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Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. The “Biggest Little Town in Tennessee” had called a town meeting, and its entire identity was at stake. It was Oct. 27 in Adamsville, in the southwest of the state, about 100 miles from Memphis. The town is a living shrine to a long-dead man named Buford Pusser. If you’re under the age of 60, you’ve probably never heard of him. If you’re over that age, you likely have. Pusser was a local sheriff whose legend was immortalized in the hit 1973 film Walking Tall, two sequels, a separate made-for-TV movie, and the more recent 2004 movie of the same name starring the Rock. The original 1973 movie depicted a renegade Southern sheriff willing to meet the violence of the criminal with the violence of the lawman. He carries a large bat throughout the film, with which he brutally beats evildoers and smashes beer joints. The movie, which was not filmed in McNairy County, where the events depicted took place, was, according to the director, “60 percent true.” In an era before impressing the president with a televised tough-guy act was a principal qualification for a top law-enforcement job, Pusser was a proto-Trumpian cop, publicizing himself loudly and carrying a big stick. Indeed, three of Trump’s favorite present-day sheriffs—Joe Arpaio, David Clarke, and Mark Lamb, the latter now running for office in Arizona—have won the Buford Pusser award, a ceremonial Pusser-autographed bat presented in May during the annual Sheriff Buford Pusser Festival, which takes place, of course, here in Adamsville. The town of 2,000 also features a full Pusser museum, the Buford Pusser fairgrounds, a water tower with Buford’s image on it, and the Buford Pusser Highway. The 1973 movie that stoked all this regalia was a smash hit, grossing $60 million at the box office. And in the original film’s climactic scenes, Buford Pusser’s wife, Pauline, is murdered by members of the local mob, something that only years prior had supposedly happened to the real-life man on which the character was based. Pauline was indeed killed in 1967. But more than 50 years later, this past August, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation announced the findings of an astonishing three-year cold-case investigation into who had really murdered Pauline—and the results had stunned the town. The topic of that Adamsville town hall meeting at the Marty Civic Center last week was what to do about the inconvenient facts the investigation had revealed. Along with 50 residents, the mayor and town leaders had gathered to discuss the fate of the museum and the many, many monuments to Pusser. Though he had plenty of detractors outside this venue, the town hall attendees were decidedly on his side. “This is a hanging crowd,” a man in a motorized wheelchair muttered to the child who sat next to me. A transplant from Connecticut, he said he had moved to Adamsville because of Buford Pusser’s “values.” One after another, men and women stood up to assert that Pusser couldn’t be guilty of the horrific crimes the report had alleged. That the state could not put a dead man on trial, so the real truth might never be revealed. A man who knew Pusser as a child said even a prosecution wouldn’t change things: “If he’s indicted, he’s OK. We got a president that’s been indicted seven times, you know, so being indicted doesn’t convict you.” To many, these recent charges were a threat to a way of life, despite a hard-won investigation by the state. That day in Adamsville, it became clear how once a cult of personality is established in America, it can be near impossible to puncture. What ultimately happens here will say a lot about how we reckon with the folk heroes we create, long after they’re dead—and even after all they’ve done comes into full view. Buford Pusser became the sheriff of McNairy County in 1964, at just 27 years old. His main competition was the incumbent sheriff, a man named James Dickey, who died five days before the election in a car crash. Even so, the race was close—Pusser beat a dead man by only a few hundred votes. Before running for sheriff, Pusser gave little indication that he was destined for great things. He joined the Marines, only to be kicked out for “asthma.” (Pusser never mentioned having asthma again.) In those early days, he worked at the local McNairy County mortuary but didn’t last in that job. For a period, he fought as a boxer in Chicago under the name “Buford the Bull” while attending mortuary school. (He eventually dropped out.) He married Pauline Mullins, a divorcée with two children, in 1959. Somewhere in those years, Pusser reportedly began his long-running dispute with members of the Dixie Mafia, a crime syndicate that operated along the border of Mississippi and Tennessee. In both movie versions and in the hagiographic book The Twelfth of August: The Life of Sheriff Buford Pusser, by W.R. Morris, Pusser visited a saloon called the Plantation Club, run at the time by W.O. Hathcock, the patriarch of a local crime family and a member of the Dixie