Criminal - A Man to Be Afraid Of

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

Sheriff Buford Pusser said he and his wife had come under gunfire early one morning on a country road - leading to her death. He told one reporter, “I'm pretty sure about who did it, and I'm pretty sure about where he is." Jason Guerrasio's article about Buford Pusser is called ⁠"A Bullet, A Legend, A Lie."⁠ Oakley Dean Baldwin's book is called "Sheriff Buford Pusser: Final Chapter." Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com slash criminal. Cheating on your partner is a huge breach of trust. All of the pain and the guilt and the reality of what was happening hit me just like a tidal wave all at once. Why do people cheat? And why does it make us so mad even when we're not the ones it's happening to? That's this week on Explain It to Me. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Early in the morning on August 12, 1967, the sheriff of McNary County, Tennessee,

Buford Pusser, said he got a strange phone call. Related to something that was happening around the Tennessee-Mississippi line. He said the caller told him that he'd, quote, find something interesting out on New Hope Road. And his wife, Pauline, was very concerned and decided that she was going to ride along with Buford to this call. writer Jason Garacio. So they get in the car and drive, while it's still dark out, down this windy, gravelly road. And about halfway there, a car out of nowhere comes out and begins shooting at them.

Buford Pusser later said it sounded like a bunch of machine guns had opened up. His wife Pauline was shot. Buford Pusser said he quickly sped away with his wife laying in his lap. Buford drives for a little farther, pulls it aside, checks his wife, see what kind of injury she has, and then the car reappears and completely just shoots up the entire car. Pauline was shot again, and Buford was also hit. Buford later told investigators that he was looking at. Pauline when she was shot in the forehead. He was shot in the chin.

Buford radioed for help and drove for several miles down the road. Police from a nearby town soon arrived. Pauline Pusser died at the scene. She was 36. Buford Pusser, who was 29, was seriously injured. when police showed up, they saw him completely bloodied, barely able to talk, just trying to kind of hold his jaw together, and then he was rushed to the hospital. Beaufort Pusser had surgery in Memphis.

During his stay in the hospital, he was put in a secret room with two sheriff's deputies and two police officers assigned to protect him. The governor of Tennessee offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. While he was still in the hospital recovering, Pauline Pusser's funeral was held in Adamsville, where the couple lived. A newspaper reported that the church was full. More than 200 people came. They wrote, quote, every wall was banked with flowers.

Less than a month after the attack, Sheriff Buford Pufford. Pusser was back at work. When reporters interviewed him about the ambush that had killed his wife, he told them, I'm pretty sure about who did it, and I'm pretty sure about where he is. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. Buford Pusser was elected sheriff of McNary County in 1964. He ran against the incumbent sheriff, who died in a car accident just a week before the election. Beaufort won by a few hundred votes.

He was the youngest sheriff to be elected in Tennessee history. He was 26. The way it was told to me by many was that if you were friends with him, he was a best friend. If you weren't, he was your greatest enemy. Buford Pusser grew up in Adamsville in McNary County, a rural area about 100 miles east of Memphis. His father was a local police. chief. Buford was tall and athletic. He played football and basketball in school. When he graduated from high school, he enlisted in the Marines, but quickly was discharged due to asthma. Eventually,

Beaufort left Tennessee and went to Chicago, where he attended mortuary school, worked at a factory, and started a professional wrestling career. He was known as Buford the Bull. I mean, this is a guy that, you know, once he grew up with six foot six, 250 plus pounds, a very imposing figure. So he was perfect for the wrestling ring. And that's where he met Pauline. Pauline Mullins was a divorced mother of three. She was six years older than Beaufort.

They got married in Chicago in December of 1959 and moved back to Adamsville a few years later. Buford Pusser was elected police chief of Adamsville after his father stepped down. And then Buford was elected sheriff of McNary County. McNary County, Tennessee, back then, even now, is a beautiful region, but a very poor region of the country. And if you weren't working out a factory or farming, even if you were doing that, you more than likely had a moonshine still in your backyard. And for most in that time, you just looked away. It was something just to pass the time or make some extra money. Once Buford became sheriff, he really, that was his goal, was to break up all these illegal moonshine stills.

