June 25, 2024 • 48 mins
Kevin Hughes wasn't the only person shot on Music Row on March 9. The other victim, an up-and-coming singer named Sammy Sadler, has made a career out of being the guy who survived the Murder on Music Row. But his story doesn't always match the police account of that night.
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S1 (00:01):
Previously on Murder on Music Row.
S2 (00:04):
Still upsets me. So Kevin Hughes, uh, he rolled out
of the car and into our lane, and then this
guy came running around from the other side of the, uh,
of the car, and he started firing at him as
he ran in front of me and then ran back
against traffic behind my car.
S3 (00:24):
We, you know, ran up to the victim. I didn't
know who it was at the time. And I remembered
very clearly that, like, the way the blood was, like
trickling down the the street.
S4 (00:35):
And faith is like, oh, my God. She, you know,
starts running towards the body. And I'm like, trying to
stop her, like, you know, stop. Do not run towards
this crime scene. I think we heard the victim's last breath.
I mean, I think he I heard him kind of exhale.
S5 (01:06):
The all mighty dollar and the lust for worldwide fame
slowly killed tradition. And for that someone should swing.
S1 (01:22):
They finished writing the song Murder on Music Row in
about two hours. Larry Cordle and Larry Shell, this is Cordle.
S5 (01:30):
When we got it done, I said, well, there it is.
And Larry looked at me seriously. He said, pal, it's
what they'll remember me and you for.
S1 (01:38):
Cordle didn't believe shell. This new song didn't fit with
what Cordle was doing. He was busy working on another project.
He had written nine other songs for an as yet
untitled bluegrass album. Then Cordle had an epiphany.
S5 (01:54):
Holy moly, I could call the album this. I could
put a hearse on the front of it. I could
put a steel guitar on the gurney. I could put
chalk men in the street. I could call this thing
Murder on Music Row. It ain't a bluegrass song, but
bluegrass fans love traditional country music. It all worked out
(02:14):
just like that.
S1 (02:15):
It was just a spark of an idea. Then one
night at the Bluebird Cafe, Cordle played it in front
of an audience.
S5 (02:22):
I said, you know, I want to do this thing
tonight that I just wrote. It comes around time to
play it. Uh, it's my turn. Whatever. And that's just
what I decided to play the first time that hook
came around. It was just like a bomb went off
in there. People jumped to their feet, and it was.
(02:43):
I had my eyes closed like I do when I'm singing.
And it was. I nearly jumped out of the chair.
It was shocking to me that it was that kind
of a reaction. I mean, you know, Bluebird, I mean,
people's heard all these great songs and it definitely rung
that bell.
S1 (02:59):
Maybe, just maybe, that song could become something bigger. This
is Murder on Music Row, an investigative podcast. I'm Keith Sharon,
(03:20):
I work for The Tennessean in Nashville. On March 9th, 1989,
a young man named Kevin Hughes was shot twice in
the head in the middle of Music Row. In August
of 2022, my editor handed me a flash drive full
of police files, interrogation reports, coroner notes, crime scene photos
(03:40):
and drawings, phone records and internal memos between Nashville police,
the FBI and law enforcement officials in other states. Somewhere
along the way, I began to feel like it was
our Was our responsibility to tell the story that two
bullets stopped Kevin Hughes from telling. This is episode two.
(04:01):
Who shot Sam? Kevin Hughes grew up in Carmi, Illinois.
(04:29):
It was a town of about 5500 people. His father, Larry,
was a farmer. Soybeans, corn. His mother, Barbara, was a schoolteacher.
They raised their boys in the First Baptist Church of Carmi.
Every Sunday, Kevin loved Jesus and the Chicago Bulls. He
wouldn't live to see Michael Jordan and the Bulls win
a championship. His younger brother, Kyle looked up to Kevin. Today,
(04:54):
Kyle and his wife, Brennan live in a gated community
in South Florida. There were three giant herons in their
yard when I visited Kyle in August of 2023. He's tall.
A former Division one basketball player. After a year of
considering and reconsidering whether to talk to me, he opened
his front door, sat at his dining room table, and
(05:16):
bared his soul. I asked him to tell me about Kevin.
S6 (05:20):
So Kevin loved music. He was a good kid. Great kid.
I learned a lot from him growing up. You know,
he's kind of an idol.
S7 (05:29):
Sorry.
S6 (05:33):
Oh, sorry. It's okay. Pretty hot stuff. Sorry. I'll keep
myself together.
S1 (05:45):
34 years after the murder, his emotions remained so raw.
We talked about those early years in the 70s and
80s and how Kevin became his idol. I thought it
was cute when he explained he was four years and
355 days younger than Kevin. He never wanted to give
his brother the satisfaction of being five years older. The
(06:08):
brothers played pranks on each other.
S6 (06:10):
One time we were while I was coming home from school,
and he had hidden in the bushes, of course, to
scare me, but he'd also put a tripwire as I'm
walking up the the the walkway. So I, you know,
I got off my bike, started walking up, and all
of a sudden I fall. He jumped out of the
(06:30):
bushes and scares the crap out of me. Uh, so
that's just one thing.
S1 (06:34):
One thing they had in common was music. Kevin's love
for music was next level.
S6 (06:40):
He would go and get every record he bought. He
would put it on an index card. Have you know
who who wrote the song Here was put out. Um,
who sang it? Index cards out. We had about a
thousand albums.
S1 (06:55):
Kevin's favorite band. Without question. Kansas. I can't help but
think of the lyric dust in the wind. All we
are is dust in the wind. Kevin wrote letters that
Kyle will never forget.
S6 (07:10):
Anytime he write me, he was asking about me first.
S1 (07:13):
I've talked to several people who kept in touch with Kevin.
S8 (07:16):
He was such a wonderful guy.
S1 (07:18):
Marilyn Bartley Chapman knew him from elementary school until the
day he died.
S9 (07:23):
I mean.
S8 (07:24):
He was friendly to everyone. Unfortunately, I was a victim
of some bullying because of my family was very, very poor.
But he never treated me like that at all. He
was so just such an open person. Never met a stranger.
S1 (07:39):
She saw Kevin start to blossom.
S9 (07:42):
He had really.
S8 (07:42):
Straight hair and glasses in middle school. It was kind
of like. I call it a bowl cut. He would
have agreed. He would have agreed. In high school, he
got contacts and went with a little bit more curly hair.
And you could just tell, like in some of the
pictures that I have is, you know, during junior high,
it was this closed off expression. But by the time
(08:03):
he got to high school, it was he was just
so much more open, so much more friendly.
S1 (08:08):
Kevin made his own music charts. His parents would take
him every week. A 45 minute drive to Evansville, Indiana
to get Billboard magazine. He would read their charts, and
when he disagreed with their choices, he would write out
his own ranking songs was his thing. I got an
email from his friend Clayton Hughes, no relation. Clayton said
(08:29):
Kevin was the go to guy. If you wanted to
hear a certain vinyl album or use his vast record
collection to make a mixtape or learn something about a
singer or a band. Kevin's dad would drive them to
Roberts Municipal Stadium in Evansville to see acts like Styx, Kiss,
and Rick Springfield. Music was Kevin's childhood and his future dreams.
(08:54):
Kevin moved to Nashville in 1983 to start a career
on the business end of drinking and cheatin songs. He
attended Belmont College. Since then, it changed its name to
Belmont University. A Christ centered institution on the edge of
his dream, Music Row. If you stand at the north
end of the Belmont campus, where it intersects with 16th
(09:15):
Avenue South, you're about two blocks from the 1989 crime scene.
Kyle said Kevin's musical tastes stretched from air supply to Metallica,
with lots of Christian rock in between. Triumph, Shooting Star, zebra, Petra,
all his loud power favorites given where he ended up.
(09:38):
There was a gaping hole in Kevin Hughes's go to genres.
S6 (09:42):
Wasn't in Wasn't it a country music? I mean, you know,
he wasn't into country music at all. Um, I don't
know what made him go to Nashville. I think he
just liked the Belmont College. We visited at one time,
and we just. He just really fell in love with it.
S1 (09:53):
Unlike the kids from everywhere. Kevin Hughes didn't come to
Nashville for the country part of country music. Here's what
no one knew. Kevin Hughes came to Nashville with a
long game plan to get hired by the Gospel Music Association.
That was the big dream, his brother said. His first
job at Cashbox magazine was only supposed to be the start.
(10:15):
Marilyn said she thinks about Kevin a lot these days.
S8 (10:18):
He was only 23 when he died. He didn't have
a chance to really live, didn't have a chance to
be married. He didn't have a chance to have children.
I don't think his mom and dad and especially his
mom when she passed away, I don't think they ever
really recovered from Kevin dying and especially the way that
he died.
S1 (10:36):
Marilyn talked to Kevin on the phone during the last
week of his life. Her recollections of the call became
part of the police file.
S8 (10:43):
He just didn't sound like the usual Kevin. I mean,
we exchanged the pleasantries in the beginning of the conversation.
We talked about, you know, things that I might want
to do when I come down and visit. And then
I just kind of said, well, what's going on with you?
You know, tell me, tell me, how are things? You know,
are you dating anybody? Am. Are you? You know, things
like that. And he just says, I've got a lot
(11:04):
of things going on. And I thought, well, what does
that mean? I said, is it inconvenient for me to
come down? And he said, no, I want to see you.
I want to see it. It's been such a long
time since I've seen you. He goes, you know, I
just remember having the conversation is there's just crazy things.
There's a lot of crazy things going on in my life.
And I said, well, do you want to talk about them?
(11:25):
And he said, I can't right now. He says, maybe
when I see you, but I can't talk about it
right now.
S1 (11:35):
Amy Lavelle worked at Cashbox magazine in 1985, while Kevin
was a student at Belmont. Her boss, editor Tom McEntee,
and art director Tony Deantonio, were looking for interns to
work in the office. McEntee asked Amy to make up
some job opening posters. Get some Scotch tape and hang
(11:55):
them at Belmont College.
S10 (11:58):
You know you live near Belmont. Why don't you stop
by there on your way home and set the thing up?
S1 (12:03):
Kevin saw Amy's poster, contacted Cashbox, and got the internship.
It wasn't long before Cashbox hired him full time. Kyle
thought Kevin always intended to go back to school.
S6 (12:16):
I think he thought castles was his way to get in.
And he wanted to go back. You know, he was
going to go back. He wanted to get in. It
was really a proposition. He couldn't overpass. He really wanted
to get in the music industry. When Cashbox offered an internship,
you know, he talked to my parents about it. I
remember them having the conversation. And, you know, I want
to do this. I want to do this. And they
(12:36):
offered me offered me. The job is when I think
you dropped out, then the full time job.
