A contemporary of Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette managed to break into the male-dominated country landscape of the 1960s and ’70s. She is perhaps best known for hits like “Stand By Your Man” and “D-I-V-O-R-C-E. Additionally, her stormy third marriage to—and captivating musical partnership with—country legend George Jones also dominated the headlines.
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On this day in 1978, the three-time CMA Female Vocalist of the Year claimed she suffered a terrifying ordeal when a masked man abducted her from a Nashville parking lot.
“The Most Terrifying Experience of My Life”
After shopping for a birthday present for her then-8-year-old daughter, Tamala Georgette Jones, Tammy Wynette returned to her car the parking lot of the Cain-Sloan Department Store in the Nashville neighborhood of Green Hills. There, a man in a stocking mask waited in her backseat. As Wynette later recounted, the man took her on an 80-mile ride through the Tennessee backcountry. He beat and strangled her with a pair of pantyhose. Then, he abandoned the Grammy winner near the home of a woman named Junette Young.
October 4th 1978 – Tammy Wynette, the popular Country music singer who cracked the Billboard Hot 100 in 1968 with "Stand By Your Man", claimed that she was abducted, beaten and held in her car for two hours by a kidnapper wearing a ski mask. She said he held a gun on her and… pic.twitter.com/LjUdO6N7jj
— Psychedelic Jukebox (@60sPsychJukebox) October 4, 2025
“I felt a poke in my side and heard a man’s voice say, ‘Drive!’” the then 36-year-old singer told People. “All I could see was a brown glove, a lot of hair on his arm and two inches of gun barrel.”
Maintaining she never saw the man’s face, Wynette called the ordeal “the most terrifying experience of my life.”
[RELATED: The Song That Made Tammy Wynette the Queen of Heartache]
What Do Tammy Wynette’s Daughters Say About Their Mother’s Reported Kidnapping?
At the time, police found the incident “very puzzling,” and they weren’t alone. In 2000, the singer’s daughter, Jackie Daly, made a bold claim in her book Tammy Wynette: A Daughter Recalls Her Mother’s Tragic Life and Death.
Daly claimed that her mother—who died in April 1998 at age 55—fabricated the abduction story to cover up domestic abuse suffered at the hands of her fifth husband, singer-songwriter-producer George Richey.
Tamala Georgette Jones backed up her sister’s claim in her own 2011 memoir. She added that Richey had threatened to “destroy” Wynette’s life with a tell-all book.
Richey refuted this story in a 2000 interview with the Scottish Daily Record, blasting the abuse claims as “preposterous.”
“To the contrary, I spent 20 years with Tammy, loving her and taking care of her and her career,” he said.
In any regard, Wynette’s alleged attacker was never found.
Featured image by David Redfern/Redferns
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