TRUE-LIFE
BEHIND THE BIG CRIME
It looked like a burglary gone wrong, but something didn’t add up
When Elizabeth Sennett opened the door to two young men on a cloudy Friday morning in March 1988, she smiled in greeting.
One introduced himself as ‘Kenny’.
Said he and his pal were interested in hunting on the grounds of the rural property in Colbert County, Alabama, and asked if they could look around.
Her husband Charles had said it was OK, Kenny claimed.
Charles, a local pastor, had already left for church.
After wandering off to phone him, Elizabeth returned and agreed that the pair could look around. The Sennetts had been married for 26 years.
They were much-loved and respected in the community, and had two grown-up sons, Charles ‘Chuck’ Jr and Mike, and 54 grandchildren. Elizabeth, 45, was a loving wife, and ‘best friend’ to her sons.
Not overly strict, but taught them both right from wrong.
After Kenny and his friend looked around, they knocked on the door for a second time.
Asked to use the bathroom. Elizabeth graciously obliged.
Only, when Charles, 45, returned home later that day, he was met with a bloodbath.
‘My wife’s been murdered!’ he screamed down the phone to police. Elizabeth’s body lay lifeless. She’d been violently punched, beaten with a pipe, stabbed eight times in the chest and once on each side of the neck.
A medic who knew her said her face was so badly beaten that he’d never have recognised her if he hadn’t already known her identity. Medics examining her found a faint pulse.
Elizabeth’s husband looked shocked.
Almost fell over.
Sadly, Elizabeth died on the way to hospital.
As a murder investigation launched, a call came in to Crime Stoppers naming three men – Billy Gray Williams, John Forrest Parker and Kenneth Eugene Smith.
Why would they kill the pastor’s wife? It looked like a burglary gone wrong.
A stereo and a video machine had been taken, glass shattered.
Yet investigators thought something about the crime scene looked staged.
Elizabeth still had $400 in her purse and other valuables had been left behind too.
Would burglars who were willing to kill really have made that mistake?
There were also rumours that Charles was unhappy in the marriage.
And he’d recently taken out a large life insurance policy on Elizabeth.
So, a week after Elizabeth’s death, detectives brought him in.
During questioning, Charles Sennett denied any involvement in his wife’s death.
But as he got up to leave the interrogation room, one officer wondered aloud if they thought Charles knew Kenneth Smith.
Charles stopped in the do