S1 (12:40):
How'd your parents take that?
S6 (12:41):
My parents were always very supportive of Kevin, because we
knew that Kevin would do the right thing, and he
would go back, I think, to finish.
S1 (12:47):
It was a little bit of a strange fit. Kevin,
the straight laced kid, was working for Tony D with
his party. Dude. Gold chain, pinky ring, lothario with the
ladies personality.
S10 (13:00):
Tony D, I guess had a hard time getting along
with most females. Now with me, he said. I reminded
him of his daughter. I'm half Italian, he was Italian
and also he knew my husband. At the time he
was just my boyfriend and I don't think he wanted
to get him riled up.
S1 (13:18):
Juanita Butler worked in the office too, with Tony D.
S11 (13:22):
He would flirt with me. I knew he was married.
He was continually asking me out. It's like, you know, no,
I will never go out with you or any promotion
person for that matter. So because they were all kind of.
I can't think of another word other than sleazy.
S1 (13:40):
Tony D often operated in a cloud of marijuana smoke
while Kevin's calling card was his nice smile.
S10 (13:47):
Kevin was a great worker. Tom offered him a full
time job, and I think he left university to take it.
He wasn't just an intern.
S1 (13:55):
She was right. Kevin dropped out of college to work
at Cashbox. He was living his dream. It wasn't a
lucrative dream, but still a dream. Not long before he died,
a coworker felt so bad for him, she loaned him
100 bucks. I talked to a promoter who said he
wanted to buy Kevin a new pair of shoes because
his were so hacked out. Just keep it filed away
(14:17):
that Kevin had plans to go to a job fair
he wanted out of cash box. The first step of
his dream, it appeared, had turned out to be unsustainable.
In the last few weeks of his life, his dream
had faded fast. We need to talk about Cash Box.
It used to be called the Cash Box when it
(14:38):
got its start in 1942, in New York City. It
was a trade publication for coin operated machines like pinball
and jukeboxes. It was basically a newsletter about equipment. The
literal cash box on a machine was where the coins landed.
On March 3rd, 1951, the Cash Box released its first
national music chart. The nation's top ten juke box tunes.
(15:02):
Number one was My Heart Cries Out for you by
Guy Mitchell and Mitch Miller. By the end of 1954,
The Cash Box had offices in New York, Hollywood, Chicago, London, Boston,
and Nashville. At 804 Church Street. By 1980. Cash Box
had dropped the the from its name, and it was
(15:24):
all charts all the time. They weren't measuring juke box
plays anymore. It was supposed to measure airplay on the radio.
Cash box had a small office on Music Row. 21
Music Circle East. It was owned by a guy named
George Albert who lived in Los Angeles. Here was the
problem for Cash Box in the music chart business.
S2 (15:44):
Billboard was by far the leader. Other publications doing the
chart were. Radio and records. Record. World. Cash box. Gavin.
Just to name a few. So there were at least
five publications doing national charts, and they were all basically
similar methodologies until January of 1990, when Billboard started using
(16:09):
electronically monitored airplay accounting. So he had all those publications
fighting for the same pie right back in that day.
And this is ranked by usage by radio and the industry.
And that was Billboard was probably number 1 in 89.
R&R was number two and then it was probably Gavin.
(16:33):
Record world and Cashbox.
S1 (16:35):
If you recognize that voice, you're a radio listening country
music fan. That's Lon Helton. He's a Nashville legend. He's
the host of Country Countdown. Publisher of country Aircheck. Editor
of the Mediabase country chart. He spent 20 years as
the country editor for radio and records. He's worked on
radio in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Denver. He's a board
(16:58):
member of the CMA and the Country Music Hall of Fame.
I'm a lot smarter after talking to Lon. He explained
the trade publications would get calls or faxes. Remember fax
machines from radio stations every week to report the songs
that played in their markets? Some of the publications had
sophisticated methods of ranking larger stations versus smaller stations, and
(17:21):
weighted their reports accordingly. For drive time airplay, which was
more important versus overnight airplay, which wasn't That's how they
were supposed to rank songs for the music charts. After
all my research, I don't think it always worked that
way at Cashbox.
S11 (17:36):
A friend of mine, Melissa Deal, worked at Don Light Talent,
and she heard about this job at Cashbox.
S1 (17:44):
That's Juanita Butler again. She started as a receptionist at Cashbox.
She talked about the incredible pressure that was on all
the Cashbox employees. Remember, of the five trade publications, Cashbox
was at the bottom when Juanita started the Cashbox chart.
Director was a guy named Tim Steinhardt. He was a
(18:06):
good guy from Iowa. He died April 18th, 1982, in
a single car accident. That always bothered Juanita Butler. She
said there was no investigation.
S11 (18:16):
I did wonder in the back of my mind at
one point, and then I just kind of let it go.
So he was drunk, is what how the story goes.
And he was in a jeep, I guess, and he
kind of clipped the shoulder at Cashbox.
S1 (18:34):
They had to find a replacement. And the editor, a
guy named Jim Sharp, wanted to get a chart manager
with integrity.
S11 (18:40):
That was awful. That was just an absolutely awful period
of time.
S1 (18:44):
Jim Sharp made Juanita Butler an offer.
S11 (18:47):
And that's when Jim came to me and said, Juanita,
I really need you to take this job.
S1 (18:52):
She took the job and it could get a little awkward.
S11 (18:55):
Earlene Greenwood's office was right next door. There were a
bunch of music people in that office, but the reason
I remember Lee Greenwood is because when he got his
first number one record, I was working on the chart,
you know, graph one day, and this guy grabbed me
from behind and kissed me, and it shocked me. And
(19:16):
I turned around and it was Lee Greenwood because he'd
just been told he had his first number one.
S1 (19:21):
I asked her how literally she did her job.
S11 (19:24):
George Albert just who owned Cashbox. He would not get
with the times. I mean, you know, the entire time
I was there researching and compiling the charts, I was
working on a manual graph. I mean, I had a
graph that I would create every week that would have
the top 100 singles listed in the top 75 albums.
And I manually graphed out the airplay on this graph. And,
(19:48):
you know, Billboard, they had a computer. They, you know,
they were just far ahead of us.
S1 (19:55):
She was using pencils at the beginning of the office
computer age. She began to feel pressure.
S11 (20:01):
So those independent promoters, I had a specific day of
the week that I used to talk to all the
label promotion people, and that included the independents. And so
Tony D'Antonio was in there and Chuck Dixon, they were
in there every week pitching their records. They tried to
get me to do dirty stuff, the relationships with them.
(20:24):
I didn't want them to think that they could manipulate
me in any way, but there was only one time
that I was asked by my boss to have a
record enter the chart that was not legitimate. And and
(20:46):
I said no. And he was. I could tell he
was scared. And he came back, and he came back
and he said, you've got to do this. And I said,
I'm not doing it. And his words to me were, well,
don't be surprised if your little Toyota blows up in
your face someday when you go to turn it on.
S1 (21:08):
At first I thought the threat she was describing was figurative. Like,
don't be surprised if this independent promoter blows up your
car in a figurative way. She explained she brushed it
off at the time as no big deal. Then, after
Kevin Hughes got murdered, she began to believe she should
have taken that threat more seriously. Juanita Butler said she
(21:29):
never told anyone the name of the independent promoter who
made the threat. I asked her to break her silence
almost 40 years later. She was reluctant to give me
the name because he was very famous in the industry,
and she wasn't sure if he was alive. So she
started searching while we were on the phone.
S4 (21:46):
All right. Well.
S12 (21:47):
If you find out that the guy is dead, text
me his name.
S11 (21:52):
Okay. Okay. All right. Start looking for obituaries.
S1 (21:56):
We talked about how you would search for someone's name.
Then suddenly.
S11 (22:01):
Oh. Oh, I just found him. Wait. What I did
is I keyed in his name and California record promoter
and several things came up. Oh, yeah. I think this
is him. And if it is, He passed away in 2005.
S12 (22:22):
There you go.
S11 (22:23):
Ray! Ruff! Ruff!
S12 (22:26):
Okay. Ray. Ruff! All right, I'll look him up.
S1 (22:29):
I found an obituary for Ray Ruff at iHeartRadio. Juanita
Butler became convinced that Ray Ruff threatened her life over
a chart position in Cashbox magazine. I'll read from Ray
Ruff's obit to promote Debby Boone's You Light Up my life.
He arranged for security trucks to deliver copies of the
single to radio stations across the country, and galvanized a
(22:52):
record that not only spent ten weeks atop the Billboard
pop charts, but became one of the signature songs of
the 1970s. Ruff worked with many of the biggest names
in Nashville. Here's what I found out. Ruff suffered congestive
heart failure and pulmonary edema and died at his home
in Saugus, California, on September 15th, 2005. Juanita Butler quit
(23:15):
as chart director of Director of Cashbox magazine after owner
George Albert cancelled all his employees health care plans that
left the magazine in a tough spot.
S13 (23:26):
I'm the only one who knows all the ins and
outs of how to pull the chart together.
S1 (23:30):
That's Tom Rowland. He was more into writing, but he
helped out on the charts. Listen to him explain how
unscientific the Cashbox charts were.
S13 (23:38):
That's where it gets a little dicey. We knew that
the way that the system was set up, that there
were people who were trying to take advantage of it. And,
you know, the charts at this period in time, it
was before Billboard introduced the whole computerized system. So everything
was done manually. It's like literally radio stations would call
us and give us the numbers that we were wanting
(24:00):
from their charts so we could make decisions about what
things were moving and what were not. You know, there
was an honor system. It's like we were not in there,
you know? They basically made their own local chart and
then would report to us the results from their local chart,
and supposedly their local chart was supposed to be based
on airplay, etc., but we had no way to monitor that. So,
(24:23):
you know, you kind of had to take it for
what it was worth. And I do think most of
the radio guys at that point were on the up
and up, but I know some of them were not.
And I know occasionally we would get phone calls from people,
you know, late on a Friday who said, oh, I
forgot to tell you that we were playing such and
such a record. And, you know, invariably it was a
record that we knew was on the bubble and somebody
(24:43):
was trying to get an extra ad or something, and
we had no way of knowing because we didn't have
the technology to do it. We had no way to
know whether they were playing the record or not.
S1 (24:52):
Tom Roland got out of charts fast. He's now a
distinguished music writer. He won a CMA Award for his
coverage of country music in 2018. People were telling me
that the corruption at Cashbox got absolutely crazy in the
mid 1980s. Earlier you heard from Amy Lavelle, who was
editor Tom Mcentee's assistant when Kevin was hired for a
(25:13):
for a short time, Amy Lavelle was put in charge
of the Cash Box gospel chart. She said she ran
things as straight and true as she could. She would
get radio reports and write down the results so she
could add them up and make her rankings.
