Part Two: Buford Pusser: The Worst Sheriff Ever

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And we're back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about bad people, the worst ones in all of history.

This is part two of our series on Buford Pusser, the man whose family could not give their kids normal names to save their lives.

Also, he committed a bunch of horrible crimes and killed people.

Back as my guest, Dan O'Brien.

Hello.

Thank you for having me.

There's

no depths to my appetite for pusser.

That's that's right.

I just love pusser.

Buford, I'm agnostic on.

Have you ever met a Buford?

Do you know a single Buford?

The only, this is not a person that I know.

The only time I've ever heard that name was

Benjamin Buford Blue, the full name of Bubba from Forest Gump.

I know that doesn't count.

I didn't remember that was Bubba's full name.

That's a person I know.

But yeah, that's the only other instance of that name I've ever heard anywhere.

Huh.

Yeah, I know that I'm actually looking up the name of the sheriff from Smokey and the Bandit.

Yeah, Yeah, Buford T.

Justice is the sheriff from Smokey and the Bandit.

Yeah.

Which I think is probably the first time I heard that name and did not realize that it was.

Yeah, that came out in 77.

So he was definitely named after Buford Pusser because Walking Tall came out in 73.

Kind of a more accurate parody of Buford Pusser as opposed to the version in Walking Tall that's basically a hero.

The cool sheriff guy.

Yeah, yeah.

Speaking of those movies, if you've watched any of the Walking Tall movies, you're probably aware, as I've mentioned, that he was, Buford was mostly famous for using a large stick or a bat or piece of wood to beat up gangsters.

The original poster, which Sophie's going to show for those of you watching the video version,

is just...

It looks like he's just holding like a log.

like but like a trimmed log like a log that someone has processed to be nice firewood like it's had the bark shaved off and everything but it does just look like a log like he kind of looks like if javier bardem was also a zombie, yeah, that's that's how the illustrated, yeah, uh, Buford and walking in the poster looks.

Yeah, and then, of course, the tagline of the original movie: the measure of a man is how tall he walks.

What does that mean?

I mean, you just mean that, like, the taller you are, the better you are.

Shut up, just shut the fuck up.

What is what is that?

It's somewhere between literal and poetic, right?

Where,

like, you would measure.

I mean, I guess the measure of a man, yes, is how

literally, yes, you can measure a man by how tall he is.

But I don't think like you're saying a lot about the man necessarily, especially since like the fact that a man can walk tall being six foot six, like that's that's less impressive.

Like if he was a short man who had like a his personality, you know, or whatever you're saying, like he walked tall, that's something.

But just being like, yeah, you know, this giant guy, he sure was tall.

That's just that's just napoleon robert right if they're if they're going literal that it's very boring and there's nothing much to say about it you're saying that the the tallness is the tallness if they're going poetic they also don't do a good enough job defining what walking tall means like what is it means you beaten a man half to death with lumber he walks the most tall

yeah

I mean, I guess so, but that's not really a point in his favor.

He just happened to be big.

Now, the more recent reboot featuring The Rock, which was a loose adaptation of the original movie that was not explicitly based on the life of Buford Pusser, shows The Rock carrying, it's interesting the differences between these.

Instead of carrying like a trimmed log, he's carrying what looks just like a piece of like

construction timber.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

He's just gotten his hand there.

And the tagline there is, one man will stand up for what's right, which is at least a better tagline than the first movie had.

And it notes that it's inspired by a true story, which it wasn't.

As we'll discuss today.

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So, the whole myth, as I noted, about him using a large piece of wood to fight crime, started when Buford hit W.O.

Hathcock Jr.

in the skull with a fence post.

Buford's daughter noted in her book, Walking On, There was a handful of other times when Daddy would find use for a sizable piece of lumber when going up against bad guys, but as often as not, he went in barehanded or maybe would grab something more like a switch.

That's usually all that was necessary, but his first retaliation against the state line mob was personal, and it did indeed require a fence post.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's okay.

That's so interesting to describe a mob fight as personal.

They're all personal.

Yeah, people are trying to kill you.

It feels very personal.

Yeah.

It is funny to me that she's like, there were a handful of times where he'd find a big piece of lumber to fight people with.

That was like a thing he did.

Yeah.

So normally the state line gang was not the kind of group who would settle a problem by calling in the police because they were a mafia.

But in this case, Buford and his friends had committed straight-up felony assault against somebody.

So Hathcock Jr.

pressed charges, and Buford was arrested with his buddies and extradited to Mississippi.

They were charged with assault, with attempt to commit murder, and armed robbery, both of which are probably accurate descriptions of what they'd done.

Buford's daughter doesn't write that he robbed a Hathcock Jr.,

but it sounds like he did.

And I wouldn't be surprised if he, well, they took my money that I gambled away.

So I'm going to take whatever's in his wallet, right?

Like, I really do.

It does sound like he actually also just robbed the guy.

Again, rather than this being, he was so upset at all the crime, he had to fight against these gangsters.

It was like, no, he beat a man half to death and took his money.

He lost money at a casino and got beat up and then wanted to rectify that specific situation for himself 10 days after his wedding.

It needs to be repeated.

Yeah, right after the wedding.

Yeah.

So Buford and his friends, they get extradited, but they don't wind up getting convicted because again, he's got that, like you said, he's got that cop brain for when he's committing violent crimes, where he made sure to set up an alibi for himself and his buddies before they went out to attack Hathcock Jr.

And their defense hinged on the fact that they worked at a factory together in Chicago, and they'd all filled out time cards.

And there were were time cards for all three men that showed them working on the day of the assault.

Um, and then they just had like a friend fake the time card so they could go out and beat that guy.

And Duana Pusser writes about this in her book about her dad, and again, describes it as like a light-hearted prank as opposed to somebody like consciously trying to evade the law while committing felonies.

Right.

Quote, as it turns out,

yeah, very premeditated.

Yes, as it turns out, having a friend clock their time cards for them while they were gone proved proved to be a stroke of really smart planning by daddy and his friends.

That's one way to describe a criminal conspiracy.

Yeah, a stroke of really smart planning.

God, it's like one of my favorite planners, the zodiac killer.

Yeah, great at planning.

In a stroke of very smart planning, he cut the body up into 40 pieces and threw it in a river.

So once the trial ended, Buford and his new wife, Pauline, returned to Chicago, where he started attending a mortuary school to get a proper degree.

So he decides to try to make this a career still.

And he's kind of like working at a factory.

He's going to mortuary school at night.

And then on the weekends, he starts wrestling.

He becomes a pro wrestler as a way to pick up extra money.

Now, Buford was good enough that he caught the eye of Jerry Lawler, the wrestling icon who later helped The Rock get started, which is a weird direct connection between the two men.

Jerry the King Lawler?

Yeah, yeah.

Lawler was reportedly a friend of Buford Pusser or like a fan of his when he was a a wrestler.

