Presenting Gone South

Published Dec 26, 2024, 5:01 AM

Here's an episode from a podcast that you may enjoy. Presenting Gone South.

This episode looks at the life and legacy of Buford Pusser, an iconic American law enforcement figure. The film "Walking Tall," starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, is based on Pusser's life as a cop. But recent revelations are turning Pusser's legacy on its head. 

Gone South, an Audacy original podcast, is available now on the free Audacy app and wherever you get your podcasts.

Pushkin.

Hello, Hello, Malcolm Glawel.

Here.

We'll be back with new revisionist history episodes in January. But today we're going to bring you something a bit different. It's an episode of the podcast Gone South. Each week, writer and host Jed Lipinski shares a different story about a fascinating crime that took place below the Mason Dixon Line. Often told from the perspective of the perpetrator, the investigator, or both. Gone South explores not only the criminal mind, but also the distinctive culture and rich characters of the South. This episode is called the Real Buford Pusser Part One. It chronicles the life of the iconic Tennessee sheriff who inspired several books, songs, and half a dozen movies, including the two thousand and four remake Walking Tall starring Dwayne the Rock Johnson. And findings suggesting Pusser played a role in his wife, Pauline's death, have called his legacy into question. Here's the episode.

Earlier this year, a listener sent us a link to an article in the Tennesseean newspaper. The article was about the decision to exhume the body of a woman named Pauline Pusser.

New information Tonight, Nearly sixty years after a sheriff's wife was shot and killed, the TBI exhumed her body and a deeper investigation into her death begins.

Pauline was the wife of Buford Pusser, the legendary Tennessee sheriff whose life story became the basis for a best selling book and a handful of Hollywood movies, most notably Walking Tall. In August nineteen sixty seven, Pauline was fatally shot in an ambush that left Buford seriously injured. She was thirty three years old and a mother of three. Authorities never figured out who was behind the ambush. Her death has remained unsolved for over fifty six years, but according to the article, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation or TBI, had recently gotten a tip that caused them to reopen the case. To their surprise, they discovered that an autopsy had never been performed on Pauline. By exuming her body, the TBI said in a statement, they intended to answer quote critical questions and provide crucial information that could help them identify who was behind Pauline's death. I was familiar with the story of Buford Pusser and the ambush that killed his wife. We'd mentioned it in season two about the Dixie Mafia. Buford had publicly blamed Kirksey Nicks, the Dixie Mafia's supposed leader, for orchestrating the attack. When I asked Kirksey about it, he'd vehemently denied being involved. In fact, he said officials had brought Bufford to an Oklahoma prison to try and identify him, but Buford couldn't do it.

I have home of your investigation reports where they brought him out to o'klhalman and he couldn't pick me out. They arranged for him to hear my voice and he could pick me up.

As Kirksey put it, Buford was a criminal himself. He said the sheriff had taken bribes from a gangster associate of his in Mississippi.

Carl gave him twelve thousand dollars when he ran for office. He gave him three thousand dollars for every month he was in office. He was on the take. He was a dirty cop, and he was a killer cop. Let him sue me for that.

