The sun had just risen on July 17, 2014, in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Eugene Anderson pulled his pickup over, paused at the stop sign in front of Paul MacLeod’s house. He could tell something wasn't quite right. The longtime funeral director was headed to what some locals call “Little Baghdad” — the gas station run by Yemeni immigrants who serve a killer sausage and egg biscuit. The best in town.
The Town & Country Garden Club never awarded Paul MacLeod Yard of the Month. Everyone usually only paid attention to the self-anointed "universe's and galaxy's and planet's and world's ultimate No. 1 Elvis fan" and his eyesore of a 24-hour museum, named Graceland Too, when he did something really big — like switching the house's exterior from Pepto-Bismol pink to blue with sparkly plastic blue Christmas trees. Most recently, Paul had half-assed a beige-ish orange paint job, white primer still covering large sections of the house and the concrete block walls surrounding it.
Elise Jordan / BuzzFeed
That morning, on the front porch behind the two large concrete lions with chain collars, Paul, 71 years old and pot-bellied, was slumped over in a rocking chair with a TCB sticker on it — Elvis' motto. His face was a pale blue, and his earlobes and fingers were purple. His mouth was agape, and his false teeth rested a few inches from the chair.
It so happened that a funeral director found him like this. Eugene Anderson went to the police and voiced his concern, but Paul had already been dead for a few hours. Eugene's son, the county coroner James Richard Anderson, arrived quickly. It was the second time in less than 36 hours that the acting coroner removed a dead body from the house. Two days earlier Paul had killed a man there — his troubled handyman, 28-year-old David Dwight Taylor, who had helped with the shoddy paint job. It wasn’t the first time Paul wielded a gun in Graceland Too, but it would be the last.
David Taylor’s murder and Paul MacLeod’s death were big news in Mississippi, and, briefly, around the country (though multiple sources misspelled the latter's last name). Had Paul not died so suddenly, the fact that he shot an unarmed black man in the heart from point-blank range might have put Holly Springs on the map for an entirely different reason; instead, a hasty investigation gave way to honoring the town's favorite, or at least most talked about, son.
On Jan. 31, Paul’s all-consuming life’s work — his Elvis Presley memorabilia collection at Graceland Too — will be up for auction, where it could be worth millions of dollars, as he insisted again and again to anyone who would listen. Or it might just be junk. That the story of Paul MacLeod and his strange home would end in such chaos wouldn't surprise the thousands who knocked on his door for a rowdy late-night tour, or the few who tried to live with him.
“You’ve heard of suicide by cop? This is suicide by crazy fucking Elvis guy,” said Wallace Lester, a local musician who knew both men. “It’s a tragic story because these are two people who needed help and there was nowhere for them to get help.”
Photograph by Paul MacLeod
Graceland, Elvis Presley's home in Memphis, is an American pop culture mecca — 600,000 tourists visit every year. Graceland Too is another matter entirely. A hoarder’s paradise for Presley ephemera, Graceland Too drew some Elvis fans, but mostly college students and gawkers — 100,000 of them over the years if you want to believe Paul— to Holly Springs, my hometown of about 8,000 residents.
I first visited Graceland Too in 1991, two years after it opened, with the other kids in my Methodist youth group. (My family is Southern Baptist, but I defected to the Methodist youth group because the leader focused on sports and coordinated an annual ski trip.) According to Paul he never forgot my name or face over the years. I barely remember this initial visit, maybe because for the true Graceland Too experience, you showed up at night, preferably after a few beers. Since the town didn’t have a movie theater and as teenagers we’d ride around on back roads drinking beer, visiting Graceland Too constituted the local nightlife.
Paul was unreachable unless you stopped by Graceland Too. He had no telephone. Ring the bell on the front door, pay a fee (in the final years $5), and Paul, usually wearing black jeans and a rumpled Hawaiian shirt, would rise and let you in. As with the real Graceland, visitors were never allowed upstairs. He also never let anyone use the bathroom and did not have running water, which was a problem when your primary clientele was drunk college students.
