The File: '57 Auburn star's dark secretBobby Hoppe's fatal encounter on a dark Tennessee road changed his lifeEmail Comments21 By Shaun AssaelESPN the MagazineArchive Auburn football preview from 1957. (Click to enlarge)When the Auburn Tigers take the field against the Oregon Ducks for the BCS National Championship Game on Jan. 10, Sherry Hoppe will be rooting as fiercely for the Tigers as she did when her husband, Bobby, was alive.Bobby Hoppe, after all, was a legendary Tigers halfback and the star of the last Auburn crew to win a national title. His team started the 1957 season unranked and finished it undefeated.Bobby died in April 2008, and to keep his memory alive, Sherry has just released an account of that perfect season called "A Matter of Conscience". A feel-good story it's not. Hoppe spent the second half of 1957 -- and three decades thereafter -- fearing that someone would find out about a deep, violent secret that he was keeping.Through police reports and court transcripts from the period, The File has reconstructed how that secret turned a legend of Auburn football into a haunted man. It's a story that summons a bygone era of law and order. And it starts with two cars meeting on a dark Chattanooga road on June 20, 1957.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Don Hudson, one of the most hard-bitten liquor runners in the Appalachian Hills, drove his 1948 DeSoto silently along Bell Boulevard at 1 in the morning. Having just posted bond for a bootlegging arrest that involved a wild car chase that ended in flames, Hudson was looking for more trouble.Hoppe was a top high school RB. (Click to enlarge)Bobby Hoppe was easy to recognize, even without the roof of his sister's convertible Ford Fairlane turned down. "Hippety" Hoppe, as he was known, was one of the best football players Tennessee ever produced -- and maybe the best. After he ran for 1,700 yards in his senior year at Chattanooga's Central High School in 1954, he was so hotly recruited that it became front-page news when he picked the Alabama Polytechnic Institute in Auburn. By his junior season, he was the ninth-leading rusher in the SEC and one of its most feared blockers.Hoppe was getting ready to return to college for his senior season when he saw Hudson's DeSoto in his rearview mirror, trailing him bumper to bumper. Bobby knew Hudson well. The bootlegger dated his sister and, if the rumors around town were to be believed, hit her when they were an item. There wasn't a lot of good blood between the men. Yet Bobby wasn't planning on spilling any, either.That changed when Hudson pointed a gun at him through his car window. Bobby reached for a loaded shotgun and fired first. Decades later, he'd insist that "I would be dead" if he waited a second longer.Bobby sped away, and at daybreak learned his shot had torn through Hudson's head, instantly killing him. Most people, Hudson's friends included, assumed the violence was the result of a bootlegging feud. And Bobby wasn't about to dissuade them. Still, by the time he arrived in Auburn, he was a nervous wreck.Seeing the sign for Auburn's First Baptist Church, he stopped in and asked to speak to a pastor.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Unwilling to let his son's murder go unsolved, Don Hudson's father petitioned the county to do something that hadn't been done in a hundred years: convene a coroner's inquest.Hoppe came back to town on Aug. 8, 1957, to testify before it and took the Fifth, as did his mother and sister. Later that day, the stymied jurors reported that they'd gone as far as they could go. Hudson's assailant would have to be officially listed as "a person or persons unknown."--------------------------------------------------------------------------------With the case seemingly closed, Bobby tried to concentrate on football and what looked to be a rough season. The Tigers were under NCAA probation, barred from playing in a bowl, and their starting QB got kicked off the team for "scholastic and disciplinary reasons" before the season opener in Tennessee.Fortunately, a third-string lefty QB named Lloyd Nix stepped up and helped Hoppe pound the ball all day in Knoxville. By the time the clock ran down, the only points on the scoreboard were the seven that belonged to Auburn.The upset led to a string of equally smothering wins against Chattanooga, Kentucky, Georgia Tech, Houston, Florida, Mississippi State, Georgia and Florida State. By the time Auburn hosted Alabama for the season finale on Nov. 30, 1957, the Tigers had allowed just four touchdowns all season and were second behind Oklahoma in the Associated Press poll.A 40-0 drubbing of Alabama left no doubt among the AP voters that the Tigers -- a bunch of low-key Southern kids who knew how to play suffocating defense -- deserved to be national champions.But even as the spotlight was shining on the Tigers, Bobby Hoppe was trying to slip out of it.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Whether Hoppe was lucky or not depends on your point of view. He was drafted by the San Francisco 49ers with the 33rd overall pick in 1958 and then played for the Washington Redskins in 1959 before an injury ended his career. After that, he returned to Auburn to complete his bachelor's degree, get his master's degree in education and assist his old coach, Shug Jordan. In the years that followed, he made a reputation for himself as a respected high school coach.But the shooting of Don Hudson continued to hover over him, just like it hung over the pastor who gave him solace that day in July 1957.On March 11, 1966, the Rev. Joseph Godwin wrote a letter to the Chattanooga police, offering to reveal Hudson's killer. When a detective arrived at his home, Godwin, then a psychology professor at High Point College, explained that he could no longer handle