobody would never thought this. That's what, you know, he would have done something like that. In the winter of 1988, 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 $150,000 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 disintegrating, 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 Senate, and that was God. Hi, I'm Dave Anthony, host of The Dollop, which I do with my co-host, very funny comedian, Gareth Reynolds.

The Dollup is an American history podcast, and every week, I read a story to Gareth from American history that he has never heard before. And we do everything from covering a baseball great Ricky Henderson to the 1908, New York, to Paris car race, to presidents, like Harding, to Mike the chicken, who was a chicken without a head that smoke cigarettes. Topics can be light. They can be serious like Iraq, but we always try to keep it funny. So give the dollop a shot, American history, the dollop, where you find podcasts, I guess. 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. 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's community is? He worked very hard to make sure nobody knew outside that tight circle of biological family. I asked a Church of Christ minister

named Rodney Plunkett about the case. He knew Charles Senate. That's not atypical. Yeah, they mask. And the amount of effort that must have gone into masking that. Enormous. Malcolm is absolutely enormous.

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's minister, Charles Senate, in Littletown, northwestern Alabama, who is having an affair, and his wife has decided to divorce him. And, you know, I'm wondering, were he a, you know, a Mennonite, or were he a Muslim or whatever, all those, all those traditions would have would shape his right 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 in 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 yeah 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 um it can do terrifying things to the psyche and in the absence of any sort of um um constructive grace, and I don't, I don't mean by that, some flabby sense of, oh, 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. 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, 40, 50 years ago, did not understand grace. Grand Asbel told me about his uncle, the songleader 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 elders 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 Asbel 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 1980s, in a small town in Alabama, this is what Asbel said. 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 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 your soul might be lost to damnation for eternity. 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 whose 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.

willing to endure 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. 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's the community that you have to be a part of if you're not going to go to hell. I mean, it's that 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,

it would be plausible that something like that's going on. Mm-hmm. You know. Which is a, which is a, he's in a terrifying, for him a terrifying place. 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.

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 bigger problem and a third even bigger problem and finally at the end of the chain. Catastrophe. The northeastern blackout in August of 2003, one of the biggest blackouts in history was a failure cascade. A couple of trees on the Eastlake 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 and on, leading to a series of failures that rippled across the entire northeastern grid, leaving 50 million people without electricity. For want of a chainsaw, the power was lost. The Alabama murders is about a classic failure cascade, only where 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 the viciousness was there, that he could do something like that. I don't know. I answered the call, and I got all the information on who done it, who was all involved, and all the particulars. It 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? I don't know which one of them killed her. I really don't. But I think both of them got what they probably deserved legally and morally. And at the time, we had had an execution in Alabama in a very long time. And I said, sure, well, you know, I didn't know. know what I was getting into. What is taught either in nursing school or as an EMT or as a doctor can not be lifted into

the death chamber. Like, it's not the same place. 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. Revision's history is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Ben Nadav Haferi, and Nina Bird Lawrence. Additional reporting by Benadhaff Haferi and Lee Hedgepeth. Our editor is Karen Shikurgy. Fact-checking by Kate Furby.

Our executive producer is Jacob Smith, production support from Luke Lamond. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Original scoring by Luis Gera with Paul Brainerd and Jimmy Bod. Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Hi, I'm Dave Anthony, host of The Dollop, which I do with my co-host, very funny comedian, Gareth Reynolds. The Dollop is an American history podcast, and every week, I read a story to Gareth from American history that he has never heard.

before. And we do everything from covering a baseball great Ricky Henderson to the 1908, New York, to Paris car race, to presidents like Harding, to Mike the Chicken, who was a chicken without a head that smoke cigarettes. Topics can be light. They can be serious like Iraq, but we always try to keep it funny. So give the dollop a shot, American history, the dollop where you find podcasts, I guess. This is an I-Hart podcast. Thank you.