The Trial of Buford H. Pusser

In 1973, in the movie Walking Tall, Hollywood introduced to the world a young professional wrestler turned sheriff named Buford H. Pusser. The movie portrayed Sheriff Pusser's real-life battle against the thugs and bootleggers who had operated freely on the Tennessee-Mississippi state line prior to his election in 1964. During his six-year tenure as sheriff, Buford was shot and stabbed multiple times and had to watch the brutal murder of his wife Pauline during an early morning ambush on August 12, 1967, during which Buford himself was seriously wounded. The assailants were never identified. The movie turned Buford into a living legend, especially for the law enforcement community, and today he is perhaps America's most famous lawman since Wyatt Earp.

In 2022, for reasons that are not clearly known, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) decided to reopen the Pauline Pusser murder investigation. After re-examining the case evidence, much of which has disappeared over the decades, and purporting to use modern investigative methods and techniques, the TBI, along with a local district attorney, announced during a 2025 press conference that they now believe Buford staged the ambush in 1967 and murdered his wife.

The Trial of Buford H. Pusser is the first critical review of the TBI's re-investigation of the case and concludes that they either misinterpreted or missed altogether critical evidence, and that their lack of investigative rigour and integrity has led them to reach erroneous conclusions about the case. The author, himself one of the Nation's leading experts on the subjects of police practices and use of force, provides a detailed analysis of every aspect of the case using files, documents, and evidence obtained from various courts and archives across the U.S. and dating back to the mid-1950s. Anyone who has an interest in the Buford Pusser story will find his analysis enlightening.