That's

I mean

There you go.

If there was a behind the bastards on Jerry the King Lawler, that'll be the one episode that I skip because I

love him too much.

I don't have any evidence of him doing anything bad.

And we don't, I don't actually have proof that he actually was a fan of Buford.

He's reported, reputed to have been a fan of Buford.

But there's a lot, like, maybe that was a lie.

I don't know.

You know,

it's also not entirely like

he was a huge dude.

You know, I could see him being decent at wrestling.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So that said, he's not wildly successful and he does not become a national name.

This is never going to be anything that like makes becomes a career for him, but it does teach him some lessons that will be useful in his later crimes.

As of 1958, it was still mostly a weekend gig.

He does do some pretty good size performances, his largest being he wrestles at an event at Kamiski Park in Chicago in front of 37,000 people.

So like, you know,

he's not a nobody here.

You know, that's, that's, that's not nothing.

He, we don't, there's just not a, I wish there was more detail about his wrestling career.

Basically, the only real documentation we have of it is a 1970 article that Buford wrote after he got famous for an issue of the men's adventure magazine True Detective.

So again,

not great journalistic reputation, True Detective magazine.

But in that article, he claims that the hardest match of his wrestling career was in Union City, Tennessee, against a guy named Big Bill Crockett.

They both wrestled the night before in Jackson, and Buford had gotten a nasty gash on his forehead during that fight.

And so when they fight again the next fight, I'm going to continue here from Buford's article.

When the referee called us out to shake hands in Union City, he hauled off and hit me with his fist, busted open the cut he'd opened the night before.

When he hit me the second night, that's when the fight come off.

We didn't wrestle.

We just fought.

It was a little old makeshift ring, and we tore it The referees stopped us, got some canvas and lumber, and patched it up, then we fought some more and tore it down again.

I don't know how I'd got home that night if I hadn't had a wrestler named Billy Daniels to drive for me.

Both eyes were swollen shut, my hands were so sore, my fingers got stiff like claws.

I was stiff as a board for days.

It was along then that I decided to give up wrestling.

So that'll be basically his only rational decision in life.

I would argue that makes him a bad professional wrestler.

I think that's probably fair.

Okay, good.

Yeah, yeah.

I think when you lose your temper enough that you have an actual fight and destroy the ring twice, although I do want to see that fight.

Like, I bet that was a hell of a thing to watch.

And, like,

gosh, whether this is an embellishment or not, it's a really good, legitimate pro wrestling bit to fight so bad that the ring breaks and then they rebuild the ring and then you have to fight the ring around you.

That's excellent.

Yeah, that is a good wrestling bit.

So one of the last things that Buford and Pauline would do in Chicago before they moved back to Adamsville was have their first child, Duana, on January 9th of 1961.

And almost immediately after that happens, they move back to Adamsville.

And I want to quote now from an article by the McNary Historical Society.

His dad, Carl, was chief of police in Adamsville.

He was retiring and encouraged Buford to apply for his job.

After a vote from the the city board, Buford was made chief of police.

Thus began his law enforcement career.

Now that's a, that seems like it's leaving out a lot, right?

He was made chief of police?

He was made chief of police, right?

And the way Duana describes it, they had to beg him to be the chief of police.

Like he really didn't want it and they had to force it on him.

There's a lot that we just don't have here.

The little bitty details around the edges that get left out that I have been able to find paint to kind of a darker picture.

So among other things, this is back during a time when small-town law enforcement was less of like a career track and more like a gig you could fall into by accident, right?

Like, if you're in a county and like the sheriff is like an elected position and you're just a popular guy, you might wind up being the sheriff, even if like that wasn't your ambition, you know?

But also, there's a lot of money being the sheriff in a town that has organized crime in it.

And that's kind of the this,

I can't say this for certain, but I really heavily suspect, based on a couple of things I've read, that his dad, Carl, was crooked and wanted to pass on the job as police chief to his son so that the money from being crooked cops in this mafia town could continue to stay in the family, right?

He becomes the police chief after he's horribly injured in a car accident.

There's a lot of car accidents in this story.

Second car accident?

No, no, no.

This is his dad.

Totally separate car.

So his dad becomes the chief of police after he gets too hurt to work in a pipeline,

which is also weird.

And yeah, does the job for just a few years and then decides he's too hurt and he pushes for his son to take the job.

Now,

given the reality of crime at the time in McNary County, this was not...

an easy job enforcing the law near the state line.

And it was made harder by the fact that everyone whose job was to enforce the law in the area was, as best as I can tell, also incredibly corrupt, right?

Like, no one was really all that interested in enforcing the law, including Buford.

The McNary County Sheriff worked with the state line gang to ensure that alcohol kept getting smuggled into the county.

And as soon as he became the police chief, Buford,

the way he would describe things is like he set himself against these corrupt cops to like fight for justice and fight against the mafia.

The way I interpret it, and what I think the body of evidence suggests now is he was just kind of trying to edge these other law enforcement guys out of the racket, right?

Because they were all getting cuts and he wanted more money for himself.

Because as soon as he becomes the police chief, he runs for constable and he wins a narrow victory as constable in 1962.

And after that, he's going to immediately like set his sights on becoming the sheriff.

So, like, what he's doing here is he's getting rid of the competition.

He's trying to make himself the only lawman in town, in part because then the cut only gets split one way, right?

Sure.

Now, kind of laying out exactly what happened here is hard because most of what was written during this time period was written from the perspective that like Buford Pusser was a hero who was going on a crusade against the whiskey trade.

That's how Michael Birdwell describes what he does for the Tennessee Encyclopedia as like a crusade.

Like this was a like a almost like a holy war that he was waging against bootleggers.

Yeah, those are always good, right?

Yeah, we love a good holy war.

Yeah, no one's ever done one of those with, you know, an ulterior motive.

Yeah, anytime someone has committed to something that they've described as a crusade, my immediate thought is like, well, it sounds like they're clear-eyed and level-headed about it.

Yeah, it sounds like you're sane and reasonable and pursuing this reasonably.

Now, again, modern evidence suggests that he was perfectly happy taking money from bootlegging, and that his issue was both specifically with the state line gang because they had beef and with the fact that like he wanted more of the money that was coming in from these illegal businesses, right?

Rather than he had an issue with the businesses in the first place.

So that's why he would go after people, right?

He was effectively starting to make people pay protection.

First as the police chief and then as the sheriff, right?

Now, we do know that the evidence of corruption between area law enforcement and the state line gang is certainly a lot broader than even just the stories Buford would tell.

Like there is out, he's not the only guy saying that like the sheriff when he became police chief was crooked.

There's evidence for this outside of Buford.

The book Mississippi Moonshine Politics is a great anecdote about Louise Hathcock that really sells how locked down the state line gang had things with the cops before Buford got into the mix.