S10 (25:27):
This one record kind of kept popping in there, but
I never wrote down what she's saying.
S1 (25:33):
Is that a record she had never heard of was
ending up in the published chart, which is strange because
she was in charge of the chart. Somebody was writing
this record into the chart after she had gone home.
So she went to her boss, Tom McEntee.
S10 (25:48):
I had to go to Tom and say, what's up
with this? You know, record keeps popping in here and
it's not reported at all by any of the Christian stations.
He said, oh, that's something I inherited. And believe me,
we're going to get rid of it. It was tied
to advertising. It was done before we got here.
S1 (26:04):
That record, which hadn't been playing on Christian stations and
yet miraculously ended up on the chart, was by a
guy named Tony Alamo, who had been advertising in Cashbox
for years. Alamo died in federal prison in 2017 at
the age of 82. Alamo was convicted in 2009 of
sexual abuse after it was revealed he had relations with
(26:26):
several teenage girls, who he considered as his wives. In 2017,
the Southern Poverty Law Center called Alamo a cult leader.
In his obituary, they said his views were anti-Catholic, anti-homosexual
and anti-government. One of his wives was named Suzi when
she died in 1982. He kept her body in a
(26:49):
glass topped coffin and asked his followers to pray for
her resurrection for months after she was dead. Their prayers
were not answered. In happier times, he and Suzi had
opened a store, The Alamo of Nashville, at 325 Broadway.
The store specialized in sequined jackets and some were worn
(27:10):
by Elvis, Dolly Parton, Conway Twitty, Prince, and Madonna. Alamo
had an album produced by Porter Wagoner in 1986. Amy
Lavelle finally got Tony Alamo's record off the Cash Box chart,
but she still doesn't know exactly how it got there
in the first place. As Kevin learned about the charting business,
(27:34):
he faced some similar shady shenanigans beginning in 1988. He
would call home and tell his family his dream job
was turning nightmarish.
S6 (27:44):
He always had serious conversations with my mom and dad
and me about things that were happening. Tell me.
S1 (27:48):
Tell me about those what was going on.
S6 (27:51):
He just didn't feel right what he was doing. He
didn't feel right about the music industry. He didn't feel
it was what he wanted to do anymore, almost. You know,
you could tell that he was upset about things. And
then we had conversations about that, you know, he would
do a chart show, would come on the magazine be
completely different than what he would put in his chart sample.
So by the time that he would do a chart,
(28:14):
it would go to press. It was manipulated or changed.
S1 (28:18):
Did he know who was doing that?
S6 (28:19):
He did not know. Um, he felt he knew because
what he was doing then, because he knew Tony had
to look at him. But he would go in after
later on and see the changes and re change him back.
S1 (28:33):
On the day he was shot to death, while a
plot was already in motion to kill him, and unaware
Kevin Hughes, who was then the chart director at Cashbox magazine,
got a phone call from Sammy Saddler. Sammy said he
wanted to hang out. Sammy was a singer with several
independently produced songs on the Cashbox charts in the years
since the murder. Sammy Sadler's life has become a sympathetic
(28:57):
story in Nashville. One of his more recent albums was
called 1989, a callback to the year of the murder.
Sammy put out a book called A hit with a bullet.
He has made a name for himself by being the
guy who survived the murder on Music Row. In his
retelling of the story, that phone call to Kevin was
terribly unlucky for Sami. He has always said he inadvertently
(29:20):
put himself in the middle of the tragedy that was
about to unfold. Sami Sadler ended up with a bullet
in his arm because of that phone call. The story
Sami always tells the media was that he had been
arguing with his wife, and he wanted to get out
of their apartment, so he called Kevin. Sami was 22,
in 1989. He said he wanted to invite himself somewhere else.
(29:42):
Could have been anywhere. So why not go visit Kevin
at the Cash Box magazine office, which had moved to
1300 Division Street in the Faron Young Executive Building, just
off Music Row. Sami said he and Kevin had known
each other for about seven months. They weren't great friends,
just friendly acquaintances who might have become friends if both
(30:02):
of them had survived that night. You're going to hear
a lot from Sammy in this podcast. He's recorded almost
four hours of interviews with me, my editor, Ben Goad,
and former Tennessean reporter Nate Rao. He's done dozens of
interviews with publications and radio stations all over America. Here's
what you have to know. Some of the things Sammy
Sadler says about the murder of Kevin Hughes are difficult
(30:24):
to pin down. I'll give you an example. That argument
with his wife, which he said happened after they were
both home from work. Genia, his wife, was in her
late teens at the time. Sammy couldn't remember precisely how
old she was at the time of the murder. He
said she worked at a department store. He couldn't remember
the name. He also couldn't remember when they were married,
(30:45):
which might have been difficult for him to sort out
because I found records of three of Sammy's marriages and
he's currently engaged. His divorce from Genia happened sometime shortly
after the murder, but he wasn't sure. I couldn't find
any police reports about interviews with Genia. I checked over
and over again for any reference to an argument with
(31:06):
his wife on the night of the murder in the
police file. It's not their lead. Detective Bill Pridemore said
he didn't remember talking with her. I have reached out
to Genia and family members by phone and messages on
social media. I wrote her a certified letter asking her
specific questions about the night of the murder, but so far,
no luck. I'll let you know if I ever get
(31:27):
a confirmation about the argument. Here's the reason the argument
raises a question. Sammy said it was dark outside when
the argument was happening and he decided to leave. We
know Kevin had gone to a 530 movie with his
friend Sharon Pennington, so he couldn't have been back at
Cashbox to pick up Sammy's random let's hang phone call
until about 730 at the earliest. We know from phone
(31:48):
records Sammy was in his Donelson apartment at 7:44 p.m.
when he called his father in Texas. All this timing
stuff is important, and it raises a question because police
took a statement from a witness, Kent Crawford, who was
Kevin's friend at Belmont. He said he had called Kevin
in the afternoon of March 9th at 5 p.m.. That's
(32:08):
before Kevin went to the movies. Sunset. That day was
at 5:49 p.m.. It was still light outside. So it's
before Sammy and his wife started arguing. Kent said he
asked Kevin what he was doing later, and Kevin told
him he was going to the movies. Then he was
going to ride around in his car with a friend.
If that friend was Sammy, how did Kevin know about
(32:29):
the plan in the afternoon? If that friend was Sammy,
then a nighttime argument between Sammy and his wife didn't
lead to a random call to Kevin. Here's what Sammy said.
You go home on a normal Thursday afternoon that you
don't even remember. Now. Is your wife there?
S14 (32:46):
I don't know if she was at home then, or
she might have got home later when she got off
of work. I'm not sure.
S1 (32:51):
Was she a teacher?
S14 (32:52):
No. She was working at a some department store, I think.
I'm not, I can't remember.
S1 (32:57):
Okay, so she comes home at home at some point
and you guys start to argue.
S14 (33:01):
At some point. That night we got in an argument
or something. Yeah.
S1 (33:05):
Do you remember.
S14 (33:05):
The. I don't even remember what it was about. You know,
probably something stupid, but it was just at that point,
it's just I wanted to get out of the house.
I didn't want to argue. And so, you know, I
just picked up the phone to call Kevin and see
what he was doing. And it just rang and rang
and rang, and I was going to hang up, and
I thought I heard somebody say hello. I brought the
phone back up to my ear and it was Kevin.
(33:25):
And I said, hey, man, what are you doing? He said,
just working on the charts. I said, well, are you
going to be there for a little while? And he said, yeah.
He said, just come on down. I'll leave the door
open for you. So I went down and when I
went in, he was on the telephone.
S1 (33:37):
I've heard you tell that story before. Did you know
in that file there's a witness who says that he
talked to Kevin before he went to the movies. There's
a 530 showing of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure at
the fountain AMC center, downtown Nashville. Kevin and Sharon go
(33:58):
see that. But before they left for the movie, a
witness says he called Kevin, and Kevin said, I can't
hang with you tonight. I got Sammy coming in later
to hang out with me. No way. Right. Mhm. Couldn't
have happened.
S14 (34:12):
Did he even know he was going to see each other?
S1 (34:14):
We'll get more into the timing of those calls later
in this podcast. One more thing. Kent Crawford, the guy
who told police he made that phone call, was not
available to help police at later points in the investigation.
Crawford got married, moved to Indiana, and he was shot
to death by his wife, Tracy as he slept. She
(34:35):
is serving life in prison. Two Belmont friends, both shot
to death one on March 5th, one on March 9th,
12 years apart. By the way, there's another Belmont connection.
Pridemore and his partner Pat Castiglione interviewed Leslie Levin, another
of Kevin's friends from Belmont. The interview summary is in
(34:55):
the police file and dated March 15th, 1989. Leslie said
he called Kevin at about 830 on the night Kevin died.
Leslie was working at the Belmont College library and he
needed a ride home. Kevin said he couldn't give him
one because Sammy Sadler was coming. Kevin told Leslie that
Sammy was upset and they had to get their problems
(35:15):
worked out. I asked Sammy if he was upset with
Kevin on the night of the murder.
S14 (35:21):
Kevin, I never had a cross word.
S1 (35:23):
So you being upset with him surprises you?
S14 (35:26):
Yeah. I mean, we never. I don't even know where
that comes from.
S1 (35:30):
Before Sammy arrived at the cash box office that night,
Kevin called his 18 year old brother, Kyle. I talked
with Kyle at length about that phone call. I'll have
more about what they said and the specific way the
call ended in an upcoming episode. Everyone connected to Cash
Box knew Kevin Hughes put in long hours on the
(35:52):
night before a before a publication. Thursday, March 9th, 1989,
was one of those nights. Would you go to the
movies on your busiest night with deadlines? Could he have
been trying to dodge people who were mad at him?
So he goes to the movies, comes back, talks to
his brother, declines to give a friend a ride home.
(36:12):
Sammy shows up. And Sammy suggests they go get something
to eat. Again, despite the deadlines, Kevin agrees. They go
to Captain D's on West End. It was where Bricktop's
is now. Kevin drove them in his sky blue Pontiac Sunbird.
Sammy says they talked about sports and girls. Regular bro
stuff over dinner. Here's what's unusual. What Sammy didn't say.
(36:36):
They talked about on that day. Sammy had a song,
Tell It Like It Is, a cover of the old
Aaron Neville song. It was ranked 46th on the previous
week's country indie chart. Sammy didn't say he asked Kevin
if his song was going was going to appear on
the next chart, which Kevin was working on that night.
