Revisionist History - The Alabama Murders - Part 2: Coon Dog Cemetery Road

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

Florence, Alabama. 1988. After a horrifying murder takes place, an anonymous caller names three young men as suspects. But speculation swirls about the victim’s husband. 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/plusSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Malcolm Gladwell here. I'm excited to share that Revisionist History is a Signal Awards finalist in two categories. The Signal Awards recognize the top podcasts that define culture. Our episode, The Joe Rogan Intervention, is up for Best Conversation Starter, and our episode, Running Hot, is up for best writing. We're thrilled to be nominated, and from now until October 9th, you can help us win by voting for us. Vote at

Vote.Signalward.com. That's vote. dot signal signail award.com. We're thankful for your support. Bushkin. 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. Previously on Revisionist History. Was he a good preacher? Evidently, he must have been... Charismatic. Yes, I would say. Very charismatic.

Florence, you don't get here by accident. And so the idea that someone within this framework could do something like Charles Senate did was very disruptive. He worked very hard to make sure nobody knew outside that tight circle of biological family. When someone says, I'm a member of the Church of Christ, that means that they are members of the true church. that's not a denomination, that's not Protestant, it's not Catholic, it's just the true church. We're now into the hills, we're now into the Alabama hills of, um, we're now into the Alabama hills of, um, we're not, we're not, we're not, we're not, we're not, we're a, we're a long, winding two-lane road following an F-150 pickup truck.

Like much of this corner of Alabama, it's really gorgeous countryside. We are way out in... I mean, we haven't passed up a house in quite some time. On one of our trips to the shoals, my colleague Ben Nadaf Halfrey and I drove out to find the house where Charles and Elizabeth Senate lived. We didn't have a precise address, just the name of their road, which turned out to be a long, winding gravel track that runs high along a mountain ridge. Coondog Cemetery Road.

We're all the best Coondogs find their final resting place. Oh, my God, it's an actual... Because we couldn't find the Senate House, We ended up at the cemetery. There were headstones, lots of American flags. There was a little sign with a kundog on it. Only the cemetery was kind in the world. Troop.

First dog laid to rest here, September 4th, 1937. Then we met an older couple who gave us directions. We drove back the way we came and finally found it. Here, this is the driveway, and there's the gate. Okay, there's the... Drain pipe. The drain pipe. I think I see the remains.

So it's just an overgrown gate with some posted signs. The house is gone now. It's a double-wide trailer. It burned down a couple years ago. There's a pond back there. It's, if we hadn't have met that, that guy we would have had no idea. Yeah, you would not have identified this as it.

Because there's the only thing is the gate that says private property. It's all overgrown now. If you wanted to hide, let's just say this is a very good place to hide. Nobody's going to trouble you. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. This is the Alabama murders. I talked in the last episode. about the notion of the failure cascade,

a crisis that does not resolve itself, but rather accelerates in a way that we neither anticipate no desire. In this episode, we're going to go deep into the crime that took place on the morning of March 18, 1988, that kicked off the cascade and tore the Senate family apart before it accelerated and spread to countless others. 35 years. That's how long Elizabeth's Senate's family waited for justice to occur, 35 long years.

This is the Attorney General of Alabama, Steve Marshall, at a press conference in 2022, when, by the way, the Senate case still wasn't over, when it still had one final grotesque act to come. To give some perspective, almost half of Alabama's population wasn't even born when this malicious crime was committed. The well-known axiom is true. The justice delayed is justice denied. No, what the Senate case teaches us is that justice delayed is what justice is in the world we have chosen for ourselves. The question is why?

How does a crime turn into a cascade? Episode 2. Kondog Cemetery Road. So then, have you seen pictures of this family of Charles Senate and Liz? So actually, Charles Senate kind of looked like a 1980s TV evangelist. This is Lacey Kenemar, whose husband was one of the many lawyers drawn into the Senate case. He was handsome, dark-headed. kind of had that southern, a little bit, a little bit redneck,

but look, she was homely as a mud fence. I mean, and everything that I've read about him and what I... What was that phrase? Homely as a mud fence. I've never heard of that. Homily as a mud fence? Yeah. I've never heard of it.

I don't even never heard of a mud fence. Well, you can imagine. Yes, it depends a picture. So what I remember, what I recall about this was the fact that he was having an affair with a parishioner. There weren't 70 people that went to that church. How did they not know that this was going on? And then they lived out on what's called Condoog Cemetery Road, which is in rural part of Cobbock County.

