Assassination witness remembers Faller ambush
On the evening of January 23, 1962, assassins shot and killed a Louisiana public official in Livingston Parish. On Highway 42 near Springville, two or more conspirators ambushed 48-year-old Marketing Commission Executive Secretary Marvin Faller, unaware that two men witnessed the operation.
One witness, still living today, recounted those events for me. Having thoroughly investigated the witness’ background, I can vouch for his credibility.
“I’m thinking the killers are all dead now,” he told me, “But I don’t want their relatives after me either.” To ensure his anonymity, I will call him Clarence.
Public records show Livingston Parish sheriff’s deputies interviewed this man with 14 others in 1962. “They brought us to the sheriff’s office after,” Clarence remembered. “They had pictures of the car and the body they wanted us to look at while we retold what happened.”
In 1976, Livingston Parish Sheriff Taft Faust retired after three decades in office. In his last news conference, he told reporters his biggest regret was not uncovering who killed Marvin Faller.
“Well, if he tried to uncover anything, he didn’t try very hard,” Clarence said. “My father and I described both vehicles involved. The truck carrying the shooter stood out like a swollen thumb. With the number of vehicles on the road in 1962, if the sheriff had looked, he would have found it. After the shooting, we never saw that truck again in this part of the country.”
Clarence, a teenager in 1962, sat on the porch, with his father, watching the occasional vehicle pass, while his mother prepared the evening meal. “Faller lived on Highway 22 between Springfield and Ponchatoula,” Clarence said. “He knew they were after him for killing Ben Kinchen in Tickfaw. Every day he drove home from the state capitol in Baton Rouge, he took a different route. Sometimes he’d take Highway 190. Other times, he would go 42, passed our place. They killed him in the curve about 200 yards from our front porch.”
Rarely did a vehicle pass that Clarence and his father did not recognize. “That day, this truck kept passing. It made three or four trips up and down the road, turning around in our driveway,” Clarence said, “like the people inside were looking or waiting for something.”
Clarence described the truck as an older model Studebaker, blue, with stacked exhausts. “The color looked like a pair of new blue jeans,” he said. “And straight pipes, loud ones, stood up behind the cab, like on an 18-wheeler.”
“After several passes, they met up with this blue and white car, a late model Oldsmobile. It parked alongside the road a mile back, facing the curve, and the blue truck drove back and parked in the curve. We could barely see the truck through tree limbs, but as my mother called us in for supper, we saw the Oldsmobile headlights flash twice.”
“At the table, we heard two pops, one loud and one muffled. We figured that old truck backfired and thought nothing of it. But when we got back on the porch, it was almost dark. The truck and car had gone, and we could see the red tail lights of Faller’s car off in the woods.”
Investigating, Clarence and his father found Marvin Faller’s white 1961 Plymouth lodged on a stump. The sedan had jumped a culvert in the curve east of the Lizard Creek bridge. Shattered glass littered the newly paved highway and trailed through the bushes to Faller’s wrecked automobile.
Inside the bloody car, Marvin Faller sat slumped over the steering wheel with a large hole in his head. “The papers said he was shot in the temple. That wasn’t so,” Clarence said. “The shot hit just under his left ear.”
Clarence estimated that highway patrol and deputies from the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office arrived within 30 minutes of the shooting. “They found a hole in the car’s frame, between the front and back doors. They first thought it was a slug, but it turned out to be fine squirrel shot fired point-blank.”
When sheriff’s deputies invited Clarence and his father to the coroner’s office to review photos and recount what they saw, deputies theorized that the Studebaker partially blocked the road, forcing Faller to slow and maneuver around the truck. As he did, the gunman, hidden in the truck bed, stood up and fired a double-barreled shotgun into Faller’s car. The first and loudest shot hit the frame. The muffled shot busted the driver’s side glass and pierced Faller’s skull.
Most living in South Louisiana in 1962, likely knew who owned the blue Studebaker truck with loud pipes. If you are one of those people, it is not too late to step forward and see this case finally resolved.
In 1963, Marvin Faller’s wife filed a lawsuit against the state of Louisiana, seeking compensation for her husband’s assassination. However, the Louisiana courts denied her request, ruling that those who conspired to murder Faller likely did so in retaliation for Ben Kinchen’s shooting, rather than something Faller did in his role as Executive Secretary.