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The Alabama Murders · Revisionist History

• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Pushkin, maybe you remember it. August two thousand and three,
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: everything went dark. A couple of trees on the East
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: Lake transmission line outside of Cleveland grew a little bit
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: too tall, and the electrical line at that precise point,
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: perhaps because of the summer heat, sagged a little bit
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: more than usual and touched the trees. Contact causes short
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: The short cause of power that used to run along
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: that line to be rerouted along another line, which overloaded
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: that line, causing an even bigger electrical surge to be
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: rerouted to another line, and on and on, leading to
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: a series of failures that rippled across the entire Northeastern grid,
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: leaving fifty million people without electricity. The Great Northeastern Blackout
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: is what's called a failure cascade. One small mishap leads
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: to a second, bigger problem, and a third even bigger problem,
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: and finally, at the end of the chain catastrophe, I
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: want to tell you a story about a moral failure cascade.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: It began with what looked like a robbery gone wrong.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: A woman murdered in her home in an area of
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  Speaker 1: northwestern Alabama known as the Shoals. But that crime would
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: soon attract the crowd, a host of others who would
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: get caught up in the cascade as it picked up
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: momentum onlookers, participants, people trying to stop the unfolding catastrophe.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: For thirty years, people wittingly or unwittingly feeding it until
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: it consumed them too. Was he Was he a good preacher, charismedic?
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: Yes, I would say very charismatic.
• 2:20
  Speaker 3: There was this joke that said that it was easier
• 2:24
  Speaker 3: to get forgiveness in the Church of Christ for murdering
• 2:28
  Speaker 3: somebody than it was to be divorced. Thank you. Just
• 2:32
  Speaker 3: got on from work and they come and he said, well, mom,
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  Speaker 3: can you come? He said, the police are here. There's
• 2:39
  Speaker 3: no sense in even having a jury. If you if
• 2:43
  Speaker 3: you're going to be able to overturn the jury, if
• 2:46
  Speaker 3: a judge can overturn the jury, he said, But I
• 2:50
  Speaker 3: was involved, and that's a horrible thing I was involved in.
• 2:55
  Speaker 3: I've been in prison twenty four twenty five years. That's
• 2:58
  Speaker 3: probably not long enough.
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: I didn't kill them. They get burned from the inside,
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: and then glad just pours into the lungs and I'm
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: sorry as I'm saying this, it's awful, and this is
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: what this is how lethal injection actually kills you.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: Here's what I don't understand. Nobody notices till you. Apparently not,
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: He would say to himself, turn to the right, to
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: the victim's family and apologize.
• 3:29
  Speaker 3: Turn to the left, tell my family, I love him,
• 3:31
  Speaker 3: So he would have this little practice.
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: To the right, I'm sorry. To the left, I love you.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: From Revisionist History, This is the Alabama Murders, a special
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: seven episode series in which we investigate why this case
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: went on for as long as it did, why it
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way,
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: and maybe the most important question, why have we created
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: a system that, in trying to respond to suffering all
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: too often makes suffering worse. The mant have damage this
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: man did is incalculable.
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: It's still damaging all of us. It still hurts us
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: to think about.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: Subscribe to Pushkin Plus to binge the entire season of
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: Revisionist History The Alabama Murders early and ed free. As
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: a Pushkin Plus subscriber, You also get bonus episodes, full audiobooks,
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: and binge's from your favorite Pushkin hosts and authors. Find
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: Pushkin Plus on the Revisionist History show page on Apple Podcasts,
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: or at pushkin dot Fm, slash plus,