the pressure that came from harboring Hoppe's confession. Godwin's letter led to a huge break in the unsolved case. (Click to read the whole letter)"[As] a professor of psychology, and as one who teaches abnormal psychology, I know the hallmarks of personality disintegration [and] I had begun to feel some of [them]...," he wrote.Recalling the day he met Hoppe at Auburn's First Baptist Church, Godwin said that Hoppe was "the most disturbed human being I've ever seen. ... He left me with the impression that when this was over, he was going to turn himself in."The letter was a breakthrough for the police, but it was still short of a murder confession. After all, Hoppe hadn't quite identified the person he'd shot, much less confessed to doing it with premeditation or reckless disregard for human life.In 1966, a Tennessee grand jury concluded the same thing as the jurors of the coroner's inquest nine years earlier: There wasn't enough hard evidence to indict Bobby Hoppe.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Bobby slipped back out of the limelight, eventually becoming the athletic director of Chattanooga State Technical College. Yet he could never be sure that his case was completely closed.That's why he got a chill in 1987, when Sherry told him that Chattanooga was starting a support group for the families of murder victims. One of the first sign-ups was Georgia Hudson, and when two cold-case cops came to speak to the group, the 78-year-old told them about the unsolved killing of her son.The cops decided to reinvestigate, and in March 1988 Bobby Hoppe found himself in the headlines again, this time because he'd been indicted for first-degree murder.The media crush around the 53-year-old former star was intense when his trial got underway at the Hamilton County Criminal Courthouse on June 21, 1988.The main prosecution witness was an old acquaintance named Odene Neal, who testified to something she hadn't mentioned before the cold-case cops came to interview her: That on July 19, 1957, she told Bobby that she'd seen Hudson smack his sister and he vowed, "Well, I got a shotgun out in my car and I'll shoot him."The Rev. Godwin testified as well, despite an attempt by Hoppe's lawyers to suppress his 1966 interview. By the time the prosecution rested, things looked grim for Hoppe.When he finally took the stand, Hoppe began making his case for self-defense by describing Hudson as a fearsome character who routinely ripped off other bootleggers. Returning to that fateful night, he recalled how he was looking for friends in his Fairlane when he noticed the DeSoto in his rearview mirror."I recognized the person in the car and he hollered something at me and pointed a gun at me," Hoppe told the jury.He said that he reached for his shotgun and laid out the window, hoping to scare Hudson away, but the DeSoto picked up speed and the two raced through the night. "It was all I could do to really keep myself under control," he said.As Hudson pulled beside him, pointing his gun, Hoppe said it was kill or be killed. So he fired first."I was not trying to hit him. Killing him had never entered my mind. I fired out of sheer fear," he testified. "...I felt like then, and I feel like now in my heart, that if I hadn't taken that action, that I would be dead."The claim might have been dismissed as self-serving if not for a surprise witness who appeared, as if out of a movie, at the last minute.A waitress who knew Hudson in 1957, and had been following the trial in the local papers, emerged to say that she saw Hudson carrying a gun that fateful night and heard him threaten to use it on Hoppe."He said he would get him. One way or another, he would get him," said the waitress, Diane Shirley.Before Shirley's testimony, Hoppe's situation seemed bleak. (Click to read the whole transcript)--------------------------------------------------------------------------------After four hours of deliberations, the jury hearing the case arrived at the same conclusion as their grand jury counterparts 22 years earlier, and the jurors in the coroner's inquest nine years before that.The facts were too conflicting. Too many memories were hazy.In her book, Sherry Hoppe recalls watching her husband listen to the jury foreman announce that they were deadlocked.Bobby never moves a muscle. I can't see his face but I know his expression is stoic, revealing nothing. He's become good at that over the last 31 years.As soon as the trial ended, the couple moved from Chattanooga to a town near Knoxville. Sherry became the president of Roane State Community College. Bobby worked as the director of a student recreation center at Pellissippi State until his retirement in 1999.For long periods, Sherry would watch as Bobby withdrew, just sitting in his chair and staring at the wall. "Even when he stopped playing football, Bobby never stopped wearing a mask," she says. "He was always very stoic, very somber. He couldn't forgive himself for what he'd done."But as the years after his trial passed, she saw him slowly come out of his shell. He seemed especially changed after a trip to Israel, where he visited the Sea of Galilee.When Sherry retired in 2008, she told Bobby that she wanted to write his story so the public could see the man behind the mask. "Go ahead and write it," Bobby told her. "But I can't promise I'll let you publish it."Two weeks later, he died of a heart attack.Bobby didn't go to Auburn much after he stopped playing. "He thought people would stare at him," Sherry says. But she thinks that if he were alive today, he'd make the trip to Arizona on Monday."He'd probably be in the shadows somewhere, scribbling plays on a piece of paper the whole game," she says. "He wouldn't show any outward emotion. But inside he'd be cheering."
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