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Hayes Hickman | Knoxville

Sunny Hurst, the boxer's son, changed the course of his life and became an investigator to find out who killed his dad.

Detectives worked for years on the case, which took twists and turns, even requiring the exhumation of the victim's remains.

The mutilated body of Paul Wayne Hurst, a local Golden Gloves welter-weight champion, was found in the woods in 1977.

Angela M. Gosnell, Knoxville News Sentinel

By all accounts, Maryville boxing coach Paul Wayne Hurst would have been a hard man to kill.

A former local Golden Gloves welterweight champion, the 54-year-old still exercised every morning, never drank alcohol and usually skipped supper.

When his remains were discovered near Cherokee Trail in 1977, authorities initially mistook the unidentified homicide victim for a man in his 30s, possibly younger.

Then again, detectives had little to go on. The head, hands and legs, among other body parts, had been severed. Only a naked torso marked the scene.

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Once experts determined the body was Hurst, the investigation quickly became sidetracked by second-guessing among authorities and family members whether it was actually him, prompting an exhumation less than a year later.

All the while, no clear motive emerged for why anyone would target the well-respected coach, who had founded a youth boxing program and had dedicated himself to mentoring young athletes, or how he had been killed.

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Hurst was a "tough customer," said Knoxville boxing legend and longtime friend, the late Ace Miller.

"I can't feature anybody taking him on without getting a lot of damage," the one-time Golden Gloves national president told the Knoxville News Sentinel in the weeks after Hurst's death.

Nearly 42 years later, authorities have yet to make any headway in what came to be known simply as the "torso murder."

'It was personal'

Two teenage boys were the first to happen upon the gruesome scene while hiking near Cherokee Bluffs in South Knoxville on a cold Saturday morning, Nov. 26, a couple of days after Thanksgiving 1977.

Rigor mortis had not yet set in, leading the medical examiner to estimate the person might have been dead only six to eight hours.

The head and neck had been taken off at the shoulders. The hands were severed a few inches above the wrists; the legs, a few inches above the knees.

Two deep gashes had been sliced across the abdomen. Another wound on one of the upper arms had been made, possibly to cut off an identifying mark such as a mole or tattoo.

The victim's genitals also had been removed.

Hayes Hickman/News Sentinel

Initial reports speculated the body might have been dismembered with a chainsaw.

Then-Knox County Sheriff Joe Jenkins told the News Sentinel he was looking into whether the killing might be connected to an unsolved "chainsaw murder" in Austin, Texas, although he doubted the Knoxville case had anything to do with the local double-feature playing at the time — "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Torso."

Authorities later dropped the chainsaw theory. On closer examination, they said the extremities appeared to have been neatly severed with a fine-toothed saw.

Either way, they never would find the missing body parts.

David Davenport, recently retired cold case investigator for the Knox County Sheriff's Office, said the severing of the head and limbs likely was done to prevent the victim from being identified.

But cutting off the genitals suggested something darker.

"It was personal — very," said Davenport, who was not involved in the initial investigation. "That usually indicates, in cases I've solved, jealousy, cuckolding or vindictiveness."

A length of rope found wrapped around the torso, as well as bloodstains and marks along the ground, hinted the victim might have been killed elsewhere and dumped at the South Knoxville site from a car.

Relatives reported Hurst missing shortly after the macabre case surfaced in the news.

A week into the investigation, the Knox County medical examiner's office compared spinal X-rays of the torso with those of Hurst, who had been treated for a back injury years earlier.

Officials deemed it a match and identified Hurst as the homicide victim. Or so they thought.

A grave without a name

By January 1978, Knox and Blount county sheriffs' detectives had interviewed more than 100 people and amassed $15,000 in reward monies, but neither had brought them any closer to making an arrest.

Frustrated by the pace of the agencies' joint investigation, Hurst's oldest son, Paul "Sunny" Hurst Jr., obtained a court order that September to pry open the family mausoleum for his own examination of the remains.

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Days later, Sunny Hurst, flanked by Blount County Coroner Roy White, two private investigators and the Hursts' family physician, announced "beyond a shadow of a doubt" the torso was not his father.

Dr. Robert Lash, then-assistant Knox County medical examiner, had based his positive identification of the torso as Paul Hurst on at least 15 distinct, matching features found in a comparison of the size and shape of spinal and pelvic bones visible in the X-rays.

The torso also shared Paul Hurst's rare O-negative blood type.

Sunny Hurst and his team of experts, however, countered with their own evidence.

The torso showed no sign of the surgery Paul Hurst had undergone to remove varicose veins in his thighs 10 years earlier, they claimed.

The torso victim appeared to have had a previous hernia operation, while Paul Hurst had never had any such procedure.

Paul Hurst also had a smallpox vaccination mark on his left arm, although none was found on the victim.

Stranger still, the torso supposedly had double nipples on the right breast. Paul Hurst evidently did not.

Knox County officials were unswayed by the new claims.

"I'm 53 years old and I can't see my vaccination mark either," Lash said.

Famed University of Tennessee forensic anthropologist Dr. Bill Bass was asked to review the spinal X-rays as well. He confirmed Lash's initial ruling — the torso was Paul Hurst.