Sammy also didn't say Kevin told Sammy the truth. On
(36:58):
that night, he was dropping Sammy's song off the charts.
Kevin was trying to clean up the charts, and among
the last things he did before he died was eliminate
Sammy Sadler's song. Those topics didn't come up. Sammy said.
The last ride of Kevin Hughes's life was supposed to
(37:19):
be from Captain D's Back to the Cash Box magazine office,
where Sammy's truck was parked. Kevin's brother always questioned the
route they took.
S6 (37:28):
I'm not so sure about the logistics of where evergreen
was in relation to where Captain D's was, but I
always heard it was kind of out of the way
to go to Evergreen Records to make a phone call.
S1 (37:37):
Kyle Hughes was right. If you went east on West
End to 17th and made a right, that's the most
direct route. Two miles of driving. But Kevin didn't go
that way. He chose to take the three mile route
toward 16th Avenue South. They took the longer way because
Sammy wanted to make a stop. Sammy said it was
(37:57):
completely random, a spur of the moment decision. Sammy wanted
to stop at Evergreen Records, the studio on Music Row
where he worked. He said he wanted to use the
phone there to call his parents in Texas. It would
be his fifth call to his parents that day. The
second in the last two plus hours if he called
him at his office. Sammy said the call would be
(38:19):
charged to Evergreen Records, not to him.
S14 (38:22):
Popped in my head to use the telephone to call
my parents, and while we were there, I introduced Kevin
to my mom and dad. He never talked to him.
He got on the phone and talked to him for
a few minutes.
S1 (38:32):
When police examined the records, remember a long distance call
would show up on the records, but a local call
would not. There was no long distance call from that
phone that night to Texas. I've got copies of their records.
Pridemore had received a copy of the copy of the
records from the Davidson County District Attorney's Office. They had
gotten a court order and the police records had been obtained.
(38:54):
On April 5th, 1989, almost a month after the murder.
Police had no record of a late phone call to
your dad in the file. I know that came up right,
that you said that at 10:00. That's when Kevin got
on the phone with your mom and dad.
S14 (39:09):
Um, I don't know exactly what time it was, but
he got on the phone and talked to my parents
when we were at evergreen.
S1 (39:16):
Did you make two calls at evergreen?
S14 (39:18):
No.
S1 (39:18):
Only one. Yeah. Okay. If there's no record of that call,
how could that be?
S14 (39:24):
I can't answer those questions, I don't know. I just
know when we called him and he got on the
phone and talked to my parents.
S1 (39:30):
Sammy told police he was still on the telephone to
Texas when he and Kevin heard something near the front
door of evergreen. Sammy told police he asked Kevin to
go check out the noise.
S14 (39:41):
Whenever we heard the rattle at the door, I was
still on the telephone. Kevin got up and he went
out and looked in the front in front of evergreen.
He came back and said, man, what was it? He said,
I don't know. He said, it kind of looked like
maybe a black guy walking down the street. He said,
but I really can't tell because of the lighting.
S1 (39:57):
A black guy, I wouldn't even have included that detail
because there's no way to check. But it comes up
again in another context a little later that night. So
file that detail away. A black guy, Sammy, wraps up
the phone call and they wait 15 or 20 minutes.
Sammy said then he and Kevin are going to leave evergreen.
They're going to get in Kevin's car, which is parked
(40:19):
directly across the street and drive to Cashbox. So Sammy
can pick up his truck. They pause on the porch
of the building, which was once a craftsman house. It was,
and still is, light green with dark green trim. They're alarmed,
Sammy said, because of that rattling they heard at the door.
They checked their surroundings. It looks all clear, so they
(40:39):
walk across the street. It's 10:25 p.m.. Kevin gets in
the in the driver's side. Sammy goes around the front
of the car. He sits in the passenger seat, but
before he can close the door behind him, there's a
man in a ski mask wedged between the passenger seat
and the car door. The killer was so close he
blocked Sammy from closing the door. The car window was
(41:00):
rolled up and the window wasn't shot out, so he
had to be almost literally on top of Sammy, touching knees. Almost.
The first shot hit Sammy in the fleshy part of
his arm above his right elbow. He said he had
raised his arms to cover his head. That's when Kevin
rolled out of the car and ran down the street.
The killer chased him down and executed him. Sammy slumped
(41:22):
for a few seconds in the car. His blood was
found on the driver's side seat. Meaning Sammy reached across
to where Kevin had been sitting. For some reason. Kevin's
keys were found on the street outside the car. Then
Sammy heard a voice from a nearby third floor apartment.
A man called out and told him to run upstairs.
Sammy was hiding under a desk in a third floor apartment.
(41:43):
When police found him.
S14 (41:44):
And I walked in front and opened the door and
sat down and started to close the door, and I
thought I caught something moving out of the corner of
my eye, and I looked up and a guy standing
over me, and I just saw his arms straight out,
and I saw a gun. And I said, oh my God,
this guy's got a gun. I threw my arms up
to cover my head, and that's when he shot. And
they said, Kevin, do like a barrel roll out into
(42:05):
the street running back up 16th Avenue. And all I
heard was shots. After that.
S1 (42:10):
The police made a rendering of the crime scene. It's
got every possible detail and measurement. For example, Sami said
the shooter came out of the shadows in the police,
drawing the only place to hide without being in plain sight.
While Kevin and Sami were walking across the street would
have been the space between two buildings across the street
from evergreen. That spot, according to the graph they provided me,
(42:32):
is about 47ft from Sami's passenger door. There is a
brick column which appears too thin and too exposed to
hide behind. That's 11ft, nine inches from Sammy's passenger door.
S14 (42:43):
Yeah, I mean, he was right on top of me.
S1 (42:46):
And I'm guessing that you went away and got hit
in the elbow.
S14 (42:49):
All I did was when I saw the gun, I
just said, oh, my God, this guy's got a gun.
And just out of reaction, I just threw my arms up,
and I can't beat a speeding bullet, you know? Only
God was there to save that or to hit me
right in the head.
S1 (43:04):
He was shooting at you.
S14 (43:06):
He was right on top of me. How could you not?
S1 (43:08):
But Kevin was the target.
S14 (43:10):
That's what they say. That's what. That's what.
S1 (43:13):
As you're as you're sitting here right now, though, 100%.
That gun, that bullet was going to hit you in
the head.
S14 (43:18):
If I hadn't have thrown my arms up, that's exactly
where it hit me.
S1 (43:21):
Police talked to several witnesses on the street that night.
They said the eyeholes of the ski mask were so
big they could see the shooter's skin. White guy, kind
of chubby, with a strange, limping, side to side way
of running. Here's Bobby Lyons, who we met in the
first episode, the guy who thought he had driven into
a music video.
S2 (43:41):
And I could tell he was white. It was a
white guy because I could see the around his eyes.
S1 (43:46):
In one police report, Sammy Sadler's description of the shooter
is noted because it doesn't line up with the accounts
of the other eyewitnesses. Sammy said the shooter was a
thin black guy. As I write this, I'm reading from
detective Pat Castiglione's March 13th, 1989 report, four days after
(44:06):
the murder. Postiglione was Pridemore's partner on the case. Pridemore
said Postiglione was the good looking one. Postiglione is the
star of the streaming cop show Deadly Recall. He says
he has a photographic memory. In the show, he recounts
cases from his long career. His report says, quoting now
(44:27):
Sammy's description of the suspect is different from all the eyewitnesses. Unquote.
He concludes. Sammy must not have had a good look
at the at the suspect I have to mention here.
Like I've said, I've read and seen lots of interviews
with Sammy Sadler. He invariably says he was rushed to
Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where he underwent. He says every
(44:48):
time he's interviewed.
S15 (44:49):
An operating on me 18 hours, 18.
S14 (44:52):
Hours. That night, I underwent 18 hours of surgery under
the microscope.
S1 (44:57):
18 hours of surgery. That seems like a lot of surgery.
And if true, it wouldn't have ended until about 6:00
the next evening. I interviewed Doctor Patrick Meacham, the guy
who performed the surgery. He didn't have his notes from
1989 in front of him, and he didn't remember precisely
how long the surgery took, but he remembered performing a
(45:18):
vein graft. Am I pronouncing that right? He took a
vein from Sammy's leg and put it in his arm.
He left the bullet in Sammy's arm because taking it
out would have been too dangerous. The surgery normally takes
between 3 and 6 hours, and that makes sense, because
the because the next morning after the shooting, Sammy had
visitors at 9:30 a.m.. Pridemore and Postiglione interviewed him in
(45:42):
his hospital bed. I can 100% say Sammy Sadler did
not have 18 hours of surgery on his right arm
on March 9th and 10th of 1989. The headline on
the front page of The Tennessean read Music Row becoming
murder Row gunmen, stalks victims, kills one, wounds second, television
(46:07):
news stations broadcasted images of police investigating the murder on
Music Row. They had footage of Willie Nelson and Kris
Kristofferson along the crime scene tape, and an irresistible story
about an up and coming country star. Sammy Sadler, who
had been transported to Vanderbilt Medical Center for surgery. As
(46:27):
those images beamed into living rooms, more than a few
telephones in Nashville started to ring More than a few
people thought they knew exactly what happened and who the
shooter was, but most of them kept their mouths shut.
Another person would have to die before several of them
came forward. Next time on Murder on Music Row.
S16 (46:53):
I think everybody was pretty, pretty afraid of what went on.
S14 (46:56):
I came to this town. I was just a naive kid,
you know? I didn't know how any of this business worked,
how things happened.
S2 (47:03):
The promoters were getting money to promote their record, and
then they were requiring them to buy ads.
S4 (47:09):
I don't make any sense. That's total corruption.
S6 (47:12):
Kevin. Big old church thing that he would work on.
You know, we had those charts of the house with
dates on them, and you could see when I saw
what's in the Cashbox magazine.
S4 (47:20):
At that point. Now, I don't think anybody.
S17 (47:21):
You know, had a lot of respect for, for Cashbox.
And I think just the buzz that was going around
after the after the murder of Kevin Hughes. You know,
I think that that had a huge impact on the
negative impact on Cash Box, for sure.
S1 (47:36):
Murder on Music Row was reported written and narrated by me,
Keith Sharon. The executive producers were Gannett's vice president of
local news and Tennessean editor Michael Anastasi, and Tennessean news
director Ben Goad. The project editor was Duane Gang. The
sound editor was Amanda Rosman. Our reporting on the legacy
(47:59):
of the murder on Music Row doesn't end with this podcast.
If you've been duped by an unscrupulous promoter in Nashville,
we want to hear your story. Please send an email
to Kay Sharon at tennessean.com. That's the letter k s
h a r o n at tennessean.com. Include some details
of what happened to you and how you can be reached.