Quote, after one particular raid on the 45 Grill, a deputy sheriff arrived early one morning at the Hathcock home in Corinth to arrest Louise on liquor charges.

Since Louise was still in her bathrobe, she asked the deputy to wait while she changed into her work clothes, fixed her hair, and applied some makeup.

Oddly, the deputy agreed.

Once she was dressed for work at the roadhouse, the deputy allowed Luis to drive to the sheriff's office in her own vehicle.

Once Luis arrived, she quickly posted a $500 bail and made it to work before the lunch crowd arrived.

And that's just

you're paying a bribe on your way to work to the cops, right?

I love this woman so, so much.

It's a shame what happens to her because she's very cool.

What a bummer.

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Live in the Bay Area long enough, and you know that this region is made up of many communities, each with its own people, stories, and local realities.

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We're back, and my long nightmare continues.

Tragic.

So,

Pusser is going to run for sheriff.

You know, he becomes the police chief, he becomes the constable.

And the next thing he's going to do is he's going to get that crooked McNary County Sheriff out so that he can continue his crusade against Moonshine/slash take all of the money for himself.

Now, he made some interesting decisions when he started this run.

The weirdest of which is that he he chose to run as a Republican in what was then a Democratic stronghold.

This should have been more of a problem for him, but he got lucky because his rival, the incumbent sheriff, James Dickey, died in a horrible car accident partway through the election, clearing Buford an easy path to victory.

Now,

did Buford have anything to do with that car accident?

Can I just

on behalf of the audience, Without any jokes or frills, just say that yes, you're

Dickey is the name.

It was Dickey v.

Pusser, and Dickie was pulverized and cleared a path for pusser to snatch this victory.

All right.

Yeah, that's uh, that's the story of Dickie v.

Pusser.

Yeah.

Proceed.

Um,

and again, we know Buford is willing to kill people and stage assassinations to get what he wanted.

Like, this is me speculating.

I just wouldn't be shocked if he had something to do with Dickie's death.

That said, this is like the fourth car accident that we've talked about in these episodes.

So you also have to acknowledge it was the 60s.

Everyone was drunk and nobody had seatbelts, right?

So people just die in cars a lot back then.

So as soon as he gets elected sheriff, Pusser began an immediate spree of high-profile raids against stateline gang properties.

Local papers reported that he'd bust into gambling dens carrying a pickaxe and use it to destroy tables and roulette wheels.

In his first year on the job, he is said to have raided 42 stills and arrested almost twice as many moonshiners.

So he's going on like a rampage here, right?

Like as soon as he gets in, and the news picks up on this.

Like he gets famous for the way he's doing this because sometimes he's calling reporters along so they can see him busting up stuff with a pickaxe or a stick.

Now, by this point, the stateline gang that he's declared war against has undergone a change of leadership.

Luis had decided to end her 20-year partnership and marriage with Jack Hathcock because in 1957, she'd fallen in love with a different criminal figure, a lieutenant from one of the most powerful gangs in the area, the Dixie Mafia.

Now,

yeah, yeah,

enter John Fulcock.

It would be, that would be pretty funny if she'd fallen for John Fulcock.

No, she keeps going by Hathcock, by the way, after she does what she does, which is interesting to me, but that's the story we're telling now.

So the Dixie Mafia, where she falls for this guy who's a lieutenant there, is based out of the Strip, which is this neighborhood in Biloxi that's basically Mississippi's answer to Las Vegas.

Edward Humes, the author of a book called Mississippi Mud that's on the Dixie Mafia, describes the strip as the cancerous heart of Biloxi.

And given the rest of Biloxi, that's really saying something, if you've ever been to that fucking town.

Per his description, the Dixie Mafia was started by a lot of guys you might call rejects from East Coast organized crime.

Like it was initially a bunch of guys who got in too much trouble in like New York or Jersey and had to flee to the middle of nowhere so they wouldn't get offed.

Like that's kind of who founds the Dixie Mafia.

Yeah.

So these are both tough guys and also maybe not quite the top of the game, right?

Because they had to flee to Biloxi.

Right.

It's oops Alfredos.

It's not, you're not going to get any of the cream of the crop there.

No, no, no.

These guys are like, yeah, the dudes who, my alternative to moving here was to get murdered.

So Louise Hathcock, the guy she falls for, is named Carl White, and he's nicknamed Towhead.

A Tallahatchie boy.

Yeah.

Carl Towhead White.

In these episodes, the names.

There's some great names.

I think you're fucking with us.

You're just

like you're just throwing fake names in there just to see if we catch it.

I was worried when we went from pussers and dickies and hathcocks to a white, you know, boring name, but then nicknamed Towhead, we're back in the game, baby.

Yeah, boy, honey.

Yeah, Towhead was a Tallahatchie-born gangster who'd risen to the highest levels of the Dixie mafia.

And yeah, Luis falls in love with this guy.

And so she's got to split up with Jack.

Now, she does file for divorce, but that's just step one, because Jack, like everyone else in the story, is a murderous gangster.

And Luis and Carl know just divorcing him isn't going to be quite enough, right?

Like, that's not really an option with this kind of crime marriage.

Author Janice Tracy summarizes: The rest of the story of Janice and Luis reads like a B-movie script.

Luis divorced Jack, Towhead, and Luis conspired to murder Jack, and Tohead shot and killed Jack in a motel room where he was enticed by his wife.

Luis convinced authorities she had shot Jack in self-defense and showed bruises to authorities that she had allowed Toehead to inflict on her body.

Although Luis was charged with killing Jack in self-defense, it was no surprise when the charges later were dismissed.

Luis and Tohead continued their off-and-on relationship, at least when Tohead was in town.

The couple never married, in part because Luis saw through Tohead's often obvious attempts to gain control of her money and her business operations.

So yeah, this is a smart, tough lady.

Orchestrates the murder of her husband and then keeps her boyfriend at arm's length because she's like, look, man, I like you and thanks for help with the murder, but like, you're not going to own my businesses.

Like, that's, that's my stuff.

You know, I put up with this guy for 20 years.

I'm not giving up my business.

Yeah.

It's such a bummer that this was the past.

If she had waited a few more decades before being alive, she'd have been a very powerful figure in government.

Absolutely.

Yes, yes, yes.

She might have been able to win the presidency, right?

She's got that kind of ruthlessness and organizational school, and apparently a very good cook.

The whole package, really.

Yeah.

If you don't mind getting murdered, maybe.

Which I've had worse things happen in relationships.

So,

and this is another crucial dimension to the Buford Pusser story, because by the time he declares his war on the state line gang, their most prominent leader is a woman, right?

And it may just be the case that why Buford starts going after them is less because he hates crime and he's got this vendetta, and more he thinks they're weak because a woman's in charge and he can take over control of the business, right?

Or at least get a better deal, you know, if somebody else winds up in charge or if he doesn't have to, like, right?