Tennessee enacted the nation's first prohibition law in 1838, making it a misdemeanor to sell alcohol in bars and stores. Even after the national ban on alcohol ended in 1933, Tennessee stayed completely dry. for several more years. The state eventually allowed individual counties and cities to vote on whether they wanted to allow sales of alcohol. By the mid-1960s, more than half of the population of Tennessee still lived in dry areas,

including McNary County. You know, Beaufort, going back to his wrestling days, knew how to self-promote. I think he wanted more than what his father had, what his friends had. He had ambitions to be someone that if you saw him out on the street, you would go, wow, hey, that's Bufra Pusser. So I think he wanted to have a persona that was as big as him physically.

So what better way to get famous, but to break up the most notorious things that were going on in his backyard? Beaufort Pusser quickly gained a reputation for going after bootleggers, moonshine stills, and illegal alcohol sales. In a raid in December of 1964, he seized almost 3,000 bottles of Kentucky whiskey with the help of state agents. He told reporters that it was the largest amount of whiskey ever seized in the county. He also raided bars and motels near the Mississippi-Tennessee State Line, known for gambling, and illegal alcohol sales. including one called the Shamrock Motel and Restaurant. It was a rough place.

Everybody will tell you. You know, there were definitely fights there. There was a lot of heavy drinking. The Shamrock Motel and Restaurant was owned by Louise Hathcock, who had shot and killed her ex-husband. She claimed self-defense. She was known to be part of a loosely organized crime syndicate known as the state-line mob.

Depending on which stories you believe it could trace all the way back to the mafia up east. But their main thing was doing moonshine and prostitution. State line mob definitely were Beaufort's main enemies. In 1966, Torres staying at the Shamrock Motel filed a police report after they set a purse containing $125 had gone missing. Sheriff Pusser showed up at the establishment because the couple had made a complaint. And he had already had interactions in the past with Louise. And he went there.

He had a conversation with Louise in a back room, just the two of them. And according to Beaufort, Louise pulled out a gun, shot at him, missed. Buford pivoted, turned, and shot her and killed her. Beaufort said that Louise's bullet had, quote, whizzed by my ear. He said he dropped to the floor and fired three shots, hitting her in the chest, face, and neck. Did he face any charges?

He was found not guilty by a grand jury. They came to an agreement that it was in self-defense. The year after Beaufort Pusser, shot and killed Louise Hathcock, Buford's wife Pauline was murdered. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. Support for Criminal comes from Bombas.

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You can go to bombus.com slash criminal and use code criminal for 20% off your first purchase. That's b-O-M-B-A-S.com slash criminal, code criminal at checkout. Support for criminal comes from Zoc Doc. Finding a doctor who's right for you can be challenging. And it's a great feeling when you finally find someone that understands you and knows how to make you feel comfortable. Zoc Doc is a free app and website that helps you find in book high quality in-network doctors, so you can find someone you love. Book in-network appointments with more than 150,000 providers

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to find and instantly book a doctor you love today. That's ZOC, doc.com slash criminal. Zocdoch.com slash criminal. Thanks to Zokdoch for sponsoring this message. Sheriff Buford Pusser said he believed that the early morning attack that killed his wife was, quote, linked to his crackdown on criminal activity at the Tennessee-Mississippi border. He told reporters that he was sure the shooters were after him, not his wife. His assumption was that it was someone involved with the state line mob. He never really

gave any specific names. It was more just, they finally got me. The local district attorney, who was leading the investigation, said he believed that hired assassins were behind the shooting. The chief of the Tennessee Bureau of Criminal Identification told reporters were not overlooking anything. A ballistics expert who examined the car that Buford and Pauline had been riding in said that the bullets that killed Pauline and wounded Buford were from a 30-caliber rifle. The investigation went on for years. Buford even took part in some points of the investigation, strangely enough. There were a few specific people in the state line mob. One individual named Toehead White, who was in jail at the time

the ambush, that they went in question, they questioned his girlfriend. And there are transcripts now that show the girlfriend calling up towhead going, why are the police trying to interview me about this ambush? So there were specific people that Buford wanted, investigated, but those things all led to dead ends. They investigated for about 10 years, even going as far as reaching out to Jay Edgar Hoover in the offices of the FBI to run ballistic tests on bullets that they had found. But eventually it became a cold case. No one was ever charged.