(48:21):
Thanks for listening.
Previously on Murder on Music Row.
S2 (00:04):
Still upsets me. So Kevin Hughes, uh, he rolled out
of the car and into our lane, and then this
guy came running around from the other side of the, uh,
of the car, and he started firing at him as
he ran in front of me and then ran back
against traffic behind my car.
S3 (00:24):
We, you know, ran up to the victim. I didn't
know who it was at the time. And I remembered
very clearly that, like, the way the blood was, like
trickling down the the street.
S4 (00:35):
And faith is like, oh, my God. She, you know,
starts running towards the body. And I'm like, trying to
stop her, like, you know, stop. Do not run towards
this crime scene. I think we heard the victim's last breath.
I mean, I think he I heard him kind of exhale.
S5 (01:06):
The all mighty dollar and the lust for worldwide fame
slowly killed tradition. And for that someone should swing.
S1 (01:22):
They finished writing the song Murder on Music Row in
about two hours. Larry Cordle and Larry Shell, this is Cordle.
S5 (01:30):
When we got it done, I said, well, there it is.
And Larry looked at me seriously. He said, pal, it's
what they'll remember me and you for.
S1 (01:38):
Cordle didn't believe shell. This new song didn't fit with
what Cordle was doing. He was busy working on another project.
He had written nine other songs for an as yet
untitled bluegrass album. Then Cordle had an epiphany.
S5 (01:54):
Holy moly, I could call the album this. I could
put a hearse on the front of it. I could
put a steel guitar on the gurney. I could put
chalk men in the street. I could call this thing
Murder on Music Row. It ain't a bluegrass song, but
bluegrass fans love traditional country music. It all worked out
(02:14):
just like that.
S1 (02:15):
It was just a spark of an idea. Then one
night at the Bluebird Cafe, Cordle played it in front
of an audience.
S5 (02:22):
I said, you know, I want to do this thing
tonight that I just wrote. It comes around time to
play it. Uh, it's my turn. Whatever. And that's just
what I decided to play the first time that hook
came around. It was just like a bomb went off
in there. People jumped to their feet, and it was.
(02:43):
I had my eyes closed like I do when I'm singing.
And it was. I nearly jumped out of the chair.
It was shocking to me that it was that kind
of a reaction. I mean, you know, Bluebird, I mean,
people's heard all these great songs and it definitely rung
that bell.
S1 (02:59):
Maybe, just maybe, that song could become something bigger. This
is Murder on Music Row, an investigative podcast. I'm Keith Sharon,
(03:20):
I work for The Tennessean in Nashville. On March 9th, 1989,
a young man named Kevin Hughes was shot twice in
the head in the middle of Music Row. In August
of 2022, my editor handed me a flash drive full
of police files, interrogation reports, coroner notes, crime scene photos
(03:40):
and drawings, phone records and internal memos between Nashville police,
the FBI and law enforcement officials in other states. Somewhere
along the way, I began to feel like it was
our Was our responsibility to tell the story that two
bullets stopped Kevin Hughes from telling. This is episode two.
(04:01):
Who shot Sam? Kevin Hughes grew up in Carmi, Illinois.
(04:29):
It was a town of about 5500 people. His father, Larry,
was a farmer. Soybeans, corn. His mother, Barbara, was a schoolteacher.
They raised their boys in the First Baptist Church of Carmi.
Every Sunday, Kevin loved Jesus and the Chicago Bulls. He
wouldn't live to see Michael Jordan and the Bulls win
a championship. His younger brother, Kyle looked up to Kevin. Today,
(04:54):
Kyle and his wife, Brennan live in a gated community
in South Florida. There were three giant herons in their
yard when I visited Kyle in August of 2023. He's tall.
A former Division one basketball player. After a year of
considering and reconsidering whether to talk to me, he opened
his front door, sat at his dining room table, and
(05:16):
bared his soul. I asked him to tell me about Kevin.
S6 (05:20):
So Kevin loved music. He was a good kid. Great kid.
I learned a lot from him growing up. You know,
he's kind of an idol.
S7 (05:29):
Sorry.
S6 (05:33):
Oh, sorry. It's okay. Pretty hot stuff. Sorry. I'll keep
myself together.
S1 (05:45):
34 years after the murder, his emotions remained so raw.
We talked about those early years in the 70s and
80s and how Kevin became his idol. I thought it
was cute when he explained he was four years and
355 days younger than Kevin. He never wanted to give
his brother the satisfaction of being five years older. The
(06:08):
brothers played pranks on each other.
S6 (06:10):
One time we were while I was coming home from school,
and he had hidden in the bushes, of course, to
scare me, but he'd also put a tripwire as I'm
walking up the the the walkway. So I, you know,
I got off my bike, started walking up, and all
of a sudden I fall. He jumped out of the
(06:30):
bushes and scares the crap out of me. Uh, so
that's just one thing.
S1 (06:34):
One thing they had in common was music. Kevin's love
for music was next level.
S6 (06:40):
He would go and get every record he bought. He
would put it on an index card. Have you know
who who wrote the song Here was put out. Um,
who sang it? Index cards out. We had about a
thousand albums.
S1 (06:55):
Kevin's favorite band. Without question. Kansas. I can't help but
think of the lyric dust in the wind. All we
are is dust in the wind. Kevin wrote letters that
Kyle will never forget.
S6 (07:10):
Anytime he write me, he was asking about me first.
S1 (07:13):
I've talked to several people who kept in touch with Kevin.
S8 (07:16):
He was such a wonderful guy.
S1 (07:18):
Marilyn Bartley Chapman knew him from elementary school until the
day he died.
S9 (07:23):
I mean.
S8 (07:24):
He was friendly to everyone. Unfortunately, I was a victim
of some bullying because of my family was very, very poor.
But he never treated me like that at all. He
was so just such an open person. Never met a stranger.
S1 (07:39):
She saw Kevin start to blossom.
S9 (07:42):
He had really.
S8 (07:42):
Straight hair and glasses in middle school. It was kind
of like. I call it a bowl cut. He would
have agreed. He would have agreed. In high school, he
got contacts and went with a little bit more curly hair.
And you could just tell, like in some of the
pictures that I have is, you know, during junior high,
it was this closed off expression. But by the time
(08:03):
he got to high school, it was he was just
so much more open, so much more friendly.
S1 (08:08):
Kevin made his own music charts. His parents would take
him every week. A 45 minute drive to Evansville, Indiana
to get Billboard magazine. He would read their charts, and
when he disagreed with their choices, he would write out
his own ranking songs was his thing. I got an
email from his friend Clayton Hughes, no relation. Clayton said
(08:29):
Kevin was the go to guy. If you wanted to
hear a certain vinyl album or use his vast record
collection to make a mixtape or learn something about a
singer or a band. Kevin's dad would drive them to
Roberts Municipal Stadium in Evansville to see acts like Styx, Kiss,
and Rick Springfield. Music was Kevin's childhood and his future dreams.
(08:54):
Kevin moved to Nashville in 1983 to start a career
on the business end of drinking and cheatin songs. He
attended Belmont College. Since then, it changed its name to
Belmont University. A Christ centered institution on the edge of
his dream, Music Row. If you stand at the north
end of the Belmont campus, where it intersects with 16th
(09:15):
Avenue South, you're about two blocks from the 1989 crime scene.
Kyle said Kevin's musical tastes stretched from air supply to Metallica,
with lots of Christian rock in between. Triumph, Shooting Star, zebra, Petra,
all his loud power favorites given where he ended up.
(09:38):
There was a gaping hole in Kevin Hughes's go to genres.
S6 (09:42):
Wasn't in Wasn't it a country music? I mean, you know,
he wasn't into country music at all. Um, I don't
know what made him go to Nashville. I think he
just liked the Belmont College. We visited at one time,
and we just. He just really fell in love with it.
S1 (09:53):
Unlike the kids from everywhere. Kevin Hughes didn't come to
Nashville for the country part of country music. Here's what
no one knew. Kevin Hughes came to Nashville with a
long game plan to get hired by the Gospel Music Association.
That was the big dream, his brother said. His first
job at Cashbox magazine was only supposed to be the start.
(10:15):
Marilyn said she thinks about Kevin a lot these days.
S8 (10:18):
He was only 23 when he died. He didn't have
a chance to really live, didn't have a chance to
be married. He didn't have a chance to have children.
I don't think his mom and dad and especially his
mom when she passed away, I don't think they ever
really recovered from Kevin dying and especially the way that
he died.
S1 (10:36):
Marilyn talked to Kevin on the phone during the last
week of his life. Her recollections of the call became
part of the police file.
S8 (10:43):
He just didn't sound like the usual Kevin. I mean,
we exchanged the pleasantries in the beginning of the conversation.
We talked about, you know, things that I might want
to do when I come down and visit. And then
I just kind of said, well, what's going on with you?
You know, tell me, tell me, how are things? You know,
are you dating anybody? Am. Are you? You know, things
like that. And he just says, I've got a lot
(11:04):
of things going on. And I thought, well, what does
that mean? I said, is it inconvenient for me to
come down? And he said, no, I want to see you.
I want to see it. It's been such a long
time since I've seen you. He goes, you know, I
just remember having the conversation is there's just crazy things.
There's a lot of crazy things going on in my life.
And I said, well, do you want to talk about them?
(11:25):
And he said, I can't right now. He says, maybe
when I see you, but I can't talk about it
right now.
S1 (11:35):
Amy Lavelle worked at Cashbox magazine in 1985, while Kevin
was a student at Belmont. Her boss, editor Tom McEntee,
and art director Tony Deantonio, were looking for interns to
work in the office. McEntee asked Amy to make up
some job opening posters. Get some Scotch tape and hang
(11:55):
them at Belmont College.
S10 (11:58):
You know you live near Belmont. Why don't you stop
by there on your way home and set the thing up?
S1 (12:03):
Kevin saw Amy's poster, contacted Cashbox, and got the internship.
It wasn't long before Cashbox hired him full time. Kyle
thought Kevin always intended to go back to school.
S6 (12:16):
I think he thought castles was his way to get in.
And he wanted to go back. You know, he was
going to go back. He wanted to get in. It
was really a proposition. He couldn't overpass. He really wanted
to get in the music industry. When Cashbox offered an internship,
you know, he talked to my parents about it. I
remember them having the conversation. And, you know, I want
to do this. I want to do this. And they
(12:36):
offered me offered me. The job is when I think
you dropped out, then the full time job.
S1 (12:40):
How'd your parents take that?
