Local Legend Was More Likely A Murderer

Back in January, I shared a two-part podcast investigation by Gone South into Buford Pusser, the larger-than-life sheriff who was the inspiration for the Walking Tall movies.

I shared it not only because it was an interesting story, but because I felt both connected to it and ignorant of it. Pusser is a hometown hero back in my West Tennessee stomping grounds of McNairy County. He was this rough-and-tough lawman who harkened back to some Wild West sheriffs; he cleaned up moonshiners and bootleggers and prostitution rings down on the state line between Tennessee and Mississippi.

I had family connections to the story as well. My grandfather had run against Pusser for sheriff all those years ago, and I can say with quiet certainty that if he’d won, there would have been no Walking Tall movies. (For one thing, Papaw wasn’t 6-feet-6-inches tall and 250 pounds and a former wrestler like Pusser was. Nor did he walk around with a large club — some would call it a baseball bat, but I saw the thing and it wasn’t a bat — just a large slab of wood.)

I saw it because I knew Pusser’s daughter, who was, for a long while, the mayor of their town, long after he’d died. She would bring it out like a prop at certain talks and presentations.

I knew his granddaughter because I dated one of her best friends. These are the kinds of connections that exist in small towns. Despite all of this, I had never really concerned myself with Pusser’s story. I knew he was shot up a few different times. I knew he died in a car wreck. I knew he inspired the movies.

The podcast raised all these news questions, namely about what happened to Pusser’s wife who, so the story went, was with him when he was attacked and gunned down and she was shot in the ambush. The podcast was chronicling an upswell in questions about that story.

And The New York Times just printed a story that answered those questions.

Apparently the news is all anyone is talking about back home, which is another way of saying if I still lived there, I probably wouldn’t have needed to read about it in the Times.

It’s hard to describe how little a splash this news will make nationally, save for the generation of Americans who remember the movies. But it’s a huge development for a town the size of Adamsville, Pusser’s town that’s right down the road from my hometown of Selmer and somehow even smaller. They have entire festivals dedicated to this man, and while it’s probably fairly modest, his legend remains a tourist attraction of sorts for a town that’s otherwise a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it kind of town.

But hat’s off to Gone South, in an age when true-crime podcasts need do little more than simply tell the story and raise the possibility of what-ifs; there are few expectations that anything come from them. Here’s an example of a podcast that saw smoke and, lo and behold, found fire.