>> PAYTON: Nashville, Indiana, has long been a destination for its local shopping, gorgeous landscape, and nearby state park.
But for more than 30 years, there was one more attraction that brought in not only countless tourists, but artists like Johnny Cash, Billy Ray Cyrus, Loretta Lynn.
It was a fixture of the local arts scene and country music at large.
And in one night, it all went up in smoke.
♪ Hello and welcome to "Flyover Culture," your guided tour of pop culture in the Midwest.
I'm Payton Whaley, here to put on my "True Crime" hat for a while.
But unlike most "True Crime," I'm not here to talk about somebody's grisly murder, and then segue into an ad for ExpressVPN.
Thankfully.
This is a story of passion, of negligence, and of a piece of a community burned away overnight.
This is the story of the Little Nashville Opry.
To tell the story, I needed help, because I am not very smart.
So I reached out to Craig Fehrman, author and journalist behind "Burned," his piece for "Indianapolis Monthly," that in my opinion, is one of the most comprehensive bits of writing about the subject.
The Little Nashville Opry opened in 1975.
It didn't take long to become a local institution.
>> Every time you talked to somebody, their face would light up, and you could see how many great memories and how many great shows that the community had experienced there together.
They had people like Billy Ray Cyrus come in and play when he was kind of up and coming.
And I still remember doing the research, and they would do two shows on Saturday night.
So they sold out both shows.
So 4,000 people there to see them.
So if somebody went out in the parking lot and counted the license plates, and there were license plates from 21 different states there in little old Brown County, Indiana, because of Billy Ray Cyrus.
But the reason why Billy Ray Cyrus was there was because of the Opry itself.
Pretty much any big name you could think of in country music had come through at least once or twice, but they also tried to prioritize young up and coming artists.
So people like Blake Shelton or Reba McEntire or Toby Keith, you know, hardly up and comers anymore, but when they first played in the Opry, they were.
And that was one of the things that was special about it.
You could see the biggest names, but you could also see the biggest names of the future.
>> PAYTON: To understand the passion behind the Opry, you had to know the owner, DeWayne Hamilton.
>> He was the guy who really did the most to build it up.
He had a great venue, and it had a lot of charm and a lot of ambience, but it really had his intelligence and hard work behind it.
One of the things that always impressed me, is that when he would have all of these people come in, whether it was Willie Nelson or Billy Ray Cyrus or Toby Keith, all these big national figures, he would make sure that there would be home-cooked meals in the dressing room for them.
You can't overstate just how Brown County the whole thing was, and I mean that in the best possible sense.
You know, when you went in there to sit down, you didn't have stadium seating.
You had wooden pews that you would sit on.
When you went to the concession stand, they would have fudge for sale, just like you could find in downtown Nashville.
And so all of these things sort of were a perfect blend with the community, but also with country music itself.
>> PAYTON: The Opry wasn't just sentimental to Brown County.
It was an economic boon.
>> So if you have 4,000 people there for two Saturday night shows, well, they got to eat somewhere.
They got to shop somewhere.
They got to sleep somewhere.
Obviously, those beautiful hills and trees are still the biggest draw in that area, but the Opry was up there too, and it worked well because people who liked one thing often liked the other.
>> PAYTON: DeWayne Hamilton passed away in 1996, and that's where things start to get dicey.
Once he died, ownership duties fell to his widow Esther.
She enlisted the help of Jim Bowyer, a man roughly ten years her junior, and for lack of a better word, her partner.
For the most part, they kept bringing in some big names, but something was missing.
Some of that hometown charm, sure, but more a desire to keep the place up to code.
>> But they did not run the Opry the way DeWayne had run the Opry.
They stopped having those double Saturday shows, which were always a lot of fun and really kind of also old-fashioned.
You know, that was very much, like, back to the Johnny Cash era of touring.
And all of a sudden that was gone.
The home-cooked meals for the talent, that was gone.
Even kind of basic mechanical things.
The sprinkler system, they had problems with it leaking.
The Opry was a wooden building, with wooden walls, wooden pews for people to sit on.
It was a literal tinderbox.
But they just let the sprinkler system go, and they just turned off the water supply because they didn't want to fix the leaks.
Not for all of it, but for large portions of it throughout the building.
>> PAYTON: Esther Hamilton and Jim Bowyer had something else in common.
They were both obsessive gamblers.
>> The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ended up getting involved, and they did an audit.
And they found in the four years before the fire, that Esther went to local casinos more than 800 times.
And Jim went to local casinos more than 650 times, and together they bet literal millions of dollars.
>> PAYTON: In 2009, she had well over half a million dollars in debts, and less than $400 in her bank account.
>> They had a lot of time and a lot of focus and a lot of drive to gamble, but there was not much evidence of them using that to take care of the Opry, to keep its finances in proper shape, or to keep, you know, the momentum of artists and fans and cultural excitement that DeWayne had done so ably throughout his career.
