November 6, 2025 • 45 mins
Buford Pusser went on a domestic call in the early morning hours of August 12, 1967. Pusser's wife, Pauline, went with him on the call. On the way a car pulled up alongside them and shots were fired, killing her and leaving Buford shot in the face. Buford survived the attempt on his life, Hollywood came calling and a feature film about Buford became a big hit, Walking Tall. The legend of Buford Pusser only grew when he died in a car accident right before he was set to star in the sequel to Walking Tall. It would be easy to blame Hollywood for covering up the truth about the man to make him into a hero, but that isn't the truth. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss the investigation into the unsolved Cold Case murder of Pauline Pusser and attempted murder of Sheriff Buford Busser.
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.12 Introduction - Hero
01:41.83 Walking Tall
05:10.58 The story of Buford Pusser
09:03.79 The dead tell tales
15:10.75 The ambush of Buford and his wife
20:03.38 Looking at surgical notes before autopsy
25:20.93 Clandestine burials
30:18.23 Domestic calls are to toughest
35:02.19 Pauline had a healing broke nose at death
39:51.21 Shot in the back of the head
45:05.22 Conclusion
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body doats, but Joseph's gotten more A long long time ago.
When I was a little boy, there were certain cultural
icons that captured my attention. Let's see who were some
of them. Oh, I know, I liked Muhammad Ali because
(00:25):
he was such a bombastic kind of personality. I liked
because he's so rare, you know, back then he would
get in front of the camera and he would say things,
and he could make things up, you know, quote quote
homemade poetry if you will on the fly. I loved
Evil can Eevil As a little boy. I had a
(00:47):
little Evil can Evil toy, you know that you'd wind
up and you could jump boxes with it and all
that sort of thing. And I loved loved ABC wide
Wide World of Sports watching him jump over cars. And
of course subsequently I think at caesar Palace, Caesar's Palace
broke every bone in his body when he jumped over
that fountain. If you ever go to Vegas, check out
(01:07):
the side of that fountain. I don't know how he
did it. And then of course, you know snacker of
a Canyon, don't forget about that. That wasn't exactly a
brilliant move, but it's something that stands out in your mind.
Another cultural icon in this former little boy's mind was
probably beauf Pusser. And the reason it was so cool
(01:30):
is that there was a movie that, of course I
was too young to go and see because of the
level of violence. But you knew about him. You heard
about him, You heard about walking tall, you heard that
he carried this massive stick that he would walk in
and he'd bust up bad guys. He'd run the ne'er
do wells out of the county. Of course, larger than life.
(01:54):
Joe Don Baker played him on the screen. But you
know what, sometimes, sometimes, just like in Hollywood, when you
go behind those facades that are on the back lots,
you realize that they're empty, and many times they're filled
with garbage and trash. You don't see it on the outside,
(02:17):
but dig deep enough and you'll see it. Today, I'm
going to discuss a possible domestic homicide that involves Beford Puster,
and we're going to explore this a little bit and
probably put an end to those dreams that I had
(02:40):
as a little boy that there were real heroes out there,
at least those that Hollywood told me to believe. I'm
Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Bags. You know, Dave,
one of the myriad of reasons, just one of the
reasons that I just like Hollywood nowadays is that their
(03:05):
brain seem to be so infantile that they're incapable of
creating new content. I absolutely despise remakes. There are very
few that are out there that are worth my time viewing.
You know, I'll sit there and I'll see some movie
that's being remade that was fantastic and it's an original form,
(03:28):
and you're sitting there thinking, why why are you going
to redo this? And you know, just a couple of
years back, we had Dwayne the Rock Johnson that came
in and remade Walking. Wait a minute, the movie.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
You know what's funny about that? What you just said
cracks me up.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
What's up?
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Is it just a few years ago?
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Twenty one years ago? That movie was made two fars
Holy smokes. Yeah, well, I got another question for you
about that. Then go ahead.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
I'm wondering light of this recent evidence, I wonder Dwayne
the Rock Johnson is signing up to do a sequel. Well,
you know, what do you think?
Speaker 2 (04:07):
I will tell you it's interesting because that Walking Tall
that he did it was It was not a remake,
It was not a retelling of the It was just
utilizing an image from back in the day, the big
stick and Walking Tall and everything else was you know,
it had nothing to do. It was all brought to
a contemporary look at things. It had nothing to do
(04:30):
with what the original story was, which, by the way,
Buford Pusser, Okay, the original Walking Tall movie. And you
mentioned Joe Don Baker, I was like, I remember bos Vincent. Yeah, yeah,
because they did a Walking Tall TV show in nineteen
eighty one and it didn't last long. And I always
thought the reason it didn't really work is because it
(04:52):
wasn't based in truth. I always thought there was something
wrong about the story of Buford Pusser, And as I
got older, I thought, maybe I have a weird feeling
about it because he was so young when he became
the sheriff. He was the youngest sheriff in the United
States of America in the early sixties when he first
became sheriff there in mcneer County, right and anyway.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Just up the road in Tennessee from where we are.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Yeah, and I look at this and the things that
I know now and I look back, and most of
the people that were made into heroes were not heroic
in life. They were heroic in the stories that were
told about them, but they were not heroes in their
personal life. While and I don't think I don't like
(05:46):
seeing these so called heroes torn down at all, but
I liked the truth to have its day, And I
wonder where was the truth when this happened, because people
knew then you realize what we're about to talk about
was common knowledge at the time the BS was flying.
There were people that at least or maybe you know what,
(06:09):
if it wasn't then they're claiming it was. That.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
That's why you got to take a lot of these
things with a grain of salt. There's only like, I
have very few heroes that I actually believe in now.
I think like one that stands out in mind is
probably Audie Murphy that I love because he never sought
(06:32):
out the glory that landed upon him, and he was
just one of these people that just took took the
bull by the horns and he didn't care, and of
course he paid a price for it later on in life,
you know, I mean, he was he had terrible problem
with alcoholism, and you know, just all these things. You
know that he bore the burden of that. People didn't understand,
you know, shell shock and all that. For Pussor was
(06:55):
not that person. He was no Audie Murphy. There's heroes.
I take exception with people too. They throw that term
around a lot. You hear it a lot. Oh, well,
you're so brave your hero. No you're not. No, you're not.
There are real heroes out there, and it's really sad.
I think that that, you know that that Buford Pusser
(07:19):
occupies that space where they you know, they have so
idolized him to the point where he, for many years
was viewed as a hero. And now with these stories
that have come to light in the wake of new
information that has come about as a result of of
(07:40):
his of his journey, if you will, his matrimonial journey
and things that they suspected that he was involved in.
Now you know, we view things in a different light
relative to him. You know, we heard these tales of
the Dixie Mafia, you know, for years and years, and
(08:01):
how it was integrated into a lot of the underworld stuff.
And of course I think they try to pull that
narrative in with these activities that were going on in
this county where he was, you know, the sheriff of
and there's not really a lot there a lot of
meat on the bone from an evidentiary standpoint, that that
(08:22):
was the case, I think, And so you know, it
makes you question everything else. And here's really the thing
is that, as we always say, the science, the science
in any case is not going to lie. And many
people don't anticipate that there is going to be a
(08:45):
telling of the truth down the line. But you know,
I got to tell you, if an individual happens to
be I don't know, let's say, exhumed the dead in fact,
do tell tales, Brother Dave. I'm curious about this. You know.
(09:20):
I felt like that, plus, the story had been essentially
I don't know, put to bed for decades now, and
you know, and I know the people up there, you know,
kind of scrap out a living. You know, they have
a museum up there. I think that kind of honors
his memory. And yeah, you know, there's all manner of
(09:41):
things that go on, and you know that's kind of
been a cottage industry. I guess now I kind of
feel sorry for the people now, you know, retrospectively.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Well joke. When the story first broke that they were
filing a report on this, the website for the museum
was down and it was not open, you know, they
closed it for a few days, but I went to
it before taping. Today, the Beauford puss Er Home and
Museum is open. The I mean, the website is and
(10:11):
the first line right there in the middle credited with
Beauford Pusser, like his slogan or the theme that he
lived by, what's right is right and what's wrong is wrong.
