The Alabama Murders - Part 6: The Porterfield Sessions

It's Michael Lewis here with some exciting news. I have a new audiobook coming out on October 6th called "Blockers." It's among other things, and inside, look at the early days of Trump's Department of Government efficiency or doge, as it's referred to, as told by the public servants it entangled. But it's not just that. One kept Americans most sensitive tax data out of the wrong hands, and another made sure that politicians and civil servants played by the rules. One figured out how to stop wildfires from destroying suburban neighborhoods, another delivered the cure to cystic fibrosis, and there was also a security guard. You can preorder your copy of the audiobook exclusively at blockers.fm. That's blockers.fm. Preorder now and will also send you a code for 25% off of all pushkin titles, including mine like Lyra's poker in the big short, through the end of the year. On revisionist history. You know, an anesthesiologist in good standing is not going to spend their Wednesdays over at the state corrections, sticking IVs in people for execution. It's not something that we do. Because a cold-blooded convicted killer complains about the prodding and poking of a small Abbey line. Really? Podding and poking with a needle? After three and a half or four hours being strapped to a gurney, you know, he was unable to stand, walk, unbutton his shirt, you know, changes closed. Do any of that without assistance? They attempted to kill him on November 17th. His lawyer called me, I think 10 days later. I didn't know them. They didn't know me. We have a client who's had this thing happen. He's really struggling. Would you take a look at him? In the months after his botched execution, Kenny Smith had a confidant, Kate Porterfield, a psychologist who specializes in trauma. She is consulted on dozens of death row cases in her career. Sped a lot of time at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay. Worked for years treating patients at the clinic for torture victims at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. A very good friend of mine, Steven, knows her well and told me one day, "You have to meet my friend, Kate. She has the strangest job in America." So I called her up and we began to talk with no real plan or agenda. And in one of our conversations, she told me about a case that I'd never heard about before and a person she'd been asked to evaluate who'd affected her deeply. Kenny Smith. That's how I learned about the murder of Elizabeth Senet. Everything in this series began with my conversations with Kate Porterfield. To tell me about your first visit with Kenny. So my first contact with him was a call, actually. It was remarkably pleasant. Kenny was a very resilient man. He had been on death row for 34 years. This was a man used to living on death row and at least to being in prison. And one of the things he said to me is, "He used to call me Doc. He'd say Doc, I am very institutionalized. I know how to do this. I've made a life here. I have a very good set of friends here and I have really good relationships on the outside. He had been married. He had children from before he went in and he had relationships with his children. So he said to me, "I'm very institutionalized. I've been through a lot, but I'm actually pretty stable." And he said, "But I'm falling apart right now from what happened." I mean, I think what now, what I think is he was signaling to me, "I'm pretty sturdy, but this really messed me up." Nate Portafield would end up spending many hours with Kenny Smith over the next year, talking to him on the phone, visiting him at home in prison, trying to understand what happened to him in that execution chamber on the night of November 17th, 2022, trying to figure out how damaged he'd been by the experience, riding an assessment of his condition that could be used by his legal team in court, and most of all, just trying to understand who he was. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to the Alabama murders. In this installment, I want to look at Kenny Smith through the eyes of Kate Portafield, to see the Kenny Smith that she saw in those many encounters between the end of 2022 and the long winter of 2023. This is episode 6, The Portafield Sessions. In my third conversation with Kate Portafield, well before we got to Kenny Smith, she told me about a patient she'd seen many years ago. An older man, this is when she was working at the torture clinic at Bellevue. He was a refugee from a war-torn country. He'd been imprisoned, tortured, and at one point he'd been subjected to a mock execution. He'd been made to believe by his captors that he was about to die. So this was probably the first person I ever worked with who had had a mock execution, and it is its own unimaginable horror that leaves a really, really bad physical, physiological rather imprint. Her goal was to gently push him back towards his traumatic experience, to better understand, and to help him. He was very rigid, and he would sit just really tightly wound in the sessions, really gripping the chair, and I, he didn't want to go there. It took a very long time to draw him out. She would go on to work with five or six other patients who had gone through something similar. A gun they thought was loaded, put to their head, owned to realize it was empty. Being held underwater almost long enough, and even in one case, being left in a cage with a lion. She came to believe that this kind of experience deserved its own category. Why is a mock execution uniquely damaging? Let me say it this way. When someone says you're about to die, you're terrified, and