>> PAYTON: Just six weeks before the fire, Esther tried to sell the Opry for a cool $2 million but that fell through when the financing company said it wasn't worth the price.
And the quarter million the potential buyer had given them to put in a trust instead went directly toward casinos and personal expenses.
>> They were on their last legs at this point financially speaking, and that was an important part of the case that was built against them.
>> PAYTON: On the night of September 19th, 2009, a bluegrass band finished up their show at the Opry, and the building emptied out, just as it had for decades before.
But a little after 10 p.m., calls started coming in to 911.
The Opry was up in flames.
Multiple fire departments responded, but it didn't take long for the Opry to be a total loss.
Here's where we get some wrinkles to the story.
At the time, the Opry was next to a couple motels, which meant potential witnesses.
>> Somebody was at the hotel, standing outside smoking a cigarette, late on that night on a Saturday.
And it's just so poetic because when DeWayne was running it, it would have been full at that time.
This was about 10:00 at night on a Saturday, and she looks up and she sees one truck, which had a cap on the back, like a camping kind of cap, pull out real fast, and it was the exact truck that Jim drove.
And so that was something that she told investigators, that the last car, by itself, seen there, pulled out in a hurry was Jim's.
And then when investigators started looking around, they found flame accelerate poured down the aisleways of the actual performance space.
There was a lot to suggest that somebody set a fire to there, and that the -- you know, the overwhelming evidence, both for investigators and for everybody who lived in Brown County, was that it was Jim and Esther behind it.
>> PAYTON: Trying to figure out a motive here isn't exactly a brain teaser.
The $3.6 million insurance policy could have paid Esther and Jim's debts and then some, and hey, no more Opry to look after either.
But in 2011, a judge ruled that Esther wouldn't be getting her payout after all, after she failed to keep the sprinkler system up and running.
In 2012, Bowyer was charged with arson and his trial began in 2014.
By this point, he was in his late 70s and Esther was in her mid-80s, and it's here we get another wrinkle.
This wasn't the first time a property over seen by Bowyer had a fire.
>> A lot of this stuff was actually not allowed to be used at the trial, the judge dismissed it because it was too prejudicial.
But, you know, some of the stuff that came out and that was later leaked to reporters, was that Bowyer had a friend with a business that was struggling and offered this friend -- this was a couple years before -- you know, I can just burn it down for you, and then you can collect the insurance money.
He would generally dismiss it to the police as just, I think that was a space heater on the fritz or something, but, I mean, come on.
>> PAYTON: There was a lot here for the jury to consider.
The lack of upkeep, the gambling debts, but perhaps the strangest twist of the whole thing was the not guilty verdict at the end of it all.
>> Arson cases are notoriously difficult, and even though in this one we had access, motive, more motives, even more motives, um, that just wasn't enough for the jury to, you know, convict beyond a reasonable doubt.
I would drive around and ask people about it, and I was trying to be a good, objective reporter, right?
And so I would say, you know, so do you think that the owners are guilty or not?
And every single person just responded with laughter, like I was the dumbest person alive.
They would just laugh -- I mean, one person finally when they stopped laughing was, like, everybody in this town thinks they are guilty as sin.
>> PAYTON: From here, things start to calm down a bit, after the back taxes were settled, a new owner bought the property for a little under $60,000, with big plans to reopen.
When he passed away in 2019, another group bought the property and told Indiana Public Media that if it does reopen, it won't be the same music venue it was in the 2000s.
The Opry making its grand re-entrance feels even less likely when you consider the Brown County Music Center, Nashville's newest venue, opened its doors in 2019.
>> The Music Center is a great venue, and I'm sure the people who work there work really hard too, but the music industry has changed.
Country music has certainly become a lot different than country music was in the '70s and '80s and '90s.
And so you are never going to recapture that kind of nostalgia.
And if there's one musical industry that is driven by nostalgia, it's country music, right?
And so when the Opry burned down, you know, a connection to the past burned down too.
>> PAYTON: All that's left of the Opry now is an overgrown parking lot and a faded billboard.
And on the Opry's website, you can still see a message from 2018 saying, "Despite a false story being circulated around the Nashville and Brown County communities, we do plan to rebuild and open as soon as possible."
What is the takeaway here?
What do we learn?
>> What did we learn?
It was a really important place, and a place that was special to a lot of people.
Unfortunately, you know, if one or two people can do something special for a community, one or two people can take something away too.
You just have one or two people who didn't want to do the hard work anymore.
Didn't care about other people.
They just wanted to take the easy way for the money for themselves.
And so it's hard to overstate or even to understand how great its run was, all this way in the future, when all we see is a cracked pavement and a lot of weeds going through it, and a sign that says, hey, we're coming back, even though everybody knows they're not.
>> PAYTON: And on that note, a big thank you to Craig Fehrman for his help with this episode.
I'll see you in a couple of weeks.
It's more uplifting, I promise.