Stand by Your Story - The Abduction of Tammy Wynette
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On October 4, 1978, Tammy Wynette walked out of a Green Hills department store with a birthday present for her youngest daughter, got into her car, and heard a man's voice behind her say one word: drive. She turned up eighty miles later on a back road with a broken cheekbone. Nobody was ever arrested. And forty-eight years on, some of the people closest to her still don't believe it happened.
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.