B
uford Pusser should have been on top of the world. By Aug. 20, 1974, he was the most famous sheriff in America, all because of the unexpected smash-hit film Walking Tall, which introduced Pusser — played in a starmaking turn by Joe Don Baker — and his crime-busting exploits in McNairy County, Tennessee, to the masses the prior year. Those exploits, as depicted in the film, included cleaning up the county of illicit bootlegging, battling ruthless gangsters known as the State Line Mob, and defending his family, especially after the ambush murder, six years before, of his beloved wife, Pauline.
As Buford told it in public ever since Aug. 12, 1967, and especially on the road to promote Walking Tall, he had received an early-morning phone call about a disturbance, and Pauline came with him. He drove along a winding, poorly paved road toward the Mississippi state line, and shots rang out — fatally striking Pauline in the head, and grievously wounding Buford in the face. In the film, after recovering from his wounds, he took his car and drove it into one of the saloons, taking an eye for an eye to avenge his wife’s death. In real life, Pauline’s murder remained unsolved.
Audiences around the country flocked to meet the 36-year-old Pusser, clearing six feet six and 250 pounds, all soft-spoken Southern manners, his face ravaged by the scars of multiple reconstructive surgeries, and his body still within range of the fighting form of his wrestling days. And that morning in 1974, seven years and eight days after Pauline’s killing, news outlets packed a Memphis press conference to hear Pusser announce that he would play himself in the sequel to Walking Tall.
Buford Pusser (left) at a 1973 dinner with Dr. Billy Graham, Johnny Cash, John Rollins, Dr. Nat Winston, and James F. Neal at the home of June and Johnny Cash.
© Frank Empson/The Tennessean/USA TODAY NETWORK
Pusser, who served as a sheriff from 1964 to 1970, loomed large both metaphorically and literally. Young men looked up to him and young women wanted to be with him. The myth of Pusser, already pervasive because of the sheer number of car accidents, knife attacks, and shootouts he said he’d survived, grew bigger thanks to the movie (and later sequels), and in the books and songs that praised his exploits, like Memphis singer Eddie Bond’s “The Ballad of Buford Pusser” and W.R. Morris’s biography The Twelfth of August.
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The accelerating celebrity fed into the enormity of his newest career move. “I’ve got to be good in this movie,” Pusser told the Jackson Sun. “Twenty or 25 million Americans are counting on it.” The same reporter asked a reasonable follow-up: Was it difficult to relive the worst and most tragic moments of his life, “to turn a personal nightmare into a box-office saga?”
“Why not?” said Pusser. “I have to live with those memories every day anyway.”
The press conference ended in the late afternoon. Pusser drove the two hours home to Adamsville, to pick up his newly repaired Corvette. After dinner, around 9:00, Pusser stopped by the McNairy County Fair in nearby Selmer, where he could check in on Dwana, his 13-year-old daughter.
Dwana had spent the day at the fair with her best friend, Tina, but she wanted to see her daddy. As she described in her 2009 memoir, Walking On, every time he got in a car, and especially the Corvette with its extra-low suspension, Dwana worried. Her nerves had gotten so bad that she’d been hospitalized earlier in the year, and the doctors quickly identified the issue: “She’s already lost her mother. Now, she’s worried sick that she’s going to lose you.”
At 11 p.m., Tina’s mother was supposed to pick up the girls, but didn’t show up until 11:40. Dwana kissed her father — who’d been drinking vodka over ice from a Styrofoam cup all evening — goodbye and told him she loved him. The green Monte Carlo set out for Adamsville along U.S. Route 64. Pusser’s Corvette sped past. “Buford had better slow down or he’ll get killed before he gets home,” Tina’s mother said. “Oh, no, please don’t say that,” implored Dwana.
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The Monte Carlo went around a troublesome curve and approached an embankment in the distance, visible through a light post and nearby store. Dwana could see that something had happened down the hill. She began to shout. “Oh, my gosh, it’s my daddy! I just know it’s my daddy!”