Kirksey was never charged with Pauline's murder, and neither was anyone else. It was a fifty six year old mystery, one of the most famous cold cases in Tennessee history, and it looked like the TBI was on the verge of a breakthrough, but they weren't talking. And the article left a lot of questions unanswered, like why had an autopsy never been performed on Pauline Pusser and why did the TBI only just discovered this fact, and also what was the tip that caused them to reopen the case and who was the tipster? As I look deeper into the story, though, I realized that this wasn't really an investigation into the death of Pauline Pusser. It was an investigation into the life of Buford Pusser. Buford was a hero to a generation of Americans, a larger than life figure who inspired people to stand up to injustice. But now the TBI was raising questions that would threaten that legacy. I'm Jed Lipinski. This is Gone South. The story of Buford Pusser reads a bit like a fable from the American South. To tell it, We're going to start with Dwayne Johnson, otherwise known as the Rock, the Star of the Fast and Furious franchise, the Voice of Maui and Mowana. One of the highest paid actors in Hollywood, but in the early time two thousands, the Rocks film career was still uncertain. He was already a global wrestling sensation, but Hollywood had a long standing stigma against pro wrestlers who tried to cross over. Hulk Hogan tried to do it in the eighties and nineties, but most of his films flopped. His nineteen ninety six film Santa with Muscles has been called one of the worst movies ever made. The Rocks film career began with fantasy roles in The Mummy Returns and The Scorpion King, but it was his leading role in the two thousand and four film Walking Tall that solidified his status as an action star. I was justified in what I did, and if you acquit me of these charges, then I'm going to run for sheriff, and if elected, I'm going to fix this town order. In the film, The Rock plays a retired Special Forces agent who returns to his hometown to find it a wash in corruption. He decides to run for sheriff and launches a one man crusade to clean up the town. The movie poster shows him striding down a country road armed only with a two by four. Younger viewers may not have realized Walking Tall was a remake of the nineteen seventy three hit movie of the same name. Both were based on the real life story of Buford Pusser. If you're under forty and live outside Tennessee, you've probably never heard of Beauford, But in the sixties and seventies he was a big deal. Pusser was an almost mythical figure in the South. He died in a fiery car crash in nineteen seventy four at thirty six, but in just over a decade in law enforcement, he managed to inspire a legend akin to that of Wild West law men like Wyatt Up and wild Bill Hiccock. The folklore surrounding Buford Pusser can make it hard to separate fact from fiction, so here are some facts. Pusser was born on a sharecroppers farm in Adamsville, Tennessee. He was six six and two fifty by high school and got a scholarship to play college football. He enlisted in the Marines instead, but was given a medical discharge for asthma. From there, he bounced around. I got a job as a die cutter for a paper bag company in Chicago. He went to mortuary school at night. For extra money, he wrestled professionally on weekends under the name Buford the Bull. It was after a match that he met his future wife, Pauline Mullins. Pauline was a petite blonde from Virginia, divorced with two young kids. They married soon after and moved back to Buford's hometown of Adamsville. It was here that Buford found his calling in law enforcement. Buford became Adamsville's chief of police at age twenty five. Two years later, he ran for sheriff of McNairy County, promising to clean up the violence and corruption that plagued the state line between Tennessee and Mississippi. For decades. The sale of hard liquor was prohibited in McNairy County, the area became a hub for bootlegging and moonshining, Illegal gambling, and prostitution flourished. Criminal groups like the State Line Mob and the Dixie Mafia terrorized residents and tourists alike. Beauford, the imposing former wrestler, seemed like the man for the job, he became the youngest sheriff in the history of Tennessee. He immediately developed a reputation as a fearless crusader.

I tell people there's nobody on a Feistar that has studied the store had been as involved and as I have. You know, for sixty years, and everybody in Mgatt County knows that.

This is Steve Sweat. He owns a body shop in McNairy County called Steve Sweat Body Shop. He's also considered the unofficial Buford Pusser historian.

Then you know, people got to call me the Pusser, a storian, and course that have been described in the newspapers for probably twenty years.

Steve first heard about Buford Pusser as a young boy. He watched a lot of Westerns and police procedurals on TV, like Gunsmoke and Highway Patrol. Pusser reminded him of the men in those shows. Steve study Buford. He read the articles about him in the newspaper, stories of Pusser arresting bootleggers, dynamiting moonshine stills, punching out drunks at the road house down the street. Once in nineteen sixty six, Beaufford killed the owner of a CD state line motel after she fired at him with a concealed thirty eight. Another time, a speeding motorist he pulled over shot him in the face before fleeing the scene. Beiufford got stitched up and went back to work. Steve could hardly believe it. Buford was like a real life Matt Dillon, the star of gun Smoke in the show Dylan is the marshal of Dodge City, Kansas, tasked with bringing lawn order to the lawless frontier town.

You know, Beauford, he was just like Matt Dylon when he got on the scene. There was no orgain back and forth and this and there. In a matter of seconds, you know, the situation was under control.

But what happened next would raise Buford Pusser from a local legend to a national folk hero. Early in the morning of August twelfth, nineteen sixty seven, a call came into Buford Pusser's home. The caller said a few drunks were threatening to kill each other at Hollis Jordan's Beer Hall, a rowdy spot near the state line.

The story goes that someone had called the jail. Of course, Beeffort's diet was the jailer, Carl and dispatcher, and he fell out. His call, you know, getting when somebody had come to state line was a bogus call. He never did even bother Beefford with it. But then at some point they called Beufford's home, you know, in the early morning hours, and told him there was trouble, you know, they're on the state line, that he needed to come down there.

According to Bufford's biographer W. R. Morris, Buford and Pauline were scheduled to attend a family gathering in Virginia later that day, so Pauline decided to join him.

And supposedly she told him, she said, I'm going to go with you so you'll get back, and that's what put her in the car with him that morning.