It doesn't matter who you are. I thought, how fitting
it is if they actually leave that on there and
now tell the real story based on information, you know,
I think that would be a way to honor his
(10:36):
wife and maybe open up a real discussion about domestic violence.
You know, we just did a story the other day
domestic violence where young woman was allegedly thrown over the
twenty fourth balcony, you know, by her husband, who has
been convicted of domestic violence. Now, and yet at first
it I don't know what they're going to I still
(10:57):
don't know how that's going to be ruled because there
was so much damage, you know, pulverized. Well, in this case, Joe,
you have Beauford Pusser's story. And I'm calling it that
because even back when he first told it, there were
people that didn't buy it. It didn't make a lot
of sense. I mean, he claims that, you know, one
of the things they built the walking tall myth on
(11:19):
was that he was the guy who stood up to
you know, all these wrongdoers in the hills, and they
were trying to kill him. You know, he was trying
they were trying to assassinate him. They were trying to
you know, catch him and get him. And this happens,
what at three in the morning, and he says his
wife is going out on a call with who takes it? What?
What shrif? I don't know, would take their wife out
(11:40):
on a call at three o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
I don't know, you know, I guess I think the
the mythology of the thing is kind of painted out
so that you know, she's also the hero wife or
something like that, and again mythologizing this to that point
where you know, she becomes essentially a prop Think about
that just for a second. In this story, I think Hollywood,
(12:05):
you know, viewed it that way. Certainly, how brave you know,
this brave, brave couple you know that are going to
sally forth into the darkness of night, you know, and
go out and he's going to run this call, a
potentially very violent call where not only that, he also
if you're to believe this, and it's one thing, if
(12:27):
you have a sheriff, okay, and this does happen. I've
actually seen this happen where there are crime scenes I've
rolled out on and you've got a high ranking official
that happened to be out at night with his wife, okay,
and they show up at a scene because that high
(12:49):
ranking official has been notified that something major has happened,
like if you've got a multiple homicide that's been committed.
This individual wants to go out there because they're the
face of the elected sheriff or it is the sheriff,
and their spouse would actually wait in the car. And
I've actually seen that because I've known their spouse is
you know, we go to parties and all that stuff,
and I might acknowledge by waving at them, I would
(13:11):
think I wouldn't want this to be my spouse. But
we're not talking about you know, you're going out to
the local fish house on Friday night and you happen
to get a call and you're going to know you're
talking about somebody that's like, yeah, I got this call,
and she's going to hop in the car to go
to this potentially very dangerous event with him and show up.
(13:31):
It seems first off, if you're truly a law enforcement
officer and there is no excuse for time, you can't say, well,
it was a different time back then. No, No, things
were dangerous. They were dangerous. There was violence, and you know,
in prior to this, he had allegedly experienced violence, he
was aware of the violence that was going on. So
you're telling me that the most precious person in your life, who,
(13:55):
by the way, should be your spouse first and then
your kids, you're going to put them in the car
with you and go out to this location and oh,
by the way, there's a hit team out that's going
to take you out. Now, this sounds like something that's created,
created in I don't know, in somebody that's living on
(14:16):
a fantastic plane in their brain. And Hollywood bought into it,
and listen, you know, you know they put a lot
of butts in seats, didn't they in the theaters with
this thing? This thing was People don't realize what a like.
I'm not going to say it was a cultural landmark,
but you know, the theaters were full to see this
movie and the book. The book also sold well.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Jay, you think about it, though, it was Hollywood didn't
create the story or they sold it. But the story
had been going on for six years before that nineteen
seventy three movie came out. This happened in nineteen sixty seven. Yeah,
So in nineteen sixty seven, he says that he's got
this domestic violence call he has to go on in
the middle of three thirty in the morning, and his
(15:00):
wife volunteers to go with him. He claims that a
car pulled up alongside his and again three thirty in
the morning on a domestic violence call, and somebody pulled
up alongside his car and fired several shots, killing Pauline
and injuring him, and what he claimed was an ambush
intended for him and was carried out by unknown assailants.
(15:23):
They were never caught. The sheriff was shot, Buford Puster
was shot. Wasn't he shot in the face? Yes, he
was yeah, he's and his wife is is dead. Now,
usually when you have somebody with a self inflicted gunshot wound,
it's usually not on the face, is it.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
No, it's not, and that that's quite interesting. But it
was in such a location I think that well, first off,
if you if you see any of the post surgical
images of him, dudes disfigured. I mean, I got handed
to him, you boys, disfigured. You know, you can see
that it almost if this was if his face was
(16:04):
a candle, you'd say that it only burned on one
side because it's like drooping, you know, it's kind of
drooping and hanging down. He went through multiple reconstructive surgeries,
but interestingly enough, they didn't score, you know, they didn't
score a shot to the top of his noggin. The
scene is kind of it's peripheral. So if you're gonna look,
(16:27):
if you're going to try to sell it, if you're
going to act the part, you know it'd be one thing.
You know, you see these people in movies. It's always
people in movies, you know, the hero that get shot
on the shoulder or the thigh, But yet they can
put rounds on target at center mass with one thousand
yards with a handgun, you know, but I got to
(16:47):
hand it to him. He really sold it, and so
you know, it's a survivable a survivable injury. And also
further consideration of this, of the case and his injuries,
the assessment of it is that it was determined that
this was not a distance injury, that this injury was
(17:11):
in fact close range. And I guess one of the
questions that I would have about this is going back
to surgical notes that would have had to have been
included in this particular case, what was the nature of
the injury, because this is a this is not a
(17:32):
case where back then there wasn't a lot of what
we refer to, and people don't know that this practice exists,
but it actually does. You know that there's actually a
practice called living forensic pathology where you can have Yeah,
and I've been involved in well, I guess two or
three cases where we had other fatalities, but the forensic
(17:54):
pathologists actually went in and examined a living victim to
do an assessment of the of the subject at the hospital.
It's kind of fascinating stuff. You don't hear about it
a lot, but it does happen. In this case, you've
got you've got a guy that's going through multiple reconstructive surgery,
and one of the things that that we do, let's
(18:17):
just say that he had died. All right, did you know,
Dave that that when we request medical records, let's just
say that somebody survives, they get into surgery, the forensic
pathologist will ask ask the investigators to compel the hospital
through a subpoena to get all of the surgery notes.
(18:38):
We're gonna get all the surgery notes, and the surgeon
will actually, in pretty detailed detailed notes, will describe the
track of the wound because they're going to go in.
They're going to go in and they're actually they're actually
going to retrieve Let's say, for instance, you've got an
in dwelling round that's still in the body. They're going
to go in and retrieve that round if they can
(19:00):
get to it. Sometimes they can't. Got a great story,
I got to tell you sometime about that, but that's
for another episode. But anyway, they will go in and
they're going to track the wound, kind of like we
do in the Morgue. But their goal in tracking the
wound is to go in and first off, stop any
(19:22):
kind of hemorrhage that's in there. That's the first stage
if you're trying to do surgical repair. They want to
go in and those little you know, you can have
these kind of gross injuries that come up as a
result of the wound track where it's kind of cavitating,
you know, through the body, but you can have these
little micro micro injuries, you know, where you've clipped little
(19:44):
vessels that are you know, hemorrhaging into the soft tissue.
They've got to go in and stem that bleeding. So
they're tracking the wound kind of like we do, but
it's with a much finer point. So we would in
that part. Let's just say that under that circumstance person
died in the hospital, we would subpoena those notes, those
surgical notes, and we'd like to try to get them
(20:07):
before the autopsy. We go in and review what the
surgeon saw, and even though that surgeon saw it in place,
we're still going to do the autopsy. This is a
homicide that we're talking about, and we're going to note
all the surgical repairs maybe where they failed to pick
up on things, not as like a judgment, but just
(20:28):
to explain to death, you know, because there's a certain
area there's sometimes you can have these catastrophic injuries that
is as desperately as a surgeon might try to repair
them and stem bleeding and all this other tissue damage
where it's you know, it's compromising organ system's ability to
function and they're bleeding out and all that sort of stuff.