Mafia. The story goes that he was so disgusted by the debauchery he saw there that he started a fight, lost, and found himself on the ground, in the rain, suffering (not for the first or last time) from life-threatening wounds. According to the almost certainly spurious legend, Pusser was charged with assault and robbery, beating the claims in court. In the film version, Pusser dramatically shows his injuries to the courtroom by way of proving, first, that the Hathcocks were bad people and, second, that he was the man to put them in their place. Pusser then moved back to Adamsville, where his father, Carl Pusser, was the police chief. He worked for his father and eventually took over the job himself. What Pusser lacked in experience he made up for in imagination. He dedicated his two terms as sheriff to feuding with members of the Dixie Mafia. During this gang warfare, Pusser shot and killed Louise Hathcock, allegedly the money maven for the Dixie Mafia operation. The sheriff alleged that it was self-defense, though Hathcock was shot in the back. In August 1967, Pusser left home early one day at 4 a.m. to respond to what he said was a call about a disturbance near a local church. He brought along Pauline, for reasons that were never quite clear. A few hours later, Pauline was dead. Pusser claimed that members of the Dixie Mafia were responsible for Pauline’s murder, pointing particularly at the Hathcocks. His story, which local investigators seemed not to question, was that the 4 a.m. call had been a ruse to get Pusser on a deserted county road to ambush him. Pusser said that a car had pulled out of a church parking lot and opened fire, hitting Pauline. The sheriff continued to pursue his assailants until there was another burst of shooting, which reportedly resulted in the bullet that killed Pauline and hit Pusser in the jaw, landing him in the hospital. CBS News came to Adamsville two years after the killing to do a nine-minute segment on Buford Pusser’s saga. A famous journalist, Roger Mudd, on national television called Pusser a “modern Wyatt Earp.” The movie and book deal soon followed, then an international speaking tour, campus visits, and many interviews. One newspaper described Pusser as “a folk hero of the South”; another called him “the darling of the continent.” As the Toronto Star reported in 1976, “The first two movies based on his life—Walking Tall and Part 2 Walking Tall—grossed $100 million between them, and set box office records in scores of theatres internationally.” The article added, “Both movies also set rating records in their TV reruns.” It is worth noting that, in an era notorious for racist Southern sheriffs, Pusser policed a town that was almost entirely white and was not himself particularly known for racism. He even hired the county’s first Black deputy. Perhaps that in part was what made it so easy for Hollywood to feel comfortable trying to turn him into a national icon. As the Star piece put it: The movie made more than money: it made Buford Pusser a living legend. ‘Pusser for Governor’ bumper-stickers began sprouting in Tennessee. Car sales soared when Southern dealers gave autographed replicas of Pusser’s club to buyers. Pusser himself made $1,000 per personal appearance. A 1974 profile in the Bradenton Herald shortly before his death described “the legendary hero-sheriff” thusly: Pusser, while sheriff, became famous for his unbelievable stamina fighting the vice, prostitution and gambling. He suffered countless bullet and stab wounds and finally the loss of his wife to an assassin’s bullet. The truth about Pusser’s role in that loss would remain hidden for decades. In 2023, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation reopened the case of Pauline Pusser’s murder, even though most of the witnesses were dead, the victim was buried, and the evidence had been destroyed by fire, flood, and negligence. The investigation was a feast for true-crime devotees. There was blood-spatter analysis, gun tracing, and drone videos in which TBI agents attempted to re-create the shooting of Pauline Pusser. In video footage, the agents shot a plastic skull made of something called ballistic gel, which gushes red. They fired a .30 carbine rifle into a sponge, which produced a squishy spatter into a tarp on the ground. They drove vehicles at speeds up to 75 mph to assess whether in 1967 a car at a complete stop could catch up to another car moving somewhere around 100 mph. And in 2024, the TBI exhumed Pauline’s body for an autopsy, finding not only that she had been shot twice in the back of the head but also that she had a broken nose. Mike Elam, who studied the case for more than 30 years, can talk endlessly about these details. Elam, who lives in Arkansas and was briefly a law-enforcement officer, told me that he became fascinated with Buford Pusser in the 1990s and has spent the intervening years documenting his findings online and in a book. We met on a Friday morning in October in Adamsville, just three days before the big town hall, for a bus tour that Elam leads biannually, called “Truth Has