Content warning: This episode contains a recorded police confession describing a murder in detail as well as discussions of child sexual abuse and a failed execution.

Resources: RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline, 800-656-4673.

Credit: Beth Karas and Sarah Treleaven, and https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-unrestorable-124203513?embed=true" frameborder="0">Unrestorable (iHeart). Also WSMV, WKRN, WVLT, WBIR, the Nashville Banner and Roane County News for the witness accounts, and Metro Nashville ECC for the dispatch audio.

State of Tennessee v. Christa Gail Pike, Tennessee Supreme Court, Oct. 5, 1998 (facts of the crime, the statement to Investigator York, the jacket, the aggravators, Judge Leibowitz)

Christa Pike federal habeas decision, U.S. District Court, E.D. Tenn., No. 1:12-cv-35 — https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-tned-1_12-cv-00035/pdf/USCOURTS-tned-1_12-cv-00035-1.pdf (Talman, Rice, Crabtree, Dr. McCoy, penalty-phase witnesses, Talman's suspension)

UT Volopedia — Job Corps student murdered on agriculture campus (verdict Mar. 22, 1996; sentence Mar. 30, 1996; Dale Avenue center closed 1995)

TDOC — Women on Death Row (arrival Mar. 30, 1996; Patricia Jones attack Aug. 24, 2001; conviction Aug. 12, 2004)

DPIC — clemency petition, abuse history, AG not contesting abuse, the 18-year-old statistic, Coffey letter: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/christa-pike-requests-clemency-ahead-of-september-30-execution-date-experts-amicus-brief-points-to-substantial-risk-of-re-traumatization

DPIC — solitary confinement settlement, Sept. 2024: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/rulings-for-two-death-sentenced-prisoners-recognize-devastating-harm-caused-by-solitary-confinement

WSMV, Oct. 2, 2026 — Shipp and Peterson; pentagram accounts

WVLT, Oct. 2025 — Shipp parole denied; next hearing 2031

KY3/Gray, Oct. 1, 2026 — Seeley, Colleen's niece

Action News Jax, Apr. 2013 — May Martinez on the remains

First Coast News (c. 2015) — remains mailed; the skull on the airplane

Good Morning America/WJXX, Oct. 1, 2026 — May Martinez after the execution

Religion Unplugged, Oct. 9, 2026 — Rev. Mikey Noechel and Metta

ABC News; WSMV (Oct. 13); Fox News — the 911 calls and dispatch audio

DPIC, EJI, WSMV, PBS, ABC — the 2022 Stanton report, Strada, Byron Black, Tony Carruthers, Hines, the same-doctor report, Strada's resignation, Stanton's new review

PBS/AP, TMZ, WLOX/Gray, FOX, ABC, Al Jazeera, Fox17 — October 6–16 developments

WSMV, May 14, 2024 — the child-rape death penalty law

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.