Cammie Wilson

civil rights workers, anybody that you disliked had a certain danger of getting run off the road if somebody didn't like your stories or your activities.

So I was trying to avoid that, so I always went a different route.

So you thought that Pusser himself might

hurt you?

Potentially.

You know, at the time, people would go down there and they would interview him and they would just swallow whatever he said.

So he knew that I was looking for the real story.

He readily admitted that he and his friends had gone to the club and they had beaten up Hathcock and they had taken the money that he had lost.

He quibbled about the amount of the money.

He said that he didn't take as much as they said he took.

He said that he was just beaten up in a lot of drunken brawls and that he was often carved up in some of those drunken brawls, that it didn't have anything to do with his activities as sheriff.

So he was drinking himself?

Oh, very much so.

And in fact, I interviewed his stepdaughter, who talked about how he would bring home cases of liquor and put them under the bed.

And, you know, if he was supposed to be sheriff, why was he keeping so much of the illegal liquor for himself?

His stepdaughter told me that she thought he had killed her mother.

And she even supplied what she thought was a motive that she was planning to leave Pusser, the stepdaughter told me.

A lot of people did.

Now, that doesn't mean that everybody did, but that was the common knowledge.

I asked him about all the rumors that he had shot his wife, and I asked him if he had been having affairs, and he of course denied it.