And when I say rule, it's frighteningly rule. Which makes me wonder about this guy. I mean, it had to be. Coontal Cemetery Road, if you were owned out on it, he had to live 32 miles from his church building. and a long life from his parishioners, I think the guy was crazy. On March 18, 1988, just before noon,

Charles Senate returned home from a morning in town. His house was ransacked. The living room was a mess. A coffee table had been turned upside down. Its legs broken. Wood fragments were everywhere. A stereo and VCR were missing. and lying on the floor of the den in a pool of blood was his wife, Elizabeth Dorleen Senate.

She'd been stabbed repeatedly. A white and blue Afghan covered her face and torso. Senate called the Colbert County Sheriff's Office. An investigator named Ronnie May answered the phone. Senate was hysterical, and May couldn't understand him at first, didn't even know whether he was speaking to a man or a woman. May said, calm down. Then again, calm down.

Senate said, I've just come home. My house has been broken into, and my wife has been killed. May said, stay where you are. We'll be right there. May and his officers drove out to Senate's house. It was raining heavily. As he walked in to the carport, Senate came running towards him,

wrapped his arms around him, and said, Ronnie, Ronnie, they've killed her. They've killed her. Ronnie May walked into the den where Elizabeth Sennett's body was lying. He reached for a pulse, couldn't find one, thought she was dead. But when the ambulance arrived, a few minutes later, one of the paramedics found a faint pulse. Chuck and Mike Sennett, their two sons, were 25 and 23 years old at the time.

Mom was just the homemaker. Kind, nurturing, was there every day. school, you know, growing up. You know, we never missed a time with her and daddy. They later gave an interview to the local news about that day. Chuck got the news before I did. Daddy called me at work. Yeah, Chuck called me at work, said something happened to mom at the farm,

get out here quick. Elizabeth Senate was taken by ambulance to Helen Keller Hospital in Sheffield. In the ER, the medical staff tried frantically to keep. her alive. The doctors started cardiac resuscitation, put in an IV, gave her fluid, put in a breathing tube. They took Elizabeth Sennett to the operating room, opened her chest, found no blood in her heart or vascular system. In one last attempt to save her life, they put a clamp across her aorta on the chance that the fluid would fill her heart chamber. We sat there for a while and then they invite you up to the second floor,

which is where they deliver the bad news. Elizabeth Senate was pronounced dead at 205 in the afternoon. Lacey Kenemar knew one of the nurses who was there at the hospital when Elizabeth was brought in that day. So she's in the ER with the doctor and the and the Senate and the doctor said please go out and tell her husband she is still hanging on she's still with us she said I walked out of that I will never forget as long as I live I walked out of that emergency department I walked out of the emergency room room and went to him

and told him and he was astounded he said that cannot be be. Wow. It wasn't long before the speculation began. I'm just really curious about when the news broke about what had happened to Elizabeth, or Elizabeth D'Aleen. Can you tell me about what that was like? I can tell you every minute of that one. This is Charlie Bill. Who went to Charles Sedan's Church? When we stopped by to visit at the church the last time where he was preaching, on the way home, to visit our parents, he backhanded his child.

I don't know what the child had done. My husband was furious because he said, you just don't do that to a child across its face. You might hit its ear and causes a hearing to be gone. So he was really mad about it. So when we heard the news on the radio one morning at breakfast, Charles Sennett's wife has been murdered. My husband looked right straight at me, and he said, he did it. That's how convinced he was over that slapping. That the viciousness was there, that he could do something like that.

I don't know. But that's where we heard it first, was sitting at the breakfast table. Carl Rodin, a member of Senate's congregation, spoke to Senate on the morning of the murder and drove him to the hospital. Picked him up at Highway 72 and 247. He was an ambulance, and they got out and got in the car with me, and I brought him on to the hospital. Yeah. The only thing he ever said after, you know, you look back, he said, they shouldn't have done her that way.

Didn't really mean nothing at the time. Her funeral was the following Sunday at the West Side Church of Christ, her husband's church. Roden watched Senate walk out of the service. After the closing prayers and singing and all that, family comes out first. And he has her picture up against his chair. with both hands, hugging it. And it was just the most fake thing I believe I've ever saw. And I told my wife, I said, that's the most phonest thing I've ever saw.

And he just, it looked put on. Rodin lives in a small white house, right down the street from the old West Side Church of Christ, now empty, but still with the very Church of Christ message on the sign outside. Time is precious. Are you spending time with the God who made you? As we were talking with Rodin, he told us about a friend, someone who'd worked the case when it first broke. He'd say his name is Mickey.