DNA testing was still nearly a decade away from becoming a reliable tool in criminal investigations.

Both Knox and Blount county authorities continued to pursue the investigation, as there was no verified crime scene. And Sunny Hurst chased his own leads working with White, the coroner who also was running for Blount County sheriff at the time.

The investigation splintered into three separate fronts as all raced for a break in the case. But without consensus on the victim's identity, much less an established crime scene or a conclusive cause of death, the torso case turned cold.

And Paul Hurst, even if he was alive, never resurfaced.

The remains were re-interred at Sherwood Memorial Gardens in Alcoa. The grave still bears no name today.

Mobsters, a mercenary and other rumors

Sunny Hurst couldn't let go of the mystery.

A former insurance adjuster, he became a licensed private detective and spent several years running down vague rumors of a possible organized crime connection, tracking supposed sightings of his father as far away as Florida and Louisiana.

As often as he ventured down the rabbit hole, though, the son only found dead ends.

"I've always come back to the same place," Sunny Hurst, now 75, told the News Sentinel last month. "Right back where I started from."

Sheriffs' detectives focused their investigation closer to home.

Reba Hurst, Paul Hurst's ex-wife, was the last known person to see him alive.

Although the two had divorced months earlier, they still shared their Maryville home, where he stayed in a separate bedroom.

She told authorities the two had gone out to dinner the Tuesday night before Thanksgiving. Paul Hurst had taken the week off from his job as a chemical operator at the K-25 plant in Oak Ridge. Reba Hurst said her ex-husband was planning a trip, although he never told her where. When she returned home from work Wednesday, Paul Hurst was gone.

Paul Hurst's brother reported him missing after he failed to turn up for work the following Monday.

If Reba Hurst knew anything, she never let on, former Blount County Sheriff's Detective Randy Kidd said.

"I don't think she said a lot," Kidd recalled. "She said he comes and goes, and that's about it."

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Detectives seized several items during a search of the Hursts' home two months after the body was discovered, including a saw, a hatchet, and the mattress and bed springs from Paul Hurst's room.

Authorities also recovered a .25-caliber shell casing from underneath his bed, according to KCSO's case file. No gun was found.

The evidence was forwarded to the FBI for analysis, but laboratory tests proved inconclusive.

Meanwhile, investigators uncovered another curious aspect of Paul Hurst — his surprisingly active social life.

For all the time he spent commuting to and from his day job in Oak Ridge, and managing his boxing program in Blount County, the mercurial man still managed to juggle several girlfriends.

"For him to be such a ladies man, though ... I never heard of any husband being of a suspicious character," Kidd said.

Women seemed drawn to Paul Hurst, and without much apparent effort on his part, said Sunny Hurst's wife, Florence Hurst.

"He didn't go out of his way," she said. "But when they got divorced, you couldn't go over there to see the man without these women calling."

Knox County Sheriff Office's archived investigative file includes an unconfirmed report that Paul Hurst's younger son, Steve Hurst, was upset about his father's affairs and bugged the home phone — supposedly at Reba Hurst's request — to eavesdrop on those conversations.

Both were interviewed by detectives, but never charged.

Steve Hurst died in 2002. Reba Hurst, who later remarried, died in 2009.

The case file also reveals details of an interview conducted by Knox County Sheriff's Office personnel and a Knoxville-based FBI special agent with a confidential informant who came forward in 1985.

The unidentified man said he had worked at a local junior college years before with Steve Hurst, as well as a strange character he identified as Richard Russell, a short-tempered man who drank heavily, always carried a handgun and boasted he had been a "mercenary" in Vietnam.

During a night out drinking together, the informant claimed, Russell confided he had killed Paul Hurst for sneaking around with Russell's girlfriend.

The KCSO file makes no mention of whether anything came of the informant's wild tale, or if Russell ever existed.

Knox County's lead detective in the torso murder, James "Smitty" Smith, died in 1988 without seeing the case closed.

In 1983, he told the News Sentinel the unsolved homicide cost him many sleepless nights of wondering.

"I put 6,000 miles on a new car, just chasing down leads," Smith said at the time.

Former Knox County Sheriff's Office chief of detectives Jim Wilson, who worked the case with Smith, did not respond to requests for comment last month.

A life without closure

The past four decades have robbed Sunny Hurst of any hope he once had.

"If that ain't him, we're in a helluva mess," he admits.

Hayes Hickman/News Sentinel

The son now concedes his father likely was the victim of the attack. By whom or how many, he doubts he will ever know.

He said he has his suspicions, but he realizes they're only that.

"It's got to have something to do with them women," he guessed.

Paul and Reba Hurst's daughter, Nancy Lambert, declined to comment for this story.

Sunny Hurst discounts any speculation that Reba Hurst or other family members may have been involved, though. He questioned his mother, and if he did suspect her, he would have reported her to authorities himself, he contends.

"I made sure I stayed there with Mom till she died," he said. "And she never came up with nothing, never said anything."

The weight of so many unanswered questions is too much to carry sometimes for the son who admired his father so much. Even now, he has trouble recalling the episode without breaking down.

He wonders whether his father suffered before he died. But more importantly, Sunny Hurst still struggles with why it happened at all.