Jed Lipinski
Appearances
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
Another was reportedly found floating in the Boston Harbor, his body riddled with bullets. Two more were shot to death in Texas. Kirksey Nix supposedly survived only because he was locked up at the time. No evidence tied Buford to those murders. But legend has it, Buford had a hand in all of them.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
Whatever the truth was, Buford's style of law enforcement suited residents of McNary County. After the ambush, he was reelected twice more. Then, in 1974, at 36 years old, he died. He was speeding down a country road in his Corvette when he spun out of control, hit an embankment, and broke his neck.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
The story of the ambush and Buford's vigilante quest to kill the men who'd murdered his wife struck a deep and primal chord in American culture. It inspired a bestselling book in 1971 called The 12th of August by W.R. Morris. From there, the legend took on a life of its own. The 12th of August was adapted into the hit 1973 movie Walking Tall, starring Joe Don Baker as Buford Pusser.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
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, Buford 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.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
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 Pussert was a figure out of American folklore, like John Henry or Paul Bunyan. Actor Joe Don Baker, who played Buford in the original Walking Tall, later compared him to a character from Greek mythology.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
Then, in 2004, the remake of Walking Tall came out. Shortly after the premiere, The Rock came to McNary County to see where Buford lived. Steve Sweat and his wife escorted him around, accompanied by a group of impatient MGM execs.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
Steve took the rock to Buford's house, his office, and the local courthouse. He regaled him with stories as the rock sat hunched in the back seat.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
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. The 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.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
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.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
What made matters worse was that the decision to exhume her could be traced to an outsider, a former security consultant from Arkansas named Mike Elam.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
Earlier this year, a listener sent us a link to an article in the Tennessean newspaper. The article was about the decision to exhume the body of a woman named Pauline Pusser.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
This is Mike Elam. In the early 1970s, when the first Walking Tall came out, Mike was a young sheriff's deputy in Benton County, Arkansas, 465 miles west of McNary County. He loved the job. He imagined being elected sheriff one day and cleaning up the county just like Buford had. but the pay was lousy.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
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 O.J. Simpson case. In the mid-'90s, he turned his attention to Buford Pusser,
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
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 Buford on a disturbance call in the middle of the night.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
Then there was the route Buford took that night. As a Buford Pusser fan, Mike had visited McNary County to check out the Buford Pusser Museum and see a few of the sites. And he realized Buford could have taken a much simpler route to Hollis Jordan's Beer Hall, where the alleged disturbance took place.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
That led Mike to another question. According to Buford, the ambushers 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 Jordans?
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
And so, when he got some time off work, Mike decided to reenact the ambush. He recruited some friends to pose as the assassins, a police chief from Ohio, a retired cameraman from Mississippi, and a McNary County local who knew the story.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
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 1967, Pauline was fatally shot in an ambush that left Buford seriously injured. She was 33 years old and a mother of three. Authorities never figured out who was behind the ambush.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
How fast were they traveling when they were trying to chase you?
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
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.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
Buford had claimed that he and Pauline were inside the car when the ambushers opened fire, wounding Buford 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.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
What specifically did that suggest about where the victim may have been at the time or the shooter?
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
The second thing that stood out to Mike was the position of the shell casings.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
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 McNary County Medical Examiner, but they didn't have it.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
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.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
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 1967 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 1967?
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
Her death has remained unsolved for over 56 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.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
Mike knew that Buford, as the sheriff of McNary 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.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
Mike was hooked. He would spend a good part of the next 10 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 Gone South.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
If you have information, story tips, or feedback you'd like to share with the Gone South team, please email us at gone south podcast at gmail.com. That's gone south podcast at gmail.com. We're on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram at Gone South Podcast. You can also sign up for our newsletter on Substack at Gone South with Jed Lipinski. Gone South is an Odyssey original podcast.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
It's created, written, and narrated by me, Jed Lipinski. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman, Maddie Sprung-Kaiser, Tom Lipinski, Lloyd Lockridge, and me. Our story editors are Tom Lipinski, Maddie Sprung-Kaiser, and Joel Lovell. Gone South is edited, mixed, and mastered by Chris Basil and Andy Jaskiewicz. Production support from Ian Mont and Sean Cherry. Special thanks to J.D.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
Crowley, Leah Reese-Dennis, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schuff. If you want to hear more of Gone South, please take a few seconds to rate and review the show. It really helps.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
By exhuming 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.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
Buford had publicly blamed Kirksey Nix, 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 Buford to an Oklahoma prison to try and identify him, but Buford couldn't do it.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
As Kirksey put it, Buford was a criminal himself. He said the sheriff had taken bribes from a gangster associate of his in Mississippi.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
Kirksey was never charged with Pauline's murder, and neither was anyone else. It was a 56-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?
