Murder on Music Row: Nashville couple witness man in ski mask take the shot. Who was he?

This is the second in an eight-part series exploring the 1989 murder of Kevin Hughes , a country music chart director who knew too much.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The little red Volkswagen puttered northbound along 16th Avenue South.

Bobby Lyons was driving his friend Allyson Kidd to the movies. Not a date really, just a couple of friends cutting through Music Row to get to the theaters to see “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”

They would not make it to the theater that night.

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It was Thursday, March 9, 1989. George H.W. Bush was a few weeks into his presidency. The San Francisco 49ers with Joe Montana had just won the Super Bowl. “Rain Man,” with Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise, was on its way to winning the Oscar for Best Picture.

Kidd, a student at Belmont College, said she remembers it was just before 10:30 p.m. and they were running late.

Lyons, also a Belmont student, knew the unpredictability of Nashville traffic. About a week earlier, he’d been frustrated when he got stuck in the middle of a music video shoot which had shut down the streets. Some country music video, it seemed, was always shooting around town.

As they drove on 16th Avenue South, they saw a car door open ahead of them and a young man with a mullet roll out onto the asphalt.

They would later learn his name: Kevin Hughes, a former student at Belmont. He was 23 and worked for a music industry trade magazine called Cash Box, which had offices at the edge of Music Row.

They watched Hughes push himself up to his feet and run in a zig-zagging pattern toward their oncoming Volkswagen.

He was being chased by another man. This guy was wearing a ski mask and was a bit overweight. Lyons said the man carried a dark revolver in his right hand, and ran strangely, “like he had a board up his rear end.”

Lyons could see, clearly, the man in the ski mask was white because the holes in the mask were too big to hide his skin color.

Lyons thought he and Kidd had driven straight into the making of a bad music video.

Lyons was angry. Why aren’t the streets blocked off? He understood going for cinema verite, but this was ridiculous.

He thought he was witnessing two actors running toward, and then past, his car.

He was so close, he could have run over the masked man with the gun. Thinking back all these years later, Lyons now wishes he would have.

“I could have saved (Kevin’s) life,” Lyons said.

They saw the man in the ski mask start shooting. One shot hit Hughes in the back, and he went down.

Lyons looked at Kidd. “She looked sick,” he said.

This was not a music video.

Lyons slammed on the brakes. They watched in horror.

Hughes was face down on the ground about four car lengths behind them. He had run 116 feet away from his parked car.

The masked man stood over him and shot Hughes twice in the back of the head.

The shooter paused for a second, as if to make sure Hughes was dead, then limped off east into the darkness between apartment buildings.

Kidd got out of the car and ran toward the victim on the ground.

“I remember the way the blood was trickling down the street,” she said.

Lyons drove up the block to a dive bar called Bobby’s Idle Hour. He ran inside and announced he had just witnessed a shooting.

Lyons implored the people in the bar to call the police.

‘I think we heard the victim’s last breath’

The young couple had been married less than a year.

In those days, Daniel Hill was a plugger, taking songs from writers and trying to get them heard by artists.

He was 29, and working unusually late at the Act III building on Music Row on that Thursday night. Hill remembers sitting in front of his computer at the bay window with a view of the street below. His young wife – Faith Hill – had come to visit him.

Faith Hill, yes, that Faith Hill, sat on the office couch while he tapped away on his keyboard.

She was 21, an up-and-coming singer, and her day job was working for Reba McEntire selling merchandise.

The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network, reached out to Faith Hill’s management team, Sandbox Entertainment, requesting an interview. “Faith isn’t doing interviews right now but thank you for reaching out” was the response.

The Hills heard gunshots and hustled downstairs.

When they got to the street, they could see Hughes’ body on the ground. That’s when Faith Hill started running toward the site of the shooting. Daniel tried to convince her to stop.

“Do not run toward this,” he said.

She didn’t listen. Faith raced to the body and Daniel caught up to her.

“I think we heard the victim’s last breath,” Daniel Hill said.