So, responding to an anonymous complaint, Bauford and Pauline jumped into his Plymouth Fury and raced down New Hope Road to Hollis Jordan's Beer Hall. En route, they passed the New Hope Methodist Church. Moments later, a sleek black Cadillac pulled up beside them. It sprayed Buford's Plymouth with a thirty caliber carbine.

Their laughs were off its just breaking day, and he didn't realize they were owning before the shots, you know, came, so as a caller.

The shots shattered the driver's side window, missing Beauford but striking Pauline in the head. As Buford later told his biographer, he had an automatic shotgun beneath the seat and a forty one magnum pistol on his hip, but he didn't have time to grab them. Pauline slumped onto the floorboard, Pusser gunned it. He drove another two miles until he thought he'd lost the attackers and pulled over to check on Pauline.

They gone it. He gone the Plymouth that he was in and approximately two miles, and that it was two miles, just right on the money, and he pulled over to say about Pauline.

Buford later said he laid Pauline's head on his lap and saw a gaping wound. He prayed, oh God, please don't let her die. As he did so, the black Cadillac reappeared. A gunman opened fire again, this time at point blank range. Beuford took two shots to the lower jaw, his chin held in place only by a flap of skin. He slumped forward as another bullet ripped through the driver's side door. It shattered Pauline's skull, killing her instantly. Buford managed to drive another seven miles to the hospital.

He drove seven miles further with his chin gone and gum lower, gum and tease gone.

At the hospital, Pauline was pronounced dead. Buford was taken to Memphis to get his jaw reconstructed. Sheriff's deputies stood guard outside his room around the clock, fearing the assassins might return to finish the job. Steve Sweat was twelve years old at the time of the ambush. He remembers the moment he heard about it.

Yeah, we didn't have social media and sell phones, but you can't imagine how fast words spray it of things like that in this area. Back to the end.

Based on Buford's statement to the cops, they concluded the ambush was motivated by his quest to combat corruption on the state line. A full scale search for the murderers ensued. The governor of Tennessee offered a five thousand dollars reward for info, leading to an arrest and conviction, but months passed and the money was never collected. The black Cadillac and the assassins had vanished without a trace. Still, Buford, now recovered, said he had a good idea of who they were. He named several men with ties to the State Line Mob and the Dixie Mafia. Kirksey Nicks was one of them. Over the next few years, four of those men died under suspicious circumstances. One, a notorious gangster named Carl Towhead White, was ambushed and killed in his car outside a motel in Corinth, Mississippi.

And a lot of people speculate about that. Then at righted heap, you know, to get rid of ham.

Another was reportedly found floating in the Boston Harbor, his body riddled with bullets. Two more were shot to death in Texas. Kirksey Nick supposedly survived only because he was locked up at the time. No evidence tied Bauford to those murders, but legend has it Buford had a hand in all of them.

That's just speculation that it's kind of the way it seemed.

Whatever the truth was, Buford's style of law enforcement suited residents of McNairy County after the ambush he was re elected twice more. Then, in nineteen seventy four, at thirty six years old, he died. He was speeding down a country road in his corvette when he spun out of control, hid an embankment, and broke his neck.

Now there was no file play. It was just mine lee speed.

You know.

He was thirty six years old and had a big engine seventy four Corvette, and he loved to go fast. And that's pretty weilliot, Yes, that's pretty well what happened.

The story of the ambush and Buford's vigilanti quest to kill the men who'd murdered his wife struck a deep and primal chord in American culture. It inspired a best selling book in nineteen seventy one called The Twelfth of August by W. R. Morris. From there, the legend took on a life of its own. The Twelfth of August was adapted into the hit nineteen seventy three movie Walking Tall, starring Joe Don Baker as Bufford Pusser.

Audiences across America are standing up, applauding and curing a film called Walking Tall, based on the true story of a young man who wouldn't surrender to the system and the girl who always stood beside him.

Walking Tall was lightly fictionalized. For example, Joe Don Baker carries a hickory stick instead of a gun while cleaning up the state line. In truth, Beauford never carried a stick on patrol. But since the film was based on a true story, most people naturally thought it was true, and so the legend grew. The film spawned two sequels, The Country and rockabilly singer Eddie Bond released an entire album of songs inspired by the sheriff. Listening to the lyrics, you could be mistaken for thinking Buford Pusser was a figure out of American folklore, like John Henry or Paul Bunyan. Actor Joe Don Baker, who played Bufford in the original Walking Tall, later compared him to a character from Greek mythology.

