A couple of weeks ago, I was flipping through the Roku app, trying to decide on whether to start a movie or commit to a couple of hours of the NYPD Blue channel.
When I saw that Walking Tall (1973) was on one of the channels, I chose that.
I first saw Walking Tall when I was about 12 years old. It is the Hollywood account of the life of the late McNairy County, Tennessee Sheriff Buford Pusser.
Pusser was famous for enforcing the law with a giant stick, rather than a gun. At least that is how the movie portrayed it.
During his tenured time as sheriff, Pusser was shot, stabbed and beaten in his attempts to stop mafia activities in the small rural community just north of the Tennessee/Mississippi line.
The attacks allegedly culminated with the murder of his wife, Pauline, as she uncharacteristically accompanied Pusser on a disturbance call early one morning.
Assassins, according to Pusser at the time, ambushed the couple as they drove down a rural road.
Pusser died in a car accident years later, shortly after the first of three Walking Tall movies was released.
My dad had told me when I was young that Pusser had died shortly after a Delta autograph tour, which included my home county of Yazoo.
I decided to look it up in the archives to see if Pusser had passed through Indianola. Sure enough, he had.
Last week, I was reading a news article about the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation reopening Pauline Pusser’s murder case, alleging that it was Buford who possibly killed her and that he had framed the mob.
TBI claimed to have come to this conclusion after exhuming Pauline Pusser’s body nearly 60 years after her death. Investigators now say there is ample evidence to take a second look at this case.
TBI officials were quoted in media reports as saying that they are seeking “justice for Pauline,” no matter how much time has passed.
Cold cases are nothing new in the United States, and there are even some that still haunt the Mississippi Delta.
This past weekend, The Enterprise-Tocsin traveled to Drew for the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till.
Till was kidnapped, tortured and killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman at Bryant’s Grocery in the small community of Money.
The 1955 lynching is still largely unresolved. Two men, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, were later acquitted for the crime but subsequently sold their confession to Look Magazine.
It has been difficult for Till’s family and the state to heal from this horrific crime, since no one to this day has been brought to justice for it.
The FBI has conducted its own investigation, but little has been uncovered about the alleged accomplices who were said to be with Milam and Bryant when they took Till from his uncle’s home that August night.
And yet, evidence in the crime has slowly leaked its way into the story, seemingly without the help of federal investigators.
A few years ago, researchers discovered in the basement of the Leflore County Courthouse an unserved warrant from 1955 for Carolyn Bryant, Roy Bryant’s wife at the time of Till’s murder.
Despite this and the fact that Bryant was still alive at the time, Mississippi investigators declined to reopen the case.
It was announced last week that the gun that was used to kill Till had been acquired by The Foundation for Mississippi History, and it is now on display at the Two Mississippi Museums in Jackson.
There are some who question what might be gained from reopening the murder cases of Pauline Pusser or Emmett Till.
Many of the people involved, notably the accused, have passed on, including Carolyn Bryant, who died in April 2023.
With no one to prosecute and statutes of limitation for lesser crimes long passed in both cases, the matter almost seems moot.
But there’s something about an unsolved or even unresolved murder case that nags at us.
In the case of Pusser, if this American hero is proved to be a wife killer, how many other people might he have harmed and framed during his time as sheriff?
For Till’s family, his killers beat the system, but 70 years later, getting to the truth means getting to a place where they can begin to heal.
The state of Tennessee seems open to considering new evidence and new investigations when it comes to decades-old murder cases.
When it comes to Emmett Till, however, Mississippi offers little consideration to a second look.
Instead, the state bought the evidence and put it on display in its own museum.