S6 (12:41):
My parents were always very supportive of Kevin, because we
knew that Kevin would do the right thing, and he
would go back, I think, to finish.
S1 (12:47):
It was a little bit of a strange fit. Kevin,
the straight laced kid, was working for Tony D with
his party. Dude. Gold chain, pinky ring, lothario with the
ladies personality.
S10 (13:00):
Tony D, I guess had a hard time getting along
with most females. Now with me, he said. I reminded
him of his daughter. I'm half Italian, he was Italian
and also he knew my husband. At the time he
was just my boyfriend and I don't think he wanted
to get him riled up.
S1 (13:18):
Juanita Butler worked in the office too, with Tony D.
S11 (13:22):
He would flirt with me. I knew he was married.
He was continually asking me out. It's like, you know, no,
I will never go out with you or any promotion
person for that matter. So because they were all kind of.
I can't think of another word other than sleazy.
S1 (13:40):
Tony D often operated in a cloud of marijuana smoke
while Kevin's calling card was his nice smile.
S10 (13:47):
Kevin was a great worker. Tom offered him a full
time job, and I think he left university to take it.
He wasn't just an intern.
S1 (13:55):
She was right. Kevin dropped out of college to work
at Cashbox. He was living his dream. It wasn't a
lucrative dream, but still a dream. Not long before he died,
a coworker felt so bad for him, she loaned him
100 bucks. I talked to a promoter who said he
wanted to buy Kevin a new pair of shoes because
his were so hacked out. Just keep it filed away
(14:17):
that Kevin had plans to go to a job fair
he wanted out of cash box. The first step of
his dream, it appeared, had turned out to be unsustainable.
In the last few weeks of his life, his dream
had faded fast. We need to talk about Cash Box.
It used to be called the Cash Box when it
(14:38):
got its start in 1942, in New York City. It
was a trade publication for coin operated machines like pinball
and jukeboxes. It was basically a newsletter about equipment. The
literal cash box on a machine was where the coins landed.
On March 3rd, 1951, the Cash Box released its first
national music chart. The nation's top ten juke box tunes.
(15:02):
Number one was My Heart Cries Out for you by
Guy Mitchell and Mitch Miller. By the end of 1954,
The Cash Box had offices in New York, Hollywood, Chicago, London, Boston,
and Nashville. At 804 Church Street. By 1980. Cash Box
had dropped the the from its name, and it was
(15:24):
all charts all the time. They weren't measuring juke box
plays anymore. It was supposed to measure airplay on the radio.
Cash box had a small office on Music Row. 21
Music Circle East. It was owned by a guy named
George Albert who lived in Los Angeles. Here was the
problem for Cash Box in the music chart business.
S2 (15:44):
Billboard was by far the leader. Other publications doing the
chart were. Radio and records. Record. World. Cash box. Gavin.
Just to name a few. So there were at least
five publications doing national charts, and they were all basically
similar methodologies until January of 1990, when Billboard started using
(16:09):
electronically monitored airplay accounting. So he had all those publications
fighting for the same pie right back in that day.
And this is ranked by usage by radio and the industry.
And that was Billboard was probably number 1 in 89.
R&R was number two and then it was probably Gavin.
(16:33):
Record world and Cashbox.
S1 (16:35):
If you recognize that voice, you're a radio listening country
music fan. That's Lon Helton. He's a Nashville legend. He's
the host of Country Countdown. Publisher of country Aircheck. Editor
of the Mediabase country chart. He spent 20 years as
the country editor for radio and records. He's worked on
radio in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Denver. He's a board
(16:58):
member of the CMA and the Country Music Hall of Fame.
I'm a lot smarter after talking to Lon. He explained
the trade publications would get calls or faxes. Remember fax
machines from radio stations every week to report the songs
that played in their markets? Some of the publications had
sophisticated methods of ranking larger stations versus smaller stations, and
(17:21):
weighted their reports accordingly. For drive time airplay, which was
more important versus overnight airplay, which wasn't That's how they
were supposed to rank songs for the music charts. After
all my research, I don't think it always worked that
way at Cashbox.
S11 (17:36):
A friend of mine, Melissa Deal, worked at Don Light Talent,
and she heard about this job at Cashbox.
S1 (17:44):
That's Juanita Butler again. She started as a receptionist at Cashbox.
She talked about the incredible pressure that was on all
the Cashbox employees. Remember, of the five trade publications, Cashbox
was at the bottom when Juanita started the Cashbox chart.
Director was a guy named Tim Steinhardt. He was a
(18:06):
good guy from Iowa. He died April 18th, 1982, in
a single car accident. That always bothered Juanita Butler. She
said there was no investigation.
S11 (18:16):
I did wonder in the back of my mind at
one point, and then I just kind of let it go.
So he was drunk, is what how the story goes.
And he was in a jeep, I guess, and he
kind of clipped the shoulder at Cashbox.
S1 (18:34):
They had to find a replacement. And the editor, a
guy named Jim Sharp, wanted to get a chart manager
with integrity.
S11 (18:40):
That was awful. That was just an absolutely awful period
of time.
S1 (18:44):
Jim Sharp made Juanita Butler an offer.
S11 (18:47):
And that's when Jim came to me and said, Juanita,
I really need you to take this job.
S1 (18:52):
She took the job and it could get a little awkward.
S11 (18:55):
Earlene Greenwood's office was right next door. There were a
bunch of music people in that office, but the reason
I remember Lee Greenwood is because when he got his
first number one record, I was working on the chart,
you know, graph one day, and this guy grabbed me
from behind and kissed me, and it shocked me. And
(19:16):
I turned around and it was Lee Greenwood because he'd
just been told he had his first number one.
S1 (19:21):
I asked her how literally she did her job.
S11 (19:24):
George Albert just who owned Cashbox. He would not get
with the times. I mean, you know, the entire time
I was there researching and compiling the charts, I was
working on a manual graph. I mean, I had a
graph that I would create every week that would have
the top 100 singles listed in the top 75 albums.
And I manually graphed out the airplay on this graph. And,
(19:48):
you know, Billboard, they had a computer. They, you know,
they were just far ahead of us.
S1 (19:55):
She was using pencils at the beginning of the office
computer age. She began to feel pressure.
S11 (20:01):
So those independent promoters, I had a specific day of
the week that I used to talk to all the
label promotion people, and that included the independents. And so
Tony D'Antonio was in there and Chuck Dixon, they were
in there every week pitching their records. They tried to
get me to do dirty stuff, the relationships with them.
(20:24):
I didn't want them to think that they could manipulate
me in any way, but there was only one time
that I was asked by my boss to have a
record enter the chart that was not legitimate. And and
(20:46):
I said no. And he was. I could tell he
was scared. And he came back, and he came back
and he said, you've got to do this. And I said,
I'm not doing it. And his words to me were, well,
don't be surprised if your little Toyota blows up in
your face someday when you go to turn it on.
S1 (21:08):
At first I thought the threat she was describing was figurative. Like,
don't be surprised if this independent promoter blows up your
car in a figurative way. She explained she brushed it
off at the time as no big deal. Then, after
Kevin Hughes got murdered, she began to believe she should
have taken that threat more seriously. Juanita Butler said she
(21:29):
never told anyone the name of the independent promoter who
made the threat. I asked her to break her silence
almost 40 years later. She was reluctant to give me
the name because he was very famous in the industry,
and she wasn't sure if he was alive. So she
started searching while we were on the phone.
S4 (21:46):
All right. Well.
S12 (21:47):
If you find out that the guy is dead, text
me his name.
S11 (21:52):
Okay. Okay. All right. Start looking for obituaries.
S1 (21:56):
We talked about how you would search for someone's name.
Then suddenly.
S11 (22:01):
Oh. Oh, I just found him. Wait. What I did
is I keyed in his name and California record promoter
and several things came up. Oh, yeah. I think this
is him. And if it is, He passed away in 2005.
S12 (22:22):
There you go.
S11 (22:23):
Ray! Ruff! Ruff!
S12 (22:26):
Okay. Ray. Ruff! All right, I'll look him up.
S1 (22:29):
I found an obituary for Ray Ruff at iHeartRadio. Juanita
Butler became convinced that Ray Ruff threatened her life over
a chart position in Cashbox magazine. I'll read from Ray
Ruff's obit to promote Debby Boone's You Light Up my life.
He arranged for security trucks to deliver copies of the
single to radio stations across the country, and galvanized a
(22:52):
record that not only spent ten weeks atop the Billboard
pop charts, but became one of the signature songs of
the 1970s. Ruff worked with many of the biggest names
in Nashville. Here's what I found out. Ruff suffered congestive
heart failure and pulmonary edema and died at his home
in Saugus, California, on September 15th, 2005. Juanita Butler quit
(23:15):
as chart director of Director of Cashbox magazine after owner
George Albert cancelled all his employees health care plans that
left the magazine in a tough spot.
S13 (23:26):
I'm the only one who knows all the ins and
outs of how to pull the chart together.
S1 (23:30):
That's Tom Rowland. He was more into writing, but he
helped out on the charts. Listen to him explain how
unscientific the Cashbox charts were.
S13 (23:38):
That's where it gets a little dicey. We knew that
the way that the system was set up, that there
were people who were trying to take advantage of it. And,
you know, the charts at this period in time, it
was before Billboard introduced the whole computerized system. So everything
was done manually. It's like literally radio stations would call
us and give us the numbers that we were wanting
(24:00):
from their charts so we could make decisions about what
things were moving and what were not. You know, there
was an honor system. It's like we were not in there,
you know? They basically made their own local chart and
then would report to us the results from their local chart,
and supposedly their local chart was supposed to be based
on airplay, etc., but we had no way to monitor that. So,
(24:23):
you know, you kind of had to take it for
what it was worth. And I do think most of
the radio guys at that point were on the up
and up, but I know some of them were not.
And I know occasionally we would get phone calls from people,
you know, late on a Friday who said, oh, I
forgot to tell you that we were playing such and
such a record. And, you know, invariably it was a
record that we knew was on the bubble and somebody
(24:43):
was trying to get an extra ad or something, and
we had no way of knowing because we didn't have
the technology to do it. We had no way to
know whether they were playing the record or not.
S1 (24:52):
Tom Roland got out of charts fast. He's now a
distinguished music writer. He won a CMA Award for his
coverage of country music in 2018. People were telling me
that the corruption at Cashbox got absolutely crazy in the
mid 1980s. Earlier you heard from Amy Lavelle, who was
editor Tom Mcentee's assistant when Kevin was hired for a
(25:13):
for a short time, Amy Lavelle was put in charge
of the Cash Box gospel chart. She said she ran
things as straight and true as she could. She would
get radio reports and write down the results so she
could add them up and make her rankings.