There's not enough that they can do, but the person
(20:49):
dies in a post surgical state. We want to know
all of that before we go in. But with with Pusser,
you know, I'd like to know what did the surgeon
see and did they make any kind of notes relative
to any kind of powder deposition on the skin, because
if you're you know, retrospectively, there's this er physician who
(21:14):
is apparently also a de facto medical examiner up in
Tennessee that was called in to consult on the scene,
and he claims that he's gone in and reviewed, you know,
reviewed reviewed to stuff, and he could tell that this
was actually as actually an injury that was sustained at
a close range to Pusser, and that there's evidence that
(21:39):
this round was potentially self inflicted. Dave as opposed to
something because what's the scenario again with this. They're saying
that he claims that people pulled up alongside of them
and began to fire into the vehicle that they're riding in.
And it turns out that that doesn't seem like that's
you know, that dog's gone.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Well, you got a little problem with blood spatter on
the hood. That's a little problem. And there were other
problems because the injury suffered by Pauline did not match
his story. And the thing is, Joe, I keep going
back to this, but they knew it at the time.
You already have the problem with the evidence at the
scene not matching his story, and they knew that then.
(22:23):
They knew that in nineteen sixty seven. But what was
the reason for digging up his wife? Because you've explained
to me that that is one big problem. It's not
something that judges liked to do to It is rest
in peace, right.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Yeah, yeah, and they take that very seriously. But here's
the thing. What I think the impetus behind this is
not the FBI, but the TBI, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation,
and in an organization I've always been really impressed with over
the years and their thoroughness. Uh, those folks don't get
(23:04):
paid a lot of money, but they they work with
what they have and they're really tenacious the ones that
I've come across. And there's great stories about some of
the cases that that TBI has worked on over the years,
and they do have a cold case squad. Dave this
case now, listen to me. This is kind of fascinating.
(23:28):
This case is still a cold case. Just let that
sink in. You know, this is still a cold case.
This is an unsolved, an unsolved violent assault case. Also, oh,
by the way, we've got a woman that's homicide victim,
(23:48):
and we've got these assailants that have been you know,
rolling down the road in a car, and this is
a targeted attack on a public official and it remained
and solved. I don't know, you know, I think that
we might not like to think of it this way.
But if you've got an open case involving an elected
official and it is unsolved, and it was something as
(24:11):
horrible as a local sheriff who was ambushed while going
down the road and in his official capacity to work
a domestic violence call in his wife is murdered along
the way, that's something that no matter how much time
(24:32):
passes by, people are still going to have an interest in,
particularly the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations. Every fall, Dave, I
(24:59):
take my class at Jacksonville State University. I take my class.
I teach a course in the fall called Clandestine Burials.
As matter of fact, I'm in the middle of it
right now, we're winding down semester. I take them out
to the cemetery. And because most people, first off, don't
(25:21):
know the difference between a cemetery in a graveyard. They
don't know the difference between a casket and coffin, they
don't know what a vault is. Many of them have
never taken time to read headstones, which is something that,
as morbid as it is, I find I find cemeteries
very peaceful, particularly if I don't have a loved one
(25:42):
that's buried there. There's a certain solemnity that comes along
with it. And I love because you're you're reading, you know,
you're walking through stones of history. I try to be
very respectful out there. But you've got these these engravings
on stones, you know, that talk about the love that
individuals had for their famiamily members decades and many times
(26:02):
those families are completely gone now, but they still they
occupy the space that you currently occupy, you know what
I'm saying. And so I take my kids out there.
And some of these graves in our local municipal cemetery
are very very old. Some of them are ante bellum,
their pre Civil War. Some of them are caving in,
and you can kind of get an idea of old
(26:24):
burial practices. You can see you can see that at
one point in time somebody really cared for the grave.
They may have put up a wrought iron fence. And
now even the rod arn fence is collapsing, it's covered
in rust, the gate is off the hinges, there's overgrowth.
But still, you know, you see these that are pristine.
Every now and then you'll see I know that a
(26:45):
couple of times we've seen elderly people that are out there.
I remember one date a couple of years ago, back
in the fall, there was a little old lady that
was at a grave and she was knelt at the
at the foot of the grave and she was weeping,
and she was off in the distance, and I told
the kids, stay, you know, we're not going that way.
(27:08):
We're going here to the really old section of the graveyard.
And the reason I make this point is that you
mentioned the r I p rest in peace right. You
see that everywhere, you know, you can see it on
the internet, you know, and social media. You know, people
will say, you know, happy heavenly Birthday r IP, you know,
(27:29):
and you're thinking about it. You know, you go out
there and these are families, you know, that are represented here.
There's individuals that have have lived these lives and some
of them ended very violently. What's fascinating to me about
about Pauline Pusser is the fact that in a way,
(27:54):
her death and her burial is kind of a clandestine
burial in the sense that and when I say clandestine,
that means that you're trying to hide something. The reason
I take my kids out of the graveyard so I
want them to be able to see what a regular
grave looks like. But you know, it's fascinating that maybe
just maybe people people actually die, someone does not do
(28:21):
a sufficient investigation, and that person gets put in the ground,
and in a way that's kind of clandestine, isn't it,
you know, because they're buried, and you know, you no
one thinks when they're standing around a grave. I wonder
if Pusser all those years ago, as he you know,
as he went back to visit his wife's grave and
she was placed in the earth, if you know, after
(28:45):
he had gone through all the surgeries and everything. I
don't know if he ever went back out there. I
guess he did to honor her, or at least demonstrate honor.
If he ever thought, you know, well, got away with it.
No one's ever going to cracked this grave open, no
one's ever going to know. I'll take this with me
to my grave. And you know, of course he died.
(29:07):
He died I think in seventy four as a result
of a car accident. He had some kind of hopped
up corvette that he died in, and of course that
secret was taken the grave with him, Dave. But you know,
when you think about back in the sixties when she
was interned there, things were hidden Wrenth They Dave.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
She had a healing broken nose when she was buried,
a healing broken nose when she was buried. So the
person that was there when she's dead, they're examined it,
they see, they know, and nobody says anything.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
Nobody, nobody at all. And you know, going back to
the earlier part of our conversation, Dave the idea that
he would take his wife on the domestic urban it's
called how many times have I mentioned and you've you've
said it too, all right, and it's it's rote. I mean,
it's everywhere, the most dangerous call a police officer will
(30:10):
ever go on. It's not some drug cartel thing, it's
not it's you know, it's uticule entrapment. It's a domestic
violence call. Because they're so unpredictable. So with that knowledge
in mind, you're going to take your wife there. Well,
let me just kind of throw this into the flame
(30:32):
as well. Here, if you're popping your wife in the
face to the point. He was a big man too,
I mean he was big and powerful, yeah, and had
a history as an athlete, I believe kind of sounds
like a brute to me. And Pauline, you know everything
(30:52):
I've heard. You know, she's kind of diminutive, quiet, beautiful. Well,
if your husband is so inclined and he's been putting
his hands on you and popping you in the face
to the point where you fracture her nasal bone, I'm
(31:13):
talking about the cartilage here, I'm talking about a facial fracture.
Here's the thing about facial fractures day. I wonder who
else was aware of this, because with fractured noses, you
know what you get, you get raccoon eyes because that
goes to what's referred to as a base of skull fracture,
the floor of the of the skull in that area.
(31:34):
That's why you see people that you know, you'll see
people that have had like facial reconstruction or you know,
some kind of plastic surgery on their nose size reduction
or whatever it is. They'll have bilateral black eyes called
raccoon eyes. And that's because you get this this trauma
to the bone that's in there and I many times
will be swelling black. And I'd like to know the
(31:59):
domestic history on them at she was. She the type
of person that you wouldn't see for a period of
time because abuse victims are like that sometimes, you know,
they get abused. Many times they're not allowed to leave
the house by their abuser. They have to stay indoors,
particularly if they're presenting with any kind of trauma because
(32:19):
generally the abuser is not that stupid. You know, how
are you going to explain. She honey, what why do
you Why are both your eyes black? You know? Oh,
I you know I bumped into the door. Really, you
bumped into the door. That's why both of your eyes
are black. You know, she can't say that. You know,
my husband, with hands the size of a canned ham,
(32:41):
you know, landed a blow in the middle of my
face and fractured my fractured my nose. And lots of
times when abuse are strike and they'll do this with
kids as well. They like to punch in the stomach,
you know that. They like to punch in the stomach.
