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.

New episodes weekly. If this one was worth your time, the best thing you can do for us is leave a review and tell somebody about it.

December 25, 2020. At 1:22 in the morning, a white RV parks in front of 166 Second Avenue North — the AT&T building on Nashville’s oldest street. Just after 5:30 a.m., a recorded voice begins warning anyone who can hear it to evacuate. At 6:14 it starts counting down from fifteen minutes. At 6:29 it detonates.

No one is killed but the man who built it. Sixty-five buildings are damaged. Phone, internet and 911 service fail across Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama and Georgia. Roughly 100 emergency call centers in 46 Tennessee counties are affected. Hospitals lose access to records. Flights are grounded.

We walk the morning on the clock, with Officers Tyler Luellen, Brenna Hosey, Michael Sipos, Amanda Topping and James Wells telling it in their own voices from the December 27, 2020 press conference. Three of the six officers on that street had been police officers for less than two years.

Then the part of the story that happened sixteen months earlier — an August 2019 call to Metro dispatch, an attorney who said he believed the bomb claim more than the crisis claim, two officers who knocked on a door on Bakertown Road, and a question this case never answers: what do you do about a man who has broken no law?

And finally, the why. The FBI closed the case in March 2021 calling it an intentional act to end his own life, driven by paranoia and conspiracy beliefs. But the fuller answer did not become public until December 2025, when the agent who led the investigation spoke on the record for the first time.

WITH THANKS

The Metro Nashville Police Department, and the department’s Office of Public Affairs, for the body camera footage and the audio of the December 27, 2020 press conference. The officers’ own account of that morning is the spine of this episode and it exists because MNPD released it.

Jeremy Finley and WSMV4 News in Nashville. Mr. Finley’s December 2025 investigation — published on the fifth anniversary of the bombing — is the source for the FBI’s findings about what Anthony Warner believed, for the lead agent’s first public interview, and for the account given by the woman who warned police in 2019. Several things in the back half of this episode have never appeared anywhere else. They are his reporting, not ours.

Metro Nashville’s Department of Emergency Communications, for the public release of the August 21, 2019 call.

SOURCES

• Metro Nashville Police Department — body camera footage released December 28, 2020; press conference, December 27, 2020

• Federal Bureau of Investigation, Memphis Field Office — investigation findings released March 15, 2021

• WSMV4 News, Nashville — reporting by Jeremy Finley, December 22, 2025

• Metro Nashville Department of Emergency Communications — recorded call, August 21, 2019

• Metro Nashville Police Department After Action Review Board report

• Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency — damage assessment

• Contemporaneous reporting from the Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Tennessean and NewsChannel 5

A NOTE

This episode discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24 hours a day — call or text 988.

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.

SHOW NOTES

Five days after Tammy Wynette was pulled out of her own car and beaten, every camera in America was pointed at the Grand Ole Opry House. Johnny Cash hosted. Dolly Parton won Entertainer of the Year. Country music was having the biggest year it had ever had. Tammy Wynette's name wasn't on the ballot in a single category.

This episode is about what happened four miles away, five days earlier — and about the three years leading up to it that most retellings skip.

Between her 1975 divorce from George Jones and that October evening, somebody waged a sustained campaign against her. Intruders got into her house fifteen times in one nine-month stretch. The family came home from bowling one night to find every faucet in the house running and slurs written across every mirror and television screen. The house caught fire with her youngest daughter asleep in the back bedroom. Her phones were wiretapped. Her tour bus burned. A week before the abduction, a stranger walked into her eight-year-old's school and tried to leave with her.

Then came the parking lot. A man she said she never saw. A ligature. A broken cheekbone. Eighty miles of back roads and a second car waiting at the drop. He didn't rob her — she still had forty dollars and thirty credit cards. He didn't assault her. He hurt her, and then he was gone.

Nashville decided it had theories. Publicity. An affair. George Jones, who didn't help himself by hinting he knew who was behind it.

Twenty-two years later, two of Wynette's daughters offered a fifth theory in print — one that pointed inside the house, at a Music Row songwriter she'd married ninety days before. He denied it until he died in 2010, was never charged with anything, and his family is in court over his reputation to this day.

Tammy Wynette never changed her story. Not once, in twenty years.

In this episode:

• The 12th CMA Awards, and the ballot her name wasn't on
• Three years of break-ins, fires and threats before anyone laid a hand on her
• What she said happened in that car, in her own account
• Why detectives called it puzzling — and why the crime doesn't work as a kidnapping or a robbery
• The songwriter she married ninety days earlier, and the hits he'd written for her ex-husband
• 1998, the exhumation he requested himself, and what the autopsy found
• The theory her daughters published, and the timeline problem it answers

FURTHER READING

Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen by Jimmy McDonough (Viking, 2010) — the major biography, built on original interviews.

Stand By Your Man by Tammy Wynette with Joan Dew (1979) — her own account, written the year after.

Tammy Wynette: A Daughter Recalls Her Mother's Tragic Life and Death by Jackie Daly with Tom Carter (2000).

The Three of Us: Growing Up with Tammy and George by Georgette Jones (2011).

Contemporary coverage: The Tennessean, October 5, 1978; People; the Washington Post; and Newsweek's "Country Music Mystery," July 18, 1999.

Note: One voice heard in this episode is a dramatized recreation. No recording of the 1978 incident exists.