No murder weapon was ever found. In September of 1967, a month after Pauline's death, the New York Daily News featured Buford Pusser in a two-page spread. They wrote that during his time as sheriff, he was responsible for destroying more than 30 stills. seizing more than 15,000 gallons of whiskey and bringing three dozen moonshiners and bootleggers to justice.

The article also talked about the many times that criminals had tried to kill him. They wrote that he had been shot, stabbed, and dragged down the road by a car. One deputy, said Beaufort Pusser, was jumped by six men while he was unarmed, adding, the sheriff took three of them to the hospital and three of them to jail. The article said Beaufort was becoming a legend in West Tennessee. A Tennessee singer named Eddie Bond recorded a song about Beaufort. Eddie Bond went on to write a whole album of songs about him, including one called Buford Pusser goes bear hunting with a switch.

That same year, Buford Pusser shot and killed a man after he was called to a disturbance at his home on Christmas Day. He said the man shot at him first. One headline after the shooting read, Sheriff Buford Pusser adds to legend. CBS News correspondent Roger Mudd came to McNary County to interview Buford. And then in 1971, a writer named W.R. Morris published a biography of him, called The 12th of August.

And then eventually that led to Hollywood getting hold of the story. Of all people, it's Bing Crosby. and his production company, who catches wind of the pusser story and decides to bring it to the big screen. And this is a film that, you know, a little small drama, not made for a lot of money.

And at its peak, when it came out in theaters, it was making more money in theaters, especially in the South, than the Godfather was, which at the time was still a sensation and had just won the Oscar for Best Picture. The movie was called Walking Tall. Buford Pusser was played by actor Joe Don Baker.

I was elected sheriff on one issue that I'd bust every joint in the whole county. We're going to start tomorrow. First off, I don't want any car, truck, or driver that even looks like a moonshadow to move on our roads. Ads for the movie said it was, quote, the powerful and true story of Sheriff Buford Pusser, who couldn't be able to. bought and couldn't be killed. Buford said the movie was about 80% true. In the movie,

Buford Pusser carries a big stick, which he uses to break up moonshine stills and beat people. During press appearances, he would autograph sticks for fans. One newspaper said the film was one of the most violent yet most moving films of the season. One review of the movie said, walking tall deserves credit for creating mostly believable characters who are bigger than life,

comic book big. The movie cost $500,000 to produce and made more than $40 million worldwide. You know, generations since people joined law enforcement because of what they saw on screen. By the time the movie came out in 1973, Buford was no longer the sheriff of McNary County. He lost when he tried to run for a fourth term in 1972.

In August of 1974, it was announced that Buford would play himself in a sequel to The Walking Tall movie. He told a reporter at a press conference in Memphis, the idea scares me some. He drove back home and was at a fair and got in his car, his corvette that he had just bought, and he sped down the highway,

and he got into a fiery wreck and died. Some people speculated that Beaufort's enemies had tampered with his car. But police investigating said they could find no evidence of foul play. One newspaper wrote, Seven times while he was sheriff, attempts were made on his life. He died, a victim of his love.

for speed. After his death in 1974, what did you hear from people in McNary County about his death? I would say a certain amount of relief. Cammy Wilson is a former investigative reporter who grew up in Mississippi, across the state line from McNary County. Everybody knew about Pusser. He was brutal. He would attack people.

people, and he was known as a violent person. What was shocking was how much he was glorified in the movie. In 1973, the year before Buford Pusser died, Cammy Wilson was working at a newspaper in Dayton, Ohio. Walking Tall was playing in the local theaters. At that time, that was in the county in Ohio, where I was working, that was the most watched movie that they had ever had. So one day my editor came back from lunch and came over to my desk and said, are you from the county near McNary County, Tennessee? And I said, yes, I'm from Allcorn County, which is just over the line. And he said, well, I just watched Walking Tall. What do you think of that movie? And I said, and I I said, well, I think it's a fraud.