He, he sees weakness here.

I think that's why he does what he does.

Whatever the case, in late 1964, Luis's gang strikes back.

Buford was ambushed by an unknown number of questionably competent assassins who stab him seven times and then leave him for dead.

They don't take any effort to confirm that he's dead.

Buford survives, and this obviously makes him famous, right?

Like that there's this lawman who's he's been doing all these very showy raids, cracking down on bootleggers and,

organized crime in the area.

And then he gets ambushed and stabbed repeatedly, and he manages to survive and continue attacking the mob.

He's becoming a hero at this point.

The news is covering him like that.

And did this really happen?

He was definitely stabbed a bunch of times.

Was it an assassination attempt?

Or is this something?

Because he's later going to injure himself.

as part of like a faked assassination attempt.

And so it kind of, this is probably real because they definitely, the state line gang had a reason to, but I can't not doubt it now, right?

For all we know, he just got tangled up with so many fucking volleyball nets again.

Right.

And he's like, oh, no.

I had to cut down seven volleys.

Let me live this down.

Yeah, we found him tangled,

covered in blood, tangled in seven volleyball nets.

What happened, Buford?

They tried to kill me.

It was the mob again.

It was the mob.

It was the state line mob.

But Buford does, like, the thing he's best at is he's very good at nursing this growing mythos around himself, right?

He gives, he gives a lot of interviews.

He likes talking to the press.

He's good at working the media, such as it is in his era.

And he really likes the image of himself as this badass, log-wielding juggernaut of justice.

So he starts making a point when that, when he realizes, oh, that's one of the things that like is really playing well with the audience, he starts carrying a hickory stick whenever he goes to on raids to bust moonshine stills.

So the press sees him with it, right?

Even though it's not really useful for anything, it's part of his legend at this point.

In 1966, he launches his most ambitious arrest yet.

He takes a squad of deputies to the Shamrock Hotel, which is the center of the Hathcock criminal empire.

The official story is that during the arrest, Luis pulls a gun and Buford shoots her dead in self-defense.

Luis's family will insist up to the present day that she was shot in the back.

And thus, probably not a self-defense case.

He just murdered her, right?

Yeah.

And again,

I think that's pretty credible.

That said, Luis definitely is not the kind of person who wouldn't pull a gun on a lawman, right?

I just think she was probably too smart to have tried to do that then.

I think it's likelier that he murdered her.

Yeah, I don't think

for the woman shrewd enough to keep her financials intact and the woman shrewd enough to like, like, let me get changed and put on my makeup and drive myself to post my own bail before I go to work.

Yeah, I don't, I think she is also shrewd enough to not shoot the famous hero cop that everyone talks about.

She's there with all of his cops in a daylight raid.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's how I feel too.

And there's something very sad about within the criminal underworld.

Obviously, this is like a brutal, these are brutal, violent, dangerous people.

But within that world and its rules, she is able to succeed and survive.

And taking her out requires someone, the only kind of person who doesn't have to abide by any sort of rule, which is a sheriff, right?

Like, that's the reality of law enforcement then and now.

But, like, sheriffs have such a degree of autonomy and power.

And when Buford says, oh, yeah, she pulled a gun on me.

So I had to shoot her.

It doesn't matter that she was shot in the back.

Like, no one else's version of events is going to carry water here.

And it's just, it's so unfair.

Like, if you were playing by the same rules Luis was playing, you never would have won, Buford, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

Just such a

coward's way to win this war.

Right.

And, like,

probably set back women's rights, at least in crime, a couple of decades.

Yeah, women's crime rights, yes.

Yeah.

It took decades for them to

recover.

Yeah, I was trying to remember a famous lady mafiosa, but actually they mostly were in, most of the ones I know were from like the 60s, 70s, like that, that lady who invented murdering people using motorcycles.

That's cool.

Yeah, we did a BTB on her at one point.

She was she was great.

So yeah, Buford's people write the official reports.

And so his version of events here is the one that history accepted.

People are only now starting to really like question it on a white, although I should point out the Hathcock family has for decades been saying, like, no, he totally murdered her, right?

Yeah, people just didn't listen to them because they were famous criminals.

Now, over the next couple of years, Buford expanded his war on crime across the state line and even into territory operated by the Dixie Mafia.

His legend grew with him.

The Buford Pusser Museum lists his greatest hits in a bulleted list that I am sure is largely inaccurate, but it gives you an idea of how people talk about like the legends that's grown up about this guy.

So here's their bulleted list of his accomplishments.

Shot eight times, knifed seven times, fought off six men at once, sending three to jail and three to the hospital, destroyed 87 whiskey stills in 1965 alone, killed two people in self-defense, hopped on the hood of a speeding car, smashed the window, and subdued the man who had tried to run over him.

Okay,

now could be a little bit of truth in that.

I mean, it's fair to say that he killed him.

He came into contact with a car and its window.

Right, we know that.

He was stabbed several times.

Who did the stabbing?

Was it him?

Was it other people?

Probably a mix.

He was shot several times.

At least one of those times he shot himself.

Were the other times people shooting him or did he, like, who knows?

He may have fought six men at once, although I kind of doubt it, but he was a really big guy.

Yeah, I mean, it depends on the definition of fighting.

I would believe that he, like,

a crowd of guys were around him and he starts hitting.

Took a stick out and spun in a circle real fast the way children do.

I think that's viable.

Yeah, or he got angry and he started beating on some guys, and they were like, well, that is literally the sheriff, so we probably can't really fight back here.

We're not allowed to kill him.

His deputies have guns pointed at us.

Maybe we just take the beating.

Perhaps that's likelier.

That said, no one doubts that Buford got into a lot of gunfights and basically every other kind of fight under the sun.

The more recent allegations do suggest that he killed more than two people and probably not any of them in self-defense, in what we would call self-defense.

And modern evidence also suggests heavily that he personally profited from his crime-busting work.

And maybe what he was doing was less a one-man war on crime than demanding protection money and busting operations who wouldn't pay him.

So this next part of the Buford pusser story is by far the most debated.

First, I'm going to give you the story that almost definitely didn't happen, but this is what everyone believed had happened for decades, right?

This is the story that's like the basis for the climactic events of the movie Walking Tall, right?

Okay.

And according to that story, despite Buford being basically an unkillable law god, Towhead White decides, I'm going to take this guy down for murdering my girlfriend Louise, right?

That's

the story that Towhead is just

trying to get vengeance for his dead lover.

So, White, who is known to the FBI as one of the top hoods in the Southeast, which I think just means top gangsters and not the other thing a hood might mean in the rural South,

he was furious and still grieving over the loss of his lover in 1966, and he decides to get Buford assassinated.

He has strong connections to another Dixie Mafia figure, a guy named Kirksey McNord Nix Jr.

So, Toehead White, again, not a normal name in this episode.

Kirksy McNord Nix Jr.