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
And why had the TBI only just discovered this fact? Also, what was the tip that caused them to reopen the case? And who was the tipster? As I looked 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.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
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.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone 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 in Moana, one of the highest paid actors in Hollywood. But in the early 2000s, The Rock's 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.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
Hulk Hogan tried to do it in the 80s and 90s, but most of his films flopped. His 1996 film, Santa with Muscles, has been called one of the worst movies ever made. The Rock's film career began with fantasy roles in The Mummy Returns and The Scorpion King. But it was his leading role in the 2004 film Walking Tall that solidified his status as an action star. I was justified in what I did.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
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! Order! In the film, The Rock plays a retired Special Forces agent who returns to his hometown to find it awash in corruption. He decides to run for sheriff and launches a one-man crusade to clean up the town.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
The movie poster shows him striding down a country road, armed only with a 2x4. Younger viewers may not have realized Walking Tall was a remake of the 1973 hit movie of the same name. Both were based on the real-life story of Buford Pusser. If you're under 40 and live outside Tennessee, you've probably never heard of Buford. But in the 60s and 70s, he was a big deal.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
Pusser was an almost mythical figure in the South. He died in a fiery car crash in 1974 at 36. But in just over a decade in law enforcement, he managed to inspire a legend akin to that of Wild West lawmen like Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok. The folklore surrounding Buford Pusser can make it hard to separate fact from fiction. So here are some facts.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
Pusser was born on a sharecropper's farm in Adamsville, Tennessee. He was 6'6 and 250 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. He got a job as a die cutter for a paper bag company in Chicago. He went to mortuary school at night.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
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.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
Buford became Adamsville's chief of police at age 25. Two years later, he ran for sheriff of McNary 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 McNary County. The area became a hub for bootlegging and moonshining. Illegal gambling and prostitution flourished.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
Criminal groups like the State Line Mob and the Dixie Mafia terrorized residents and tourists alike. Buford, 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.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
This is Steve Sweat. He owns a body shop in McNary County called Steve Sweat Body Shop. He's also considered the unofficial Buford Pusser historian.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
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 studied Buford. He read the articles about him in the newspaper. Stories of Pusser arresting bootleggers, dynamiting moonshine stills, punching out drunks at the roadhouse down the street.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
Once, in 1966, Buford killed the owner of a seedy state-line motel after she fired at him with a concealed .38. Another time, a speeding motorist he'd pulled over shot him in the face before fleeing the scene. Buford got stitched up and went back to work. Steve could hardly believe it. Buford was like a real-life Matt Dillon, the star of Gunsmoke.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
In the show, Dillon is the marshal of Dodge City, Kansas, tasked with bringing law and order to the lawless frontier town.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
But what happened next would raise Buford Pusser from a local legend to a national folk hero.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
Early in the morning of August 12, 1967, 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.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
According to Buford'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.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
So, responding to an anonymous complaint, Buford 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 .30-caliber carbine.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
The shots shattered the driver's side window, missing Buford but striking Pauline in the head. As Buford later told his biographer, he had an automatic shotgun beneath the seat and a .41 Magnum pistol on his hip, but he didn't have time to grab them. Pauline slumped onto the floorboard. Pusser gunned it.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
He drove another two miles until he thought he'd lost the attackers and pulled over to check on Pauline.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
Buford later said he lay 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. Buford 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.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
It shattered Pauline's skull, killing her instantly. Buford managed to drive another seven miles to the hospital.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
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 12 years old at the time of the ambush. He remembers the moment he heard about it.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
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 $5,000 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.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
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 in the Dixie Mafia. Kirksey Nix 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.