Ricky? Ricky Miller. Ricky Miller. And he was one of the deputies investigating the case. And he's... He's one you really need to talk with. And so Roden called Ricky up. When do you say come, from day or tomorrow?

I don't know shit. Right now, everyone's talking. Okay, get it over with. We'll be there and... Now, they're feminine and everything. Get your hair come on. There what? It's going to be a movie.

They'll get your hair combed. You got a haircut today. Well, you don't have got your hair cut. I don't know, but they don't know. I don't know. No, they're just writing a story or something. I don't really know. They're pretty good old Joe's anyway.

They are Yankees. Hey, how many of them is it? It's just two of them with a microphone. Wow. When you're back to you're going to be there in 10 minutes. They'll be there in 10 minutes. All right. Okay, bye.

Thank you so much. Thank you all. Appreciate it. I see. Good luck. Malcolm Globel here. I'm excited to share that. Welcome Gladwell here.

The Signal Awards recognize the top podcasts that define culture. Our episode, the Joe Rogan intervention, is up for best conversation starter, and our episode, Running Hot, is up for best writing. We're thrilled to be nominated, and from now until October 9th, you can help us win by voting for us. Vote at vote.orgnet.com. That's vote. Dot signal, S-I-G-N-A-L-Word.com.

We're thankful for your support. Carl Rodin's friend Ricky Miller lives in a small, immaculate house in a quiet part of Muscle Shoals. He's retired after a long career as an investigator in the district attorney's office, handsome, quiet, recently widowed, still had a law enforcement haircut. I assisted the sheriff's department in investigating the case. And it got interesting. Now, the more you got into it, the more interesting it got. He was part of the team that went out to the Senate's property after the murder to search the pond.

They drained it, found a survival knife, a fireplace poker, and a fireplace brush. There were so many leads and stuff, we followed and followed. But at the time, the crime stopper's phone for our county was in my office. And I answered the call, and I got all the information on who done. who was all involved in all the particulars. The anonymous caller named three young men, all in their teens and early 20s, Billy Gray Williams, John Forrest Parker,

and Kenny Eugene Smith. The caller had details, right down to the location of key pieces of evidence. The caller said they had taken the VCR. And the call I received even told me where the VCR was being used, and it was on Kenneth Smith's TV. He said, it's sitting there right now.

He's using it. And I couldn't have found out. That was accurate. All three of the young men were arrested. All three confessed. Kenny Smith explained that he'd been approached by Billy Williams a month earlier. He knew Williams from high school. The two of them had talked out on his front porch.

Smith said, quote, Billy said he knew someone that wanted somebody hurt. Billy said the person wanted to pay to have it done. Billy said the person would pay $1,500 to do the job. I think I told Billy I would think about it and get back with him. Smith then says he agrees to do it and recruits John Parker to help. Two weeks later, Smith met with the man Williams had been in contact with. He didn't identify himself, and they had no idea who he was.

The man said he wanted someone taken care of, a woman. The man said the woman would be at home that she never had an visitors. The man said that the house was out in the country. They all met again at a coffee shop. The man drew a diagram of the house. It was supposed to look like a burglary that went bad. The man said they could take whatever they wanted. On the morning of the 18th, Parker and Smith met up at 8.30. Parker brought a black-handled survival knife. The two of them drove out to Coondog Cemetery Road in Parker's Pontiac Grand Prix. Smith told investigators, John and I got to the Senate House around 9.30, I think.

I knocked on the door. I told Mrs. Senate that her husband had told us that we could come down and look around the property to see about hunting on it. John and I looked around the property for a while, then came back into the house. John and I went back to the door. We told Mrs. Senate we needed to use the bathroom, and she let us inside. I went to the bathroom nearest the kitchen, and then John went to the bathroom. I stood at the edge of the kitchen talking with Mrs. Senate. Mrs. Senate was sitting at a chair in the den.

Then I heard John coming through the house. John walked up behind Mrs. Senate and started hitting her. John was hitting her with his fist. I started getting the VCR while John was beating Mrs. Senate. John hit Mrs. Senate with a large cane and anything else he could get his hands on. John went into a frenzy. Mrs. Senate was yelling.

Just stop. We could have anything we wanted. As John was beating up Mrs. Senate, I messed up some things in the house to make it look like a burglary. The last place I saw Mrs. Senate, she was lying near the fireplace, covered with some kind of blanket. I had gone outside to look into storage buildings when I saw John run out to the pond and throw some things in it, end quote. The next morning, the two of them read the newspapers and learned that the woman they had attacked, was dead and that her name was Elizabeth Senate. Did you, at what point in the investigation did you come to suspect that Charles Senate might be involved? The first thing that called our attention, the best I can remember, was he made too many alibis.