When they stopped at the scene of the wreck, Dwana jumped out of the car. Pusser lay face down behind the Corvette, whose front end was in flames. She screamed at her father not to die. Dwana heard him mumble something — she hoped it was her name — and then he was gone, dead of a broken neck, his blood alcohol level twice the legal limit. As Dwana later wrote, “Daddy loved a fast car.”
Buford Pusser in September 1968 with daughter Dwana, 7, stepdaughter Diane, 18, and stepson Michael, 14.
© Jack Corn/The Tennessean/USA TODAY NETWORK
Buford Pusser’s death cemented him as an American legend, fully embedded into the country’s tough-guy DNA. Over the next five decades, through more rehashings of the story — including the 2004 Walking Tall remake with the Rock — that legend metastasized. He became the archetype for sheriffs everywhere, seeping into the American fabric. Every May, a local museum devoted to Pusser bestows an annual award — a ceremonial Pusser-autographed bat — to sheriffs who best emulated his crime-busting ways (past winners include Joe Arpaio, David Clarke, and Mark Lamb.) Walking Tall’s director, Phil Karlson, had outlined the rationale all the way back in a 1974 interview with The New York Times: “I wanted to make a picture for once in which the good guy was the hero — I was tired of pictures which glorified crooks, petty chiselers, and con men.”
But as the summer of 2025 turned to fall, the legend of Pusser had taken a licking. The strongman-vigilante archetype was decidedly out of vogue.The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) had reopened its investigation into the long-unsolved murder of Pauline thanks to a stream of tips about a lost murder weapon and witnesses never interviewed at the time. In tandem with the McNairy County district attorney’s office, the TBI announced that Pusser was the prime suspect in his wife’s murder, and that he likely killed her and staged the crime scene. For those who knew him only through Walking Tall, the news was a shock — but not to McNairy County residents who’d been skeptical of Pusser’s narrative, and dared to posit he was anything but a hero.
THE JARRING DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MAN and myth is never more apparent than at the Buford Pusser Museum, which turned the house Pusser lived from 1971 until his death into a permanent shrine. (The one where he’d lived with Pauline burned down.) A giant statue replicating his sheriff’s badge greets visitors, as do faded twin tablets listing the Ten Commandments. An eight-minute introductory video featuring his daughter, Dwana, establishes the narrative, further buttressed by family photos, perfectly preserved rooms (the walls and carpeting all orange and tan hues), guns and ammunition behind plexiglass cabinets, movie memorabilia, the wreckage of the car that finally killed him, and a signed photo from President Ronald Reagan to Pusser’s mother, Helen, “with best wishes.” The museum makes little room for nuance, let alone the stories of anyone alongside Pusser — particularly Pauline and her children.
Making a myth requires active participation. It also necessitates a good storytelling instinct, which Pusser had in spades. He’d honed those instincts as a boy in Adamsville, so close to his mother that he refused to go to school. (Pusser’s relationship to his father, Carl, a farmer, sharecropper, and eventual police chief of Adamsville, was more complicated.) Finally forced to attend school at six, he preferred to dwell in his own mind rather than listen to teachers. “More muscle than brain,” read Pusser’s high school yearbook inscription, by virtue of his prowess on the football field and basketball court. He also demonstrated erratic behavior, as with a story he liked to tell about a practical joke he played upon his maternal grandfather, firing a shotgun against the side of the outhouse as the older man used it. According to Dwana, “When his grandpa came running out with his pants hanging down below his knees, Daddy thought it was the funniest thing he had ever seen.”
He joined the Marines in August 1956, but washed out after a few months, apparently because of asthma. Only 11 days after his discharge, Pusser was seriously injured in a car accident, the first of many. When he recovered, he landed a job as a mortician’s assistant in Selmer, but that also ended after a few months, around the time he claimed to have been attacked by members of the so-called State Line Mob, immortalized in Walking Tall as a beatdown so severe it left him with untold scars and face down in a rainy ditch. (This version of events could never be corroborated.) In October 1957, Pusser made his way to Chicago to work at the Union Bag Co. His stature attracted notice, and wrestling became a side hustle, adopting the monikers “the Wild Bull” and “the Mad Russian.” At one of his matches, he met the woman who would become his wife.
