Cold case investigation into ‘Walking Tall’ sheriff uncovers murder

Episode Notes

Transcript

Lee Rawles:

Welcome to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, Lee Rawles, and today I am joined by Mike Elam, author of the book Buford Posser: The Other Story, as told by the people who lived the real story. So Mike, welcome so much to the show. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself first? You were in law enforcement, is that correct?

Mike Elam:

That’s correct. And thank you for having me. As far as law enforcement, that’s what I was doing in my early, early 20s. And I worked for the Benton County Sheriff’s Office here in Arkansas. Just had a short career initially because I got married. I felt like I needed to make more money, so I went to the private sector, used some of the skills I had there in starting a loss prevention department for a regional grocery retailer here.

Lee Rawles:

So unlike I think many of the listeners, I actually had not heard of Buford Pusser until recently, but many people will be familiar with him because his story was supposedly told by the movie Walking Tall. Could you tell people who maybe like me weren’t aware of kind of the legend of Buford Pusser a little bit about him and what the story used to be?

Mike Elam:

The story used to be that he was a legendary sheriff in McNairy County, Tennessee, which is about 90 miles southeast of Memphis. And according to the movie, McNary County was terribly corrupt, especially an area along the state line right between Mississippi and Tennessee. And of course, the movie which starred Joe Don Baker portrayed Buford as a very much a law enforcement icon to be dealt with in the county. Had no experience basically according to the movie when he went in and took the job, which we found out was not correct later. And that he allegedly went down, cleaned up the state line, got the county back on track. And of course, when the movie first came out being in law enforcement, I was really impressed by the character that I saw in the movie. And so much so that I wanted to research it. And of course, back in the 70s, you couldn’t hardly do that.

We didn’t have the internet, anything like that. You relied on magazines, what newspaper articles that you could find, which were far and few between, and just things of that nature. Well, of course, in the mid 90s, the internet came into a being, and of course it needed a little bit of time to mature. And after a while, it started getting some information on there. I started a social media page and I was very much a fan of Buford Pusser at that time. And it was one of those things where I got to researching it and learned far too much for my own liking because I did not like the man I saw as opposed to the one that was in the movie.

Lee Rawles:

And I’d love to read from the beginning of your chapter 13. Coming from a law enforcement background myself, I can tell you that the profession is a true brotherhood. In times of trouble, you’re always covering another officer’s back and in turn, they are watching out for you. You trust them with your life. As such, to speak out in a negative fashion about another officer is rarely done. Make no mistake, I defended Buford for a long time when people would tell me that he was actually a corrupt sheriff. It was not until I saw the autopsy report of Louise Hathcock that I began to have my doubts. The next shoot to drop were the photos of the alleged August 12th ambush. While I wanted to believe that Pusser was much like his character in the movies, the evidence told me otherwise. So we come to it.

You had been researching him because you admired the man that the legend talked about, but you started to hear rumblings and you were talking to people who knew him who were directly involved. Can you tell us what was so upsetting about the autopsy report of Louise Hathcock and who was Louise Hathcock?

Mike Elam:

Louise Hathcock in the movie, the people that are familiar with the movie Walking Tall, they used the name Callie Hacker in the movie. She was an operator of a state line establishment, which actually operated on both sides of the state line. Had a restaurant in Mississippi and just a few feet away across the state line was a motel. Wasn’t anything like it indicated in the movie because there they showed it as one big club. At any rate, Buford shot and killed Louise Halfcock. And I always wondered about it. A lady that had tried to convince me that Buford was not a good guy finally came up with that autopsy report and she shared it with me. And when I saw it, it indicated that she was shot in the back twice and before she was shot in the head as she lay on the floor.

And of course, the reason I knew that she was shot in the head last was that her teeth were shattered and impacted in the carpet below her head, but it surprised me that she was shot in the back. And I started doing my own cold case investigation at that point, if you will. And doing things, I made several trips over there. I met some of the family, interviewed them, interviewed people that knew both Buford and Louise, trying to get a feel for the feelings that they had toward each other.

Lee Rawles:

And what had been the story in the ’60s about what had happened?