You know, if you go about your casual day, you might run into one, maybe two people. But he had a pattern everywhere he went was to make an alibi. And when he went by Carl's house, Carl said, told me he'd never been to his house, except that one time. 8 to 8.30, Jolt Kendrick. 8.30 to 9. Sam Garrett, Jr. 9 o'clock. Billy Alexander. Mrs. Louise Allen sees him leave Westside Church. 9.30 to 10. Carl Rodden.

10. Teresa Hall. 10.15. A phone call with Tammy Sue Wright. 11 a.m. with Brenda sprayed on Woodmont Drive in Tuscumbria. And on and on. He made too many out of it. It was overkill. You know, he stopped to see people they'd have never seen.

And that just threw up a red flag to us. Why is he seeing all these people? For the first time, it happened to be at the time his wife's being murdered, you know. And even on his way home, I don't know if you're familiar where it happened at, out in the county. Have you ever been there? It's a good way. It's a good way's out there. People along the way, even, on the highway, 247 going up, they said he had stopped and said he'd never stopped here before.

He could tell you every time, everything, every day. Well, had my wife just been murdered in my home, I couldn't tell you nothing. My mind's gone. But he knew everything in detail. That's a red flag. So it's... And then Carl told us that in the car,

Carl takes him to the hospital. That night, he said that Senate said to him, they beat her up pretty bad or something like that. They shouldn't have done her that way. They shouldn't have done her that way. How does he know there's two? Yeah. Yeah, when you use the word, they, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I understand that when Senate is, he tells the story about how he comes back to the house. He sees his wife's body and then they say, well, what did you do? And he said, I didn't touch her, even though he was trained. And surely that was another red flag. his wife was lying mortally wounded a few feet away

he didn't touch her and this was a man who was trained in CPR that was a question we all wondered first thing you're going to do is go to your wife if it had been my wife laying there blundgeon bloody and all first thing I would have done was checked her grabbed her I would have had some kind of evidence on me that I had made contact with he lived 16 miles out It's going to take them a while to get there.

So what are you doing the whole time? Are you just standing there looking at her? Then you're not going to check her? That's a red flag. You know, there would have been some kind of evidence that you would have checked your wife. He did not. Malcolm Gladwell here. I'm excited to share that Revisionist History is a Signal Awards finalist in two categories.

The Signal Awards recognize the top podcasts that define culture. Our episode, The Joe Rogan Intervention, is up for Best Conversation Starter, and our episode, Running Hot, is up for best writing. We're thrilled to be nominated, and from now until October 9th, you can help us win by voting for us. Vote at vote.signalward.com. That's vote. dot signal, S-I-G-N-A-L-Word.com.

We're thankful for your support. In the Brothers Grimm Telling of Little Red Riding Hood, a fairy tale beloved by small children for centuries, Little Red Riding Hood is tricked by a wolf, dressed as her grandmother and eaten. She's then saved by a hunter who cuts open the wolf's belly, glimpses her red cap and pulls her out.

Ah, how frightened I have been! How dark it was inside the wolf's! Little Red Riding Hood, however, quickly fetched great stones with which to fill the wolf's belly. And when he awoke, he wanted to run away, but the stones were so heavy that he collapsed at once and fell dead.

Then another wolf stalks her, jumps on a roof of her grandmother's house, and Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother foil him by putting a pot of sausage-flavored water in front of their house. Then the smell of the sausages reached the wolf, and he sniffed and peeped down, and at last stretched out his neck so far that he could no longer keep his footing and began to slip,

and slipped down from the roof straight into the great trough, and was drowned. But little red riding hood went joyously home, and no one ever did anything to harm her again. Why do children so cheerfully indulge in a story that is about, let's be clear, a pedophile? Because the wolf gets his comeuppance in the end. It's the same principle that explains everything from Sherlock Holmes to the television show Law and Order to countless tabloody true crime podcasts. We are more than happy to wallow in stories of madness and depravity so long as order is restored in the end. Crime stories are exercises in moral assurance.

With the Senate case, it's enormously tempting to tell a story this way. The case is pure Southern Gothic. I mean, a preacher who has lost his way, a house on a lonely mountain road, called, for goodness sake, Coondog Cemetery Road, and then two local killers for hire speeding back to Florence with a VCR in the backseat. You want that version? You can find it online. This is the story.

of a God-fearing family who preach, sing, and pray together through good times and bad, but behind church doors and wholesome music blooms betrayal and deceit and a murder that will rock a small-town Alabama community to its core.

