Hero. Legend. Buford Pusser and the Cold Case Unsolved Murder of His Wife

Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan

CrimeOnline and iHeartPodcasts

True Crime

4.8 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2025

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Buford Pusser went on a domestic call in the early morning hours of August 12, 1967. Pusser's wife, Pauline, went with him on the call. On the way a car pulled up alongside them and shots were fired, killing her and leaving Buford shot in the face. Buford survived the attempt on his life, Hollywood came calling and a feature film about Buford became a big hit, Walking Tall. The legend of Buford Pusser only grew when he died in a car accident right before he was set to star in the sequel to Walking Tall. It would be easy to blame Hollywood for covering up the truth about the man to make him into a hero, but that isn't the truth. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss the investigation into the unsolved Cold Case murder of Pauline Pusser and attempted murder of Sheriff Buford Busser.

Transcribe Highlights

00:00.12 Introduction - Hero

01:41.83 Walking Tall

05:10.58 The story of Buford Pusser

09:03.79 The dead tell tales

15:10.75 The ambush of Buford and his wife

20:03.38 Looking at surgical notes before autopsy

25:20.93 Clandestine burials

30:18.23 Domestic calls are to toughest

35:02.19 Pauline had a healing broke nose at death

39:51.21 Shot in the back of the head

45:05.22 Conclusion

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is an IHeart podcast.
0:05.5	Bodybacks with Joseph Scott Moore.
0:09.7	A long, long time ago, when I was a little boy, there were certain cultural icons that captured my attention.
0:22.6	Let's see.
0:23.9	Who were some of them?
0:25.4	Oh, I know.
0:27.5	I liked Muhammad Ali because he was such a bombastic kind of personality.
0:35.4	I liked because he was so rare.
0:41.3	You know, back then he would get in front of the camera and he would say things and he could make things up, you know, quote, quote, homemade poetry, if you will, on the fly.
0:48.8	I loved Evil Caneval as little boy.
0:51.1	I had a little evil caneval toy, you know, that you'd wind up and you could jump boxes with it and all that sort of thing. And I loved, love ABC, wide, wide world of sports, watching him jump over cars. And of course, subsequently, I think it's Caesar Palace. Caesar's Palace broke every bone in his body when he jumped over that fountain. If you ever go to Vegas,
1:11.9	check out the side of that fountain.
1:13.3	I don't know how he did it.
1:14.4	And then, of course, you know,
1:15.8	Snake River Canyon.
1:17.0	Don't forget about that.
1:18.6	That wasn't exactly a brilliant move,
1:20.6	but it's something that stands out in your mind.
1:23.3	Another cultural icon
1:26.4	in this former little boy's mind was probably Buford Pusser.
1:33.1	And the reason it was so cool is that there was a movie that, of course, I was too young to go and see because of level of violence, but you knew about him.
1:42.0	You heard about walking tall. You heard that he carried this massive stick that he would walk in. He'd bust up bad guys. He'd run the
	...

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