Pauline Mullins remains an elusive figure. Born Feb. 27, 1931, the eldest of six, she was raised in Haysi, Virginia — an even smaller town than Adamsville. A place that when you grew old enough, as her younger brother, Griffon, told the TBI, you “bugged out of there because there was nothing left but the coal mines.” (Griffon Mullins did not respond to requests for an interview.) By 1959, Pauline had survived a troubled first marriage and made the wrenching decision to give up her youngest child, Karen, born physically and mentally incapacitated, to distant relatives to raise. (Karen, later Sharon, died in her twenties.) Pauline and her two eldest kids, Diane and Mike, settled in Chicago.
When Pauline met Pusser, he was just 21 to her 28. He liked her as well as her children, which was more than her first husband ever had. They married on Dec. 5, 1959. A week later, for reasons that remain murky and are depicted quite differently in Walking Tall, Pusser and two pals decided to travel back to Adamsville, an eight-hour trip on a good day, and ended up at the Plantation Club, where they got into a fight with the owner, W.O. Hathcock. Later, Pusser said it was revenge for the attack two years earlier; Hathcock, who swore out an assault and attempted-murder complaint, claimed Pusser and his friends were out to rob him. The trio were acquitted in a jury trial thanks to multiple witnesses, including Pauline, swearing he was out of state at the time.
Pauline Pusser had been trying to leave her husband, Buford, before her death.
© Jamar Coach/The Jackson Sun/USA TODAY NETWORK/Imagn Images
In early 1962, a year after this legal victory, Pusser moved his family, now including baby Dwana, to Adamsville. He picked up wrestling gigs for money, but wanted to be in law enforcement, finally given the chance when elected constable that September. He professed a desire to clean up the area; McNairy County was dry, unlike neighboring Mississippi, and busting up illegal moonshine rackets became a semiregular thing.
But Pusser wanted more. He wanted to be county sheriff and ran for election in the summer of 1964. It would be a long shot, but five days before the election, his opponent, Democratic incumbent James Dickey, died in a car crash. At 26, Pusser became the youngest sheriff in the state’s history. He would be reelected handily two years later. Was it popularity — or fear?
He claimed self-defense when he shot Louise Hathcock, W.O’s sister in law and the proprietor of the Shamrock Hotel, on Feb. 1, 1966, while he was investigating an on-site robbery. Maybe that’s how it happened, but no one else was in the room. (An autopsy concluded Hathcock had been shot twice in the back.) No one was around, either, when Pusser killed convicted murderer Charles “Russ” Hamilton on Christmas Day 1968, responding to a drunk-and-disorderly complaint. Then there was the stabbing incident, supposedly instigated by a hitchhiker. A couple of gunshot wounds to his face in January 1967 landed Pusser in a hospital.
All the while, Pauline was looking for a way out of her marriage. Multiple people would later attest to the trouble between Pusser and Pauline, who not only kept house, but also handled the books for the sheriff’s department and cooked for the prisoners at the county jail. Pusser had affairs with several women. Pusser’s deputy, Jim Moffett, later told the TBI that Pauline had gone to the DA’s office asking about how to get a divorce from her husband, since she would have to prove he was at fault. And she had found a motel room in nearby Savannah while she figured out how to get the kids out of the house and leave Pusser for good.
Any troubles, however, evaporated on Aug. 12, 1967, when Pusser got a disturbance call before dawn. Pauline went with him. Maybe it was to save time on later travel, or because she was worried about him, or because he didn’t want to let her out of his sight; his story kept changing. Either way, Pusser and Pauline were the victims of an ambush, he said, by several of his enemies. Pauline was killed almost instantly. He attempted to battle them on a desolate road near the state line, and kept going even after his jaw was nearly shot off, he said, by a .30-caliber carbine.