I’m guessing that Paul bought most of his wardrobe at Walmart, where he went almost daily, flashing a big wad of cash — always a big bill on the outside, but otherwise mostly singles — and filling his cart with Coca-Cola. (He claimed to consume a case a day and sued Coca-Cola over a contaminated soda, settling for a shed full of more Coca-Cola). He'd also stock up on video cassettes to record any mention of Elvis on television and drop off film at the photo lab; an entire room at Graceland Too was covered floor to ceiling in the pictures he took of visitors, and poster boards handled the overflow when the walls were full.
Jabbering his way through rapid-fire quasi-historical factoids and frequently clearing his throat, oblivious to the flap of his loose dentures, Paul ushered guests through Elvis curtains and shiny silver Christmas garland into the first room on the tour, “Can’t Help Falling in Love” playing in the background. Elvis posters, towels, and photos covered the walls and every inch of the ceiling. An inflatable jukebox and guitars sat on the floor. “You ready? You ready?” Paul would say.
Paul MacLeod at Graceland Too in August 2007.
Stan Honda / AFP / Getty Images
To hear him tell it, Graceland Too hosted millions of dollars worth of artifacts, all in mint condition. I relived Paul’s bravado when I pulled up some of the many oddball videos tourists posted after their visits. “You see those yellow gum wrappers above your head? They are worth $5,000.” He added: “If I lied to you for half a second while you’re in this house, kill me. Cut my head off. Burn my family to death.” He was frequently on the verge of even greater wealth. “You know anyone who’s looking for a business deal? I’ll get you richer than Bill Gates and Sam Walton,” Paul said. I believed Graceland Too was full of priceless artifacts. A lot of people in town did.
According to Paul, famous people overwhelmed him with their interest: Caroline Kennedy, Muhammad Ali, J.Lo, George W. Bush. Bill Clinton tried to buy a record from him for $250,000 (he wouldn’t sell). Ted Turner came and tried to pay him $500,000 to do a documentary. The Rolling Stones dropped by en route to hill country master bluesman Junior Kimbrough’s juke joint. Likeliest of these claims is that Glenn Close, Chris O’Donnell, and Lyle Lovett visited when Robert Altman’s 1999 Cookie's Fortune was filmed in Holly Springs.
Paul loved to show off a drawer of bras and panties he claimed sorority girls stripped off and gave him, so moved were they by his tribute to Elvis. He’d tell college boys to deliver him pedophiles so he could whip them and tell women he wanted to whisk them off to New Orleans and marry them — but warned he would never pay child support. He’d brag colorfully about his sexual stamina. I was slightly uncomfortable hearing some of his spiel as a high school girl.
At the end of tours, Paul would grab a neon green and pink ice cream cone microphone and sing and imitate Elvis’ pelvis shake. According to Paul, a lady once peed herself watching him sing. “We had to go get Lysol,” Paul said.
Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1863.
Harpers Weekly / Library of Congress
If nothing else, Graceland Too brought some much-needed tourism to town. Even by Mississippi standards, Holly Springs is poor: Thirty-three percent of the town’s residents live below the poverty line, with per capita income hovering at around $10,000.
During the Civil War, the town was used as a federal arsenal, and General Ulysses S. Grant took up residence in two mansions to plan the siege of Vicksburg. Faulkner liked to drink in Holly Springs — where didn’t he? — and based his fictional world of Yoknapatawpha on a diary he found at a friend’s plantation. During the Freedom Summer of 1964, Holly Springs teemed with visiting civil rights workers, or, as some remember them, those dirty hippie agitators. Women dress in hoop skirts and men wear Confederate uniforms at the annual pilgrimage of antebellum homes, but turnout decreases every year. Seventy-nine percent of the town is black; 19% is white.