They because you're going to be clothed in that area,
(33:04):
and they'll do they'll do things where trauma can be hidden,
but where the trauma cannot be hidden, they'll hide the
victim from from public views. So I guess you know,
when when you're going to do an exhamation and you
can actually tell this, her body would in fact have
been X rayed and anything that was there or the
(33:28):
skeleton remains all the remains of her. Remember she was
buried back in the sixties day. I'd like to know
how much remained of her that was casketed and even less,
say all of the soft tissue is gone, you'd be
surprised with embalmed bodies, particularly dependent upon how well they're embalmed,
(33:52):
how you can have surviving soft tissue. Sometimes that'll be there.
You know, it's kind of amazing. And again it all depends,
It depends on a lot of factors. If if, first off,
the embalming job was really good, all right, that's that's
the baseline. And if you can keep moisture out of
the vault and certainly out of the casket, you know
(34:13):
you want to keep if you can keep it reasonably
dry many times, that will facilitate preservation. And plus the
the embalming, the embalming fluids that they used back then
were you know, still had a lot of heavy metals
in them and that sort of thing. I don't know
(34:34):
how well she would have been preserved, but they would
have to have something to work with. But if she's
got and they've been able to appreciate this day apparently
per this exhammation, that she's got a resolving facial fracture
here and that they were able to pick up on it,
that it was in the and this is key man,
(34:54):
that there's a trauma response here. That you've got to
nose that was in fact healing at the time she
was murdered. So this is pre existing trauma. And how
far do the rest of this trauma extend where there
do you just have like one fracture line? Because even
(35:15):
and I've seen this, even in cases where we will
have people that will sustain injuries and they have pre
existing you know, trauma like to bone, the bone will
respond and sometimes it'll do what's called modeling. You'll you'll
have this kind of abnormal growth and it's the bone
(35:38):
trying to kind of reconstitute itself so that it's still viable.
Is fascinating and you can appreciate that. You know, you
can look at it and I think that somebody that's
probably more well versed than I am, can say, Okay,
that's not some type of disease pathology. That's evidence of trauma,
and you'll see maybe an outgrowth from it. You see
it in long bones a lot. You know, get these
(36:00):
kind of gnarly looking, you know, presentations on the shaft
of the bone, particularly where people have not had had
their bones like professionally set the bone. It nature dictates
that it wants to rejoin and if they can approximate
that you'll get these kind of odd presentations. I wonder
what they saw with her nose that gave them an
(36:22):
indication that it was in the midst of healing. That's
kind of fascinating. And how long? How long did this
happen before the so called ambush occurred? Sorry, I don't
mean step.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
Now, no, no, I remember asking you about this when this
came out a cotle of months ago that I wanted
to know for my own edification. How could they know this?
And I was looking at you know, they just have
made parts of the report, which is very, very long.
They've they've made it available through the University of Tennessee.
(36:56):
And one of the things that I found fascinating about
the report of that day is that I just want
to share this with you because this is kind of
to me, it's a hint to According to the files,
witnesses said that Beauford Pusser attempted to flee from emergency
personnel that were responding to provide medical care for Pusser
(37:17):
and his wife. In a statement to the TBI, Donald G.
Smith stated that on the morning of August twelve, nineteen
sixty seven, he was working on the ambulance that picked
up Buford Puzzer. Smith provided that he couldn't understand much
of what Bufferser was saying. Caud You mentioned his injuries.
According to Smith, Buford's injuries were severe and it was
difficult to distinguish what he was trying to say. Smith
(37:39):
told the TBI he described that Pusser on top of
the hill on Highway forty five going south on Guy's Road,
and that Pusser was driving the car and Pauline Pusser
was lying over his lap. He told investigators that Pusser
refused to stop the vehicle for emergency person. Now, now,
(38:04):
was he doing that to make sure her injuries were
going to be fatal?
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Making sure that she bled out?
Speaker 2 (38:12):
In other words, right?
Speaker 1 (38:14):
Yeah? Because you know the thing about it is that
even back then in law enforcement, they were still trained
in first aid. They had and if I'm not mistaken,
Pussler had served time in the United States Marine Corps.
He would have had some level of basic basic first aid.
And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that
(38:35):
if you've got a traumatic related event, particularly relative gunshot ones,
you got to stem the bleeding. You have to so
I can't imagine that an individual that would that would
have this kind of knowledge relative to just basic trauma assessment,
(38:56):
would not want someone to get you know, to get well,
you know, not just for themselves, but for you know,
for their so called loved one as well. You would
want this, you know, you would want this to happen
so that you could observe them, you know, having a
shot at least some kind of shot of survival.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Dave, it breaks my heart, it just does.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
I well, I got to tell you, just let me
run this down to you. If just from a forensic
pathology standpoint and from an anthropology standpoint, Pauline when she
when she died, this is the evidence that they found.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
So.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
She had survived or struck that Dave, I'm sorry. Three two.
Pauline has sustained an entrance gunshot wound actually to her
left occipital bone. So if everybody in the side, in
(40:03):
the sound of my voice right now, will take either
your left or your right hand, and you will reach
behind your head and you will find that that bump
on the back of your head, that bony bump that's
called the eccipital protuberance. Okay, if you will find that
point of reference. Move over to the left side of
that bump on the back of your head, and that's
(40:24):
still your occipital bone. That's where the bullet, the projectile
actually entered, Dave. And this round, that's an entrance wound.
And what do we classically classically define an exit you
remember had We've had this several times, an execution style murder.
(40:46):
You'll hear that term thrown around a lot. It's generally somebody.
You have this vision of somebody like kneeling before you,
are seated next to you, and they sustain a gunshot
wound to the back of the head in this round,
interestingly enough travels from back to front, and the the
(41:09):
reality is is that there is a still to this day,
they are projectile fragments after all these years that were
actually found inside of her skull. Now there's market signs
of decomposition. But here's the other thing. When they examined
her body, they were able to and I know that
(41:32):
they did X rays. They had to. That's if you're
going to go to the trouble to ezum a body,
you're going to do like extensive X ray another body.
They were able to pick up on the fact that
her nose, that her nose was actually in a state
of healing, this fracture that was going on. And you
can tell that when any forensic anthropologist in particular, and
(41:56):
it's you know, they're involving ut in this, you know
that that's that's going to be the people in the
forensic anthropology department there. You know that they're able to
understand the difference between fresh trauma, which is going to
be associated with the immediate cause of death, and healing trauma. Well,
if there's no other report of her having sustained a
(42:19):
fractured nose and that was in the healing process, I
think that my question probably would be time wise, given
the state of healing, how long prior to this fatal
event did this this fractured nose, you know, happen. I
(42:40):
think that that's I think that that goes a long
way to kind of establishing perhaps you know what you're
going to find relative to her, you know, and kind
of and there's no way you know, we're I don't know,
we're decades now, you know, down range. As a matter
of fact, I guess what in two years this will
(43:00):
have occurred sixty years ago, There's no way that we can,
you know, actually go back and there's no one to charge. Now,
you know, he's dead and gone. He's buried somewhere up there,
maybe adjacent to her. I don't know. I've never visited
the grave, don't care to. But what I'm saying is
there's nobody to charge here. But just perhaps, just perhaps,
(43:26):
the mystery behind the assassins that chase them down that
night has finally been solved. And it wasn't a Dixie mafia.