In death, she became a symbol and ceased being a person. No one discussed Pauline as being anything other than the wife of Buford Pusser, legendary lawman. Meanwhile, Pusser’s second turn as sheriff was an opportunity for further publicity. In 1968, Eddie Bond, the Memphis singer who infamously turned Elvis Presley away from his band, garnered local notoriety for “The Ballad of Buford Pusser,” and later, an entire album’s worth of Pusser-related songs (the queasiest might be “Christmas in Heaven,” dedicated to Dwana, and about her dearly departed mother).
A year later, in 1969, having gotten wind of Pusser’s notoriety, Roger Mudd of CBS News arrived in McNairy County to interview the sheriff for the broadcast. Mort Briskin, a Hollywood producer, watched it and saw film potential, obtaining Pusser’s life rights that summer to make the movie that would become Walking Tall. W.R. Morris, a local PR guy and former newsman, made hay with a 1971 biography — really hagiography — called The Twelfth of August. Pusser, and later his estate, would have legal skirmishes with all three men. He openly disparaged Morris in particular — but continued to sign copies of The Twelfth of August for anyone who asked.
CAMMY WILSON WAS A YOUNG REPORTER working at the Dayton Daily News in Ohio when her editor saw Walking Tall in the fall of 1973. He was curious about the relationship between the real Buford Pusser and Joe Don Baker’s version, so he sent Wilson down to Tennessee.
Wilson had covered the war in Vietnam, and was nearly as scared by McNairy County. “I had a rental car, and every time I went to Selmer, I would take a different route,” she says. She’d been told by reputable people that Pusser would sit in his car on U.S. Route 45, watching for her to pass. Wilson refused to interview or meet Pusser in person, only by telephone: “I thought he was very volatile, and I was not in a position where I would have had sufficient protection from anybody.”
The resulting story ran in the Sunday edition of the Dayton Daily News on Oct. 7, 1973. Wilson delivered an incisive, forensic deconstruction of the Pusser legend, revealing him to be almost the exact opposite of the heroic crime fighter of Walking Tall. She reported that Pusser took $600 a month in bribes from Louise Hathcock, whom he later killed — “There were no actual witnesses, as far as is known, to the killing,” Wilson wrote. It landed with a thunderclap.
She had an affidavit from a tavern owner about Pusser being on the take. And in her retelling of Pauline’s murder, written with a sizable amount of skepticism of the official narrative, “the only person who substantiated Pusser’s story was his father, Carl Pusser.” As Grady Bingham, Alcorn County, Mississippi’s sheriff, told Wilson, “I was in office four years, and I never had to kill anybody.” Another resident, shaking his head, added: “There’s just been too much killing with Pusser.”
Needless to say, Pusser wasn’t happy with the article, and claimed that Wilson had an agenda. “Her mother was about to lose her home in Mississippi,” he told Newspaper Enterprise Association wire reporter Ellie Grossman in March 1974. “Cammy was contacted by these people involved in the crime now on the state line, and she stayed some weeks to do the story. Then she came up with the $1,500 payment for the house. Now, you tell me: Is a paper in Dayton, Ohio, going to send someone 500 miles to write a story and pay her salary all that time?”
Yes, said Wilson’s editor. When Pusser died, the Dayton Daily News ran an editorial detailing the reality of his life, featuring “at least seven mysterious deaths and countless beatings.” After publishing a pointed story about Pusser’s death and legacy in New Times Magazine, Wilson decamped for Minnesota and a job at the Star Tribune. She revisited the Pusser story in 1977, timed to the release of the third Walking Tall film, and then moved on to other award-winning investigations, first at the paper, and later in Asia in the 1980s.
Wilson retired a few years ago after a long stint as a journalism professor. Now 80, she is feeling the pull of the Pusser story again. “I think I was so disgusted with the way that people reacted,” Wilson says. The myth had grown larger than ever, but Wilson still vividly remembers what it was like to talk to the people who actually lived in McNairy County. “It was only in other places that people wanted to believe that movie,” she says. “People were cowering. They did not engage him directly. The people who engaged him directly, some of them wound up dead.”
