ATMORE, Alabama — The mask was industrial, heavy, and fitted tight against his face, connected to a tangle of hoses that snaked away into the machinery of the execution chamber. Kenneth Eugene Smith was strapped into a steel chair bolted to the floor of the William C. Holman Correctional Facility, and for the first time in human history, a government was about to kill a man with nothing but nitrogen gas.
There was no gurney tonight. No IV line. No bag of clear fluid hanging from a metal pole.
Just a mask, a chair, and a method that had existed only in theory until this moment. Outside the prison walls, protesters and journalists had been gathering since the afternoon, cameras from news outlets around the world pointed at a building most of them had never heard of a week earlier. Inside, correctional officers moved with practiced choreography, but every single one of them was operating without precedent.
There was no manual written from experience. Everyone in that chamber tonight was, in one sense, guessing.
This was not Kenneth Smith’s first appointment with a death chamber. Two years earlier, he had been strapped down for a different execution entirely, and it had not gone the way the state planned. The execution team had spent four hours searching for a usable vein, jabbing needles into his arms and hands while he lay conscious, bleeding, sweating, watching the clock tick toward midnight when his death warrant would expire.
They had failed. He had walked out of that chamber alive. Tonight, Alabama was determined that would not happen twice.
But to understand how a man ended up in that chair, breathing nothing but nitrogen while the entire world watched to see what would happen, you have to go back nearly four decades. Back to a woman named Elizabeth Dorlene Sennett, who on March 18, 1988, was living an unremarkable, decent life in Sheffield, Alabama. She was 45 years old, a wife, a mother to grown sons, a pastor’s wife in a small, close-knit community where people still waved at cars they did not recognize and left doors unlocked because nothing much ever happened there.
Her husband, Charles Sennett Sr. , was the pastor of the West Side Church of Christ. Every Sunday, he stood in front of a room full of people and told them how to live a righteous life.
By every account available from the people who knew her, Elizabeth was well-regarded, warm, and trusting. She was the kind of person who took her husband’s word at face value because why would not she? He was, as far as she knew, exactly who he presented himself to be, a husband, a father, a man of God.
What Elizabeth did not know was that Charles was quietly unraveling. He was in serious debt, the kind that keeps a man up at night doing math that never comes out right. And alongside the financial pressure, there was a secret relationship, an affair, the sort of thing a pastor in a small town absolutely cannot afford to have discovered.
In a community that small, a scandal like that would cost him everything, his marriage, his pulpit, his entire identity.
Charles looked at Elizabeth’s life insurance policy instead. He did not act on it alone, and he did not act on it quickly. What he needed first was someone willing to actually do the killing, because whatever Charles Sennett had become capable of imagining, he apparently was not capable of doing it himself.
He turned to Billy Gray Williams, one of his own tenants, and offered him money to have Elizabeth killed. Williams said yes.
But Williams did not plan on doing it himself either. Instead, he reached further down the chain and brought in two more men, Kenneth Eugene Smith and John Forrest Parker. Each man was promised a thousand dollars for his role in ending Elizabeth Sennett’s life, a sum that, even adjusted for 1988, was a devastatingly small price for what it was buying.
A pastor with a secret paying a tenant who recruits two more men, one of whom would spend the next 36 years connected to this case, right up until the night the entire country watched him die.
On the morning of March 18, 1988, Elizabeth was home alone. Her sons were away. Her husband had told her in advance that two men would be stopping by, something about wanting to look over the property for hunting.
It was such a small, believable lie. Smith and Parker arrived at the house that morning. They did not force their way in.
They did not threaten her. They walked the property, made small talk, and when Elizabeth, being careful, called Charles to confirm the two strangers were who they said they were, he told her yes, go ahead, let them look around.
That phone call is the entire tragedy of this story compressed into a single moment. Elizabeth did exactly what a careful, sensible person would do. She checked.
She confirmed. And the person she checked with, the one person whose word should have meant something, lied to her directly, in real time, knowing exactly what those two men were actually there to do.
For a while, the morning unfolded almost peacefully. The men walked the property. They pretended to look for hunting spots.
Elizabeth went back inside. Then they knocked again. Could they use the bathroom?
She said yes. The moment that door closed behind them, everything changed. Smith grabbed whatever was closest, a fireplace tool, then a cane, then whatever else was within reach, and began striking her.
Elizabeth fought back. She screamed. She clawed at the men attacking her in her own home.
Parker joined in, and then came the knife. Eight stab wounds to the chest, one on each side of her neck, on top of the blunt force injuries already inflicted.
Before leaving, Smith and Parker tried to stage the scene, taking a VCR, a stereo, wiping down surfaces to make it look like a random burglary. It did not look random. It never was.
When Sheriff Ronnie May arrived at the Sennett home, he did not need long to know something was wrong. The wounds were too personal, too repeated, too clearly the product of rage or panic rather than an efficient grab-and-go burglary.
