Walking Tall's Buford Pusser Under Fire: The Stick Wasn’t the Whole Story...
For decades, Buford Pusser was a walking, talking piece of Americana: a one-man anti-corruption reel who carried a stick, cleaned up McNairy County, and inspired a 1973 movie called Walking Tall (and yes, a 2004 remake — because Hollywood likes recycling gravelly stares).
The movie narrative was tidy: the sheriff’s wife is killed in an ambush, he survives, and vengeance + stick ensues as he battles crime. The story begins with a horrible tragedy and ends with justice served!
Except new reporting from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, summarized by District Attorney Mark Davidson, suggests the script may have included a few uncredited plot twists — and not the kind with cinematographer cut-scenes and synth music...
Davidson said the TBI recently uncovered “inconsistencies with Pusser’s statements and other evidentiary inconsistencies” surrounding the 1967 death of Pauline Mullins Pusser.
He added that those inconsistencies would have “more likely than not” been used to seek an indictment against the sheriff — had he still been alive. (He isn’t: Buford Pusser died in a 1974 car crash.)
This is a plot twist that even a seasoned director couldn't have seen coming!!
That’s a line that hits like a movie reveal, except it landed in a prosecutor’s office instead of a Cannes screening.
According to the DA, modern crime lab evidence suggests Pauline “was shot outside of a vehicle, then was placed inside of it,” and that her death was “not an accident” but an “act of intimate, deliberate violence.”
Blood spatter on the car hood — the kind of forensic detail that makes CSI producers salivate — apparently doesn’t match the version Pusser told investigators.
Even the sheriff’s facial wound, Davidson says, was from close contact, not long range, indicating it was likely self-inflicted.
If you’re picturing a Tolstoyan family drama behind the courthouse doors, you’re not alone.
An autopsy also reportedly revealed Pauline had a healing fracture on the right side of her nose.
Experts consulted during the re-examination have gone as far as to suggest the shooting could have been staged.
Last year the TBI exhumed Pauline’s body after receiving a fresh lead.
This spring the investigation wrapped up, producing more than 1,000 pages now sitting in the public record and evidence lockers at the University of Tennessee at Martin.
For Pauline’s brother, Griffon Mullins, the epilogue brought a measure of relief.
“I knew, deep down, there were problems in her marriage,” Mullins told WREG. “I can lay down tonight and have some peace in my mind. This is closure for me, my wife, and my two daughters. I’m thankful I got the news.”
And yet it raises a question that feels like it should have its own headline: how did a case with such theatrical potential for wrongdoing remain effectively frozen in time for six decades?
How did Tinseltown’s version — the sheriff with a stick, ambushed by shadowy criminals — lodge itself so firmly in the popular imagination that fresh forensics and a DA’s qualified indictment threshold only just now caused a ripple?
Part of the answer lives in the messy intersection of myth, media, and memory.
Pusser’s legend was perfect movie material: lone hero, stick as symbol, corruption as target.
The man who “claimed to have been shot eight times, stabbed seven times and had to kill two people in self-defense,” as CBS News reported, made for compelling copy.
Hollywood, hungry for narratives with moral clarity, helped nail that story into place. The movie version of the story was the narrative that was believed.
Another part of the answer is simpler and more bureaucratic: evidence degrades, witnesses die, politics calcify. Cases go cold.
Investigations that might have been pursued aggressively at the time can stall due to lack of forensic tech, community pressure, or official convenience.
And when you replace a messy truth with a tidy story, the tidy story has staying power.
There’s also an important civic question here — not a punchline: what should we do when new evidence complicates a community mythology?
Do we shrug and keep the popcorn, or do we demand accountability even when it makes us uncomfortable? Is the movie still a Classic Blockbuster or is it now a 'Hot Potato'?!
Davidson’s office isn’t accusing anyone today; he’s saying the evidence, as it now stands, would likely have been enough to ask a grand jury for an indictment.
The accused sheriff is dead, the sheriff’s museum in Adamsville still exists, and Paulines and Pussers are part of family histories that can’t be fully recast by TV edits.spot.com/2025/08/s
So here’s the kicker: we’ve enjoyed the myth for years, but are we ready to accept the messier human story?
And if so — why did this only surface now?
Why did it take decades for an investigation to pull at the seams of a Hollywood-ready narrative?
If the soundtrack of American folklore has always been bravado and tidy endings, maybe what this new chapter demands is a little less trumpet and a little more courtroom light.
The movies gave us a sheriff with a stick.
The newly opened files give us a reminder that real life, even heroic-seeming life, often resists being boxed into a poster.
Stines & Mullins: When Small-Town Courtroom Drama Turns Into a Full-Blown Scandal
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