A poster for the original ‘Walking Tall’ movie from 1973, starring Joe Don Baker and Elizabeth Hartman.
MGM/Everett
THE DRIVE WEST INTO MCNAIRY COUNTY from Nashville on a late October day is a particularly beautiful one, crossing rolling hills through brightly colored foliage. Something changes at the approach to Adamsville, population roughly 2,200, and not only because U.S. 64 suddenly becomes Buford Pusser Highway. The ‘Ville, with its red, teeth-baring bird mascot, fish-fry and rib joints, and close proximity to the Shiloh National Military Park, has gone all in on the long-dead sheriff. Pusser was their hometown man, who inspired generations of men to make law enforcement their career (never mind his flagrant flouting of the law) and who gave off the aura of potent masculinity so many still strive for today.
Not everyone in McNairy County holds Pusser in high regard, though. It doesn’t break cleanly, but the gist is that in Adamsville, you are pro-Pusser, and in Selmer, you aren’t. The divide began years before Pauline’s murder, but her death cemented the split, the rumor mill churning within hours of her death. Pusser’s story didn’t make sense. Why would Pauline have gotten into the car with him at 4:45 a.m.? Why, if she’d been shot and he hadn’t yet, had he not radioed for help? And then when bullets supposedly blew through the side and took out Pusser’s cheek, why hadn’t he tried a distress signal of some kind? Why was there another crime scene two miles away from where the ambush happened, where 16-year-old Dennis Hathcock, son of Pusser beating victim W.O. and nephew of murdered Louise, discovered part of Pauline’s scalp and brain matter stacked in a pile, almost as if it had been carefully arranged?
The rumors grew so deafening that a month after the alleged ambush, the state district attorney, Will Terry Abernathy, flatly denied to the Jackson Sun that Pusser had been arrested for murdering Pauline. The rumor “has absolutely no foundation,” Abernathy said, and “several leads are being checked out.” Those leads circulated around supposed “State Line Mob” members like Carl “Towhead” White, murdered in 1969, who denied any involvement. Or Kirksey Nix, imprisoned still for other crimes — including ordering a successful hit on a judge — who denied, at times volubly, having anything to do with Pauline’s murder. (He also had an alibi.)
If Pusser knew something more, or even had something to do with killing Pauline, who was going to do anything about it? Whatever appetite there may have been likely vanished after Pusser was reelected McNairy County sheriff handily for his third and final term in 1968, and were quelled for good after his death six years later. State investigators had only Pusser’s word for what happened. And despite what a Tennessee medical examiner later said, it was unusual that Pauline’s body wasn’t autopsied; she was a homicide victim, after all.
The lack of an autopsy baffled law enforcement, too, who finally did something about it. On Feb. 8, 2024, Pauline’s remains were disinterred from the cemetery in Adamsville. The presence of a backhoe reverberated across McNairy County, and everyone — the pro-Pusser crowd and the naysayers — understood what it meant: the answer to what really happened to her was, perhaps, in sight.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation quietly reopened the case in late 2022, acting on many tips sent its way by Mike Elam, a former law-enforcement officer from Bella Vista, Arkansas. Elam, once a Pusser fan, had grown suspicious of the legend over the course of three decades, and wasn’t shy about broadcasting his beliefs on message boards, Facebook groups, and YouTube videos.
Elam heard from those with information about Pauline and what might have happened to her — people whom the TBI had never spoken to during the initial investigation. People like Dennis Hathcock, whom police officers had shooed away from the crime scene in 1967 and never interviewed. People like Lavon Plunk, the wife of Deputy Sheriff Peatie Plunk and Pauline’s best friend. Pauline had confided in Lavon that she was planning on taking the kids and leaving Pusser. Though Lavon had expressed some mild suspicions to Cammy Wilson, it would take another three decades before Lavon told Elam, in a recorded conversation later obtained by the TBI, about the gunshot she thought she had heard coming from the Pusser house on the night Pauline died — and that in her fear of the likely culprit, she drove home.