And he said, well, I thought it was, too, so I'm going to send you down there, and I want you to do a story for us. Cammy Wilson went down to McNary County to talk with people about what they knew. She talked with the mayor of Selmer, the county seat, who had previously said that the plot of walking tall, quote, has little, if any, resemblance to the truth. She also talked with the Sheriff of McNary County at that time, Clifford Coleman, who Beaufort lost to in 1972. Sheriff Coleman ran on the slogan, if your son had to be arrested, would you want it to be done by me or by Pusser?

And he won the election. So, anyway, he was sheriff at the time. And he had told me that Pusser would pull off. the road at a fast food restaurant and wait to see if I drove by. And at that time, it was well known that civil rights workers, anybody that you disliked, had a certain danger of getting run off the road if somebody didn't like your stories or your activities. So I was trying to avoid that, so I always went a different route.

So you thought that Passer himself might hurt you? Potentially. You know, at the time, people would go down there and they would interview him and they would just swallow whatever he said. So he knew that I was looking for the real story. Cammy Wilson said she talked with local club owners, one of whom told her they had regularly paid Buford Pusser bribes. People also told her that Louise Hathcock had also paid bribes to the county

before being shot and killed. In the movie version of his story, Buford Pusser gets robbed and beaten up at a state-line club before becoming sheriff, and then goes back to the club and gets revenge, beating people up with his stick and getting his money back. He's put on trial and tells the courtroom he stood up for himself to show, quote, there's still a little law and order left. He's found not guilty by the jury.

Cammy Wilson learned that in reality, something different had happened. In 1960, while he was still living in Chicago, Buford had gone to a state-line club seeking revenge for an earlier incident. He beat up a man named W. O. Hathcock, a relative of Louise Hathcock, who was so badly injured that he was in the hospital for two weeks. Buford was charged with armed robbery. But when he was put on trial, he said he wasn't there that night. Pauline testified that he was in Illinois at the time, and Buford produced a punch time card from his factory job in Chicago. He was found not guilty.

He later said he lied. He readily admitted that he and his friends had gone to the club and they had beaten up Hathcock, and they had taken the money that he had lost. He quibbled about the amount of the money. He said that he didn't take as much as they said he took. Cammy Wilson also talked with one of Buford Pusser's former deputies, about the many times Buford had reported being attacked or hurt on the job.

He said that he was just beaten up in a lot of drunkled brawls and that he was often carved up in some of those drunken brawls, that it didn't have anything to do with his activities, his sheriff. So he was drinking himself? Oh, very much so. And in fact, I interviewed his stepdaughter who talked about how he would bring home cases of liquor and put them under the bed. And, you know, if he was supposed to be sheriff,

why was he keeping so much of the illegal liquor for himself? Buford Pusser's stepdaughter, Diane, also talked with Cammy Wilson about her mother's death. His stepdaughter told me that she thought he had killed her mother. And she even supplied what she thought was a motive that she was planning to leave Pusser. The stepdaughter told me. Diane told Cammy Wilson that Buford Pusser was, quote, a man to be afraid of. Cammy says Diane was not the only person who told her they thought Buford had killed his wife.

A lot of people did. Now, that doesn't mean that everybody did, but that was the common knowledge. When she got back to Ohio, Cammy Wilson called up Buford Pusser for an interview. I asked him about all the rumors that he had shot his wife, and I asked him if he had been having affairs, and he, of course, denied it.

And I asked him about taking bribes, and I told him that I had an affidavit from a club owner, and I asked him about his killing of Louise Hathcock. How did he react when you asked him those questions? With anger, but he was not surprised. You know, it wasn't like it was a call out of the blue. He knew that I had been asking people questions, and that I had been gathering affidavits and interviewing a number of people.

He denied everything. Yes. The headline of Cammy's article was, The Sheriff walked tall and violently. A year after Cammy Wilson published her first article, she published another one, shortly after Buford Pusser's death. One thing is sure, she wrote, most citizens of McNary are not grieving.

She also quoted a former sheriff from across the state line in Mississippi, who told her before Beaufort Pusser's death, as far as I'm concerned, Pusser is just a thug. Did you think that maybe something might change in the investigation into Pauline's death after you wrote those articles? I would have hoped so, but it was a matter of money. I mean, once the movie came out, people would come to the county to see what had been going on there. And then when he was killed, then people began to really make money from the fact that people would come.

