The Alabama Murders - Part 3: A Peculiar Institution
Malcolm Gladwell examines the trial of John Forrest Parker for the murder of Elizabeth Sennett, highlighting how medical evidence and timing cast serious doubt on whether Parker actually inflicted the fatal stab wounds, and pointing instead toward her husband, Reverend Charles Sennett. The episode then traces how Alabama's judicial override system allowed a judge to impose the death penalty against a jury's recommendation of life without parole, and how the state later abolished override without correcting past cases, leaving Parker on death row despite the system's acknowledged flaws.
The Alabama Murders - Part 2: Coon Dog Cemetery Road
Malcolm Gladwell continues his exploration of the Alabama Murders by reconstructing the 1988 killing of Elizabeth Dorleen Sennett, the investigation that followed, and the early suspicions that her preacher husband Charles may have orchestrated the crime. Through interviews with congregants, investigators, and locals, he details the killers' confessions, the red flags in Charles Sennett's behavior, and the eventual revelation of Sennett's infidelity and suicide. Gladwell contrasts the messy, ongoing reality of this case with the tidy resolutions of typical crime stories, introducing the idea of a 'failure cascade' in the justice system.
The Alabama Murders - Part 1: The True Church
Malcolm Gladwell opens a seven-episode series by introducing psychologist Kate Porterfield and the death row client "Kenny," whose botched execution and focus on love after trauma lead Gladwell into an Alabama murder case decades in the making. The episode then shifts to northwestern Alabama and explores the culture and theology of the Church of Christ, including its strict rules, lack of grace, and practices like disfellowshipping, and how that environment shaped the life and unraveling of preacher Charles Sennett. Through interviews with Church of Christ members and ministers, Gladwell sets up the idea that a rigid, shame-driven religious system helped create the conditions for a moral and legal catastrophe that will unfold in the series.
The Alabama Murders
This short episode introduces a special seven-episode Revisionist History series titled "The Alabama Murders." Using the 2003 Northeast blackout as an analogy for a "failure cascade," the host frames a decades-long Alabama murder case as a moral and legal cascade involving a woman killed in her home, a charismatic preacher, disputed jury and judicial decisions, long imprisonment, lethal injection, and far‑reaching harm. Interview clips hint at themes of religious culture, judicial power, the death penalty, and how a justice system meant to respond to suffering can instead amplify it.