OCTOBER 4, 1978 – Country singer Tammy Wynette was kidnapped and held at gunpoint in her car for two hours by a kidnapper wearing a ski mask. He held a gun on her and forced her to drive 90 miles from Nashville, Tennessee. She was later released and the kidnapper escaped.”It was the most terrifying experience of my life,” Tammy later said. She was climbing into her yellow Eldorado at a nearby shopping center when “I felt a poke in my side and heard a man’s voice say, ‘Drive!’ All I could see was a brown glove, a lot of hair on his arm and two inches of gun barrel.” After 20 minutes and no further words, Tammy remembers, the man wrung panty hose so tightly around her neck that it left burn marks. He then drove for another 90 minutes, beat her and fled in another car. Gasping for breath, she stumbled into the dirt driveway of Junette Young, a mother of eight. “I couldn’t believe it was the real Tammy Wynette,” recounts Junette, a fan who says she can hardly afford Tammy’s records. “I wanted to say how I just love her and George Jones together, but it wasn’t the time or place to talk about her ex-husband.”