terror doesn't even capture it. Most people lose control in some part of their body, maybe they're bladder or bowel. There's usually incredible exclaiming of horror. It's not good to think you're about to die. I mean, I've seen six people or whatever try to describe it to me, and they all fall apart. It's like I've never had someone to say it the first time and not really fall apart, like collapse. And different ways I had a guy who had been kidnapped and the soldiers came in and said, if we don't get the ransom, we're going to kill you. Then they came in the next day and they had a gun and they put it to his head. This man was the most put together, disciplined, controlled guy. When he tried to tell that moment, he just fell down in his chair and grabbed his head. He was like, "My head's hurting, my head's hurting, I can't, I can't." There's just this incredible physiological, probably hormonal dump into his system of the same thing that happened when the mock execution took place. Essentially, what trauma does is it becomes imprinted in your body and your memory banks are then linked and hooked up with the fear reaction. That's the problem. It's a bad linkage. When you think about being told I'm about to kill you and then you try to tell it, your body just goes, it goes right into that state of terror. This is the first thing that Kate Portafield saw when she sat down with Kenny Smith, that he was in that special category. But his experience in some ways was even more overwhelming. This was not a mock execution, it was a botched execution. It wasn't a trick, they were actually intending to execute Kenny, they just didn't manage to pull it off. And Kate was entreating someone years after it had occurred. With Kenny Smith, this had just happened. This was different. This was this very orchestrated, slow, systematic process being done by these guys all in this room who we knew. Guys who had been his guards for some of them, some of them he knew some he didn't, but guys he's known for a lot of years, trying to kill him. Very hard to wrap your brain around. How did the guards react? You know, I think that he believed they got very-- very rattled and he watched it on their faces, but no one could do anything. And it's a scary narrative then of what people will do with orders, right? Like, I mean, there was a point after all these poking of him with needles going around his feet, his arms where they took the gurney and inverted it upwards with his feet up and left him there for, I have to look, but I think it was upwards of 20 minutes, 30 minutes. They came back in and they started to flood the poses. So then they started poking on his collarbone. So they took this man. They tipped him upside down so that the blood would rush to a part of his body. They came back in. They injected him with something which he believes and we believe was probably a pain killer. And then they started going on his neck, around his collarbone. I mean, I'm sorry, but I don't imagine that a person who's doing that and witnessing it can walk away from that unscathed themselves. Kenny wanted to apologize to the Senate family and say goodbye to his own family, but he was all alone with the execution team. He thought they were killing him before the witnesses could get there. - And he said one of the ways he stayed calm when he, when there was all that dead time, was he would say to himself, turn to the right to the victim's family and apologize, turn to the left to tell my family I love him. So he had this little practice to the right. I'm sorry to the left, I love you. And he said that kind of helped him pass the time, which also was like remarkable to me. He was thinking about how you're managing, like how you're gonna choreograph this. They come back in, they begin to untie the tourniquet on his arm and they say it's over now. And then one of the people on the team who he didn't know says to him, it's over and I'll be praying for you. So these kinds of moments for Kenny were just, what's the word? Unmanageable afterwards. They were unmanageable moments with other humans. - One minute they were trying to kill him, then they weren't trying to kill him. - It's very confusing. And then the man references God. Kenny's most core faith, right, was his belief in God and his belief that because of his faith, he had really been saved. I'm not talking about saved in the execution, I'm saying saved as a man, the his faith saved him. So this collision of people trying to kill you, your body being in something that we don't really understand unless you thought you're gonna die. And then someone bringing God in and saying this sort of generous thing, I'm gonna pray for you. It was, like at the word unmanageable is what I keep come up with, he couldn't grasp it and he couldn't deal with it after. I mean, there were many things that made him stressed, but that was what. You know, the word in taking his head and saying, this is what's best for you was another. Kate Portafield would end up having 17 marathon phone sessions with Kenny Smith and she would twice fly down to Alabama to meet with him in person. And after he had told her the story of what happened on November 17th, he told her the story of his life in the years leading up to the murder of Elizabeth Senet. That's after the break. (soft music) It's Michael Lewis here with some exciting news. I have a new audio book coming out on October 6th called "Blockers." It's among other things and inside look at the early days of Trump's Department of Government efficiency or doge, as it's referred to, as told by the public servants in entangled, but it's not just that. One kept Americans most