Mike Elam:

Well, that depended on who you ask. If you ask people who were on the pusser side of the story, all of those people just say he had to shoot her. It was self-defense. And on the other side, you had everyone saying, “No, it was out and out murder.” And that’s what got me so interested in it. I wanted to make a determination for myself which way it went. And I decided that the method in which Buford used to shoot her was unjustified and that was a big leap for me. I mean, that was one of the hardest things that I did because like you said, law enforcement’s brotherhood, you watch each other’s backs and here I felt like I was betraying a man I’d always thought of as a legendary sheriff.

Lee Rawles:

So you bring up your own wife in the introduction, you talk about how she encouraged you to write this book. Prior to starting to write the book, was this just a hobby for you? Were you storing all these documents in the living room? What was your method before writing the book that your wife got you to finally sit down and do?

Mike Elam:

Well, it was one of those things where I was really interested in it at first. It was nothing more than that. Then it became a hobby and it worked its way into becoming a cold case investigation for me. I would make trips over to McNairy County. I live 465 miles away, so I would, whenever I had a few days of time, I’d drive over, check it out, and she would never go with me. She had no interest in the story. I started collecting documents, files, anything that I could get that was related to the case. It filled up my home office after a while. I’ve got boxes and boxes, cases, file cabinets full of things that I’ve gathered over the years. And it was one of those times where I had an individual from Oregon that called and asked me if I would meet him over there, that he had been to there previously and could never find anything.

None of the ambush sites. He didn’t know where to locate any of these things. So I told him, yes, I would meet him. And that was the first time she decided to go. Well, I was taking Ed down the route that Buford and Pauline took that day because that goes out into the middle of the country where there’s nothing but country roads, some of them, dirt, gravel, just whatever. And I always wondered why he didn’t just … He lived two blocks from Highway 64 and why he didn’t go down 64 and Highways 45 where he could make the run quickly. So that led to a lot of suspicion on my place. And when Connie, who by the way, we celebrated our 53rd wedding anniversary yesterday. Oh, congratulations. At any rate, she decided to go with me that time. And when she saw that route, before we got back to the motel, she was saying, “You are going to have to write that book, that it was so incredible to see all of this.

” So she got behind it and really started pushing me to write a book.

Lee Rawles:

Now, there are plenty of true crime books out there and they may represent kind of labors of love just like this one was for you that people just want to get to the bottom of something, but not every true crime book ends up reopening an investigation. You published this book in 2020, and one of the reasons I’m talking to you today is that five years later, what has happened is the Tennessee Bureau investigation ended up looking into this cold case of Pauline Pusser’s death and deciding that the official story was absolutely not correct. Can you tell us about that? Were you involved with the TBI? Did you give them some of the evidence that you’d found about this cold case? Tell us about what happened after the publication of this book.

Mike Elam:

Well, I’d gone through a surgery. That was about the time that COVID hit. And I was undergoing chemo and radiation at the time, and I couldn’t be around people because of what it does to your white blood cell count. So people on my Facebook page started encouraging me to take that time and write a book because I knew I was going to be away from people for months. So I wasn’t sure about my future or at that point, if I even had a future. At any rate, I started writing and never done anything like this before. It was difficult, but at any rate, one of those things where I just started from the beginning. And I had always operated a Facebook page and a little bit later started doing a YouTube channel about all of this, hoping that I would get more leads in. And sure enough, it brought a ton of information, a list of women that Buford had been seeing, a list of state liners and people about the county that were making payoffs to Buford.

And finally, I had one individual, Ricky Plunk, that contacted me and said, “I may have the gun that was used to kill Pauline.” And I got in the car, drove over there to see the gun, photograph it, get all the information I could from the gun, serial number, where it was manufactured, when it was manufactured, so on. And ran it, found out that it did have a history that parallel with Buford’s story or the story about Buford, I guess I should say. So I convinced him that we needed to contact the TBI. They came out, picked up the gun a couple of days later, special agent from the TBI in the Western Division, Mike Parson, contacted me and asked me if I had any other information. And I said, “Well, how much do you want? ” So I met with he and another investigator, Brent Booth, and we just started, or I started sharing information.

It’s against Tennessee protocol for them to share information with anyone. So the sharing was going one way. I was telling them what I knew, and they just let them into the direction that they ended up with.