But let's be clear, the Little Red Riding Hood model is an illusion. You don't return home happily and safely after fighting off a violent predator. You spend the rest of your childhood recovering. The actual NYPD is nowhere near as effortlessly effective as the fictional NYPD of law and order. And as much as everyone involved in the Senate case wanted it to end neatly and tidily as all the classic crime stories do, it didn't end. It kept going. So tell me about when the Senate case breaks, when we first hear about it, what impact does it have on the town?

Well, of course, abject horror throughout the whole community. And it, of course, made the gory headlines for days and days, especially because they didn't know who had murdered the minister's wife. and as long as they're on the run, then everybody's frightened. They don't know the motive. Billy Warren, the Florentzown historian. They don't know at that point that the minister has hired these young men.

They don't know anything. So it was gripping really for the whole community because there was so much unknown. In the middle of this is Senate himself, under suspicion, but still at large, trying and failing to play the role of the grieving husband and becoming increasingly aware that his treachery was transparent. Why did Charles Senate do such a bad job of covering his own tracks?

Billy Gray Williams, the man he first approached with his scheme, was his tenant, for goodness sake. The sheriff's deputy, Ronnie May, recognized Senate because there had been a murder not long before at a gas station, and Senate had come to the crime scene uninvited and hung around as if he was studying police. procedure. And you know where he found the money to pay his hitman? His lover. It's as if he wasn't even trying, like he turned himself in before he'd even committed his crime. When I try to imagine

what was going through his mind in the days after his wife's death, I can't help but think of what the theologian Lee Camp said in the last episode, about how Senate's original transgression, his affair with a woman in his church, would have filled him with shame. And remember the joke, he told, that for us in the Church of Christ, it's easier to get forgiveness for murdering someone than it was for a divorce? The point of the joke is that we are the most rigorous of Christian communities, and we will cast you out for a second-degree transgression like cheating on your wife, as surely as for a first-degree transgression, like arranging for her murder.

The acts are very different, but the consequences are the same. So why would Charles Senate act as if he was indifferent to whether he got caught? Because maybe in his own tangled mind, the leap from an affair to a killing wasn't a leap at all. From the moment he cheated on his wife, he was already beyond redemption. Charles Senate was called in for questioning. He admitted to the affair, but he denied any involvement with his wife's death. He said he suspected a black man from Cherokee, Alabama, a town not far from his house, who he said had an ongoing feud with his son.

The police called Senate back for another round of questioning. One of the officers mentioned the name Kenny Smith, and Senate turned beat red. Senate left the police station. He drove to his son, Michael's house. You know, he said, you know, I failed a lie detector test. He said, you know, I've been involved. with somebody else, and we're taking all this thing, can't believe it.

Charles Senate left the house, got in his Chevy truck, picked up a 22. How? You hear it. Firecrackeray. He's in his truck where he shot itself. That was seven days after mom got killed. Friday to Friday. Yeah. Lost them both in seven days.

One don't know how much you can take until you go through something like that. In the neat and tidy version of the Senate story, this is the ending. The killers have confessed and are in custody. The master criminal has shot himself. The victim is buried. A crime, a culprit,

A mystery, a resolution, a beginning, an end. But we're not telling that version of the story. We're just getting started. Coming up on the Alabama murders, the trial of John Forrest Parker. I just don't think some of these people that were on the jury, they didn't want that to be on their conscience. The rest of their life, putting somebody into the death penalty. I've had, you know, other cases that technically were probably factually more complex,

but this is, you know, this is the one that I, um, it's still on my mind, even without chop comedy. He was the chief of police in Florence. He theorized really early on that, you know, that it wasn't like it was, like it was supposed to be looking like it was. Revision's history is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Ben Nadaf Haferi and Nina Bird Lawrence. Additional reporting by Ben thataf Haferi and Lee Hedgepeth. Our editor is Karen Shakurgy, fact-checking by Kate Furby. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence, production support from Luke Lehmond.

Original scoring by Luis Gera with Paul Brannard and Jimmy Baud. Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski. I'm Malcolm Gladham. Malcolm Gladwell here. I'm excited to share that Revisionist History is a Signal Awards finalist in two categories. The Signal Awards recognize the top podcasts that define culture. Our episode, the Joe Rogan intervention, is up for Best Conversation Starter, and our episode, Running Hot, is up for best writing.

We're thrilled to be nominated, and from now until October 9th, you can help us win by voting for us. Vote at vote.com. That's vote.signal, signail.org.com. We're thankful for your support. This is an I-Hart podcast.