It wasn't you know, it wasn't some phantom that emerged
in the night, according to what the TBI says. Now,
if he were still alive today, they put the bracelets
(43:49):
on him, they take him downtown, they would ask him
questions because he would be the prime suspect. But dave
you start or you started something here, and I would
be remiss for not following up with it. And I'm
going to go ahead and say it now. If you
(44:10):
or anybody you know is in a violent relationship pleading
with you, you got to get them help. Now. I'm
not saying I have all the answers. I'm not saying
anybody else does either, But a place to start is
going to be the National Domestic Violence Hotline. And let
(44:31):
me give you that number. I'll repeat it after I
say it's the first time. It's one eight hundred seven
nine to nine seven two three three. That's one eight
zero zero seven nine tonne seven two three three. I hope,
(44:54):
I do hope that Pauline Pusser rest in peace, and
I that her death stands for something more than the
false image that was created by her husband. That it
stands for what is a problem in this country, and
that is domestic violence. Those are the memories that we
(45:18):
should hold onto relative to the murder of Pauline Pusser.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Bodybags
Body doats, but Joseph's gotten more A long long time ago.
When I was a little boy, there were certain cultural
icons that captured my attention. Let's see who were some
of them. Oh, I know, I liked Muhammad Ali because
(00:25):
he was such a bombastic kind of personality. I liked
because he's so rare, you know, back then he would
get in front of the camera and he would say things,
and he could make things up, you know, quote quote
homemade poetry if you will on the fly. I loved
Evil can Eevil As a little boy. I had a
(00:47):
little Evil can Evil toy, you know that you'd wind
up and you could jump boxes with it and all
that sort of thing. And I loved loved ABC wide
Wide World of Sports watching him jump over cars. And
of course subsequently I think at caesar Palace, Caesar's Palace
broke every bone in his body when he jumped over
that fountain. If you ever go to Vegas, check out
(01:07):
the side of that fountain. I don't know how he
did it. And then of course, you know snacker of
a Canyon, don't forget about that. That wasn't exactly a
brilliant move, but it's something that stands out in your mind.
Another cultural icon in this former little boy's mind was
probably beauf Pusser. And the reason it was so cool
(01:30):
is that there was a movie that, of course I
was too young to go and see because of the
level of violence. But you knew about him. You heard
about him, You heard about walking tall, you heard that
he carried this massive stick that he would walk in
and he'd bust up bad guys. He'd run the ne'er
do wells out of the county. Of course, larger than life.
(01:54):
Joe Don Baker played him on the screen. But you
know what, sometimes, sometimes, just like in Hollywood, when you
go behind those facades that are on the back lots,
you realize that they're empty, and many times they're filled
with garbage and trash. You don't see it on the outside,
(02:17):
but dig deep enough and you'll see it. Today, I'm
going to discuss a possible domestic homicide that involves Beford Puster,
and we're going to explore this a little bit and
probably put an end to those dreams that I had
(02:40):
as a little boy that there were real heroes out there,
at least those that Hollywood told me to believe. I'm
Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Bags. You know, Dave,
one of the myriad of reasons, just one of the
reasons that I just like Hollywood nowadays is that their
(03:05):
brain seem to be so infantile that they're incapable of
creating new content. I absolutely despise remakes. There are very
few that are out there that are worth my time viewing.
You know, I'll sit there and I'll see some movie
that's being remade that was fantastic and it's an original form,
(03:28):
and you're sitting there thinking, why why are you going
to redo this? And you know, just a couple of
years back, we had Dwayne the Rock Johnson that came
in and remade Walking. Wait a minute, the movie.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
You know what's funny about that? What you just said
cracks me up.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
What's up?
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Is it just a few years ago?
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Twenty one years ago? That movie was made two fars
Holy smokes. Yeah, well, I got another question for you
about that. Then go ahead.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
I'm wondering light of this recent evidence, I wonder Dwayne
the Rock Johnson is signing up to do a sequel. Well,
you know, what do you think?
Speaker 2 (04:07):
I will tell you it's interesting because that Walking Tall
that he did it was It was not a remake,
It was not a retelling of the It was just
utilizing an image from back in the day, the big
stick and Walking Tall and everything else was you know,
it had nothing to do. It was all brought to
a contemporary look at things. It had nothing to do
(04:30):
with what the original story was, which, by the way,
Buford Pusser, Okay, the original Walking Tall movie. And you
mentioned Joe Don Baker, I was like, I remember bos Vincent. Yeah, yeah,
because they did a Walking Tall TV show in nineteen
eighty one and it didn't last long. And I always
thought the reason it didn't really work is because it
(04:52):
wasn't based in truth. I always thought there was something
wrong about the story of Buford Pusser, And as I
got older, I thought, maybe I have a weird feeling
about it because he was so young when he became
the sheriff. He was the youngest sheriff in the United
States of America in the early sixties when he first
became sheriff there in mcneer County, right and anyway.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Just up the road in Tennessee from where we are.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Yeah, and I look at this and the things that
I know now and I look back, and most of
the people that were made into heroes were not heroic
in life. They were heroic in the stories that were
told about them, but they were not heroes in their
personal life. While and I don't think I don't like
(05:46):
seeing these so called heroes torn down at all, but
I liked the truth to have its day, And I
wonder where was the truth when this happened, because people
knew then you realize what we're about to talk about
was common knowledge at the time the BS was flying.
There were people that at least or maybe you know what,
(06:09):
if it wasn't then they're claiming it was. That.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
That's why you got to take a lot of these
things with a grain of salt. There's only like, I
have very few heroes that I actually believe in now.
I think like one that stands out in mind is
probably Audie Murphy that I love because he never sought
(06:32):
out the glory that landed upon him, and he was
just one of these people that just took took the
bull by the horns and he didn't care, and of
course he paid a price for it later on in life,
you know, I mean, he was he had terrible problem
with alcoholism, and you know, just all these things. You
know that he bore the burden of that. People didn't understand,
you know, shell shock and all that. For Pussor was
(06:55):
not that person. He was no Audie Murphy. There's heroes.
I take exception with people too. They throw that term
around a lot. You hear it a lot. Oh, well,
you're so brave your hero. No you're not. No, you're not.
There are real heroes out there, and it's really sad.
I think that that, you know that that Buford Pusser
(07:19):
occupies that space where they you know, they have so
idolized him to the point where he, for many years
was viewed as a hero. And now with these stories
that have come to light in the wake of new
information that has come about as a result of of
(07:40):
his of his journey, if you will, his matrimonial journey
and things that they suspected that he was involved in.
Now you know, we view things in a different light
relative to him. You know, we heard these tales of
the Dixie Mafia, you know, for years and years, and
(08:01):
how it was integrated into a lot of the underworld stuff.
And of course I think they try to pull that
narrative in with these activities that were going on in
this county where he was, you know, the sheriff of
and there's not really a lot there a lot of
meat on the bone from an evidentiary standpoint, that that
(08:22):
was the case, I think, And so you know, it
makes you question everything else. And here's really the thing
is that, as we always say, the science, the science
in any case is not going to lie. And many
people don't anticipate that there is going to be a
(08:45):
telling of the truth down the line. But you know,
I got to tell you, if an individual happens to
be I don't know, let's say, exhumed the dead in fact,
do tell tales, Brother Dave. I'm curious about this. You know.
(09:20):
I felt like that, plus, the story had been essentially
I don't know, put to bed for decades now, and
you know, and I know the people up there, you know,
kind of scrap out a living. You know, they have
a museum up there. I think that kind of honors
his memory. And yeah, you know, there's all manner of
(09:41):
things that go on, and you know that's kind of
been a cottage industry. I guess now I kind of
feel sorry for the people now, you know, retrospectively.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Well joke. When the story first broke that they were
filing a report on this, the website for the museum
was down and it was not open, you know, they
closed it for a few days, but I went to
it before taping. Today, the Beauford puss Er Home and
Museum is open. The I mean, the website is and
(10:11):
the first line right there in the middle credited with
Beauford Pusser, like his slogan or the theme that he
lived by, what's right is right and what's wrong is wrong.
It doesn't matter who you are. I thought, how fitting
it is if they actually leave that on there and
now tell the real story based on information, you know,
I think that would be a way to honor his
(10:36):
wife and maybe open up a real discussion about domestic violence.