Okay.

Kirksy McNord Nicks Jr.

Yes.

Oh, Kirksey.

Now, the reason why White needs Kirksy is that White is behind bars at this point.

He's gotten locked up for one of his many crimes.

While Nix is free and allegedly the center of a gang of hitmen and hired muscle.

So Nick's is kind of like the guy in the Dixie Mafia that you call if you need some wet work done, right?

He'll ice a motherfucker for you.

So from prison, Toehead is alleged to have orchestrated an assassination attempt using Nick's to do the on-the-ground work, Nick's and his hired goons.

So we know that Nick's visits the Shamrock Hotel the day before, on August 11th, the day before Sheriff Pusser receives a phone call from an anonymous caller who tells him, there's a couple of drunks going at it out on the edge of town.

Someone's going to get killed.

So an anonymous caller calls the station and reports these drunk guys are like fighting and the police need to break it up otherwise someone's going to die right and they give a location to sheriff pusser who promises to drive out and take care of it in the lore established by pusser after this point his wife pauline wasn't just a good life partner she was also moderately involved in his business as sheriff and regularly rode along on calls with him this is what he claims that she loved to go with him as he was fighting crime she was his ride or die and she decides at the last minute as he's heading out to bust up this fight between these drunks to come along with him.

So the couple hits the road a little after 4 a.m.

on August 12th, 1967.

For a summary of what happened next from an article on AL.com.

His wife Pauline, a 33-year-old mother of three, insisted on going with him and they listened to an eight-track cassette, he said.

We were discussing a vacation we were planning to take to Florida the next day, Buford Pusser told the Tennessee in a 1969.

After they passed New Hope Methodist Church, he claimed a car pulled up alongside his Plymouth and someone inside fired a.30 caliber carbine rifle into his vehicle.

I knew Pauline was hit, Pusser told the newspaper.

I cradled Pauline's head in my lap and prayed over and over again, Oh God, don't let her die.

He told the reporter he never returned fire from the shotgun or handgun by his side, and instead drove several miles, waiting until he thought he escaped the ambushers to pull over.

He then claimed the car again pulled up to his and someone fired at him at point-blank range.

I felt my face getting torn off my head, Pusser said.

My chin was hanging on my chest.

I don't see how I lived.

So

that's the story he gives.

And this is the story that makes him famous, right?

Now,

you might have noticed there's a couple of sketchy things there, right?

Yeah.

First off,

the fact that he's describing, well, we got shot first and my wife was hit.

And then I drove and I thought I had gotten away from them.

And then later they came up and shot me.

Well, what are you establishing?

That my injuries and my wife's injuries didn't happen simultaneously, right?

Right.

And that there's multiple locations involved in the shooting.

And I get that he's a lawman, but what are you stopping at lights?

What do you mean they caught up to you and shot you again when you were stopping, Buford?

Your wife's bleeding to death or whatever.

Right.

You didn't go straight to a hospital.

Like, what was your plan there?

Now, as far as the injuries Buford got, both he and his wife were shot with a 30-caliber.

I mean, it's technically a rifle or a carbine, right?

And most of the articles will describe it as like, these as high velocity rounds but in terms of ballistics a 30 caliber is not like a big bullet right it's closer to like a nine millimeter handgun round than for example like a 556 the the the round that you that's fired by an ar-15 normally right and i bring this up not for gun nerding purposes, but because it explains how he could survive being shot in the face, right?

Because people often have that question when they hear about this is like, oh, well, how could he, how could he, number one, how could he have survived being shot in the face?

And also, how could he have faked something as serious as being shot in the face?

Well, because he was shooting himself in a place and with a bullet that was survivable, right?

Okay.

Like that, that's the reason I'm bringing that up.

Now, the only parts of this initial story that have proven accurate with time is that Pauline Pusser was shot and killed, and Buford was shot, but not.

killed, right?

Like, those are the only two things that definitely happened.

Everything else about the story that Buford told to authorities when he was found and nursed back to health has been shown to have been a lie.

No one in law enforcement seriously questioned the heroic sheriff's version of events.

He started to claim after he recovered that informants he had inside the Dixie Mafia and the state line mob had brought him word that Nick's and White had orchestrated the shooting.

And they also, these informants, brought him the name of like three other guys who had been the goons who took part in the actual assassination attempt.

Now, He never provided any evidence of this, nor did he ever produce an actual live informant who was willing to go go on the record.

And this is the other really suspicious thing that should have been suspicious at the time.

No charges are ever filed in Pauline's murder against anyone.

Even though the sheriff is saying, I have an informant telling me it's these guys, no one ever pushes charges.

Like nobody ever, yeah, which, oh, that seems suspicious, you know?

All of this should have

caused suspicion at the time, but it didn't.

And it didn't for a couple of interesting reasons.

Now, the reality of the story, and what we're pretty sure at this point happened, is that Buford Pusser murdered his own wife and then covered up the murder by faking an assassination attempt.

He shot himself, right, after he shot and killed his wife.

Now,

there were rumors that this had happened.

immediately afterwards, right?

Like that it was kind of a thing people would whisper about in Adamsville, right?

That like, I don't know if I believe Buford's story.

I don't know if I think that like this is exactly what happened.

But it wasn't the kind of thing like this was always like a matter for either like local gossip or independent investigators.

And there were through the years a couple of independent investigators who got interested in the Buford pusser myth.

One of them published a book trying to like

basically arguing years before the most recent round of investigations that Buford had probably murdered his wife.

So

there were people pointing this out earlier, but it wasn't until the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agreed to reopen the case case in 2022 that things started to really change publicly.

Now, the reopening of the cold case of Pauline's pusser's murder was publicized.

And once, you know, there started being articles out that, like, oh, they're looking into this famous assassination attempt, the TBI received a tip about the murder weapon, which had been sold years later and wound up in the hands of someone who

had tracked it back to its original owner and was willing to give it over to the TBI.

So they look at the gun, they analyze the gun, and they they conclude based on physical evidence from the crime scene that Pauline was likely shot and killed outside of the vehicle and then placed inside after death and driven to a second location, where Pusser wounded himself and then radioed for help.

One investigator concluded this appears to be a domestic violence homicide rather than this notion that they were ambushed in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere in 1967 with no streetlights.

I mean, this forensic evidence is incredibly helpful, and broadly speaking, I'm I'm pretty pro-innocent until proven guilty.

If a wife dies and the town is saying, I bet the husband did it, I don't think this story is true.

Generally, the town being lockstep in their suspicion, it's like, yeah, he probably did that shit.

Yeah, I think old Buford killed his wife, right?

Buford comes home with a dead wife and a scratch on his face, and everyone is immediately like, oh shit, he finally did it.

Yeah.

Well, what?

Are you going to call out the guy who murders people who annoy him?

The man who shot his grandpa with the 12-gauge for fun?

