Snow was falling in Stevenson, Alabama, when Brittany Smith and her brother, Chris McCallie, stopped at a McDonald’s. It was January, 2018, and Brittany felt happier than she had in a long time. After years of working low-paying, menial jobs, she was coming from an interview at a flooring company. She’d been hired on the spot, at a wage that would more than cover her expenses, including rent for her four-bedroom red brick house. Brittany, who is now thirty-two, has four children. In 2013, after she struggled with substance abuse, the state removed the eldest three, who eventually went to live with her uncle. But a long period of good behavior meant that she’d soon get increased visitations, and then, she hoped, full custody. “I was just uplifted,” she told me recently. “Like, everything is going right. I have a job now, I’m going to get my babies back, and I have a home.”

This piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

On the drive back to her house, Brittany got a call from Todd Smith, an old acquaintance who bred pit bulls in Jasper, Tennessee, just over the state line. She had visited his house the day before, and taken home a reddish-colored puppy with gray-blue eyes, like her own. She named her Athena.

Now Todd, who was thirty-eight, asked if she would pick him up from a city park. He said that he was stranded and freezing, and he had no one else to call. He didn’t tell her that his father had kicked him out of the house after a violent altercation that ended with Todd’s arrest. Picking Todd up didn’t seem like a good idea—according to Brittany, he had expressed romantic interest in her, which she’d rejected—and Chris advised her not to. “I just had a gut feeling that something was going to happen,” he said.

Still, the snow was coming down thick and fast. Brittany told Todd that they’d pick him up, and that he could stay on the couch for the night; she didn’t want him in the children’s beds.

After Chris dropped Brittany and Todd off at her house, they gave the puppy a bath and talked about the meth crisis that had engulfed the Tennessee Valley and derailed their lives. Brittany had become hooked after losing her grandmother and a baby—to a rare congenital condition—within a year. She’d grown alarmingly skinny, had been arrested for drug possession, and spent two weeks in jail. But now she was clean. Todd, who had buzzed hair, flushed cheeks, and a disarming smile, said that he still struggled with drugs. Brittany urged him to get “his priorities together,” telling him about the good job she’d just been offered and how her kids might soon come home.

According to her, as she spoke, Todd’s face hardened, and he asked if she thought she was better than him. He then called her a bitch and head-butted her. Terrified, she ran into her bedroom and shut the door, but Todd broke through it. He threw her on the bed and choked her until she passed out. When she woke up, she was naked and had urinated on herself. He was raping her, and his hands were tight around her throat. “We’re friends,” she tried to say, but her voice sounded squeaky through his grip, like a cartoon character’s. “We’re friends,” he replied, mocking her. “Don’t say a fucking word or I’ll kill you.”

As he raped her, Brittany fought back, sobbing and clawing at him so hard that some of her fingernails ripped off. He twisted her head against the side of the bed until she thought her neck would break. They fell onto the floor, and again he choked her until she blacked out. “Then I woke back up, and let him finish what he was doing,” Brittany told me. “And his whole face changed, he was normal.”

Afterward, Todd said that if she told anyone what had happened he would kill her and everyone she loved—her mother, her brother, and her children. He wanted cigarettes, and Brittany offered to call someone to take them to the store, since she didn’t have a car.

She called her mother, Ramona McCallie, who lived nearby. Todd held the phone while Brittany talked, and she tried to subtly convey that something was wrong. Ramona thought that her daughter sounded strange, as if she’d been crying. But Ramona was exhausted from a new job cleaning houses, and she sent Chris over.

At a local gas station, Brittany went in for cigarettes while Chris and Todd sat in the car. In the fluorescent light, the cashier, Paige Painter, who regularly served Brittany, noticed her tangled hair, ripped nails, and scratched face. “What happened to you?” Painter asked.

In a low voice, Brittany asked for a piece of paper, wrote down “Todd Smith,” and said that he’d beaten and raped her. She added that, if she was dead in the morning, he was the person who had done it. But she made Painter promise not to call the police. “If the police were involved, I would be dead right now,” Brittany said to me. “He told me that, and after what he put me through I believed him.”

When Chris again dropped off Brittany and Todd, Brittany told him to go see Painter. At the gas station, Chris said, he went “blank.” Then he drove back to Brittany’s house with a registered .22-calibre revolver that he kept in his car. Meanwhile, Brittany had texted her mother. “Mom Todd has tried to kill me literally,” she wrote. “Don’t act like anything is wrong . . . He will kill me if he knows.”

Chris said that he found Todd in the kitchen. “You need to get your shit and leave,” Chris told him, and accidentally fired a shot into a cabinet. When Todd refused to go, Chris set the gun down on the kitchen island and tried to wrestle him out of the house. Chris was large but soft; Todd was barrel-chested, and he had taken a combination of Xanax, amphetamines, alcohol, and meth. According to Chris, Todd easily got him in a headlock and began choking him.

Brittany, who had been in the living room until hearing the shot, said she picked up the gun from the counter. Sobbing and screaming, she told Todd to let her brother go. When he kept choking Chris, saying that he’d kill them both, Brittany fired a shot. When Todd still didn’t let go, she fired two more rounds. After he fell, she called 911.

“Someone just got shot at 211 Sharon Drive,” Brittany told the operator. “He—he tried to kill me and—” As the operator went through a series of questions, Brittany grew frantic. “Just have an ambulance come, please, because I don’t want this man to die.” The operator told her how to do CPR, and Brittany performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on Todd while Chris did chest compressions.

Police officers showed up nearly half an hour later, around the time that Todd died. Brittany detailed how he had beaten and raped her and attacked Chris. A rape kit showed bruises on her neck, breasts, arms, legs, and pelvis, evidence of strangulation, bite marks on her neck and chin, and secretions on her neck and in her vagina. Yet within forty-eight hours she had been charged with murder.