Lee Rawles:

Well, we’re going to take a quick break to hear from our advertisers. When we return, we’ll hear more about this case with Mike Elam. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, Lee Rawles, here with Mike Elam, and we are talking about the legend of Buford Pusser and his book, Buford Pusser, The Other Story. So Mike, let’s focus on Pauline and the story of what happened to her. So in the old story, Buford and Pauline are driving, they’re ambushed. Can you tell us what people understood the story to be? What Buford said the story was of Pauline’s death?

Mike Elam:

Well, of course, Buford said that he was very much disliked by the entire criminal element in that area and in the region, and that morning they were going to an anonymous call. Pauline had decided that she wanted to go with him because she wanted to find out what his job really was. And in the movie, it shows it as being early to mid morning. They’re driving down a country lane, two cars come up, submachine gunfire rips the car apart, Pauline is shot and killed and Beaufort is wounded, and that’s the way that the movie portrayed it.

Lee Rawles:

At the time, no autopsy was performed. You open the book talking about the people who were at the scene, you spoke to a photojournalist who was there documenting it. At the time, did people seem to accept Buford’s explanation that there had been an ambush and that’s what had happened? Or were people always a little bit puzzled by some of the elements of the case, like the different scenes of the ambush and things like that?

Mike Elam:

Well, there are locally people who were familiar with Sheriff Pusser and familiar with the story. Just you have to understand that McNary County is about fifty fifty as far as Republicans and Democrat, and they do everything it seems like along party lines. And so this story was very much the same way in that you had those that wanted to believe Buford and a lot that still do, some that just absolutely thought he was the worst thing that ever happened to law enforcement. So when you look at that, even back then, you had a very torn community. You had rumors flying around that Buford had murdered Pauline. You had a lot of people saying that it never happened. And one of the sticking points to me was the district attorney general who apparently was aware that Buford and Pauline were having marital problems, that she was seeking a divorce, and that she was being physically abused by him, and yet three days after he had learned a lot of this, and the point being that he even refused to consider Buford as a suspect in her homicide.

Lee Rawles:

Well, now we come to 2023 and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations decides to reopen the case. They exhume Pauline, they perform an autopsy. And earlier this year, by this year, you and I are speaking on December 19th, 2025. Earlier this year, they completed their investigation, turned it over to the district attorney. Can you tell listeners what they determined had actually happened?

Mike Elam:

Of course, in Buford’s statement that he gave that morning, or just shortly after the ambush, I should say, he indicated that much like in the movie, a car had pulled up alongside of him, fired some rounds that Pauline was hit, but he said she was only wounded at the first ambush site. He drove about two miles down the road, pulled over to stop and check on her, and that she was shot a second time, that he was looking directly at her when she was shot in the forehead, which is a very important part of this conversation. He said that then he was shot in the chin. And I guess what got me was when the … I didn’t believe any of that to be true, and that’s the reason I started digging into this so hard. And it was determined by the autopsy that she was actually shot in the back of the head, not the forehead, and his entire statement was just incredible, but that imaging of her head was just so convincing that he was just flat out lying about the ambush.

Lee Rawles:

And so the Tennessee Bureau investigations determined that he was responsible for her murder. And he passed away in the 1970s, but the district attorney said that had he still been alive today, he would have faced indictment. This is pretty big news, especially for Adamsville, a town that, as you say, that there’s a real divide over how they feel about Sheriff Pusser, but there is a cottage industry around him. There’s a museum, people come to visit, people are drawn to the elements of the story that promote the heroic. And so there has to be a lot of controversy now over do we prioritize this new truth? And you have a saying, “The truth has no agenda.” Can you talk about what it’s been like to go back to the town now and what you’re hearing from people who live there about how they feel now that the investigation has been released?

Mike Elam:

Well, first of all, let me say that they do have a museum. It’s the Pusser Homan Museum. That’s where Buford was living at the time that he was involved in a fatal accident. Although Pauline never lived in that particular house, the one that she had lived in that was at the same location had burned in 1972, I believe it was. And of course, she was killed in 67, so the house was rebuilt. It’s a museum now, and I’ve always supported the museum. I hope it never goes away because it is an interesting place, has lots of puss or memorabilia that brings some tourism to the town still yet. And like I say, I support it. However, I don’t support the story they tell because they still want him to be remembered as a hero, so on. And I just didn’t feel like that was the truth by any stretch of the imagination.