No Agenda.” It was initially a counterpoint to the Pusser museum’s biannual official bus tour, though this year’s was postponed amid the fallout from the TBI investigation. Among the riders on Elam’s bus, half were currently serving as law-enforcement officers. Sorting through the 1,000-page TBI file and associated audio and video requires, as Connie Elam, Mike’s wife, told me, a “police officer’s eye for details.” The tour traces important touchstones in the Pusser legend, including, at the end, the place where Pusser claimed that Pauline died, inspiring the blockbuster films, Pusser’s fame, Elam’s decades of work, and, ultimately, the TBI’s decision to revisit the case. After gathering at the courthouse and taking a tour of the old jail, now decorated with Pusser memorabilia, we boarded the bus. I sat next to Allen and Stephanie, a couple from the Memphis suburb of Germantown. Allen is retired from the Memphis Fire Department and told me that he had once met Pusser and shook his hand as a kid as part of a March of Dimes fundraising event. He had been a sheriff’s deputy in a small department, he told me, but quit because he was “tired having to deal with politics.” Allen peppered me with a running commentary on the TBI investigation and his view of the corrupt nature of sheriffs, especially in Pusser’s day. The first stop was the place where Pusser had died in August 1974, just a year after Walking Tall came out in theaters and shortly after Pusser had agreed to play himself in the sequel. According to news reports from the time, he had been driving nearly 130 mph while highly intoxicated. He had actually had a car crash in the same spot before, in 1970, that resulted in a monthlong hospitalization. But this time, in the 1974 collision, Pusser flipped his maroon Corvette—a new purchase made with the Walking Tall money—and broke his neck in the process. The car burst into flames. A law-enforcement official responding to the scene, echoing many in Adamsville, believed that this was no mere accident because, in his words, Pusser always drove “fast but safe.” His daughter Dwana, who was a teenager, said she arrived at the scene in time to hear her dying father call her name. Local children came to sort through the wreckage, looking for souvenirs to take home. Now what remains of the “death car” sits in the basement of the Buford Pusser museum, after spending some years at Carbo’s Police Museum in eastern Tennessee, which advertised, with a skull and crossbones, “We Have Sheriff Buford Pusser’s Death Car.” The tour next went to see Pusser’s grave, as well as the disturbed dirt where his wife had been reburied, after TBI agents disinterred Pauline’s body and conducted the autopsy that had never happened in 1967. As one of the sheriffs on the tour said to me, “Generally, autopsies don’t lie.” Dwana is also buried there, as are Pauline’s children, Pusser’s stepchildren, who were cremated but whose ashes lie in the Pusser plot. The next stop was the Pusser museum, a replica of the Pusser family home, which burned down in 1971, supposedly the result of a dryer mishap. When you walk into the museum, you are met by a life-size cardboard cutout of Pusser, who was a formidable 6-foot-6. A television plays a short video of Pusser’s life narrated by people who have only nice things to say about him. Dwana Pusser, Pusser and Pauline’s daughter, who was 6 years old when her mother was killed and who died by suicide in 2018, claims that her father was a “gentle giant,” though she adds: “When he needed to, he could become that alter ego.” I asked the sheriffs on the tour if, knowing what they now know, they would accept a Buford Pusser award. “Well,” said one, “that’s a very tricky question.” The town, he argued, meant the award in a “positive way,” although he had to admit that the case did not look good for Pusser. Another sheriff said, “I’d really have to think about that.” Joe Arpaio, the Arizona sheriff, himself called me after the results of the TBI investigation were announced to the public. A recipient of the award, he said he was concerned. “Not only was he corrupt, he was a killer,” the 93-year-old, infamous for racially profiling Latinos and housing them in a “tent city,” told me. He was among the only people honored in the sheriff’s name who would admit to it. In the movie Walking Tall, as well as the 2004 remake starring Dwayne Johnson, Pusser carries a large chunk of wood that he uses to bash skulls and wallop soft organs in the torso. The bat was such a big deal that sometimes Pusser is remembered for his lack of firearms. (The “stick” in the film version was actually a metal bat wrapped in wood because, according to a report at the time, a wooden bat simply didn’t do enough damage.) However, this, like many things having to do with Pusser, was a complete fantasy. One old-timer from town told me that Pusser did indeed wallop people over the head but that it was all with the butt of a gun. Pusser indeed owned a lot of guns, including a .30 carbine caliber revolver that Mike Elam managed to procure over the course of his