A woman named Diane Palovich, who was a nurse, stopped to help. Palovich performed CPR, but her effort to revive Kevin Hughes was futile. Daniel Hill remembers the gruesome image of Palovich covered in Hughes’ blood.

As a crowd formed around the body, Hill noticed a dark blue hat lying on the street. He wondered if it had fallen off the shooter’s head. The words on the hat said: WORLD WAR II VETERAN AND DAMN PROUD OF IT.

From inside the hat, police would later pluck a single black hair.

Blood trail leads in another direction

David Williams was the first police officer to arrive at the scene.

In police files, the Murder on Music Row is known as case No. 89-59058.

A body was down, covered by a yellow tarp, in front of 1026 16th Ave. S., the Bug Music building. Hughes’ blue Pontiac Sunbird sat with its doors open in front of a small apartment building at 1020 16th Ave. S. The scene was quickly secured by police tape.

Witnesses said the shooter fled toward Edgehill Avenue. Some said they saw him drive away in a gray Nissan with the lights turned off.

That’s when Williams learned there was a second victim.

There was a trail of blood on the sidewalk next to Hughes’ car.

Williams followed the blood across a driveway, up the stairs to a third-floor apartment at 1020 16th Ave. S. where he found Sammy Sadler, 22, bleeding and hiding under a table. Sadler had been in the passenger’s seat of Kevin Hughes’ car.

Sadler was an aw-shucks, yes-sir, no-ma’am twangy singer who was raised in Texas. Like Hughes and every other 20-something, male wannabe in Nashville, Sadler had a prodigious mullet.

Sadler said a masked man had appeared out of the shadows. The assailant stepped close enough to the car that Sadler couldn’t shut the passenger side door.

Sadler sat face-to-face with the masked man, who shot once into the car. That bullet hit Sadler in the fleshy part of his right arm between his elbow and bicep.

“I can’t beat a speeding bullet,” Sadler said in an interview years later. “Only God was there to save (me) or it would have hit me right in the head.”

Sadler’s blood was found mostly on the driver’s side of the Sunbird, meaning he had crawled over the center console away from where the shooter had been standing.

Then, the shooter chased down and executed Hughes.

After the killer trundled away, Sadler heard a voice from an apartment window asking if he was OK. The voice belonged to Phillip Barnhart, who lived in the third floor unit with his girlfriend Connie Gaddis. Sadler stumbled up the stairs to find a place to hide.

When Williams arrived in Barnett’s apartment, Gaddis was using a towel to put direct pressure on Sadler’s wound.

Williams quickly determined Sadler’s injury wasn’t life-threatening, but still needed medical attention.

He called for an ambulance.

Williams learned Sadler had made two phone calls in the apartment. The first was to his father, Jerry Sadler, in Texas. The second was to his wife, Jeania, from whom he was in the midst of problems that would lead to divorce.

(One investigative note about Sadler’s first few comments: He described the shooter as Black and thin, when all the other witnesses had said he was white and chubby.)

The ambulance arrived quickly.

So did the television cameras from local news stations.

Sadler was helped into a gurney and whisked away to Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Dr. Patrick Meacham performed a “saphenous vein graft,” taking a vein from Sadler’s leg and inserting it into his right arm.

Trying to remove the bullet would have risked more damage, Meacham said, so the bullet has been as much a part of Sammy Sadler all these years as his music career.

It wasn’t long before two Murder Squad detectives arrived at the scene. Bill Pridemore, a longtime Nashvillian, became the lead investigator on the case. And Pat Postiglione, a transplanted New Yorker, became his partner.

Pridemore had always wanted to be a police officer. When he was 10 years old, his 5-speed Schwinn bike with a banana seat was stolen. A police officer helped him track down the bike, and his dreams were ignited.

Postiglione was a dapper detective who told people he had a photographic memory. In 2019, he became the host of a true crime television series called “Deadly Recall” on the Investigation Discovery network.

Pridemore said he and Postiglione were like “two mules.” He used an esoteric farming term to describe how they worked together.