It goes beyond just Louise Hathcock, and then of course, Pauline’s questionable death because there’s also Russ Hamilton who he shot and killed in very strange circumstances. And no other law enforcement officer had ever experienced that kind of situation, and especially when he’s claiming that he had to clean up the state line about everything that was going on down there. And when you get into it, you find out that he was taking payoffs from most of these people, which entirely contradicted what we saw in the movies, that he was a part of the problem and that a lot of this was just being swept under the rug just to keep his legend to life.

Lee Rawles:

Well, we’re going to take a quick break to hear from our advertisers. When we return, I’ll still be speaking with Mike Elam, author of Buford Pusser, The Other Story. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. I’m here with Mike Elam, author of Buford Pusser, The Other Story. So Mike, after you have written this book, you have spent literal decades interested in this case, do you feel like your job is done? Are you still involved in looking at some of the other questionable incidents in Sheriff Pusser’s career? Where does this go for you now?

Mike Elam:

Well, I thought I would be finished with it and that I would just be able to sit down and write a book about the investigation. My book will be entirely different from, I think, what others have done because I was the only one out there that was actually boots on the ground going to McNairy County. There were a lot of people that were checking into the story, but I don’t think that they were looking at it as I was, as mine was an investigation. I was wanting to know who killed Pauline. And that did lead to so many other avenues for me to go down and I didn’t realize at the time, but like I said, you had Will Terry Abernathy, who was the district attorney general at that time. Now I sit back and I wonder, why did he seem so unwilling to pursue Buford as a suspect in Pauline’s murder?

Why did he not do something or look more deeply into the way that Louise Hathcock was killed? And frankly, I’m not sure if it was because he knew Buford. Buford had a reputation of being a very mean individual. He was a huge man, six foot six, 250 pounds, a former wrestler. And I think a lot of people, I know a lot of people over in that area were scared of him, afraid of him because of what he might physically do. There was also a medical examiner over there. In Tennessee, the traditional way for these things to occur is that in the case of an unexplained death, the local medical examiner, who at the time was Harry Peeler, and the district attorney basically needed to concur on the need for an autopsy. They did one on Louise Hathcock, a state line operator, but then they refused to order up an autopsy report on Pauline, a sheriff’s wife, and I found that to be strange.

Lee Rawles:

And just for anyone who’s not familiar, so by state line operator, there was a whole little cottage industry of moonshine, maybe some prostitution, gambling. This was the community of people who provided vice products, let’s say.

Mike Elam:

Yes. And basically that’s another thing I learned along the way is there was a little to no prostitution that was going on there. There was no casino style gambling as the movie showed. It was more of a simple razzle game that was played at a cash register there at the state line, for instance, on the Mississippi side. It was played at the Shamrock Restaurant, which was Louise Hathcock’s establishment. She also had one just yards away on the Tennessee side, the White Iris that was operated by a friend of hers, Carl Douglas Towhead White. And it was just a simple board game, two foot square board with numbers on it, rolled ice. I guess it are add up numbers. And if you hit a particular number, you win a prize, and that was the big scam. Somehow the movies turned it into a casino style gambling, and I’ve never understood that, but you look at all of those things and you’re saying if things were so bad, why didn’t the district attorney general get into that?

So I guess the bottom line to your question is that all of this got me to looking at the relationship between the sheriff, the local medical examiner, and the district attorney general about why a lot of these issues were not truthfully pursued back in the mid 1960s.

Lee Rawles:

So let’s talk about your personal journey when it comes to thinking about law enforcement and the law in some of these, say, rural areas where it’s not like people see on TV with Law and Order. It’s a big city, lots of resources, official police, but instead it’s these areas where the sheriff is the law and in charge of enforcing it and relationships might matter more than the truth sometimes. Have you changed your thoughts about law enforcement and about this kind of way that we police our communities? I’m just curious.