You know, we just did a story the other day
domestic violence where young woman was allegedly thrown over the
twenty fourth balcony, you know, by her husband, who has
been convicted of domestic violence. Now, and yet at first
it I don't know what they're going to I still
(10:57):
don't know how that's going to be ruled because there
was so much damage, you know, pulverized. Well, in this case, Joe,
you have Beauford Pusser's story. And I'm calling it that
because even back when he first told it, there were
people that didn't buy it. It didn't make a lot
of sense. I mean, he claims that, you know, one
of the things they built the walking tall myth on
(11:19):
was that he was the guy who stood up to
you know, all these wrongdoers in the hills, and they
were trying to kill him. You know, he was trying
they were trying to assassinate him. They were trying to
you know, catch him and get him. And this happens,
what at three in the morning, and he says his
wife is going out on a call with who takes it? What?
What shrif? I don't know, would take their wife out
(11:40):
on a call at three o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
I don't know, you know, I guess I think the
the mythology of the thing is kind of painted out
so that you know, she's also the hero wife or
something like that, and again mythologizing this to that point
where you know, she becomes essentially a prop Think about
that just for a second. In this story, I think Hollywood,
(12:05):
you know, viewed it that way. Certainly, how brave you know,
this brave, brave couple you know that are going to
sally forth into the darkness of night, you know, and
go out and he's going to run this call, a
potentially very violent call where not only that, he also
if you're to believe this, and it's one thing, if
(12:27):
you have a sheriff, okay, and this does happen. I've
actually seen this happen where there are crime scenes I've
rolled out on and you've got a high ranking official
that happened to be out at night with his wife, okay,
and they show up at a scene because that high
(12:49):
ranking official has been notified that something major has happened,
like if you've got a multiple homicide that's been committed.
This individual wants to go out there because they're the
face of the elected sheriff or it is the sheriff,
and their spouse would actually wait in the car. And
I've actually seen that because I've known their spouse is
you know, we go to parties and all that stuff,
and I might acknowledge by waving at them, I would
(13:11):
think I wouldn't want this to be my spouse. But
we're not talking about you know, you're going out to
the local fish house on Friday night and you happen
to get a call and you're going to know you're
talking about somebody that's like, yeah, I got this call,
and she's going to hop in the car to go
to this potentially very dangerous event with him and show up.
(13:31):
It seems first off, if you're truly a law enforcement
officer and there is no excuse for time, you can't say, well,
it was a different time back then. No, No, things
were dangerous. They were dangerous. There was violence, and you know,
in prior to this, he had allegedly experienced violence, he
was aware of the violence that was going on. So
you're telling me that the most precious person in your life, who,
(13:55):
by the way, should be your spouse first and then
your kids, you're going to put them in the car
with you and go out to this location and oh,
by the way, there's a hit team out that's going
to take you out. Now, this sounds like something that's created,
created in I don't know, in somebody that's living on
(14:16):
a fantastic plane in their brain. And Hollywood bought into it,
and listen, you know, you know they put a lot
of butts in seats, didn't they in the theaters with
this thing? This thing was People don't realize what a like.
I'm not going to say it was a cultural landmark,
but you know, the theaters were full to see this
movie and the book. The book also sold well.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Jay, you think about it, though, it was Hollywood didn't
create the story or they sold it. But the story
had been going on for six years before that nineteen
seventy three movie came out. This happened in nineteen sixty seven. Yeah,
So in nineteen sixty seven, he says that he's got
this domestic violence call he has to go on in
the middle of three thirty in the morning, and his
(15:00):
wife volunteers to go with him. He claims that a
car pulled up alongside his and again three thirty in
the morning on a domestic violence call, and somebody pulled
up alongside his car and fired several shots, killing Pauline
and injuring him, and what he claimed was an ambush
intended for him and was carried out by unknown assailants.
(15:23):
They were never caught. The sheriff was shot, Buford Puster
was shot. Wasn't he shot in the face? Yes, he
was yeah, he's and his wife is is dead. Now,
usually when you have somebody with a self inflicted gunshot wound,
it's usually not on the face, is it.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
No, it's not, and that that's quite interesting. But it
was in such a location I think that well, first off,
if you if you see any of the post surgical
images of him, dudes disfigured. I mean, I got handed
to him, you boys, disfigured. You know, you can see
that it almost if this was if his face was
(16:04):
a candle, you'd say that it only burned on one
side because it's like drooping, you know, it's kind of
drooping and hanging down. He went through multiple reconstructive surgeries,
but interestingly enough, they didn't score, you know, they didn't
score a shot to the top of his noggin. The
scene is kind of it's peripheral. So if you're gonna look,
(16:27):
if you're going to try to sell it, if you're
going to act the part, you know it'd be one thing.
You know, you see these people in movies. It's always
people in movies, you know, the hero that get shot
on the shoulder or the thigh, But yet they can
put rounds on target at center mass with one thousand
yards with a handgun, you know, but I got to
(16:47):
hand it to him. He really sold it, and so
you know, it's a survivable a survivable injury. And also
further consideration of this, of the case and his injuries,
the assessment of it is that it was determined that
this was not a distance injury, that this injury was
(17:11):
in fact close range. And I guess one of the
questions that I would have about this is going back
to surgical notes that would have had to have been
included in this particular case, what was the nature of
the injury, because this is a this is not a
(17:32):
case where back then there wasn't a lot of what
we refer to, and people don't know that this practice exists,
but it actually does. You know that there's actually a
practice called living forensic pathology where you can have Yeah,
and I've been involved in well, I guess two or
three cases where we had other fatalities, but the forensic
(17:54):
pathologists actually went in and examined a living victim to
do an assessment of the of the subject at the hospital.
It's kind of fascinating stuff. You don't hear about it
a lot, but it does happen. In this case, you've
got you've got a guy that's going through multiple reconstructive surgery,
and one of the things that that we do, let's
(18:17):
just say that he had died. All right, did you know,
Dave that that when we request medical records, let's just
say that somebody survives, they get into surgery, the forensic
pathologist will ask ask the investigators to compel the hospital
through a subpoena to get all of the surgery notes.
(18:38):
We're gonna get all the surgery notes, and the surgeon
will actually, in pretty detailed detailed notes, will describe the
track of the wound because they're going to go in.
They're going to go in and they're actually they're actually
going to retrieve Let's say, for instance, you've got an
in dwelling round that's still in the body. They're going
to go in and retrieve that round if they can
(19:00):
get to it. Sometimes they can't. Got a great story,
I got to tell you sometime about that, but that's
for another episode. But anyway, they will go in and
they're going to track the wound, kind of like we
do in the Morgue. But their goal in tracking the
wound is to go in and first off, stop any
(19:22):
kind of hemorrhage that's in there. That's the first stage
if you're trying to do surgical repair. They want to
go in and those little you know, you can have
these kind of gross injuries that come up as a
result of the wound track where it's kind of cavitating,
you know, through the body, but you can have these
little micro micro injuries, you know, where you've clipped little
(19:44):
vessels that are you know, hemorrhaging into the soft tissue.
They've got to go in and stem that bleeding. So
they're tracking the wound kind of like we do, but
it's with a much finer point. So we would in
that part. Let's just say that under that circumstance person
died in the hospital, we would subpoena those notes, those
surgical notes, and we'd like to try to get them
(20:07):
before the autopsy. We go in and review what the
surgeon saw, and even though that surgeon saw it in place,
we're still going to do the autopsy. This is a
homicide that we're talking about, and we're going to note
all the surgical repairs maybe where they failed to pick
up on things, not as like a judgment, but just
(20:28):
to explain to death, you know, because there's a certain
area there's sometimes you can have these catastrophic injuries that
is as desperately as a surgeon might try to repair
them and stem bleeding and all this other tissue damage
where it's you know, it's compromising organ system's ability to
function and they're bleeding out and all that sort of stuff.
There's not enough that they can do, but the person
(20:49):
dies in a post surgical state. We want to know
all of that before we go in. But with with Pusser,
you know, I'd like to know what did the surgeon
see and did they make any kind of notes relative
to any kind of powder deposition on the skin, because
if you're you know, retrospectively, there's this er physician who
(21:14):
is apparently also a de facto medical examiner up in
Tennessee that was called in to consult on the scene,
and he claims that he's gone in and reviewed, you know,
reviewed reviewed to stuff, and he could tell that this
was actually as actually an injury that was sustained at
a close range to Pusser, and that there's evidence that
(21:39):
this round was potentially self inflicted. Dave as opposed to
something because what's the scenario again with this. They're saying
that he claims that people pulled up alongside of them
and began to fire into the vehicle that they're riding in.