The investigation that followed did not take the robbery story at face value. Investigators started asking the question every homicide detective eventually asks when the staging does not quite add up: who benefits from this woman’s death? That question started turning the investigation toward the one person who should have been least suspicious, the grieving husband.
Charles played the part. He cried. He accepted condolences.
He did everything a grieving husband in a small, tight-knit community is expected to do. But performances like that only hold up for so long.
A tip came in through Crime Stoppers, names attached to the case that had nothing to do with random chance. Kenneth Smith. John Parker.
One week after Elizabeth’s murder, investigators brought Charles in for questioning. At first, he denied everything. Then someone asked him, almost in passing, whether he knew a man named Kenneth Smith.
Something in Charles broke. Witnesses described him turning visibly red, losing whatever composure had carried him through the interview. He left, went to his own church, and in front of his sons and his congregation, confessed the affair, the debt, the plan to have his wife killed for the insurance money.
Then he walked outside, got into his truck, and shot himself.
Charles Sennett never faced a jury. He removed himself from the story in the same instant he finally told the truth about it, leaving every ounce of legal consequence to fall on the three men he had paid to do what he could not bring himself to do. Billy Gray Williams was sentenced to life without parole and died in prison in November 2020.
John Forrest Parker was executed by lethal injection on June 10, 2010, his final words an apology. And then there was Kenneth Smith, whose case refused to close.
Smith was convicted in 1989 and sentenced to death. An appeals court threw the conviction out three years later. By 1996, he was retried, and this time the jury voted 11 to 1 in favor of life imprisonment instead of death.
Under Alabama law at the time, that recommendation did not have to be final. Judges had something called override power, the ability to disregard a jury’s sentencing recommendation entirely. The judge in Smith’s case used it, overruling 11 jurors and sentencing Smith to death.
Alabama would eventually decide judicial override was a bad enough idea to get rid of entirely, repealing the law in 2017, but that change did not apply retroactively. It did not reach back and rescue the people already sentenced to death under a system the state itself had abandoned.
By 2022, Smith was scheduled for execution by lethal injection. What happened instead became national news. The execution team strapped him to the gurney and spent four hours searching for a usable vein, failing repeatedly while Smith lay conscious, bleeding, aware of what was happening around him.
The warrant expired at midnight. He was unstrapped and returned to his cell alive, having survived his own execution. Smith and the state eventually reached a settlement.
In exchange for Alabama agreeing not to attempt lethal injection on him again, Smith was given the ability to choose an alternate method. He chose nitrogen hypoxia, a method that had never been used to execute a human being anywhere in the world.
On January 25, 2024, at 4:00 in the afternoon, Smith was brought his final meal. He ate slowly. At 6:00 that evening, he was led into the execution chamber.
There was no gurney, no IV bags, just a steel chair bolted to the floor and a heavy mask connected to a tangle of hoses. He was strapped in. The mask was fitted tightly over his face.
Asked if he had any final words, he said that tonight Alabama had caused humanity to take a step backward, and that he was leaving with love, peace, and light.
Then the nitrogen began to flow. For the first several seconds, there was nothing visible, exactly the calm, quiet process the state had promised. Then witnesses described Smith beginning to shake.
His feet pressed against the restraints, his hands curled into fists, his chest rose and fell rapidly, and his whole body started to convulse. For several minutes, witnesses described him struggling, heavy, labored breathing, visible movement on the chair. The execution took roughly 29 minutes from start to finish.
Smith was pronounced dead at 8:25 p. m.
State officials called it a success, an effective, lawful, humane method finally proven to work exactly as intended. Civil rights groups and international observers described something very different, several minutes of visible suffering, a method that looked far less controlled and far less painless than the state had promised. United Nations human rights officials would later issue statements condemning the execution and calling for the method to be banned entirely.
Somewhere in the middle of that disagreement sits an inconvenient, unavoidable fact. If Kenneth Smith’s original 1996 jury verdict had simply been honored, the 11 to 1 vote for life instead of death, none of this would have happened at all. The law that let a single judge override that verdict was gone by 2017.
Smith was not. He had already been sentenced under a system Alabama itself had since decided was unfair enough to abolish. And that discarded system reached across nearly three decades to put him in that chair anyway.
Elizabeth’s son, speaking after the execution, called it a bittersweet day, not a triumphant one. Just a day that was, at long last, finally over. Bittersweet is a strange, precise word to reach for after waiting 36 years for a case to close.
Not relief, not vindication, just the particular exhaustion of an ending that arrives too late to feel like anything except an ending. Nobody walks away from this case feeling like justice arrived cleanly. Charles Sennett never faced a jury.
The judicial override that sent Smith to death row no longer exists in Alabama. And yet it still reached across almost 30 years to put him in that chair. A method invented to be humane produced minutes of visible convulsing that even some of the people defending it struggled to fully explain.
Elizabeth Sennett’s murder ended in about 10 minutes inside a house she should have been safe in. Its consequences took 36 years to finish playing out, and even now, with every man connected to that morning either dead or still in prison, it is hard to say they actually have.
