On Thanksgiving Day 1953, a 26-year-old reporter from Nashville stood on the stoop of a small, wood-frame house on Orange Avenue and knocked at the door.
The couple who lived at the house agreed to talk with him. The story he wrote about them coming back from the dead made worldwide headlines and started him on a long, illustrious career.
Tom and Betty Palmer, who lived at 1001 Orange Avenue, went through their days of notoriety and then continued to live at the house until their deaths. They are still together today, buried in Evergreen Cemetery.
They had run away 22 years earlier and were legallly declared dead. They left behind families and fortunes. “If money had meant anything to us, we wouldn’t have done what we did,” Betty said. “We were in love.”
John Seigenthaler won a National Headline Award for his stories on the couple. A few years later he became one the the “hononary Kennedys” and worked as assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy. He was beaten with the black Freedom Riders when RFK sent him to monitor the bus riders. He then went back to the Nashville Tennessean newspaper as editor and publisher. He was a founding editorial board member of USA Today. A bridge in Nashville is named in his honor.
Now, the house, which looks almost the same as it did in the photograph Life Magazine ran in 1953, is facing demolition. Owner Chrisleigh Dal Sasso is asking the Orange Historical Preservation Commission permission to tear it down. The commission meets Monday at 5:30 p.m.
The Palmer story started in Nashville in 1931 with Thomas Craighead Buntin. The 1978 book “Among the Missing: An Anecdotal History of Missing Persons” by Jay Robert Nash, described Buntin as a “young socialite in Nashville” with a wife and two young sons.
The 28-year-old Buntin, however, was a heavy drinker and was heavily in debt, even with a large monthly income. Buntin, Nash wrote, worked as a manager in the insurance firm founded by his millionaire grandfather. He received $300 a month in salary plus a $200 a month allowance from his widowed mother. The U.S. Inflation Calculator puts the $500 a month at about $11,100 a month in 2018. And 1931 was a year when the Great Depression was hitting hard across America.
Buntin throughout stories was described as tall, thin and handsome. He had a physical flaw, though. His left ear bent forward and stuck out.
In the book, author Nash said as Buntin’s drinking got worse, depression deepened. His father had committed suicide and Buntin talked of it with his wife. After he disappeared, she told authorities that one night she woke and the sight alarmed her. Her husband was sitting on the bed with a pistol pointed to his head.
Buntin ended up in jail one night in September 1931. Nash wrote the man broke down the door “of two terrified spinsters” and wrecked their house before police arrived. Two days after he got out of jail, he disappeared.
His wife and friends thought he had gone through with his suicide plans. “The Tennesse Supreme Court ruled the alcoholic Buntin would not have had the physical strength or the mental ability to survive,” the book says.
Buntin had a $50,000 insurance policy and New York Life investigators were suspicious, especially because Betty McCuddy, who had once worked as secretary to Buntin, disappeared a couple of weeks later. She, too, could not be found. The insurance company put the money from the policy into a trust for the two Buntin boys.
After seven years, Betty’s family had her declared dead for legal matters. She was one of five heirs to her uncle’s $125,000 bequeath. If the money had been divided evenly, Betty’s $25,000 share would be worth nearly $400,000 in 2018.
Jump ahead twenty-two years. The December 7, 1953, issue of Life Magazine had a one-page on the Palmers with photographs of the couple and house. The brief story said six months earlier an insurance investigatorm Wallace Murray, saw a man with Buntin’s tell-tale ear in Orange, Texas. He mentioned it to the reporter, who later picked up the trail.
Seigenthaler searched around the area. He would sit in hotel lobbies and bus stations. One day he was in Orange and saw a “tall, gray-haired man with spectacles” limping from a bus. The reporter followed the man home, but waited a couple of days for more research before knocking on the door. When he did, the Palmers admitted they were the missing Buntin and McCuddy.
They told the reporter their story of devotion and love. When they left, they went to Brownsville, Texas, and then traveled around scraping a living. They married and took the last name of Palmer, keeping their originals first names.
Tom continued to drink and would lose jobs like being a car salesman. He fell off a curb one night and broke his hip, leading to him needing crutches for a year. Gradually he got sober and managed to support a growing family. The two had six children through the years.
The Orange city directory for 1944 reports the couple was living at 1001 Park Avenue. Thomas Palmer’s occupation was not listed. In the 1953 directory, they were living at 1001 Orange Avenue, two streets south from Park. His occupation was listed as salesman. The Life article said he was selling televisions.
News stories from 1953 report the couple had two married daughters and one grandchild. A son was in the Marine Corps. At home, were a 14-year-old son who was crippled, and two younger girls.
The New York Times on November 28, 1953, had a headline “Couple Who Ran Away Will Stay Together.” The two planned to continue living in Orange as “Mr. and Mrs. Thomas D. Palmer.”
Tom Buntin’s wife had married a Nashville lawyer. Betty McCuddy’s mother and a brother had died, but her 76-year-old father was happy to talk to her.
On April 10, 1954, the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times reported on the “dead man” visiting his family. Tom made a trip to Nashville. He introduced himself to an old friend as Tom Buntin. He also met for two hours with his mother, but neither would talk to the press afterwards.
No charges were ever filed. Mrs. Buntin remarried after her husband was legally dead. The statute of limitations had run out on a Texas bigamy charge, and Buntin had not claimed the insurance.
After the attention dwindled, the Palmers did as they announced. They continued to live in Orange. Tom died on October 3, 1966, at the age of 64. Betty died at the age of 66 on November 26, 1972. They are buried next to each other in Evergreen Cemetery. The names on their granite markers read “Thomas David Palmer” and “Betty McCuddy Palmer.”
Former Orange resident Leslie Barras unearthed the forgotten story of the Palmers after she bought a house in the Old Orange Historic District. She lived catacorner to what a neighbor called “The Palmer House.” Her curiousity led to research.
In an email this week, Barras said she once went to visit Seigenthaler in Nashville before he died in 2014 at the age of 86. The distinguished journalist, who also fought for civil rights and the First Amendment, never forgot the Buntin-Palmer story. It was his first big nationally-recognized reporting.
-Margaret Toal, KOGT-
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