And it turns out that that doesn't seem like that's
you know, that dog's gone.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Well, you got a little problem with blood spatter on
the hood. That's a little problem. And there were other
problems because the injury suffered by Pauline did not match
his story. And the thing is, Joe, I keep going
back to this, but they knew it at the time.
You already have the problem with the evidence at the
scene not matching his story, and they knew that then.
(22:23):
They knew that in nineteen sixty seven. But what was
the reason for digging up his wife? Because you've explained
to me that that is one big problem. It's not
something that judges liked to do to It is rest
in peace, right.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Yeah, yeah, and they take that very seriously. But here's
the thing. What I think the impetus behind this is
not the FBI, but the TBI, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation,
and in an organization I've always been really impressed with over
the years and their thoroughness. Uh, those folks don't get
(23:04):
paid a lot of money, but they they work with
what they have and they're really tenacious the ones that
I've come across. And there's great stories about some of
the cases that that TBI has worked on over the years,
and they do have a cold case squad. Dave this
case now, listen to me. This is kind of fascinating.
(23:28):
This case is still a cold case. Just let that
sink in. You know, this is still a cold case.
This is an unsolved, an unsolved violent assault case. Also, oh,
by the way, we've got a woman that's homicide victim,
(23:48):
and we've got these assailants that have been you know,
rolling down the road in a car, and this is
a targeted attack on a public official and it remained
and solved. I don't know, you know, I think that
we might not like to think of it this way.
But if you've got an open case involving an elected
official and it is unsolved, and it was something as
(24:11):
horrible as a local sheriff who was ambushed while going
down the road and in his official capacity to work
a domestic violence call in his wife is murdered along
the way, that's something that no matter how much time
(24:32):
passes by, people are still going to have an interest in,
particularly the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations. Every fall, Dave, I
(24:59):
take my class at Jacksonville State University. I take my class.
I teach a course in the fall called Clandestine Burials.
As matter of fact, I'm in the middle of it
right now, we're winding down semester. I take them out
to the cemetery. And because most people, first off, don't
(25:21):
know the difference between a cemetery in a graveyard. They
don't know the difference between a casket and coffin, they
don't know what a vault is. Many of them have
never taken time to read headstones, which is something that,
as morbid as it is, I find I find cemeteries
very peaceful, particularly if I don't have a loved one
(25:42):
that's buried there. There's a certain solemnity that comes along
with it. And I love because you're you're reading, you know,
you're walking through stones of history. I try to be
very respectful out there. But you've got these these engravings
on stones, you know, that talk about the love that
individuals had for their famiamily members decades and many times
(26:02):
those families are completely gone now, but they still they
occupy the space that you currently occupy, you know what
I'm saying. And so I take my kids out there.
And some of these graves in our local municipal cemetery
are very very old. Some of them are ante bellum,
their pre Civil War. Some of them are caving in,
and you can kind of get an idea of old
(26:24):
burial practices. You can see you can see that at
one point in time somebody really cared for the grave.
They may have put up a wrought iron fence. And
now even the rod arn fence is collapsing, it's covered
in rust, the gate is off the hinges, there's overgrowth.
But still, you know, you see these that are pristine.
Every now and then you'll see I know that a
(26:45):
couple of times we've seen elderly people that are out there.
I remember one date a couple of years ago, back
in the fall, there was a little old lady that
was at a grave and she was knelt at the
at the foot of the grave and she was weeping,
and she was off in the distance, and I told
the kids, stay, you know, we're not going that way.
(27:08):
We're going here to the really old section of the graveyard.
And the reason I make this point is that you
mentioned the r I p rest in peace right. You
see that everywhere, you know, you can see it on
the internet, you know, and social media. You know, people
will say, you know, happy heavenly Birthday r IP, you know,
(27:29):
and you're thinking about it. You know, you go out
there and these are families, you know, that are represented here.
There's individuals that have have lived these lives and some
of them ended very violently. What's fascinating to me about
about Pauline Pusser is the fact that in a way,
(27:54):
her death and her burial is kind of a clandestine
burial in the sense that and when I say clandestine,
that means that you're trying to hide something. The reason
I take my kids out of the graveyard so I
want them to be able to see what a regular
grave looks like. But you know, it's fascinating that maybe
just maybe people people actually die, someone does not do
(28:21):
a sufficient investigation, and that person gets put in the ground,
and in a way that's kind of clandestine, isn't it,
you know, because they're buried, and you know, you no
one thinks when they're standing around a grave. I wonder
if Pusser all those years ago, as he you know,
as he went back to visit his wife's grave and
she was placed in the earth, if you know, after
(28:45):
he had gone through all the surgeries and everything. I
don't know if he ever went back out there. I
guess he did to honor her, or at least demonstrate honor.
If he ever thought, you know, well, got away with it.
No one's ever going to cracked this grave open, no
one's ever going to know. I'll take this with me
to my grave. And you know, of course he died.
(29:07):
He died I think in seventy four as a result
of a car accident. He had some kind of hopped
up corvette that he died in, and of course that
secret was taken the grave with him, Dave. But you know,
when you think about back in the sixties when she
was interned there, things were hidden Wrenth They Dave.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
She had a healing broken nose when she was buried,
a healing broken nose when she was buried. So the
person that was there when she's dead, they're examined it,
they see, they know, and nobody says anything.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
Nobody, nobody at all. And you know, going back to
the earlier part of our conversation, Dave the idea that
he would take his wife on the domestic urban it's
called how many times have I mentioned and you've you've
said it too, all right, and it's it's rote. I mean,
it's everywhere, the most dangerous call a police officer will
(30:10):
ever go on. It's not some drug cartel thing, it's
not it's you know, it's uticule entrapment. It's a domestic
violence call. Because they're so unpredictable. So with that knowledge
in mind, you're going to take your wife there. Well,
let me just kind of throw this into the flame
(30:32):
as well. Here, if you're popping your wife in the
face to the point. He was a big man too,
I mean he was big and powerful, yeah, and had
a history as an athlete, I believe kind of sounds
like a brute to me. And Pauline, you know everything
(30:52):
I've heard. You know, she's kind of diminutive, quiet, beautiful. Well,
if your husband is so inclined and he's been putting
his hands on you and popping you in the face
to the point where you fracture her nasal bone, I'm
(31:13):
talking about the cartilage here, I'm talking about a facial fracture.
Here's the thing about facial fractures day. I wonder who
else was aware of this, because with fractured noses, you
know what you get, you get raccoon eyes because that
goes to what's referred to as a base of skull fracture,
the floor of the of the skull in that area.
(31:34):
That's why you see people that you know, you'll see
people that have had like facial reconstruction or you know,
some kind of plastic surgery on their nose size reduction
or whatever it is. They'll have bilateral black eyes called
raccoon eyes. And that's because you get this this trauma
to the bone that's in there and I many times
will be swelling black. And I'd like to know the
(31:59):
domestic history on them at she was. She the type
of person that you wouldn't see for a period of
time because abuse victims are like that sometimes, you know,
they get abused. Many times they're not allowed to leave
the house by their abuser. They have to stay indoors,
particularly if they're presenting with any kind of trauma because
(32:19):
generally the abuser is not that stupid. You know, how
are you going to explain. She honey, what why do
you Why are both your eyes black? You know? Oh,
I you know I bumped into the door. Really, you
bumped into the door. That's why both of your eyes
are black. You know, she can't say that. You know,
my husband, with hands the size of a canned ham,
(32:41):
you know, landed a blow in the middle of my
face and fractured my fractured my nose. And lots of
times when abuse are strike and they'll do this with
kids as well. They like to punch in the stomach,
you know that. They like to punch in the stomach.