sensitive tax data out of the wrong hands and another made sure that politicians and civil servants played by the rules. One figured out how to stop wildfires from destroying suburban neighborhoods, another delivered the cure to cystic fibrosis and there was also a security guard. You can preorder your copy of the audio book exclusively at blockers.fm. That's blockers.fm. Preorder now and we'll also send you a code for 25% off of all pushkin titles, including mine like Lyra's poker in the big short through the end of the year. Kenny Smith's full name was Kenneth Eugene Smith. Both Kenny and his brother Joey were named for their father, a truck driver named Wesley Eugene Smith. - Did you ever regret naming the madman? - Linda Smith, Kenny Smith's mom, still lives in the sholes. She spoke with Lee Hedgebeth, a local reporter who knew Kenny well and covered his case. - Has he passed now? - Jane? - Oh yes. Yeah, hey, I think he was 45 when he passed. - Linda and Jane had five children together in quick succession. Kenny was the eldest. - He didn't really want to child at that point. - Why do you think that was? - I just, I don't know. I guess he wouldn't, through with his wall oats, I guess. - So tell me about the wild oats? - Not too much of a drinker, more of like peels. Back then it was kind of uppers and downers. - Jane was on the road a lot. He had another relationship. Linda says it was with an underage girl. Jane got a pregnant, but he still came around to see Linda, to sleep with her or just to hit her. - Oh yeah, he always did that, just about. - When did it start? - I mean, not when we first started dating, it started, I guess it started after Kenny was born. You know, what I think is he was doing stuff and he was thinking I was, you know? - Right. - And he was jealous, yeah. - But I wasn't, you know. I had a kid to raise. I mean, he would just hit me in the head. And I still got a score right there who they were about letting me. And right here it may have gone now, but it would just, you know, hit me, not in the form, just letting me. We'll say, like I said, he thought that I was, you know, out doing stuff in partying. And like I said, which I wasn't. And can you recall, like for example, the incident with the bottle, can you tell me what happened then? Do you remember? - Yeah, I mean, I didn't know he was coming in and that what you didn't matter. But I was at home, you know, and a friend of mouth of work was just there with me. And Kenny was there and he just came in and he was just in a rage, that night. - Do you remember what Kenny's reaction would be when that's happened and how old is Kenny around this time? - Around that time, he's probably there for, I mean, it just ran, get up on the couch and sit. You know, and Joey and just, you know. - Do you remember anything that Kenny ever said to you either when the abuse was happening or afterward? - Yeah, I mean, he would. I mean, you know, and hug me and, you know. I guess, you know. I guess they just tell me and everything would be okay. - Kenny would draw pictures and give them to his mom. But Kenny's sentencing hearing, a series of witnesses testified about Gene's abuse. One was a woman who worked as a waitress with Linda. Gene would come into the restaurant when Linda was working. This is what she said. Well, he would take what money Linda had made in tips and if she did not make what he thought he needed, she would get slapped and beat around right in the restaurant. He would walk in and he would tell her he needed to talk to her. Well, she would walk off into a private place with him, which was around the corner in the hall and the next thing you know, you would hear this commotion and he would be beating her. He would slap her and he would hit her with his fist. I have seen him backer up in the corner and just beating her and I have seen her when her pocket would be torn on the uniform where he had taken the money out of it. Question. And how often would he come around? Answer. Well, at least two to three times a week that happened. He always made a point to hit her around the eyes. The fifth of the children Linda and Jean had together was Michael who died a few hours after birth. His lungs never developed. In testimony Kenny's brother Joey said, quote, "Well, he blamed mother for it and said it was her fault and pretty soon you know she felt bad even kind of accepted the blame and started drinking real heavy." Question. Does your mom drink now today? Answer. No. Kenny. Joey said in his testimony was the one taking care of her. He would be in there with a cold rag on her head, feeding up the vomit out of the floor when she missed the commode, and trying to wrestle her up out of the floor to get her in the bed because she was a big woman. Question, how old do you think Kenny was the first time that you saw him picking your mama up and talking to her and wiping her? How old do you think he was? Answer, probably eight or nine. Question, did there ever come a time when you saw your brother turn to drinking? Answer, oh yes. Question, do you remember how old he was? Answer, he was sixteen. Question, did there ever come a time when you saw your brother start to drink too much? Answer, yes. Kenny met a woman, they had a child together, Michael, named for Kenny's brother who died. They moved to a house in Florence, and one day a friend of his from high school asked him if he wanted a little quick money roughing someone up. And off he and John Parker went in Parker's Pontiac Grand Prix with a hunting knife and a fifth of wild turkey on the console between them, to do what he had seen people do a hundred times in his life. I have a new audio