Loranger murders in same location, decades apart

At dusk, near a Loranger community called Mixon’s Corner, Sunday, August 27, 1950, a two-man search party found a log truck abandoned. Minutes later, the searchers found the driver’s body in the woods fifteen yards from his vehicle.

Twenty-three years earlier, the Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff’s Office discovered another body in the same wooded area and arrested a log truck driver for the murder—the same truck driver killed there in 1950.

Thomas Anthony, 43, had been missing three days when a cousin, Charley Anthony, and a friend, Hulon Cutrer, found his body. A coroner’s inquest determined someone shot the truck driver once in the leg and once in the head with a .38-caliber revolver.

One bullet entered his face on the left side near his mouth before exiting on the right side of his head near the ear. Another slug hit his right leg in a downward trajectory, smashing bone between his knee and ankle.

After finding the body, the men telephoned Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff Thomas Irving Sanders. Accompanied by two deputies, the sheriff arrived on the scene soon after and transported the body to Thomas Funeral Home in Hammond, where Coroner Luther Layton Ricks held the inquest Monday night, August 28.

Based on a sheriff’s investigation tracing Anthony’s movements until 1:20 Sunday morning when he bought groceries, Ricks told the jury he estimated the murder occurred between two and sunrise that morning. The coroner said Anthony died ten or more hours before his cousin discovered the body. A lumberjack at Cooper’s Sawmill nearby told Sheriff Sanders he heard gunshots just before dawn Sunday morning.

Sheriff Sanders said his investigation found that the gunman had forced Thomas Anthony from his truck and chased him into the woods, shooting him in the leg to stop the chase, before standing over him and shooting him in the head.

Deputies with dogs later tracked footsteps in the area to the home of a Loranger man, whom they brought to Amite for questioning. District Attorney Joseph Simms and Assistant District Attorney Duncan Kemp assisted Sheriff Sanders in the interrogation, but the team found nothing and ultimately released the man.

Coincidentally, twenty-three years earlier, the same coroner, Luther Ricks, conducted the inquest of another man found slain within a half-mile from the Thomas Anthony crime scene.

However, in that homicide, Thomas Anthony was the prime suspect.

Sunday, June 5, 1927, Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff Lem H. Bowden escorted Coroner Ricks into the woods near Union Church, where he examined the body of 65-year-old Nathaniel “Seab” Seaborn Holland.

Two weeks after the owner of the Natalbany Lumber Company went missing, timber hauler Joe Chambers found his employer’s decapitated body in a thicket near Union Church, severely decomposed and ravaged by animals. At the inquest that followed, the coroner’s jury could not determine the cause of death. Ricks could not tell whether the victim’s head became detached before or after death. However, he testified that a sharp blade severed the spine. Animals had not removed the man’s head.

Two weeks earlier, the night of May 31, 1927, having drawn three-hundred and fifty dollars from an Amite City bank to buy a pair of mules from Loranger farmer Lawrence Populis, Holland and his driver, Thomas Anthony, stopped at the Ponder Hotel for coffee. Both left the hotel restaurant around ten, the last time anyone remembered seeing Holland alive.

Thomas Anthony told Sheriff Bowden that Holland contracted him to drive him from Montpelier to Amite to draw money from the bank and buy the mule team from Populis. After the two had coffee, Anthony said, Holland decided it was too late to continue to Loranger. Instead, he planned to check in at the hotel and have Populis bring the mules into town the following day. After purchasing the team and wagon from Populis, Anthony said, Holland planned to drive the mules back to Montpelier.

Two weeks later, Sheriff Bowden arrested Thomas Anthony and Lawrence Populis, charging both with murder, assuming robbery as the motive.

During their first trial, Sheriff Bowden testified that Charles Johnson, an Amite blacksmith, led him to Loranger farmer Frank Hugh Cutrer, who claimed to have seen Holland after he left the Ponder Hotel.

Called to the stand, Frank Cutrer told District Attorney Lee Ponder that Holland and three other men stopped by his farm that night to buy moonshine. Holland appeared asleep in the backseat. The car’s driver told him, “The old fart can’t hold his whiskey.” Cutrer told Ponder he did not recognize the men with Holland and could not identify either defendant as one of them.

The first trial ended in a mistrial with a hung jury.

After another proceeding, in May 1928, a jury found Anthony and Populis guilty, and a judge sentenced both to life in prison. The following day, inmates at the Tangipahoa Parish jail in Amite kicked out a set of rusty bars, and eleven men escaped. However, Anthony and Populis remained in their cells, refusing to leave. When Sheriff Bowden asked why they stayed behind, both professed their innocence as they had countless times before, saying they would leave jail only after winning an appeal.

On July 2, 1928, six days before Anthony and Populis transferred to the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, the Louisiana Supreme Court overturned their convictions, ordering a severance and scheduling new and separate trial dates for both men.

In the third trial of Lawrence Populis on November 1, 1928, Thomas Anthony told the District Attorney that he witnessed two timber haulers kill Holland, Leonard Husser and Joe Chambers, the logger who told police he “discovered” Holland’s body. Populis, Anthony told the District Attorney, knew nothing of what happened that night, and this jury found Populis not guilty and released him.

Thomas Anthony’s last trial ended on June 25, 1929. In another mistrial, the jury voted 9 to 3 to convict him.

The Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff’s Office charged no one in the 1950 murder of Thomas Anthony. His widow had him buried at the Union Church cemetery in Loranger, near his childhood home, walking distance from the woods where he and Seab Holland died.