They because you're going to be clothed in that area,
(33:04):
and they'll do they'll do things where trauma can be hidden,
but where the trauma cannot be hidden, they'll hide the
victim from from public views. So I guess you know,
when when you're going to do an exhamation and you
can actually tell this, her body would in fact have
been X rayed and anything that was there or the
(33:28):
skeleton remains all the remains of her. Remember she was
buried back in the sixties day. I'd like to know
how much remained of her that was casketed and even less,
say all of the soft tissue is gone, you'd be
surprised with embalmed bodies, particularly dependent upon how well they're embalmed,
(33:52):
how you can have surviving soft tissue. Sometimes that'll be there.
You know, it's kind of amazing. And again it all depends,
It depends on a lot of factors. If if, first off,
the embalming job was really good, all right, that's that's
the baseline. And if you can keep moisture out of
the vault and certainly out of the casket, you know
(34:13):
you want to keep if you can keep it reasonably
dry many times, that will facilitate preservation. And plus the
the embalming, the embalming fluids that they used back then
were you know, still had a lot of heavy metals
in them and that sort of thing. I don't know
(34:34):
how well she would have been preserved, but they would
have to have something to work with. But if she's
got and they've been able to appreciate this day apparently
per this exhammation, that she's got a resolving facial fracture
here and that they were able to pick up on it,
that it was in the and this is key man,
(34:54):
that there's a trauma response here. That you've got to
nose that was in fact healing at the time she
was murdered. So this is pre existing trauma. And how
far do the rest of this trauma extend where there
do you just have like one fracture line? Because even
(35:15):
and I've seen this, even in cases where we will
have people that will sustain injuries and they have pre
existing you know, trauma like to bone, the bone will
respond and sometimes it'll do what's called modeling. You'll you'll
have this kind of abnormal growth and it's the bone
(35:38):
trying to kind of reconstitute itself so that it's still viable.
Is fascinating and you can appreciate that. You know, you
can look at it and I think that somebody that's
probably more well versed than I am, can say, Okay,
that's not some type of disease pathology. That's evidence of trauma,
and you'll see maybe an outgrowth from it. You see
it in long bones a lot. You know, get these
(36:00):
kind of gnarly looking, you know, presentations on the shaft
of the bone, particularly where people have not had had
their bones like professionally set the bone. It nature dictates
that it wants to rejoin and if they can approximate
that you'll get these kind of odd presentations. I wonder
what they saw with her nose that gave them an
(36:22):
indication that it was in the midst of healing. That's
kind of fascinating. And how long? How long did this
happen before the so called ambush occurred? Sorry, I don't
mean step.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
Now, no, no, I remember asking you about this when this
came out a cotle of months ago that I wanted
to know for my own edification. How could they know this?
And I was looking at you know, they just have
made parts of the report, which is very, very long.
They've they've made it available through the University of Tennessee.
(36:56):
And one of the things that I found fascinating about
the report of that day is that I just want
to share this with you because this is kind of
to me, it's a hint to According to the files,
witnesses said that Beauford Pusser attempted to flee from emergency
personnel that were responding to provide medical care for Pusser
(37:17):
and his wife. In a statement to the TBI, Donald G.
Smith stated that on the morning of August twelve, nineteen
sixty seven, he was working on the ambulance that picked
up Buford Puzzer. Smith provided that he couldn't understand much
of what Bufferser was saying. Caud You mentioned his injuries.
According to Smith, Buford's injuries were severe and it was
difficult to distinguish what he was trying to say. Smith
(37:39):
told the TBI he described that Pusser on top of
the hill on Highway forty five going south on Guy's Road,
and that Pusser was driving the car and Pauline Pusser
was lying over his lap. He told investigators that Pusser
refused to stop the vehicle for emergency person. Now, now,
(38:04):
was he doing that to make sure her injuries were
going to be fatal?
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Making sure that she bled out?
Speaker 2 (38:12):
In other words, right?
Speaker 1 (38:14):
Yeah? Because you know the thing about it is that
even back then in law enforcement, they were still trained
in first aid. They had and if I'm not mistaken,
Pussler had served time in the United States Marine Corps.
He would have had some level of basic basic first aid.
And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that
(38:35):
if you've got a traumatic related event, particularly relative gunshot ones,
you got to stem the bleeding. You have to so
I can't imagine that an individual that would that would
have this kind of knowledge relative to just basic trauma assessment,
(38:56):
would not want someone to get you know, to get well,
you know, not just for themselves, but for you know,
for their so called loved one as well. You would
want this, you know, you would want this to happen
so that you could observe them, you know, having a
shot at least some kind of shot of survival.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Dave, it breaks my heart, it just does.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
I well, I got to tell you, just let me
run this down to you. If just from a forensic
pathology standpoint and from an anthropology standpoint, Pauline when she
when she died, this is the evidence that they found.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
So.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
She had survived or struck that Dave, I'm sorry. Three two.
Pauline has sustained an entrance gunshot wound actually to her
left occipital bone. So if everybody in the side, in
(40:03):
the sound of my voice right now, will take either
your left or your right hand, and you will reach
behind your head and you will find that that bump
on the back of your head, that bony bump that's
called the eccipital protuberance. Okay, if you will find that
point of reference. Move over to the left side of
that bump on the back of your head, and that's
(40:24):
still your occipital bone. That's where the bullet, the projectile
actually entered, Dave. And this round, that's an entrance wound.
And what do we classically classically define an exit you
remember had We've had this several times, an execution style murder.
(40:46):
You'll hear that term thrown around a lot. It's generally somebody.
You have this vision of somebody like kneeling before you,
are seated next to you, and they sustain a gunshot
wound to the back of the head in this round,
interestingly enough travels from back to front, and the the
(41:09):
reality is is that there is a still to this day,
they are projectile fragments after all these years that were
actually found inside of her skull. Now there's market signs
of decomposition. But here's the other thing. When they examined
her body, they were able to and I know that
(41:32):
they did X rays. They had to. That's if you're
going to go to the trouble to ezum a body,
you're going to do like extensive X ray another body.
They were able to pick up on the fact that
her nose, that her nose was actually in a state
of healing, this fracture that was going on. And you
can tell that when any forensic anthropologist in particular, and
(41:56):
it's you know, they're involving ut in this, you know
that that's that's going to be the people in the
forensic anthropology department there. You know that they're able to
understand the difference between fresh trauma, which is going to
be associated with the immediate cause of death, and healing trauma. Well,
if there's no other report of her having sustained a
(42:19):
fractured nose and that was in the healing process, I
think that my question probably would be time wise, given
the state of healing, how long prior to this fatal
event did this this fractured nose, you know, happen. I
(42:40):
think that that's I think that that goes a long
way to kind of establishing perhaps you know what you're
going to find relative to her, you know, and kind
of and there's no way you know, we're I don't know,
we're decades now, you know, down range. As a matter
of fact, I guess what in two years this will
(43:00):
have occurred sixty years ago, There's no way that we can,
you know, actually go back and there's no one to charge. Now,
you know, he's dead and gone. He's buried somewhere up there,
maybe adjacent to her. I don't know. I've never visited
the grave, don't care to. But what I'm saying is
there's nobody to charge here. But just perhaps, just perhaps,
(43:26):
the mystery behind the assassins that chase them down that
night has finally been solved. And it wasn't a Dixie mafia.
It wasn't you know, it wasn't some phantom that emerged
in the night, according to what the TBI says. Now,
if he were still alive today, they put the bracelets
(43:49):
on him, they take him downtown, they would ask him
questions because he would be the prime suspect. But dave
you start or you started something here, and I would
be remiss for not following up with it. And I'm
going to go ahead and say it now. If you
(44:10):
or anybody you know is in a violent relationship pleading
with you, you got to get them help. Now. I'm
not saying I have all the answers. I'm not saying
anybody else does either, But a place to start is
going to be the National Domestic Violence Hotline. And let
(44:31):
me give you that number. I'll repeat it after I
say it's the first time. It's one eight hundred seven
nine to nine seven two three three. That's one eight
zero zero seven nine tonne seven two three three. I hope,
(44:54):
I do hope that Pauline Pusser rest in peace, and
I that her death stands for something more than the
false image that was created by her husband. That it
stands for what is a problem in this country, and
that is domestic violence. Those are the memories that we
(45:18):
should hold onto relative to the murder of Pauline Pusser.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Bodybags
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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