Mike Elam:

Well, actually, I am a huge supporter of law enforcement, always have been. What I do understand, and a lot of people may not quite get, is that standards of the 1960s and the standards we have today are in … Different is daylight and dark. The sheriff was the king of the county, and he pretty much had free reign, especially in rural communities to do what needed to be done. And things that Buford did, even things that happened in law enforcement where I was back in the early ’70s, might not be deemed as acceptable today, but you have to remember that the standards has evolved or have evolved. And it’s one of those things where right now I fully support law enforcement. It’s like any other job. Yes, you’re going to have a few bad apples and it happens with everything, regardless of the type of screening that you try to do, regardless of the steps that you take to make sure you’re hiring the best officers possible, things happen.

And so that being said, it’s not unlike any other profession. You’re going to have some problems, but it’s always the bad apples that seem to get the most publicity in today’s news. I think that’s had a big impact on things.

Lee Rawles:

Well, and finally, I’d love to ask you for anything you’ve learned as someone who’s doing this kind of investigation, you’re not backed by any major university or major magazine doing this investigation. You’re a citizen investigator. So do you have any tips for people who have a case that they know of that they think, “You know what? This needs more looking into, and I want to be the one to do it. ” I’m just curious.

Mike Elam:

Don’t give up. I mean, I never thought that this would take as long as this taken to get down to the truth. I always suspected that when I started this, that I would eventually get there. I didn’t know what course it would take. That’s the reason I went to social media, because that was a way of reaching out to people who were there, that lived the real story, that just they were the ones with the knowledge of what actually happened. Then you just have to sort through all those to see which ones are real, which ones weren’t, and start down that road. And eventually, like I say, the individual that called me about having the gun and telling the story, which by the way, his story was, and this is an important part of all this conversation, that his father was one of Beaufort’s deputies.

And at the morning of the ambush, when they transported Buford to the hospital there in Sulmer, he called this deputy and told him to go to the garage where the car had been taken and was being stored for processing by the TBI. Told him to go in, get the guns out of the trunk of the car and basically make them disappear. Well, this deputy brought one of those guns to the house, which ironically was the same caliber of the gun that was used to shoot Pauline, a gun that the chief deputy knew that Buford carried in the trunk of his car. When the chief deputy went back to find that gun, it was missing. He asked Buford about it. Buford told him he had sold it a couple of weeks prior as it was his own personal firearm. And the chief deputy’s name was Jim Moffitt.

He looked for not only that car being, but also a little handgun that Pauline wouldn’t normally carry, which I believe may very well have been the gun that Buford used to self-inflict a wound To make it appear that he had been involved and was a victim of the ambush. So both of those guns turned up missing. And then you trace it on back and you learn that the carbine was taken from the military when they were updating their firearm level from the M1 carbine to an M14 and that it was the chief deputy’s son who had taken them from the Air Force and had allowed Buford to acquire some of these. So there’s so many ways that gun connects back to the story. So if I had a piece of advice I would give to people is use social media, find people who were there, interview them face to face if possible.

And if not, do it over the phone. But try to check out all the facts, but just don’t give up because the end is always there. There’s usually going to be a piece of evidence that just can’t be denied. And like in this case, it was Pauline’s autopsy report, which just totally countered Buford’s story about her being shot in the forehead that he was looking directly at her.

Lee Rawles:

And for any listeners who want to pick up Buford Pusser, the other story, as a visual learner, I really appreciated this. You have included all of these images and scans, documents, photos. You really do pull together the evidence for the readers to look at themselves and analyze and evaluate. So I really appreciated that about the book.

Mike Elam:

And to think I have so much more as far as documentation that I had when I did that book. I mean, I’ve had access to a lot more information than I did when I wrote that book. I’m writing a second one, like I say, about the ambush itself and trying to go step by step and show how all of this new information dispels everything about the ambush and how it occurred.

Lee Rawles:

And do you think that’ll be in 2026 or to be seen?

Mike Elam:

It will be in 2026.

Lee Rawles:

Well, Mike, thank you so much for joining us. If people are interested in your YouTube channel, hearing more from you, where can they go?

Mike Elam:

I have a YouTube channel. You can find it either under my name, Mike Elam, or Buford Pusser, the other story. And of course, I also have a Facebook page by the same name, which ironically is the same name as my book, Buford Pusser, The Other Story.

Lee Rawles:

Well, thank you to Mike Elam and thank you listeners of the Modern Law Library. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe in your favorite podcast listening service.