Like, right.

Nah.

The mafia killed my wife.

Man.

Sheriff, that's crazy.

That sucks.

Yeah, that definitely sounds real, Sheriff.

For sure.

Also feels pretty case closed, man.

I'm not going to ask any questions.

Yeah, yeah, I'm good.

I'm good.

Please just stay away from my house.

Look, I got shot too.

No, no, totally.

That's crazy that you got out of that alive.

That mafia must really hate you.

Yeah, the mafia did it, huh?

So the case gets reopened by the TBI in 2022.

And then in 2024, they feel like they've got enough evidence to justify exhuming Pauline.

and actually doing like a second autopsy.

And upon re-examining her body, they find evidence of several serious injuries consistent with domestic violence, including a pre-death nasal fracture that had been in in the process of healing when she was killed.

In other words, Buford had broken his wife's nose days before actually murdering her.

And you'll never guess, a week before the assassination, the mafia punched my wife.

Yeah, that's crazy.

Came over right to our house and punched us straight in the nose.

Can you believe it?

Classic mafia stuff.

Now, as we've talked about, there are a couple of reasons why there's not any like serious,

like at the professional, like

public level, no one really questions the story at first, right?

And first off,

the most obvious reason is that Buford is so grievously wounded in the attack that people just didn't think he could have inflicted the injuries on himself based on, and this is crucial, his description of the injuries he suffered.

In the book Mississippi Moonshine Politics, Janice Tracy describes him as having, quote, the lower half of his face virtually shot off.

Now, Janice is a good writer and this is a good book, but she's based that line entirely off of Buford's testimony to police, which I quoted earlier, right?

Where he's like, I can't believe I survived.

My jaw was basically hanging onto my chest, right?

Now, Buford himself relied heavily on the supposed severity of his own injury to explain away lingering questions about what happened that night.

In a 1969 interview, he insisted, I loved my wife.

I'd have been pretty damn stupid to blow my own jaw off.

And it's here I will remind you: Buford Pusser was a pro-wrestler.

He had made a living pretending to suffer serious injuries and even faking injuries for the entertainment of a crowd.

District Attorney Mark Davidson, who has been intimately involved with the reexamination of the case, told AL.com, our theory is he put a pistol inside his cheek and pulled the trigger and created a flesh wound.

And this would have been easy for Buford because as a result of his wrestling career, the left side of his face was numb because he'd gotten seriously injured.

A number of it was either that or the car accidents, but he didn't have feeling in that side of his face that he shot himself.

And this is a pro tip for all of you listeners out there.

If you ever need to fake a grievous injury, shooting through your own cheek creates a hideous-looking wound that is unlikely to kill you or even all that seriously injure you, right?

Like, it's not nothing, but like

the cheek is not right.

Look, if you've got a, if you've got to fake an assassination attempt, shoot yourself in the cheek.

Allegedly, no, that's all I'm saying.

I don't know.

Actually, I think they're pretty, it's pretty easy to tell when you've fired the bullet from inside of your mouth.

But, you know,

if you're in a pinch, maybe try shooting yourself in the cheek.

Or

Evans, Evans, is it just a fake assassination attempt?

Or if I wanted to scare but not kill someone, or if your listener wanted to scare but not kill someone, would you also recommend shooting your enemies in the cheek?

Absolutely.

You know, that is the official stance of this podcast, of iHeartRadio,

and of our sponsors, all of whom are very pro shooting people in the cheek as a bit.

Let's be real.

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Live in the Bay Area long enough and you know that this region is made up of many communities, each with its own people, stories, and local realities.

I'm Erica Cruz-Guevara, host of KQED's podcast, The Bay.

I sit down with reporters and the people who know this place best to connect the dots on why these stories matter to all of us.

Listen to The Bay, new episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.

And we're back.

Following me.

Yeah, well, Sophie, apparently we're allowed to say whatever we want about our sponsors because it has not been a problem for us yet.

That's awesome.

Knocked on wood.

I think it's good.

Yeah.

I'm not sure if my desk is made of real wood.

I guess we'll see.

I believe it is.

I ordered it.

Thank you.

I feel like I got in trouble for loudly sighing during one of our podcast reads that I'm contractually obligated to do, and then

they no longer came back to us.

Whatever that fucking dog food company that made my dog eat crickets and get diarrhea i think oh chewy is it chewy

no this was uh give us money chewy

chewy's all right maeve i think maeve was no no no no no uh i'll think of it i'll think of it because i'm not allowed to say it here i'm gonna pull a buford pusser you know maeve send us some money if you want us to cut out this part of the show where dan accuses your food of giving his dog diarrhea you know well we're basically holding it for protection money jiminy's it's jiminy's dog food that's called jiminy's because that doesn't sound right.

If you want this all cut out of the episode, Jiminy's, send us some cash.

You know, I can be bought.

It's easy to remember because it's called Jiminy's because the food is made of cricket meat.

Yeah, that's right.

I was going to say, I've heard good things about Maeve.

Yeah.

No, Maeve is good.

Jiminy's is the one I'm not allowed to say on our podcast anymore.

Well, I will say all of them are good or bad, depending on who pays me money.

You know, that's my promise.

You know what I have to say to Jiminy's?

Everybody, just like what about like a nice group sigh just like a

jiminies

so speaking of eating crickets

buford pusser probably not eating crickets for a while after he shoots himself in the face but otherwise he's more or less okay right um and i think it's interesting And this is something the D.A.

Davidson, District Attorney Mark Davidson, who's one of the guys who's been doing this like reopen the cold case, specifically points to his wrestling career as like, well, look, this is a guy with experience selling a fake injury to a crowd.

Like, this is exactly in his wheelhouse.

Quote, it was not the debilitating wound many seem to believe it was.

It healed up pretty well.

People say he got his face blowed off.

Nobody believes he did that to himself.

That's not accurate.

So he just didn't have that serious an injury, and he lied about it a lot.

And the media was like, well, it looks like he got hit in the face.

Sounds serious to me, you know?

And just kind of reported what he was saying as if it was the truth.

And that's how the legend grew, which is great.

So, this all brings the question: why would Buford Pusser murder his wife?

Now,

right, you do want to ask that, right?

Motive matters.

Unfortunately, I don't think we're ever going to get a perfect satisfying answer because of how long ago this was and how dead basically everyone involved was.

There are, and I talked earlier, there was that uh,

that, uh, this guy, Mike Elam, who is a former Benton County sheriff who started his career in law enforcement as like a huge fan of Buford Pusser.

And then basically, through trying to like recreate the crime scene, like traveling to where the crime's at, he started to notice inconsistencies with Buford's story and what had happened.

And he's, he's one of these guys.

He like writes a book about it.

He self-publishes a book in like 2004 about it.

So he's one of the early guys trying to make noise about how, what a fraud this dude was.

Yeah.

And the theory.