book coming out on October 6th called Blockers. It's among other things and inside look at the early days of Trump's Department of Government efficiency or doge, as it's referred to, as told by the public servants in entangled. That's blockers.fm. Preorder now and will also send you a code for 25% off of all pushkin titles, including mine like Lyra's poker in the big short through the end of the year. Kate Portafield and I sometimes digress into more personal subjects. We talked a lot about our kids and parenting, what she had learned as a mother of three daughters. And there was something she said at one point that I can't stop thinking about. You know Catherine Harrison, you know, that is she's a great writer. And she wrote this incredible memoir about her life with her father who had disappeared and then got involved with her in incredibly inappropriate way. It was a beautiful, very painful memory, very brave. And she has a line in there. I'm going to get it wrong, but where she says, "We think that parenting is about unconditional love." And what we mean by that is that the parents have unconditional love towards the children. But what you learn as you grow and as you have kids is that actually the unconditional love is coming from the child to the parent. And I will say I see that all the time in my patients who got abused as children, which is they love their parents. They're hungry for their parents. They yearn for the memory of their parent to be the good parts. And it doesn't matter that the parents did terrible things to them. Doesn't matter. No, I mean it matters to who they've become, but in their sense of self, I see. They'll yearn for that parent. Children have an unconditional, my point is children have an unconditional love of the parent. When Kate Portafield was just out of college, she'd been attacked by a stranger. He took her by surprise and beat her up. She suffered from what she now realizes was PTSD. It took her years to recover. That experience was one of the reasons she developed such an interest in treating trauma. She had no connection to her attacker though, no reason to return to him. It was possible to understand ultimately that this was just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But what if he wasn't a stranger? What if you loved your attacker? And what if your love was so powerful and instinctual that you couldn't help yourself, that you kept coming back again and again, hoping things might be different? I think that's another kind of suffering that deserves its own category. I can't tell you how many of the moms of my clients were sexually abused. I can't tell you. It's incredible. You know. And you just go, it's just perpetrating and perpetrating and perpetrating through generations. I'm curious about what it is you said that dealing with these repeated cases of people who had been through this kind of childhood experience taught you a lot. I want to put my finger on what it taught you. I understood child development. I trained in child psychology. And I was like, you know, pretty good on it. But when you see it go wrong, you really then understand what it takes for it to go right. And so watching again and again, men, grown men sitting across from me, cover retitudes, you know, guys who had killed a couple people maybe, crying, watching these men sobbing when they were counted being eight years old and being, here's one, and I'll frame carefully, but you know, raped at age eight multiple times by an older family member. And this, you know, person who had committed homicides, no question sobbing talking about it. That was so powerful for me in getting me to understand that this guy sitting across from me who is, quote unquote, scary to everybody in the world. And he looks scary, right? He is a hurt person. If you go all the way back, he's a hurt little boy. And he's now got warrior. He's got warrior shit all over himself, right? He's got armor. He's got tattoos all over his face. He's so bad at and he hurts people, right? And at all, if you can kind of back channel it and go back in time, he was a little boy who had happened to him. He was really, really harmed in this hypothetical semi-apetetical case of the guy with the tattoos. Yeah. How often in his life do you think he talked about that childhood abuse to somebody? Oh, never. He had never, never talked about it. More to the point, no one bothered to ask him until she did. And then I went and visited his family and interviewed all these relatives. It was 100% known. Everybody knew this older relative sexually abused kids and the family and particularly had done so with this child. Nothing ever done. Imagine no treatment, no assessment, no law enforcement, nothing. Now imagine what that does to that kid. Think about the growing sense of yourself. I'm going to get hurt by this person. Everyone's going to know people are terrifying. They hurt you and there's no recourse ever anywhere. The waitress who worked with Kenny's mother remembered this detail about Kenny's interactions with his dad. At the trial, she said, you did not see him go to gene or like you know like a child usually runs up to his daddy and approaches him that he was glad to see him or that his daddy was glad to see him. At first when I read that, I thought she meant that the tragedy of Kenny and gene was that Kenny didn't want to run up and hug his father. But after talking to Kate Porterfield, I realized no, it's much worse. It's that he wanted to run up and hug his father but understood even at that age that was impossible. Kenny Smith's crime was not committed in isolation. It was a violent act that came at the end of a long