Scene on Radio · Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University

Revisionist History: The Alabama Murders

October 9, 2025·34 min·3 clips

A psychologist describes how a death row inmate talked about love for hours after a failed execution attempt.

Justice looks strained here, and not in an abstract way. John introduces The Alabama Murders as an episode from another show, one that shares Scene on Radio's interest in systems, worldview, and collapse. The story starts with Charles Sennett, an Alabama minister who, according to the introduction, arranged for three men to murder his wife while he tried to hide an affair. Kenny Smith carries much of the later weight. One convicted man spent decades on death row before an execution attempt went badly enough to draw a national debate. So the question is not only guilt. It is the punishment machine around the case: who gets to live, who is made to die, and how the state carries that out. Then the episode turns inward. A speaker describes a church culture ruled by strict lines, public discipline, and fear of being judged outside those lines. Divorce is one of the hard boundaries. The rule, repeated plainly, is that a man cannot divorce his wife unless adultery is documented. Social belonging has conditions, too. Disfellowshipping means public and social estrangement until repentance restores standing. The details are ordinary, which makes them feel harsher. Women cannot participate in church service. Singing must be acapella. Instruments are treated as frivolous. Even bodies are watched. Dancing, swimming with people of the opposite sex, and wearing shorts are described as roads toward lust and damnation. One van story catches the whole world in miniature: a preacher sees a jogger in shorts and turns the moment into a warning about hell for teenagers. That is where the episode lands. It places Sennett inside a moral order where private panic, religious authority, and public shame could become brutally consequential. The closing credits return the piece to Revisionist History, but it still fits Scene on Radio's habit of following a system until the failure shows.

As heard by us

A murder case expands into a study of death row, church discipline, and the failures surrounding a botched execution.

The Alabama Murders begins with an affair inside a strict Church of Christ world, then widens into something colder and more troubling. Charles Sennett's 1988 arrangement to have his wife killed becomes less a closed true-crime case than a way into legal, moral, and…

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Why you'd press play

You want a murder story that widens toward death row and the machinery of justice.

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