S10 (25:27):
This one record kind of kept popping in there, but
I never wrote down what she's saying.
S1 (25:33):
Is that a record she had never heard of was
ending up in the published chart, which is strange because
she was in charge of the chart. Somebody was writing
this record into the chart after she had gone home.
So she went to her boss, Tom McEntee.
S10 (25:48):
I had to go to Tom and say, what's up
with this? You know, record keeps popping in here and
it's not reported at all by any of the Christian stations.
He said, oh, that's something I inherited. And believe me,
we're going to get rid of it. It was tied
to advertising. It was done before we got here.
S1 (26:04):
That record, which hadn't been playing on Christian stations and
yet miraculously ended up on the chart, was by a
guy named Tony Alamo, who had been advertising in Cashbox
for years. Alamo died in federal prison in 2017 at
the age of 82. Alamo was convicted in 2009 of
sexual abuse after it was revealed he had relations with
(26:26):
several teenage girls, who he considered as his wives. In 2017,
the Southern Poverty Law Center called Alamo a cult leader.
In his obituary, they said his views were anti-Catholic, anti-homosexual
and anti-government. One of his wives was named Suzi when
she died in 1982. He kept her body in a
(26:49):
glass topped coffin and asked his followers to pray for
her resurrection for months after she was dead. Their prayers
were not answered. In happier times, he and Suzi had
opened a store, The Alamo of Nashville, at 325 Broadway.
The store specialized in sequined jackets and some were worn
(27:10):
by Elvis, Dolly Parton, Conway Twitty, Prince, and Madonna. Alamo
had an album produced by Porter Wagoner in 1986. Amy
Lavelle finally got Tony Alamo's record off the Cash Box chart,
but she still doesn't know exactly how it got there
in the first place. As Kevin learned about the charting business,
(27:34):
he faced some similar shady shenanigans beginning in 1988. He
would call home and tell his family his dream job
was turning nightmarish.
S6 (27:44):
He always had serious conversations with my mom and dad
and me about things that were happening. Tell me.
S1 (27:48):
Tell me about those what was going on.
S6 (27:51):
He just didn't feel right what he was doing. He
didn't feel right about the music industry. He didn't feel
it was what he wanted to do anymore, almost. You know,
you could tell that he was upset about things. And
then we had conversations about that, you know, he would
do a chart show, would come on the magazine be
completely different than what he would put in his chart sample.
So by the time that he would do a chart,
(28:14):
it would go to press. It was manipulated or changed.
S1 (28:18):
Did he know who was doing that?
S6 (28:19):
He did not know. Um, he felt he knew because
what he was doing then, because he knew Tony had
to look at him. But he would go in after
later on and see the changes and re change him back.
S1 (28:33):
On the day he was shot to death, while a
plot was already in motion to kill him, and unaware
Kevin Hughes, who was then the chart director at Cashbox magazine,
got a phone call from Sammy Saddler. Sammy said he
wanted to hang out. Sammy was a singer with several
independently produced songs on the Cashbox charts in the years
since the murder. Sammy Sadler's life has become a sympathetic
(28:57):
story in Nashville. One of his more recent albums was
called 1989, a callback to the year of the murder.
Sammy put out a book called A hit with a bullet.
He has made a name for himself by being the
guy who survived the murder on Music Row. In his
retelling of the story, that phone call to Kevin was
terribly unlucky for Sami. He has always said he inadvertently
(29:20):
put himself in the middle of the tragedy that was
about to unfold. Sami Sadler ended up with a bullet
in his arm because of that phone call. The story
Sami always tells the media was that he had been
arguing with his wife, and he wanted to get out
of their apartment, so he called Kevin. Sami was 22,
in 1989. He said he wanted to invite himself somewhere else.
(29:42):
Could have been anywhere. So why not go visit Kevin
at the Cash Box magazine office, which had moved to
1300 Division Street in the Faron Young Executive Building, just
off Music Row. Sami said he and Kevin had known
each other for about seven months. They weren't great friends,
just friendly acquaintances who might have become friends if both
(30:02):
of them had survived that night. You're going to hear
a lot from Sammy in this podcast. He's recorded almost
four hours of interviews with me, my editor, Ben Goad,
and former Tennessean reporter Nate Rao. He's done dozens of
interviews with publications and radio stations all over America. Here's
what you have to know. Some of the things Sammy
Sadler says about the murder of Kevin Hughes are difficult
(30:24):
to pin down. I'll give you an example. That argument
with his wife, which he said happened after they were
both home from work. Genia, his wife, was in her
late teens at the time. Sammy couldn't remember precisely how
old she was at the time of the murder. He
said she worked at a department store. He couldn't remember
the name. He also couldn't remember when they were married,
(30:45):
which might have been difficult for him to sort out
because I found records of three of Sammy's marriages and
he's currently engaged. His divorce from Genia happened sometime shortly
after the murder, but he wasn't sure. I couldn't find
any police reports about interviews with Genia. I checked over
and over again for any reference to an argument with
(31:06):
his wife on the night of the murder in the
police file. It's not their lead. Detective Bill Pridemore said
he didn't remember talking with her. I have reached out
to Genia and family members by phone and messages on
social media. I wrote her a certified letter asking her
specific questions about the night of the murder, but so far,
no luck. I'll let you know if I ever get
(31:27):
a confirmation about the argument. Here's the reason the argument
raises a question. Sammy said it was dark outside when
the argument was happening and he decided to leave. We
know Kevin had gone to a 530 movie with his
friend Sharon Pennington, so he couldn't have been back at
Cashbox to pick up Sammy's random let's hang phone call
until about 730 at the earliest. We know from phone
(31:48):
records Sammy was in his Donelson apartment at 7:44 p.m.
when he called his father in Texas. All this timing
stuff is important, and it raises a question because police
took a statement from a witness, Kent Crawford, who was
Kevin's friend at Belmont. He said he had called Kevin
in the afternoon of March 9th at 5 p.m.. That's
(32:08):
before Kevin went to the movies. Sunset. That day was
at 5:49 p.m.. It was still light outside. So it's
before Sammy and his wife started arguing. Kent said he
asked Kevin what he was doing later, and Kevin told
him he was going to the movies. Then he was
going to ride around in his car with a friend.
If that friend was Sammy, how did Kevin know about
(32:29):
the plan in the afternoon? If that friend was Sammy,
then a nighttime argument between Sammy and his wife didn't
lead to a random call to Kevin. Here's what Sammy said.
You go home on a normal Thursday afternoon that you
don't even remember. Now. Is your wife there?
S14 (32:46):
I don't know if she was at home then, or
she might have got home later when she got off
of work. I'm not sure.
S1 (32:51):
Was she a teacher?
S14 (32:52):
No. She was working at a some department store, I think.
I'm not, I can't remember.
S1 (32:57):
Okay, so she comes home at home at some point
and you guys start to argue.
S14 (33:01):
At some point. That night we got in an argument
or something. Yeah.
S1 (33:05):
Do you remember.
S14 (33:05):
The. I don't even remember what it was about. You know,
probably something stupid, but it was just at that point,
it's just I wanted to get out of the house.
I didn't want to argue. And so, you know, I
just picked up the phone to call Kevin and see
what he was doing. And it just rang and rang
and rang, and I was going to hang up, and
I thought I heard somebody say hello. I brought the
phone back up to my ear and it was Kevin.
(33:25):
And I said, hey, man, what are you doing? He said,
just working on the charts. I said, well, are you
going to be there for a little while? And he said, yeah.
He said, just come on down. I'll leave the door
open for you. So I went down and when I
went in, he was on the telephone.
S1 (33:37):
I've heard you tell that story before. Did you know
in that file there's a witness who says that he
talked to Kevin before he went to the movies. There's
a 530 showing of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure at
the fountain AMC center, downtown Nashville. Kevin and Sharon go
(33:58):
see that. But before they left for the movie, a
witness says he called Kevin, and Kevin said, I can't
hang with you tonight. I got Sammy coming in later
to hang out with me. No way. Right. Mhm. Couldn't
have happened.
S14 (34:12):
Did he even know he was going to see each other?
S1 (34:14):
We'll get more into the timing of those calls later
in this podcast. One more thing. Kent Crawford, the guy
who told police he made that phone call, was not
available to help police at later points in the investigation.
Crawford got married, moved to Indiana, and he was shot
to death by his wife, Tracy as he slept. She
(34:35):
is serving life in prison. Two Belmont friends, both shot
to death one on March 5th, one on March 9th,
12 years apart. By the way, there's another Belmont connection.
Pridemore and his partner Pat Castiglione interviewed Leslie Levin, another
of Kevin's friends from Belmont. The interview summary is in
(34:55):
the police file and dated March 15th, 1989. Leslie said
he called Kevin at about 830 on the night Kevin died.
Leslie was working at the Belmont College library and he
needed a ride home. Kevin said he couldn't give him
one because Sammy Sadler was coming. Kevin told Leslie that
Sammy was upset and they had to get their problems
(35:15):
worked out. I asked Sammy if he was upset with
Kevin on the night of the murder.
S14 (35:21):
Kevin, I never had a cross word.
S1 (35:23):
So you being upset with him surprises you?
S14 (35:26):
Yeah. I mean, we never. I don't even know where
that comes from.
S1 (35:30):
Before Sammy arrived at the cash box office that night,
Kevin called his 18 year old brother, Kyle. I talked
with Kyle at length about that phone call. I'll have
more about what they said and the specific way the
call ended in an upcoming episode. Everyone connected to Cash
Box knew Kevin Hughes put in long hours on the
(35:52):
night before a before a publication. Thursday, March 9th, 1989,
was one of those nights. Would you go to the
movies on your busiest night with deadlines? Could he have
been trying to dodge people who were mad at him?
So he goes to the movies, comes back, talks to
his brother, declines to give a friend a ride home.
(36:12):
Sammy shows up. And Sammy suggests they go get something
to eat. Again, despite the deadlines, Kevin agrees. They go
to Captain D's on West End. It was where Bricktop's
is now. Kevin drove them in his sky blue Pontiac Sunbird.
Sammy says they talked about sports and girls. Regular bro
stuff over dinner. Here's what's unusual. What Sammy didn't say.
(36:36):
They talked about on that day. Sammy had a song,
Tell It Like It Is, a cover of the old
Aaron Neville song. It was ranked 46th on the previous
week's country indie chart. Sammy didn't say he asked Kevin
if his song was going was going to appear on
the next chart, which Kevin was working on that night.
Sammy also didn't say Kevin told Sammy the truth. On
(36:58):
that night, he was dropping Sammy's song off the charts.