They would stay in the local motels. People started giving them tours. They even created a Buford Pusser Museum. So people loved the story. It was a complete fabrication, but they loved the story. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Shopify. Before starting a business, lots of people experience self-doubt.

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Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash criminal. Go to Shopify.com slash criminal. That's Shopify.com slash criminal. Support for criminal comes from Wayfair. You want your home to be inviting and comfortable, not just for you, but for anyone who comes to visit. And that includes your outdoor space. If yours is lacking seating, lighting, decor, or even a grill, Wayfair is here to help. I'm in need of an outdoor umbrella this year.

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Wayfair, every style, every home. On Thursday, February 8, 2004, 50 years after Buford Pusser's death, a team from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, went to the cemetery at Adamsville, Tennessee. They were there to exhume the body of Pauline Pusser. I knew that there was going to be something there that was going to tell the true story. It was going to give Pauline a voice from the grave. Oakley-Deen Baldwin is a former sheriff's deputy

from Wake County, North Carolina. He's also a distant relative of Pauline Pusser. I never met Pauline. Of course, I was only 12 years old when she was. was murdered. But my uncle Johnny, who was our family historian, I want to say in the, about the time the movies came out, maybe 73, he was telling me at a family reunion that we had a distant cousin who was murdered while she was writing with her husband. Oakley Dean Baldwin started looking into Pauline's story in 2014. He'd retired and was interested

and learning more about his family tree. At the start, I had no clue other than what I had heard from the law enforcement circles, what Buford Pusker had told the TBI, that's the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. So at the start, I was, you know, I believed that, you know, they were ambushed. Oakley-Deen Baldwin read the 1960s case files, which detailed what Buford had said happened on the night Pauline's murder, and he started gathering other pieces of evidence. Photographs were the crime scene, witness statements from people, things were not matching up. At the same time, another person states away, in Arkansas, was also looking into the case.

A former deputy sheriff named Mike Elam. Mike was someone who loved Bufur Pusser, loved the movie, loved the book, and loved the book. Writer Jason Garaccio interviewed Mike Elam, who told him that as he started looking into Buford Pusser's story more, he got interested in the death of club owner Louise Hathcock, who Buford shot and killed in 1966. But then he started doing some digging, and he found Louise Hathcock's autopsy. And inside that autopsy, it showed that her wounds were not to the front of her.

they were to the back. Two shots in the back, one shot in the back of the head. That is very different than what Buford said happened in that room when supposedly she pulled a gun on him. Mike Elam also found that Louise Hathcock's autopsy report

was never shown to the grand jury that acquitted Buford Pusser of murder. When Pauline was murdered, the year after Louise Hathcock's death, There was no autopsy performed at all. You had this high-profile sheriff with a 36-year-old wife who's murdered from an ambush that he's saying was from the mob, and it didn't make any sense that they didn't do an autopsy on her.

There were other things about Pauline's murder that didn't make sense to Mike Elam or Oakley Dean Baldwin either. What they both found out independently, that was a major red flag to both of these people who had careers in long, enforcement was that there was too much blood on the outside of the car. That showed me that there was somebody violently injured on the outside of the car. And Bufour Pusser's statement was that Pauline and himself were, they were both shot inside the car only.

Either someone was hit with a club or shot in front of that car on the outside. Then there was also Buford's statement about how fast they were going on New Hope Road, how far away the other car was, how far away he went the second time he pulled over to check on Pauline. All these things, when Mike Elam actually went and drove the whole route, he did exactly what Buford said he did that night. none of it added up, none of it made sense. Mike Elam and Oakley Dean Baldwin both published books about their findings. And then in 2022, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation decided to reopen the investigation into Pauline's murder. And the first thing they have to do, because it wasn't done 50-so years before, was to give Pauline's an autopsy.

Good morning. Thank you all for being here. I'm Mark Davidson. I'm the District Attorney General for the 25th Judicial District. In August 2025, a press conference was held about Pauline's murder.

Justice for Pauline has been a long time coming, and thanks to all the hard work put in by so many were finally able to announce to Pauline's surviving family and to the public that we

believe we are as close as possible to justice. District Attorney Mark Davidson said the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation believed there were inconsistencies in what Buford Pusser had told law enforcement about Pauline's death. Including physical, medical, forensic, ballistic, and reenactment evidence that contradicts his version of events. One of those pieces of evidence was Pauline Pusser's autopsy, conducted in 2024. That autopsy reveals that her gunshot wound is in the back of her head, which completely just throws away Buford's statement that he's looking right at her when she's shot in the forehead.