investigation. Elam in turn gave it to the TBI, whose officers would later record themselves shooting bags of red dye to see where the blood spatters when a .30 caliber bullet hits a person’s head. The museum, in fact, used to display one of Pusser’s pistols with a note asserting that the former sheriff had used it to shoot stray dogs when he was a kid. Eight years after Pusser’s death, Colt issued a limited-edition .357 Magnum Python series pistol with “likenesses of Pusser engraved in gold on the gun.” But the gun that Elam had furnished, the 2022 investigators concluded, had probably killed Pauline. In the last hour, we reached the pinnacle of the tour, the meandering drive to the crash site, where Pusser claimed he was ambushed by at least three men. The law-enforcement personnel on the tour scanned the area, as if looking for clues. There used to be a sign marking the spot, but it’s gone, leaving a blank pole in the grass next to a two-lane country highway. The tour-bus driver, Dennis Hathcock, was 16 years old when Pauline Pusser died. The story goes that Hathcock, who now has a pure white trimmed goatee and makes a living driving around various celebrities, was following Pusser, as the teens in town were wont to do, and happened to be there when law enforcement responded to the “ambush.” He was told to scram, which he did, although he ended up being one of the people blamed because he was a Hathcock. “I thought Buford would kill me,” he told the TBI in 2023. In what may have been his final interview, conducted just weeks before his death, Pusser told the editor of the Bradenton Herald that the men who had killed his wife had been brought to justice. Pusser, though, was extremely cagey about who these “real killers” actually were: Questioned about the persons responsible for his wife’s murder, Pusser … said, “two of ’em have already met their death and another is serving a life sentence in a Louisiana parish (county). I can’t tell you who or where, ’cause we have a hold against him should he ever get out. We wouldn’t want the publicity to hurt our chances of getting him. On the tour, Hathcock stared at a spot on the side of the highway. He remembered seeing part of Pauline’s scalp in the road. “At that time, I assumed it was the top of her head over in the ditch. That blond hair was strung out from it.” He described blood, flies, and “brain matter” along the roadside. He repeated the story a few times, each time looking sad, looking at the same spot. “I can still see it sometimes,” he said. In August, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation revealed that after disinterring Pauline’s body, searching for lost and damaged evidence from more than 50 years ago, and interviewing anyone still alive who knew Pusser, agents had probable cause to believe that Pusser, not any local mob, had killed Pauline in their house, the one that later burned down. Pusser may have carried her to the car, dropping her shoes in the process. He went back to pick them up, sliding them onto her feet so it looked as though she had been fully dressed when she got into the car, of her own volition. Because the house burned to the foundation, no investigators could ever examine the carpet or walls for blood, potentially helping to maintain his ruse. The investigation found that her head injuries were “consistent with at least one high velocity projectile with a back to front trajectory.” Investigators determined that Pusser had probably shot Pauline in the back of the head, twice. He then may have shot himself in the jaw, an injury that, despite requiring multiple surgeries, was not life-threatening. The museum we had visited contained nothing about Pauline or her death. There was a side table with a Bible prominently displayed, but nothing for the visitor to envision where she fit. According to some who knew Pauline at the time, she was allegedly preparing herself to leave Pusser, even going so far as to pack a suitcase. Another acquaintance said that Pauline would wear two sets of clothes out of the house so that she could sneak her wardrobe out, bit by bit, without Pusser noticing. The man in charge of Buford Pusser’s legacy—the official state historian for Buford Pusser, according to an official certificate—is Steve Sweat. The small office of Steve Sweat’s Auto Shop is an homage to Pusser, whose picture graces every wall at least once, alongside Trump–Vance stickers. Sweat, who is 70, has a golfer’s tan, flinty eyes, and a shirt unbuttoned just a little too far. He is adamant that Pusser is innocent, although he is careful to acknowledge that Pauline’s murder was a “terrible, horrific, and sad event.” Sweat is also quick to tell me that the McNairy County News, the local paper, is “fake news” and rails against a front-page article it published titled “Justice for Pauline.” And he has only bad things to say about Mike Elam, recounting a conversation he claims they had: “I said, ‘You’re a sorry, low-down dog.’ And I said, ‘This is a fact: If Buford Pusser were still alive, you would not be running your mouth like you are.’ ” The museum may be at risk because of the TBI investigation, although the people of Adamsville—even those who think Pusser probably killed his wife—want it to remain open. Sweat has a solution. He wants to buy it, he says, and put up billboards along the highway to advertise. Right now, the museum is owned by the city of Adamsville, which must fund its upkeep and staffing. “Sheriff Pusser inspired thousands to enter into law enforcement,” Sweat told me, gesturing to a Pusser admirer turned lawman who had just visited his shop to talk Pusser. These were words I would hear frequently, that Pusser was an inspiration for many who wanted to fight crime. Looking at the facts, though, it’s not clear whether Pusser fought more crime than he created. There are those in town who questioned Pusser’s official narrative even while he was alive. Several witnesses told Tennessee law enforcement in the days after Pauline’s killing that they believed that Pusser was responsible. Rumors of the sheriff’s pending arrest were so widespread that the local prosecutor had to tell the media they were “without basis.” In a March 1974 syndicated column, Cammy Wilson, of the Dayton Daily News, visited Adamsville and spoke with Pusser’s then critics. “I was in Vietnam for two years and I encountered more fear in McNairy County than I did there,” Wilson said in the piece. “It’s the first time in my life I had to go outside a town to get affidavits signed.” The day after the bus tour I attended, Elam gave the same tour to around 50 people from all across the country. As the group milled about, drinking coffee and eating doughnuts, I met Joe, a longtime resident of Adamsville. He had known Pusser well, he said. Many of his relatives were bootleggers back in the day, and Pusser, he told me, was notorious for taking bribes and controlling the production of liquor in the county, like a mob boss. He took a cut from bootleggers and loaned money at usurious rates. He also told me a story about his uncle, who was arrested in Alabama. According to Joe, Pusser loaned him the money for bail but then demanded nearly four times as much in repayment. Pusser could be kind, he said, but there was always a price. “I’ll guarantee you he killed more people he’s not getting credit for,” Joe said. The TBI’s investigation is replete with testimony from the time of the “ambush” in which witnesses say they believe that the entire thing was a setup. We know that before 1967, Pusser had killed at least two people, one of them a woman he shot twice in the back. If the alleged truth of Buford Pusser was breaking through among the attendees of the “Truth Has No Agenda” bus tour, it was a different story among Pusser’s most committed disciples in Adamsville. At the town hall on Oct. 27, a man named Bob Smith led an opening prayer: “We pray for Your guidance tonight to give us the courage to represent Buford and our thoughts about him.” There was no mention of Pauline. The entire proceeding went on in much the same way. Over Zoom, and despite some technical difficulties, Madison Garrison Bush, the granddaughter of Pauline and Pusser and Mrs. Plus America 2025, asserted her view that her grandfather had not killed her grandmother. As for the TBI investigation, “Everything that has been brought up in recent events is circumstantial and hearsay.” Many of the speakers agreed that Pusser was not a perfect man, neatly skirting the issue that he had been credibly accused, with reams of evidence, of murdering his wife and covering it up. “He was willing to fight evil on its terms,” one man said, “not let them hide behind the law if that’s what it took. So we know, and I think he would say himself, he was no perfect saint.” The people of the town asserted that not only was Pusser possibly innocent, or at least not as guilty as the TBI wanted the public to believe, but preserving his history was their birthright. “The myth we’ve created is good,” one man explained. “It’s what we need to hear. The little guy can stand up. Corruption will eventually end.” A sheriff’s deputy from north Alabama said that changing any of the official history of Buford Pusser would let “the internet win.” He blamed people who “didn’t like law enforcement” for spreading the “rumor” that Pusser had been corrupt. “We’re gonna stop this,” he concluded. “When I look at my children and I think, What am I going to tell them when they’re asking about this museum?,” one Adamsville resident said, “what I’m going to tell them is, there’s a man, there’s a myth, and there’s a legend. Every man lives his life and does the good that he can. Every man suffers evil in his life. Every man’s hand will eventually do something. It’s inevitable.” In Adamsville, as in America, the myth of a man always outlives the man—and, today especially, seems also to outlast the truth. Steve Sweat insisted on getting the last word. “Let me tell you one thing,” he said. “Nobody came into Adamsville and told us what to do here. Buford Pusser did that. He stood up for Adamsville, and all of you tonight have done for him.” He earned the most roaring applause of the evening.