cascade. We like people to either be victims or bad guys, right? And so victims are people that things happen to and people who do bad things are just people who do bad things. And what the area that I think were woefully missing is especially in criminal justice is seeing that people who do things that are against the law or even violent or even murder are usually and or frequently doing that themselves having suffered really bad harm, hurt, malstreatment, abuse, violence. People have a hard time recognizing that a lot of bad behaviors come out of trauma too. At the very beginning of the series, I played an excerpt of part of my conversation with Kate Porterfield. It was about the first time she saw Kenny Smith in person at home in prison in December of 2022, about a month after the botched execution. And now I want to play it again because now I think it will make more sense. It will be easier to see why this case out of the many Kate Porterfield has done affected her so deeply. When I first went to see Kenny, he wanted to talk for the first probably two hours of our visit about how beautiful his goodbyes were and the love he received from his family as he was going into the execution. That's what he wanted to start with. And I found this so powerful and also fascinating, honestly, as a clinician, because what I first thought was, oh, he's avoiding, right? He can't talk about the execution. He spent a lot of time telling me the story of everything else, the goodbyes, the phone calls, the last meal, what people said to him. I mean, he went through each family member, his grandson, his mom. So he told me all about his last visit with her and sang a bite of her, her walking out of the visiting room and turning back to him. You know, and it was all about love. He talked to me about love for, for probably two to an half hours. So he really kind of got me, he, he, he, he made me really pause and think a lot of Kenny Smith because watching someone only start from a place of love after something so horrible was I had never seen that before. You don't think he was avoiding the subject? Well, I think he wasn't away. I think both were true. And I would, and I ultimately, we got to know each other well and I could tease him a little and say, you know, you know, you got the gift of gab Kenny, you're really good at like keeping me off the stuff that, and he would just laugh and say, oh yeah, I don't want to go there. I don't want to go there, Doc. And he would say, I get nauseous. I start sweating. I can't do it. Don't make me do it, Doc. So like we got to a place where we knew what avoidance was, but I don't think that's the whole ballgame. I think what really happened is that I got to have this time with this man who thought he was about to die and had a pre-death experience of intense love. There's a famous quote from the art critic, John Ruskin, hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. After a lifetime working with people who had suffered great trauma, Kate Portafield was the one who could see. And what she saw was a very different version of Kenny Smith, someone in pain over what it happened and what was to come. And he was just having severe nightmares of being executed over and over. So he was really tormented at night. Then during the day, he'd be exhausted. He had a ton of nausea. And he had a lot of images coming back to him over and over again. And then on top of that, starts the meaning making. And the meaning making started to really be dark after several weeks. He started to really think about what had happened, that these people who he knew had done it to him, how could people do this to other people. He started to get really, and then he got depressed. He just got full-on depressed. He was actually doing pretty much post-traumatic stress symptoms at first, and then he moved into depression in the spring. And then that kind of worsened for a while. And then he sort of came out of the depression. And then the second execution came up. The second execution, the state of Alabama wasn't finished with Kenny Smith. Coming up on the series finale of the Alabama murders. They said, "Well, Mom, they're coming to get me." And we said, "Our good-piles and the life that's the thing you said was, "I love you, Mom." I got to go. So the theory was that because nitrogen gas was not noxious, it could be given to someone that as a kind of method of gas execution, there would not be so troubling to them because they would grieve it and not know it, and that they would then lose consciousness and die. I'm not a medical person. I can't opine on what happened, the only one who can tell us if he experienced pain, it's not here to describe it. But what I observed anyhow did not look like what Alabama had advertised. Revision's history is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Ben Dadaf Haffrey and Nina Bird Lawrence. Original reporting by Ben Dadaf Haffrey and Lee Hedgebeth. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Fact checking by Kate Furby, our executive producer is Jacob Smith, production and support from Luke Lamand. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence, original scoring by Luis Guerra with Paul Brainard and Jimmy Baud. Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorsky. I'm Malcolm Gladbone. You can get this entire season now, add free by subscribing to Rebusiness History on Pushkin Plus. Sign up on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus. Pushkin Plus subscribers can access add free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive benches and bonus content for all Pushkin shows. And you can also get a new video of this video.