What the town has is a lot of churches — 48, to be exact, many of them self-segregating. Evangelicals dominate. People who didn’t go to church were social pariahs of sorts. You might as well have been a Yankee.
Plenty of Christians tried to get Paul to go to church. An aggressive Baptist recruiter my father calls a chronic Christian beelined to Paul every time she saw him at Walmart. Paul always declined.
“Jesus has his missionaries,” Paul frequently declared. “God is taken care of. I’m Elvis’ missionary.”
MacLeod in 1989.
Catherine McGann / Getty Images
A young Paul MacLeod
Courtesy of Brenda Young
Courtesy of Brenda Young
Paul Bernard MacLeod was born in Detroit in 1942. His father, a retired Marine who worked as a security guard, and mother, 25 years younger than her husband, moved Paul and his four sisters from project to project in the Detroit area. “We were happy but very poor,” his sister Betty remembered. Paul’s mother was a devout Pentecostal, and the children attended church at least three times a week.
Paul sometimes claimed to have first seen Elvis perform with Charlie Feathers and the movie cowboy Lash LaRue in 1954 while visiting his relatives in Mississippi; Betty remembers the first concert being at the state fair in Detroit. In another version Paul first saw Elvis on TV. Regardless of when Paul first heard the King, he was hooked for life. Teenage Paul wore a leather jacket, combed his hair like Elvis, and saved for Elvis singles he would play again and again.
After dropping out of high school, Paul worked on the General Motors assembly line as a chipper, grinding wood for use in the exterior and interior panels of Cadillacs. He married his first wife Liz when he was 21 and she was 18. A year later she gave birth to their first daughter, Brenda, who was followed two years later by another, Shari.
Liz, though, didn’t love Elvis, or Paul’s fits of rage. Finally Liz couldn’t take it anymore and left with the girls in the middle of the night. “We left with our pajamas on our back,” Shari recalled. Paul’s sister Betty also remembers another breaking point: Liz “got tired of hearing about Elvis.” She filed for divorce in 1971.
Paul tried, for a bit, to visit the girls. He’d drive over every two weeks in a Cadillac limo. “He always had limos,” Shari said. “I don’t think he knew what to do with us other than to take us to the zoo,” Brenda said. One day he dropped by unannounced and attempted to kidnap Shari. Visits ended, and the divorce was soon final. Paul moved to Mississippi to be closer to Graceland, about a 40-mile drive, never sending child support, which really would have been more of a symbolic gesture anyway. “He quit working during the divorce, so he only owed $5 to $10 a month,” Brenda explained.
Brenda and Shari didn’t see or hear from their father until over a decade after he left. On a Friday night in 1983 at around 11 p.m., Paul called and invited Shari and Brenda to spend Christmas in Mississippi; Shari, 14, accepted and flew to Memphis.
Paul and Shari
Courtesy of Brenda Young
Paul met her at the gate. “Something about him just seemed off,” Shari recalled. After Shari retrieved her suitcase at baggage claim, she refused to let Paul carry it, already calculating how she could get back home. They drove an hour to Paul’s house on the Mississippi back roads, deep in farm country and outside the city limits. The first night, Paul sat in a chair in the hallway outside Shari’s bedroom and watched her sleep the entire night. The next night, she locked the door and stuck a chair under the doorknob.
Paul’s new wife, Serita Kay, a brunette with a beautiful face whom he met when she was 17 and married in 1979, was clearly the breadwinner, doling out cash for Paul before she left for her job at Coleman's, a barbecue restaurant. Though Shari protested — she didn’t like Elvis — Paul insisted on taking her to Graceland and Elvis’ birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi.
At the end of the visit, Shari had one condition for continuing their relationship. She wanted Paul to mail Brenda a birthday card in a few weeks. The card never arrived, but Paul called eventually. According to Shari, she uttered her last words to her father during that phone call: “I’ll see you in court, or I’ll see you in hell."
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