Pusser-truther?

An early pusser-truther.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's, I'm trying to find a way to bring Dickie back into it, but it didn't work.

But yeah, he's a, he's a pusser truther.

And

based on his research, one possibility as to why pusser had his wife murdered is that he was just a gardener variety abusive spouse, right?

And maybe, and also he's a giant.

So he's huge and very strong.

And he gets drunk one night and he kills his wife by accident or he kills his wife in a moment of passion and then has to fake the assassination attempt right like it's a thing he has to come up with kind of suddenly that's possible um elam Elam's like personal theory is that Buford was actually involved himself in the illegal moonshine trade and as I've used earlier in these episodes was probably taking cuts of a number of different illegal businesses going on in the county and Elam thinks Buford had Pauline murdered because she knew what he was up to and maybe they had a fight and she threatened to tell everyone, right?

Like, it's kind of unclear.

Or maybe she wasn't initially aware and became aware and then he had to do it.

We don't really know.

Per an article in the Nashview Tennessean, quote, Elam says he believes Buford Pusser killed her to prevent her from speaking to authorities.

Quote, if he, Buford Pusser, took someone's life to keep a secret, what kind of hero was he?

Elam said.

And I think the answer is.

Not a hero at all.

Not a hero.

But maybe, maybe a generational talent at self-branding.

He's very good at that.

And probably what happens is he this is, he has to come up with this fake assassination attempt kind of quickly because he's killed his wife.

But once people buy that, he has to lean into this larger-than-life hero figure.

And he just keeps kind of upping the ante on the stories he's telling because part it in part continuing to get away with it means continuing to sell people on the belief that he is the guy he's claiming to be, right?

Right.

This larger-than-life hero who's survived all these impossible brushes with death.

And if he makes this calculation, right, it pays off perfectly.

In the wake of the murder, Buford Pusser's story spread across the country about as fast as a story could spread in those pre-internet days.

Countless news articles celebrated the sheriff as the ideal lawman, tough as nails and willing to fight crime

even if he had to break the rules to do it.

Buford was smart enough to know that he had to sell what he'd done by acting as a grieving husband, and so he vowed public vengeance against the men he had accused of the assassination assassination attempt.

Carl Towhead White was shot dead the next year, and rumor had it that Pusser had hired an assassin to do the job.

Two other men he accused of partaking in the murder, George McGann and Gary McDaniel, were shot dead in Texas the next year.

Nix goes to prison at this point, so he doesn't get assassinated.

But the fact that these three guys who he has publicly named but not charged with any crime die in very quick succession, a lot of people suspect maybe he orchestrated these deaths, right?

Maybe he had these guys killed.

And it's it's a sign of like where things are culturally and how much rope we're willing, how much slack we're willing to give cops in this country that the average assumption of like a normal person in Tennessee is like, well, he definitely had three guys murdered, but it's fine.

They killed his wife.

So like, I get it.

You know, that's cool.

You know, sometimes you got to break the law to uphold the law.

Why couldn't he have these guys arrested?

I don't know, but it's fine.

Yeah, that's actually a

surprising to me if he's going to,

if we're okay with him bending the law, which it seems like we are, I don't know why he would hire an assassin and why he wouldn't kill those guys himself.

Like, if people are going to

accept the fact that he hired assassins, yeah,

and he's going to steer into this image of the

reckless above-the-law man.

I don't know why it's against the rules for him to like killhead white himself.

I don't know.

I may not, not to give him ideas.

Yeah.

But that is, that is, like, and it's, did he have some, did he kill some of these guys himself?

Did he hire people to, like, we don't really know?

It's also possible.

I think unlikely, but not impossible, just given these guys are all criminals who are in a violent business.

Maybe they just happened to most, three of them died in a year or so after this crime.

Not the most shocking thing in the world, right?

The only stable things that I feel like we can say is that he did pin

that sick, child-proof teddy bear, and he definitely killed his wife.

Those are the ones that I feel most confident in.

Yeah.

So I've quoted several times from the book Mississippi Moonshine Politics by Janice Tracy because it's a good book in general about a lot of characters at the edge of this story.

But Tracy bought into Buford's lie.

And I think that it's useful the way she did is useful because it does kind of explain how people thought, like why people bought into this at the time.

And this is how Janice explains why none of the people that he charged, that he named as having tried to kill him and killing his wife actually got charged with crimes.

Quote, this suited Pusser, however.

He preferred a more personal revenge.

And that is like the official story that people buy is that, that like, yeah, he didn't have him charged because he wanted to have him murdered personally.

Like he wanted to do this personally.

And we're okay with that out of our lawmen in Tennessee.

This is fine.

We like that.

We like that in America.

This guy's a hero.

And that's the most interesting thing about the story to me.

There was always evidence that Buford was sus and a fraud, but Americans in and outside of law enforcement were happy to ignore it because the story version of Buford Pusser was so good and it matched exactly with the kind of tale that Hollywood had primed audiences to expect.

In 1971, W.R.

Morris wrote a book about Buford titled The 12th of August, which is the day that he and his wife were targeted by that quote-unquote assassination attempt.

This is the book that was ultimately adapted into 1973's Walking Tall, which became a surprise hit and rocketed Buford to the level of a national celebrity.

The studio sent him on a tour around the country and Europe to do promotional work for the film.

He starts making celebrity friends.

He's publicly buddies with Johnny Cash.

There's a fucking,

what's his name?

The Margaritaville guy.

Jimmy Buffett.

Jimmy Buffett writes a song about him and has a story about Buford, like basically assaulting him and his friends.

So he gets famous.

And in fact, he becomes such a public figure in his own right that after the Smash surprise success of the movie Walking Tall, the production company, Bing Crosby Productions, decides to make a sequel and they ask Buford to to play himself.

They're trying to do an Audi Murphy with him, right?

And the new movie would just be titled Buford and would be based entirely, presumably, on his exploits as a grief-stricken sheriff out to murder the criminals who killed his wife.

It's a shame we never got to see this movie, because I am really curious, what direction would they have gone vis-a-vis all of the murders, you know?

Right.

As his fame sets off, Buford takes questions from fans, including one who asked him how people in his home county treated him after he became famous.

And the answer he gave to the newspaper when he's doing this Q ⁇ A is really interesting to me.

I'd say about 80% of the people in McNary County are proud of me, at least they say they are, but there's a handful that never liked me and still don't.

They resisted every step of my campaign to clean up the corruption, and they have nothing good to say about me now.

It's not that these people like crooks, it's that I think they consider me too big for my britches.

There's one man in the county, I won't mention names, who's always bad-mouthing me.

One of the reasons for that, I think, is because when I was sheriff, I was always after him for passing bad checks.

But that's life.

No matter what you do, you can never make friends with everybody.

Man, that guy's fucking dead.

That guy's fucking dead.

Yeah.

Beat him to death with a stick.