The autopsy also reveals that Pauline had bruising in her nasal passage, which was, thought to be that she had suffered domestic violence before her death. The TBI's investigative report about Pauline's murder, which was more than a thousand pages long, also included statements from Buford Pusser's chief deputy that he had made almost a decade after Pauline died. He knew that Buford Pusser had beaten Pauline up

just days before she was murdered. and another lady, she worked with Pauline, and she saw Pauline with black eyes and bruises on her arms where she had been beaten up. His former deputy also said that shortly before her death, Pauline had gone to the local district attorney for help with getting a divorce. Investigators from the TBI spoke with two witnesses,

who said they heard Pauline and Buford arguing the night before Pauline's death, about his involvement with a woman named Pearl Wade. Pauline allegedly shouted that she would ruin Buford and would turn him in for taking bribes from businesses. Later that night, Buford was also seen trying to talk with a woman named Anne Henderson, who later confirmed that she'd also been having an affair with him. He was in a rage trying to get in the door, and Beaufort was yelling, let me in, I'm going to die tonight, you'll be putting flowers on my grave.

So she runs out of the house and they get into a big scuffle and he grabbed her by the arm, but she manages to get away and goes back in the house and he leaves and he's spinning his tires. And two hours later, or maybe an hour later, we're not exactly sure, but that window of opportunity, Pauline's murdered. A medical examiner also looked at photos of Beaufort Pusser's facial wounds and concluded that he was shot at close range, rather than from a distance, as he had claimed. They concluded that his wound was likely self-inflicted. At the press conference, District Attorney Mark Davidson said that they now believed that Pauline

had most likely been shot outside of the car, and then placed inside the car. They believe the crime scene had been staged. He said, quote, there is probable cause to believe that Pauline's death was not an accident, but an act of intimate, deliberate violence. If Beaufort Puster was alive today, they felt they had enough probable cause

to charge him or indict him with the murder of Pauline. When this all came out in Adamsville, you went there, you talked to people in town, What was the reaction? Was this a big deal in town? So when you go to Adamsville, Tennessee, which is in McNary County, which is where Beaufort lived and where he patrolled, the legend of Beaufort Pusser is everywhere. When you drive up to the town line, there's a giant sign that says, welcome to Adamsville, home of Buford Pussell. with a silhouette of the man holding his trusty stick that he supposedly fought crime with.

There's a giant water tower with that silhouette figure on it. His home has turned into a museum. Everything in Adamsville is about Buford Pusser. And so there were certainly people in town who once the DA had their press conference had a very knee-jerk reaction. Take pusher off the signs that welcome you into the town, take them off the water tower, you know, what are we going to do in the museum now? But there are certainly people that love the man there. After the report came out, people in Adamsville had a town hall meeting to talk about what to do next. Buford Pusser's granddaughter, Madison Bush, said, this isn't over yet.

One man, who said he became a law enforcement officer because of Buford Pusser, said that closing the Buford Pusser Museum would be letting this new day and age of the Internet win. A man named Steve Sweat spoke. And I think it's terribly sad that they did this to a man who couldn't defend himself. Amen. That's not a human. One person said, I believe in America.

People are innocent until proven guilty. The Beaufort Pusser Museum remains open. The top of their website reads, What's right is right and what's wrong is wrong. It doesn't matter who you are. It's a quote attributed to Beaufort Pusser. The town decided that they weren't going to change anything, and they were still going to celebrate Buford Pusser.

So the legend lives on. The legend absolutely still lives on. The annual Buford Pusser Festival was held last month in Adamsville. The legend of white herb you heard no doubt. Matt Dillon clean the West out hits a fight. There's a legend now for the world to see. And he's walking tall right here in Tennessee. Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me.

Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Ziegko, Lily Clark, and Lena Sillison. This episode was fact-checked by Katie Cedarborg. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at this iscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at this iscriminal.com slash newsletter.

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Discover more great shows at podcast. boxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal.