Nashvillains

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

SHOW NOTESFive 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

Marcia Trimble was nine years old, a fourth-grader working on her Girl Scout cookie sales in one of the safest, wealthiest neighborhoods in Nashville. Thirty-three days after she disappeared, on Easter Sunday, her body was found in a neighbor's garage, hidden in a plastic wading pool about 150 yards from her home. She had been strangled.What followed became Nashville's most notorious unsolved murder. Investigators fixed early on Jeffrey Womack, a 15-year-old neighbor who was among the last people

In August 1996, Janet March vanished from her Forest Hills home the night before she was scheduled to meet a divorce attorney. Her husband said she'd taken a vacation. It took ten years, an international manhunt, a murder-for-hire plot, and testimony from the killer's own father to prove otherwise — in a case prosecuted without ever finding a body.  Portions of this episode include audio from Off The Record: On The Air — featuring retired Nashville homicide detective Pat Postiglione and reporter

Dreamers come to Nashville every day chasing that country music dream. A tiny percentage actually make it. The rest find their own way—some playing for smaller crowds because it's more about the music than fame, some becoming songwriters, some heading back home knowing they gave it everything.And then there's Paul Dennis Reid. He chose a completely different path—one that started with reinventing himself from the ground up.Paul didn't come to Nashville with dreams. He came with certainty. He knew

In November 2013, Nashville gathered to give George Jones the send-off of a lifetime — and when the arena emptied, the after-party rolled down to Second Avenue, to a bar called the Pit and Barrel, freshly made over for a reality show set to air the very next day. Among the last men standing were outlaw singer Wayne Mills — an Alabama football player who'd walked away from the game to chase his musical dreams down the highway — and his friend, the bar's owner, Chris Ferrell. The next morning, one of

Kevin Hughes came to Nashville to count the hits — a small-town numbers man who rose to run the charts at Cash Box magazine, right in the heart of Music Row. But the charts were rigged, the payola ran deep, and Kevin had started asking the wrong questions. On the night of March 9, 1989, a masked man with a strange, stiff run stepped out of the dark on 16th Avenue and shot him dead in the street, wounding the young singer walking beside him. Then the trail went cold — for fourteen years. And when the

David "Stringbean" Akeman was a Grand Ole Opry legend and an original Hee Haw star — a banjo man who came up through the Great Depression and never trusted a bank again, keeping his money close and hidden inside his little cabin north of Nashville. Everyone in those hills had heard the rumors of what he kept there. On the night of November 10, 1973, two young men were waiting in the dark when Stringbean and his wife, Estelle, drove home from a performance at The Grand Ole Opry. What happened next