Now, it's hard for me to say how much of McNary County thought this guy was legitimately a hero and how many people were aware, like, nah, there's something fucked up at the center of that story.

I did find an article in AL.com that notes, quote, Davidson said during the investigation, he often heard from those who believed Pusser murdered Pauline and wanted him to tell the truth.

In McNary County, especially, everybody knew that's what happened.

Nobody ever believed the walking tall story.

They knew he was a bad guy.

And, you know, Davidson's the DA who's digging up and reopening the case.

I don't know if that's totally accurate or totally accurate to how people would have felt back in the 70s, but you will, I have found a couple of other quotes to that.

extent that basically like, yeah, in his hometown, people kind of knew, but also he's kind of the biggest thing that ever happened in this county, right?

So at the same time, you have to embrace it because you don't have, there's not any other reason people are heading to McNary for tourism, right?

Which is why the water tower in Adamsville has a silhouette of Buford with his trademark big stick.

There's a museum for him.

And of course, the town historical society or the County Historical Society is largely dedicated to him, right?

Like it's

walking tall and walking tall related tourism are still kind of two of the bigger things in that county.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah.

I mean, people will add 20 miles onto a road trip to see a giant chair.

Just imagine what they'll do for a big, fucking massive mountain of

people with a stick in this county.

Let's go see the water tower, right?

Buford spent the rest of his life dining out on the lie that he told to cover up for murdering his wife.

He spent his last years jet-setting around the world and making a lot of money.

When he died, he was worth an estimated $1 million, which is a lot more money back then and more money than a guy who was briefly sheriff for six years uh would have accumulated honestly, right?

Um,

he did fail to win re-election in 1970, uh, which is interesting to me.

So that is kind of more evidence for the people, local people knew this guy was full of shit, but that was before Walking Tall came out.

So who knows how his law enforcement career would have gone if he tried to run for election after becoming a celebrity.

Had he lived longer, he also might have slipped up or behaved in such a way as to draw more attention back to that alleged assassination attempt.

I have trouble imagining this guy living a lot longer and not killing someone else.

Right.

But he doesn't get the chance.

At the height of his fame, right after signing an agreement to play himself in the sequel to Walking Tall, he's driving back from Memphis to Adamsville and he crashes his sports car and dies on August 21st, 1974.

He's in his like mid-30s.

And that's the Buford Pusser story.

Man, crashing his sports car.

What a

cool way to die.

Awesome way for a murderer to die.

It is very appropriate for this guy being the kind of dude he is that's like, yep, sports car crash right at the end.

Yeah, that's that's how this story ends.

Yeah, that's so lame.

The fucking fake, grieving sheriff who's on his way to Hollywood and buys a sports car, and then he dies, and the entire town is like,

honestly, dodged a bullet there.

That's the best.

What have I been cool if he got killed by a big stick?

Yes.

Just impaled by a stick.

I mean, maybe he did.

Maybe he crashed into a tree, Sophie.

That's my head cannon.

Impaled by a stick after crashing his car into a tree.

Or like

the cane of that sickly bear all grown up.

That works too.

Just

glad that this guy's dead.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

That's the good part is he does die and he does die very early.

Right?

There are a couple of things that are, I mean, there's a lot of tragedy in this story.

The fact that he for sure murdered his wife enough that everyone was talking about it, and his daughter still becomes his biggest evangelist.

That's an added layer of tragedy.

In the beginning, in the first episode,

I kind of understood her hero worship because

you...

If you have the opportunity to write your dad's story and you want to embellish a bit and take all of his tall tales as gospel.

There's something endearing about that, but she must have also known the many rumors and the open secret that he for sure murdered her mother and

decided to ignore that or not buy into it.

And that's like, there's, there's,

I don't know, maybe that's Stockholm or brainwashing or whatever else, but that like that makes it much less endearing and charming and more tragic for her in

my mind.

I would agree.

And there's also, also, I mean, there's also the darker question of like, I mean,

or was this an act for her too?

And was she just like, look, there's a lot of money in being Buford Pusser's family.

That walking tall money keeps coming in, you know?

I don't know.

I think that's probably less likely than just this is a daughter who hero worshipped her dad who died very early.

But yeah,

it is, it did give me a lot of fun to tale on growing up in the 50s, which sounded like a fucking nightmare.

So easy to do crime, but

much more dangerous.

Yeah.

Especially if you were a cop.

Especially if you were a cop.

Oh my God.

If you want to do crime then and now,

a cop is the way to go.

Being a cop, number one, you can get away with prank shooting your grandpa with a shotgun if you're a cop.

Apparently.

It's great training for

for really pranking your wife somewhere down the line.

Yeah.

Oh, he sure got Pauline good.

She didn't see that coming at all.

Prank the whole town.

Classic Buford pusser prank.

Murdering his wife and staging it as an assassination attempt by the mob.

Like, that's the funny thing.

I came in here with a lot more detail on these different, like, organized criminal groups.

And then, as I, the more research I did, the more I was like, oh, these guys barely did anything to him.

Like, maybe they had him stabbed.

Maybe he got in some fights, but he could have faked a lot more of that.

Like, yeah, this mafia was running four successful businesses and they really were cutting corners Well, they had to pay off the cops They needed to cover all those financial losses

Yeah,

so I don't know

It's it there's a fun quote from the DA that I've Davidson that I've quoted from a few times where he's like I don't know we probably won't reinvestigate every shooting he was involved in but you could like maybe we should

We're not gonna reopen it because like at this point,

what do you think?

What's it going to be?

Yeah, what are we going to get out of reopening it?

Like, clearing the name of Luis Hathcock, the gangster who also murdered people.

I don't know.

Dan, you got anything to plug here at the end of the episode?

How you feeling?

I feel good.

I liked the story.

It's,

you know, murder is bad.

Hold for applause.

But I like those bastards more than like

endangering children bastards and like creating

systemic wrongs that still plague our society today.

So I appreciate that it was like kind of a standalone bastard.

That's pretty fun.

Yeah, that's always fun.

Thanks for giving me that.

Otherwise, pluggables, I write for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

You can find that on HBO Max, the one to watch, or on YouTube.

We release our episodes there.

Podcast that I do is Quick Question.

We answer rider questions and talk about bullshit.

And you can find me on Blue Sky.

It's probably Daniel O'Brien on Blue Sky.

I'm not really sure.

Yeah,

I hate to ask you to Google it, but

look him up.

But yeah.

Well, everybody, this has been Behind the Bastards.

Please check out Dan's podcast, Quick Question, and Last Week Tonight.

And more than anything, you know,

go shoot your grandfather with a shotgun if he's in the

okay no we don't we shouldn't do that can't do that don't shoot anybody with

advice from robert evans

don't do pranks can we maybe we can just come down on that bad idea pranks pranks bad unless it's like really funny yeah yeah yeah obviously

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