This astounds me that people still remember it. I mean, I can understand it because Beefort was such a wonderful person. You know, he was a hell of a character in real life. He was like Hercules, a Zeus or something. He was incredible.

Then, in two thousand and four, the remake of Walking Tall came out shortly after the premiere, The Rock came to McNairy County to say see where Baufford lived. Steve Sweat and his wife escorted him around, accompanied by a group of impatient MGM execs.

And he came here out of respect for Beauford. He wanted to see where Beaufort walked and worked DC and he said, I'll see where he actually worked.

Steve took The Rock to Beaufort's house, his office, and the local courthouse. He regaled him with stories as the Rock sat hunched in the back seat.

And we had the sheriff and chief in front of me and five mark units behind us, and with lights and sirens. We didn't stop at any red lights, any intersection, and we ran like eighty miles an hour down the highway. Here, he wrote in my back seat, with his elbows on the front seat, and you know, just like a five year old kid, you know, trying to absorb these stories.

As they drove, The Rock told Steve that starring in Walking Tall had been a dream come true. The Rock's father, Rocky Johnson, had also been a pro wrestler. Two of them had watched the original Walking Tall over and over when The Rock was young. It was their favorite movie. According to Steve, it inspired the Rock to be a better man.

And he told us, he said, that was my dad and my favorite movie when I was a little fella, and he said, and in my life, he said, all the times I had the opportunity to take the wrong path, he said, I would think of those Walk and Tall movies, and I wanted to walk tall.

That's what the Rock said.

That's what he said.

Like the Rock, Steve Sweat was emotionally invested in the legend of Buford Pusser as a righteous hero, and so when Steve learned that Pauline's body was being exhumed earlier this year, he was appalled. The suggestion that Buford played a role in Pauline's death threatened to destroy his legacy. What made matters worse was that the decision to exume her could be traced to an outsider, a former security consultant from Arkansas named Mike E.

Of course, the perception that America has is that Buford was a real hero, that he cleaned up the state line, and that he sought revenge for his wife's death. But you know, there's a whole other story that needs to be told. Like everybody else. When I first heard the story of Buford Pusser, I was a huge fan. I don't think they made fans any bigger than me. I admired the man and everything he did. The Twelfth of August had me convinced. Then the movie came out and I saw the movie. I thought it was incredible. It told a really entertaining story, and you know, I was just filled with admiration for Buford.

This is Mike Elam in the early nineteen seventies when the first Walking TLL came out. Mike was a young sheriff's deputy in Benton County, Arkansas, four hundred and sixty five miles west of McNairy County.

He the job.

He imagined being elected sheriff one day and cleaning up the county, just like Beauford had, but the pay was lousy. To support his family, he reluctantly took a job as the head of loss prevention for a regional grocery retailer, and yet his interest in police work never went away. He watched every episode of Dragnet. He got hooked on the jfk assassination and later the OJ Simpson case. In the mid nineties, he turned his attention to Buford Pusser. Mike still held the man in high regard, but certain elements of the story had always bothered him. For one, the idea that Pauline had joined Bauford on a disturbance call in the middle of the night.

I think I can speak for just about anyone who's been in law enforcement. They will tell you that one thing you never do is take your spouse to a disturbance call. A disturbance call can go sideway so quickly, and it's just dangerous for everyone.

Then there was the roote Buford took that night. As a Buford Pusser fan, Mike had visited McNairy County to check out the Buford Pusser Museum and see a few of the sites, and he realized Bufford could have taken a much simpler route to Hollis Jordan's Beer Hall, where the alleged disturbance took place.

It was a very convoluted system of back roads to get to the state line. That didn't make sense to me, because he was just two blocks from Highway sixty four, and he could have got on Highway sixty four then on forty five been to the same location in a very short time, whereas this convoluted system of roads, several of them were unimproved at that time, and so it would have been a much slower route.

That led Mike to another question. According to Beauford, the ambushors were lying in wait behind a church on a deserted country road. But how would they have known that Buford would take that road instead of the more direct route to Hollis Jordan's.

Wouldn't they be waiting on either sixty four or forty five or possibly even and they're at the site where he was supposed to be responding to. So that didn't make sense.

And so when he got some time off work, Mike decided to re enact the ambush. He recruited some friends to poses the assassins, a police chief from Ohio, a retired cameraman from Mississippi, and a McNairy County local who knew the story.

We set up a scenario where I would pass by, representing Buford's car passing by the church, and we actually had a Cadillac beside the church that gave chase. However, by the time that I got to the bridge, they were still about two hundred, two hundred and fifty yards behind me. And you know, that really started to ring true. That if they couldn't catch me in broad daylight, how could that have happened in the pre dawn hours with no headlights.