“We gee hawed,” he said.

“When you have two mules … one’s gotta turn and the other’s gotta follow.” (Actually, in animal training “gee” means right, and “haw” means left.)

The names of all six members of the Murder Squad appeared on a dry-erase white board inside the Metro Nashville Police Department’s detective bureau.

On this night, the red-dot magnet was next to Pridemore’s name.

For case No. 89-59058, Pridemore was the lead mule.

Stars line up along police tape

March 9, 1989, was the last night of recording for an album by country supergroup The Highwaymen.

To finish “Highwayman 2,” they had been putting together songs like “Silver Stallion” and “American Remains” at Emerald Sound Studio, 1033 16th Ave. S.

Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson were recording with producer Chips Moman. Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings had already finished their parts. Harmonica player Mickey Raphael, who was in the studio that night, said it was impossible to hear the shots.

“The studio is pretty well insulated,” Raphael said. “I just know that everybody takes a break every once in a while. I go outside and smoke a cigarette.

“There were a lot of police around, and we'd heard that somebody had been shot.”

Nelson and Kristofferson went out to the street.

As the news cameras rolled, they captured images of Nelson and Kristofferson standing along the police tape. Another witness was Donny Lowery, the famous songwriter who had written “Old Flame” by Alabama, “Say What’s in Your Heart” by Restless Heart and “Stand a Little Rain” by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

From his apartment window at 1030 16th Ave. S., Lowery told police he saw the gun, “a dark revolver with a 4- to 6-inch barrel.”

Years later, the bullets from that gun, and where that gun came from, would become extremely important in the investigation.

Pridemore looked around the famous street. Hughes’ body was covered by a yellow sheet, the second victim wasn’t much help and the ski-masked suspect had fled with the gun.

“Oh shit, this don’t look good,” Pridemore said. “Looks like I’m going to be here for a while.”

‘All we are is dust in the wind‘

About 3 a.m., the police placed a call to Carmi, Illinois, the farming town where Kevin Hughes had grown up.

Hughes’ parents, Larry and Barbara, heard the shocking news.

And then Larry Hughes walked down the hallway to wake his youngest son.

Kyle Hughes, who was 18 in 1989, liked to tell people he was four years and 355 days younger than his brother Kevin. He didn’t want Kevin to have the satisfaction of being five years older.

He said his big brother was his hero.

“My dad came and told me what had happened,” Kyle Hughes said through tears in an interview at his Florida home in 2023. “It was just a horrible situation. Nashville police had called and said he had been shot. We started getting more of the details later on. That night is kind of a blur.”

When Kyle thinks about his brother, he sometimes thinks about Kevin’s favorite band.

Kansas.

They were famous for singing, “ All we are is dust in the wind.”

“Kevin loved music,” Kyle Hughes said. “He was a good kid, great kid. I learned a lot from him growing up. He was kind of my idol …”

He became overcome by emotion.

“I’m sorry," he said. "I’m sorry."

As the sun came up the next morning, Pridemore and Postiglione were still at the scene.

They had lots of possibilities to consider as they sat on the low brick wall near where Hughes’ car had been parked. Could it have been a random stick-up robbery that turned into murder? Was it a drug deal gone wrong? A lovers’ quarrel?

Or was it something more targeted, more conspiratorial?

When the news was broadcast into Nashville homes, with crime scene images and footage of famous bystanders, phones began to ring, from the top of the country music world to its seedy underbelly.

Here’s what Pridemore and Postiglione didn’t know.

More than a few people in the industry believed they knew, immediately, what had happened.

And who the killer was.

Those people did not tell the detectives, choosing instead to stay silent. They were scared.

It would be more than a decade before some of the most important witnesses agreed to talk.

Before they would come forward, another person would have to die.

READ PART 3: Murder on Music Row: Corrupt independent record chart might hold key to Nashville homicide

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Murder on Music Row: Nashville couple witness man in ski mask take the shot. Who was he?