Monday, October 19, 1998. On a farm outside Monterey, on the Cumberland Plateau, State Senator Tommy Burks — a hog and cattle farmer who served 28 years in the Tennessee legislature — is getting ready for a class of nursery-school children coming to pick pumpkins. A dark car passes the farm lane. Then it passes again.

Byron Anthony Looper was born in the same town as Tommy Burks. He went to West Point, switched political parties, sued a law school, sent out roughly 400 press releases as Putnam County Property Assessor, and was indicted on 14 counts while still in office. In 1996 he legally changed his middle name to "(Low Tax)." In 1998 he was the Republican nominee for Tommy Burks's Senate seat. And all that summer, he'd been asking an old friend about guns.

We follow the plan, the used Audi bought for cash, the drive north in the dark, the sixteen hours after the shooting, and the midnight knock on a door in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Then the ballot problem Tennessee law created, the write-in campaign that answered it, a trial with a defense witness who did the prosecution's work for it, and the strange end of the man who called himself Low Tax.

THANKS TO:
The reporters in the Upper Cumberland and in Nashville who covered this case as it happened. Much of what we know about October 1998 we know because they were there.

SOURCES

• State of Tennessee v. Byron Looper, Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals (2003), 118 S.W.3d 386

• Nashville Scene — "The Death of a Senator: Tommy Burks and Byron (Low Tax) Looper," Stephen Elliott (2018)

• NewsChannel 5 Investigates — "Byron Looper Remembered as Political Assassin," Phil Williams

• The Tennessean, October 20, 1998

• NPR, October 23, 1998

• Chattanooga Times Free Press, June 2013

• Tennessee Department of Correction — "Death of Inmate Byron Looper," June 26, 2013

• Crime Library — "Byron Looper"

• Oxygen, "Dying to Belong," Season 1, Episode 4

A NOTE

Some quotations in this episode are read by voice actors from court testimony and published reporting.

ABOUT THE SHOW

Nashvillains is a true crime podcast about the cases that happened here — in Music City and the counties around it. Written and hosted by Jerry Broadway. A production of Hey Dad Productions.

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