Elam forwarded his interview with Lavon to the TBI. He also learned that Peatie and Lavon’s son, Ricky, had held on to a gun that may have been used to kill Pauline and wound Pusser, and urged Ricky to tell investigators. Ricky told the TBI that on the day of Pauline’s murder, Buford asked Peatie to retrieve his guns from the trunk of his car while he was in the hospital. Peatie then gave the gun to his son. Oakley Dean Baldwin, another former law-enforcement official, in North Carolina, also passed on relevant information, including contacts for Pauline’s surviving siblings. The new investigation was short on direct evidence — most of the witnesses, as well as the likely suspect, were dead — and long on circumstance, reconstruction, and narrative.
The TBI tracked down Pusser’s former girlfriends, one of whom was the subject of an alleged argument between him and Pauline in the early-morning hours of Aug. 12, 1967. According to family members who were told this information decades later, Barbara Gail Drewry Bivins and Shirley Smith were in the parking lot of the Old Hickory Club in Guys, a town near the Mississippi state line. They heard shouting from a man and a woman in the near distance, the couple unaware anyone was listening. But the women quickly recognized the Pussers’ voices.
Pauline sounded fed up, the women said. She knew about his affairs, but the one with Pearl Wade, a Black woman visiting her parents off and on from Ohio, was the last straw. “I’ll ruin you!” she screamed at her husband from the passenger side of the car. That was all they heard before the car sped off.
Antipathy is not grounds for indictment. The results of Pauline’s autopsy, however, created reasonable cause to believe that Buford Pusser was her likeliest murderer. It revealed that Pauline had been shot twice in the back of the head, contradicting Pusser’s initial statements to the TBI in August 1967. The autopsy also revealed that Pauline had recently recovered from a broken nose, which, investigators noted, are “frequently associated with incidents of domestic violence.”
Buried within the six-volume, more-than-2,300-page TBI file was a 1976 statement by another of Pusser’s deputies, Jim Moffett. He told investigators then that he knew Pusser had hit Pauline three days before her death.
WITH THE TBI FILE AVAILABLE to the public, and the district attorney’s judgment that if alive today, Buford Pusser would be indicted for the murder of his wife, more than 60 years of myth seems to be challenged. “I’m absolutely delighted that the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation finally got onto it,” Wilson tells me. Patterson Hood, co-founder of the Drive-By Truckers, whose 2004 album, The Dirty South, included three songs puncturing the Pusser myth, is more pointed when I ask him about the new developments: “I said all along that he was a piece of shit!” Hood says. “It was also pretty common knowledge back in those days that he was no better than the people he was fighting — and maybe even worse, because he had a badge and that made him extra powerful.”
Mike Elam and Oakley Dean Baldwin also believe this is a happy outcome. Elam ends every video on the case by saying, “We got justice for Pauline.” Baldwin, in the newest edition of The Murder of Mrs. Buford Pusser (Solved), co-written with his wife, Doris, closes the book with, “No more running and no more hiding. Justice is served!”
But what does justice mean here? In the rush to celebrate the end of a case, and for overturning the myth of Buford Pusser, there’s little appetite to grapple with Pauline’s lived life, and what she meant to her family and her friends. In all of the mythmaking surrounding the story of Pusser beating and robbing W.O. Hathcock in December 1959, it’s telling that little, if any, thought was given to the effects on Pauline, barely wed a week with two kids to care for while her husband was off criminally gallivanting with his pals.
Buford Pusser, then the sheriff, showing a photographer around the McNairy County Courthouse in Selmer in 1968.
© The Tennessean/USA TODAY NETWORK
A similar lack of insight exists about Pauline’s life in McNairy County: Did she feel isolated from her family, particularly as her husband became physically abusive, slept with other women, and killed several people in suspicious circumstances?