How fast were they traveling when they were trying to chase you?

Well, I was going forty five and at one time they reached ninety two miles an hour in that seven tenths of a mile straight trying to catch me. And like I say, they were still over two hundred yards behind me by the time I reached the ambush point, and that just convinced me that there was no way it happened the way that Beufford said. At this point, I just started to gather up all the information that I possibly could.

Mike began making public records requests. He read the police reports and studied the crime scene photographs from the ambush. Two things immediately stood out. One was the blood spatter. He knew that blood spatter often tells a story about how a crime occurred.

Blood spatter tells you several different things. It can tell you the direction that a shot came from, the high that it came from the distance, the firearm was away from a person, and none of it matched beauford stories.

Beauford had claimed that he and Pauline were inside the car when the ambushers opened fire, wounding Beaufort and killing Pauline. As such, you'd expect the blood spatter to be all over the car's interior, but that's not the only place the blood spatter was.

You had blood on the front bumper, the hood of the car, at the top of the car, the sides of the car, all over the outside of the windshield. So you knew that something was not correct with his story.

What specifically did that suggest about where the victim may have been at the time or the shooter.

So all of the blood spatter on the outside of the car leads you to believe that someone was actually standing in front of that car when they were shot, not on the inside.

The second thing that stood out to Mike was the position of the shell casings.

He said that he was sitting in the car that they pulled up close enough that they were right next to him. You would expect the shellcasings to have been found in between the cars, possibly some being ejected inside the Cadillac and some even going over into Ford's car after the window was smollown out.

But the shell casings weren't in the middle of the road or inside Buford's plymouth. They were on the shoulder of the road, on the opposite side of where Buford's car would have been. Pauline was said to have died from two gunshot wounds to the head, but Mike wanted to see what the autopsy report said. He called the McNairy County medical examiner, but they didn't have it, so he called the medical examiner for the State of Tennessee in Nashville. They didn't have it either. When Mike asked why, the response shocked him.

I learned that one was never performed.

Mike couldn't believe it. Pauline was the sheriff's wife who had, according to Buford, been killed in a dramatic Hollywood style ambush, with no other witnesses and no viable suspects. Even a cursory look at the evidence suggested Buford's version of events was highly dubious, and yet no autopsy. The state and local medical examiners from nineteen sixty seven had long since passed away, so Mike reached out to the current state medical examiner. He asked what could have prevented the autopsy of a murder victim back in nineteen sixty.

Seven, and he told me that the prosecutor and the local medical examiner had to concur on the need for one. So for some reason they could not concur. And you have to wonder about the reasoning for that, because that autopsy would have told so much about her death that they just passed up the opportunity to get trajectories, the angles, the distance, so much there that needed to be told.

Mike knew that Beauford, as the sheriff of McNairy County, was friendly with both the local DA and the medical examiner. They must have felt sorry for Buford. Mike could easily imagine him persuading both men to bury his wife without an autopsy.

You know, it is possible that Buford Amssel literally did not want an autopsy done and convinced the two men not to have one. It makes absolutely no sense otherwise.

Mike was hooked. He would spend a good part of the next ten years investigating Buford and the events leading up to Pauline's death. Along the way, he would uncover details no one knew about one of the South's most famous unsolved murders. Details that suggested the prime suspect in Pauline's death was her husband, Buford Pusser. That's next Time on Gonsouth. If you have information, story tips, or feedback you'd like to share with the Gonsouth team, please email us at Gonsouthpodcast at gmail dot com. That's Gonsouthpodcast at gmail dot com. We're on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram at Gonsouthpodcast. Also sign up for our newsletter on substack at Gone South with Jed Lopinsky. Gone South is an Odyssey original podcast. It's created, written and narrated by me Jed Lopinsky. Our executive producers are Jenna weis Berman, Matty sprung Kaiser, Tom Leapinsky, Lloyd Lockridge, and Me. Our story editors are Tom Leapinsky, Matty sprun Kaiser, and Joel Lovell. Gone South is edited, mixed and mastered by Chris Basil and Andy Jaskowitz. Production support from Ian Mont and Sean Sherry. Special thanks to J. D Crowley, Leahrhese, Dennis Mora, Kerrn, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schuff. If you want to hear more of Gone South, Please take a few seconds to rate and review the show. It really helps

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Revisionist History

Revisionist History is Malcolm Gladwell's journey through the overlooked and the misunderstood. Ever 
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