Kevin was trying to clean up the charts, and among
the last things he did before he died was eliminate
Sammy Sadler's song. Those topics didn't come up. Sammy said.
The last ride of Kevin Hughes's life was supposed to
(37:19):
be from Captain D's Back to the Cash Box magazine office,
where Sammy's truck was parked. Kevin's brother always questioned the
route they took.
S6 (37:28):
I'm not so sure about the logistics of where evergreen
was in relation to where Captain D's was, but I
always heard it was kind of out of the way
to go to Evergreen Records to make a phone call.
S1 (37:37):
Kyle Hughes was right. If you went east on West
End to 17th and made a right, that's the most
direct route. Two miles of driving. But Kevin didn't go
that way. He chose to take the three mile route
toward 16th Avenue South. They took the longer way because
Sammy wanted to make a stop. Sammy said it was
(37:57):
completely random, a spur of the moment decision. Sammy wanted
to stop at Evergreen Records, the studio on Music Row
where he worked. He said he wanted to use the
phone there to call his parents in Texas. It would
be his fifth call to his parents that day. The
second in the last two plus hours if he called
him at his office. Sammy said the call would be
(38:19):
charged to Evergreen Records, not to him.
S14 (38:22):
Popped in my head to use the telephone to call
my parents, and while we were there, I introduced Kevin
to my mom and dad. He never talked to him.
He got on the phone and talked to him for
a few minutes.
S1 (38:32):
When police examined the records, remember a long distance call
would show up on the records, but a local call
would not. There was no long distance call from that
phone that night to Texas. I've got copies of their records.
Pridemore had received a copy of the copy of the
records from the Davidson County District Attorney's Office. They had
gotten a court order and the police records had been obtained.
(38:54):
On April 5th, 1989, almost a month after the murder.
Police had no record of a late phone call to
your dad in the file. I know that came up right,
that you said that at 10:00. That's when Kevin got
on the phone with your mom and dad.
S14 (39:09):
Um, I don't know exactly what time it was, but
he got on the phone and talked to my parents
when we were at evergreen.
S1 (39:16):
Did you make two calls at evergreen?
S14 (39:18):
No.
S1 (39:18):
Only one. Yeah. Okay. If there's no record of that call,
how could that be?
S14 (39:24):
I can't answer those questions, I don't know. I just
know when we called him and he got on the
phone and talked to my parents.
S1 (39:30):
Sammy told police he was still on the telephone to
Texas when he and Kevin heard something near the front
door of evergreen. Sammy told police he asked Kevin to
go check out the noise.
S14 (39:41):
Whenever we heard the rattle at the door, I was
still on the telephone. Kevin got up and he went
out and looked in the front in front of evergreen.
He came back and said, man, what was it? He said,
I don't know. He said, it kind of looked like
maybe a black guy walking down the street. He said,
but I really can't tell because of the lighting.
S1 (39:57):
A black guy, I wouldn't even have included that detail
because there's no way to check. But it comes up
again in another context a little later that night. So
file that detail away. A black guy, Sammy, wraps up
the phone call and they wait 15 or 20 minutes.
Sammy said then he and Kevin are going to leave evergreen.
They're going to get in Kevin's car, which is parked
(40:19):
directly across the street and drive to Cashbox. So Sammy
can pick up his truck. They pause on the porch
of the building, which was once a craftsman house. It was,
and still is, light green with dark green trim. They're alarmed,
Sammy said, because of that rattling they heard at the door.
They checked their surroundings. It looks all clear, so they
(40:39):
walk across the street. It's 10:25 p.m.. Kevin gets in
the in the driver's side. Sammy goes around the front
of the car. He sits in the passenger seat, but
before he can close the door behind him, there's a
man in a ski mask wedged between the passenger seat
and the car door. The killer was so close he
blocked Sammy from closing the door. The car window was
(41:00):
rolled up and the window wasn't shot out, so he
had to be almost literally on top of Sammy, touching knees. Almost.
The first shot hit Sammy in the fleshy part of
his arm above his right elbow. He said he had
raised his arms to cover his head. That's when Kevin
rolled out of the car and ran down the street.
The killer chased him down and executed him. Sammy slumped
(41:22):
for a few seconds in the car. His blood was
found on the driver's side seat. Meaning Sammy reached across
to where Kevin had been sitting. For some reason. Kevin's
keys were found on the street outside the car. Then
Sammy heard a voice from a nearby third floor apartment.
A man called out and told him to run upstairs.
Sammy was hiding under a desk in a third floor apartment.
(41:43):
When police found him.
S14 (41:44):
And I walked in front and opened the door and
sat down and started to close the door, and I
thought I caught something moving out of the corner of
my eye, and I looked up and a guy standing
over me, and I just saw his arms straight out,
and I saw a gun. And I said, oh my God,
this guy's got a gun. I threw my arms up
to cover my head, and that's when he shot. And
they said, Kevin, do like a barrel roll out into
(42:05):
the street running back up 16th Avenue. And all I
heard was shots. After that.
S1 (42:10):
The police made a rendering of the crime scene. It's
got every possible detail and measurement. For example, Sami said
the shooter came out of the shadows in the police,
drawing the only place to hide without being in plain sight.
While Kevin and Sami were walking across the street would
have been the space between two buildings across the street
from evergreen. That spot, according to the graph they provided me,
(42:32):
is about 47ft from Sami's passenger door. There is a
brick column which appears too thin and too exposed to
hide behind. That's 11ft, nine inches from Sammy's passenger door.
S14 (42:43):
Yeah, I mean, he was right on top of me.
S1 (42:46):
And I'm guessing that you went away and got hit
in the elbow.
S14 (42:49):
All I did was when I saw the gun, I
just said, oh, my God, this guy's got a gun.
And just out of reaction, I just threw my arms up,
and I can't beat a speeding bullet, you know? Only
God was there to save that or to hit me
right in the head.
S1 (43:04):
He was shooting at you.
S14 (43:06):
He was right on top of me. How could you not?
S1 (43:08):
But Kevin was the target.
S14 (43:10):
That's what they say. That's what. That's what.
S1 (43:13):
As you're as you're sitting here right now, though, 100%.
That gun, that bullet was going to hit you in
the head.
S14 (43:18):
If I hadn't have thrown my arms up, that's exactly
where it hit me.
S1 (43:21):
Police talked to several witnesses on the street that night.
They said the eyeholes of the ski mask were so
big they could see the shooter's skin. White guy, kind
of chubby, with a strange, limping, side to side way
of running. Here's Bobby Lyons, who we met in the
first episode, the guy who thought he had driven into
a music video.
S2 (43:41):
And I could tell he was white. It was a
white guy because I could see the around his eyes.
S1 (43:46):
In one police report, Sammy Sadler's description of the shooter
is noted because it doesn't line up with the accounts
of the other eyewitnesses. Sammy said the shooter was a
thin black guy. As I write this, I'm reading from
detective Pat Castiglione's March 13th, 1989 report, four days after
(44:06):
the murder. Postiglione was Pridemore's partner on the case. Pridemore
said Postiglione was the good looking one. Postiglione is the
star of the streaming cop show Deadly Recall. He says
he has a photographic memory. In the show, he recounts
cases from his long career. His report says, quoting now
(44:27):
Sammy's description of the suspect is different from all the eyewitnesses. Unquote.
He concludes. Sammy must not have had a good look
at the at the suspect I have to mention here.
Like I've said, I've read and seen lots of interviews
with Sammy Sadler. He invariably says he was rushed to
Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where he underwent. He says every
(44:48):
time he's interviewed.
S15 (44:49):
An operating on me 18 hours, 18.
S14 (44:52):
Hours. That night, I underwent 18 hours of surgery under
the microscope.
S1 (44:57):
18 hours of surgery. That seems like a lot of surgery.
And if true, it wouldn't have ended until about 6:00
the next evening. I interviewed Doctor Patrick Meacham, the guy
who performed the surgery. He didn't have his notes from
1989 in front of him, and he didn't remember precisely
how long the surgery took, but he remembered performing a
(45:18):
vein graft. Am I pronouncing that right? He took a
vein from Sammy's leg and put it in his arm.
He left the bullet in Sammy's arm because taking it
out would have been too dangerous. The surgery normally takes
between 3 and 6 hours, and that makes sense, because
the because the next morning after the shooting, Sammy had
visitors at 9:30 a.m.. Pridemore and Postiglione interviewed him in
(45:42):
his hospital bed. I can 100% say Sammy Sadler did
not have 18 hours of surgery on his right arm
on March 9th and 10th of 1989. The headline on
the front page of The Tennessean read Music Row becoming
murder Row gunmen, stalks victims, kills one, wounds second, television
(46:07):
news stations broadcasted images of police investigating the murder on
Music Row. They had footage of Willie Nelson and Kris
Kristofferson along the crime scene tape, and an irresistible story
about an up and coming country star. Sammy Sadler, who
had been transported to Vanderbilt Medical Center for surgery. As
(46:27):
those images beamed into living rooms, more than a few
telephones in Nashville started to ring More than a few
people thought they knew exactly what happened and who the
shooter was, but most of them kept their mouths shut.
Another person would have to die before several of them
came forward. Next time on Murder on Music Row.
S16 (46:53):
I think everybody was pretty, pretty afraid of what went on.
S14 (46:56):
I came to this town. I was just a naive kid,
you know? I didn't know how any of this business worked,
how things happened.
S2 (47:03):
The promoters were getting money to promote their record, and
then they were requiring them to buy ads.
S4 (47:09):
I don't make any sense. That's total corruption.
S6 (47:12):
Kevin. Big old church thing that he would work on.
You know, we had those charts of the house with
dates on them, and you could see when I saw
what's in the Cashbox magazine.
S4 (47:20):
At that point. Now, I don't think anybody.
S17 (47:21):
You know, had a lot of respect for, for Cashbox.
And I think just the buzz that was going around
after the after the murder of Kevin Hughes. You know,
I think that that had a huge impact on the
negative impact on Cash Box, for sure.
S1 (47:36):
Murder on Music Row was reported written and narrated by me,
Keith Sharon. The executive producers were Gannett's vice president of
local news and Tennessean editor Michael Anastasi, and Tennessean news
director Ben Goad. The project editor was Duane Gang. The
sound editor was Amanda Rosman. Our reporting on the legacy
(47:59):
of the murder on Music Row doesn't end with this podcast.
If you've been duped by an unscrupulous promoter in Nashville,
we want to hear your story. Please send an email
to Kay Sharon at tennessean.com. That's the letter k s
h a r o n at tennessean.com. Include some details
of what happened to you and how you can be reached.
(48:21):
Thanks for listening.
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