The trauma didn’t end with Pauline’s death, either. Diane, 17 when her mother was murdered, once called Pusser “a man to be afraid of.” He had slapped her at least once, and spoke of other kinds of abuse to her friends, including more than one occasion when Pusser ran his hands all over her body as he cornered her in the kitchen. Shortly before Pauline’s death, Diane ran away after an argument with her mother. “The vibes were so bad,” Diane told Cammy Wilson in October 1973. “Mother was upset, she would have these bad headaches. She got real upset and nervous.” Pauline tracked her down and called, imploring Diane to come home. “She told me things were going bad with her and Buford. That was right before she got killed.”
The mood grew even more rancid for Diane after Pauline’s death. She’d heard a fight and a gunshot that night, the TBI later learned, and believed she saw Pusser carrying her mother to his car. She continued to clash with Pusser and grew suspicious about his finances. According to Wilson’s article, Diane’s concerns grew after cases of booze were delivered to the house: “I remember one time he busted a U-Haul trailer full of untaxed whiskey. I looked under my bed and there was a case of McIntosh Scotch and a case of half-pints,” she is quoted as saying. ”If he was supposed to be putting people in jail for hauling so much whiskey, why was he keeping so much of it?”
Diane eventually left Adamsville, marrying and having children. She died in 2010 at the age of 60. Mike stayed close with his stepfather and never publicly questioned his narrative before his own death in 2021, age 66. Dwana, Pusser’s only known biological child, felt the most profound psychological effects, with both of her parents dead before her 14th birthday. Much of her estate, approximately $260,000 (more than $1.7 million today) was lost when Pusser’s mother, Helen, hired a supposed private investigator whom she paid more than $100,000 to look into an alleged murder conspiracy, according to the Toronto Star.
Dwana got pregnant at 16 with her first daughter, Atoyia, marrying the girl’s father in a brief union. Several other husbands came and went; a second daughter, Madison, was born in 1990. Though she worked for more than 15 years at a local radio station, hosting the afternoon drive-time show, Dwana invested most of her energy in her father’s legacy, particularly with the official opening of the Buford Pusser Museum in 1988, and a later, the short-lived restaurant Pusser’s.
In her memoir Walking On, Dwana stated that she believed her father’s death wasn’t an accident. If she had any reservations about the official narrative about Pauline’s murder, expressing them — and the public refutation of the myth by Buford Pusser’s daughter — was out of the question. Dwana eventually developed multiple sclerosis and struggled with depression. In 2018, according to an autopsy report obtained by Mike Elam, she died by suicide at the age of 57. Six years later, Atoyia, just 46 years old, died.
At the end of October, the city of Adamsville hosted a meeting to discuss the future of the Buford Pusser Museum. The Pusser skeptics largely stayed away, so the overall sentiment in the room was that Pusser was, and always would be, the local hero, and that the museum should remain open, a pledge of allegiance to the myth. Madison Garrison Bush, Dwana’s daughter and the older surviving Pusser heir, appeared by Zoom, vowing to take legal action against the TBI. In a statement posted the following day, Bush said: “Do I believe my grandfather killed my grandmother in the ambush? I absolutely do not.”
Bush moved to Houston a few years ago, where she is raising her family and was recently crowned Mrs. Plus America, but Adamsville, she said in an email a few days after the meeting, is always with her. “There are no easy words for the kind of loss my family has faced,” she tells me. “Losing my mother was like losing my anchor — she was my link to the past, my mentor, and my best friend. Then, losing my sister felt like the ground shifted all over again. Grief like that never really leaves you; it changes you. But it also clarifies what truly matters.”
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For her, the recent TBI revelations about her grandmother’s murder may have been painful and “stirred up questions,” but they also confirmed her sense of purpose. “Truth doesn’t erase legacy, and this past investigation did not prove a new truth. It deepens it. My goal is to protect our family’s humanity — to ensure that behind the legend, people never forget there was love, loss, and a little girl who grew up without her parents, whose story still deserves to be told with respect. It’s living with the weight of history, but also trying to live your own story in the present.”
That story will continue. Last month, the museum announced that the annual Sheriff Buford Pusser Festival would return to Adamsville in May.
