Town note
Kensett was a stop on the Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad.
about 0:07:35The story
Kensett is a small town in White County in central Arkansas, about an hour outside Little Rock, with a population the episode gives as 1,651. The hosts lead with its railroad history: the Cairo and Fulton line, later the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern, came through the county in 1872 and the settlement was named for Thomas Kensett, a railroad board member. A fire destroyed most of the business district in 1915, the railroad pulled out in 1946, a new high school was wrecked by a tornado, the lumber mill closed for good in 2005 and a Walmart two miles away emptied the downtown. Schools were integrated in 1966. The town is poor: median household income about $26,000, a third of residents under $15,000 a year and 48.5 per cent of children below the poverty line.
His step-grandmother, Marie Sullens, 67, was married to his grandfather and looked after him. He decided to kill her on All Saints Day, 1 November 1989, because he believed that dying on that day would send her straight to heaven.
He drove to her apartment in Kensett expecting to find her alone. Margaret Brown, 34, and her husband William 'Billy' Brown, 32, relatives of Sullens, were visiting. He then bound all three around the neck, gave each of them four sleeping pills and waited for the drugs to work.
When the pills took too long he took Sullens to the bathroom and back to the bed and stabbed her several times. He went to the kitchen, drank coke and ate chips, came back and attacked Margaret Brown, stabbing her, shooting at her and finally strangling her with an electrical cord. Finally he set the apartment on fire, using foam and plastic in the hope of making the smoke toxic, and left.
Fire crews found three bodies and at once treated the blaze as arson. Margaret Brown had died before the fire, from 14 stab wounds and strangulation.
His final meal was a double cheeseburger, jalapeno peppers and part of a raisin pie. The injection was given at 9.01 p.m. and he was pronounced dead at 9.11 p.m. Two family members, John Brown and Donald Brown, watched and left without speaking to reporters. Marie Sullens is buried at Pilot Prairie cemetery in Waldron, Scott County, Arkansas.