Have you ever ran for office? Probably not, but if you have, you’ve probably lost. And if you’ve won, it was for some wimpy local office.

But maybe you’re helping someone win public office, in which case, do not tell them to act like this politician. Or do tell them to. It’s really up to you.

Byron Anthony Looper (1964-2013) was a politician who ran for many offices until 1998, when he tried to win an election in an… unorthodox way.

Looper was born in Tennessee, but grew up in Georgia. From 1983 to 1985, he served at West Point until he was discharged for a knee injury. After that, he went to the University of Georgia, where, after he graduated, he began working for the Georgia House of Representatives.

He tried to get a seat in the GHOR in 1988, but lost in the Democratic primary to the bizarrely-named Wyc Orr. Then, he enrolled as a graduate student at a business school and worked on Al Gore’s 1988 campaign for president (which I’m learning just now!) In 1992, Looper came back to Tennessee and switched his party from Democratic to Republican, and in 1994, he tried to do what he did for the GHOR (see above) and had the same result.

But this is where things get interesting.

In 1996, he managed to change his full name from Byron Anthony Looper to Byron (Low Tax) Looper. He then proceeded to run for Putnam County tax assessor, where he finally won, unseating an incumbent who had done the job for 14 years. The interesting thing is that his only medium for his campaign was negative attack ads.

But that paragraph above isn’t where his life started to take a wonky turn.

In 1998, he decided to take a shot at the big leagues and filed to run in the primaries for Tennessee’s 6th congressional district and their 15th state Senate. He didn’t win in the congressional district primary, but was unopposed for the state senate. His Democratic opponent in the state senate race was Tommy Burks, who had represented the area for 28 years (8 years in the state House and 20 years in the state Senate). He was very popular and expected to win the election smoothly.

On October 19, however, things would not go that way.

That morning, Burks was found dead at the wheel of a truck at his local farm. Authorities investigated the scene, and a person watching TV, who saw an image of Looper, recognized the man behind the shooting. Looper was caught in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and he was put in jail.

But if you do some research, Tennessee law says that candidates who died before the election had to be removed from the ballot. And if you do some thinking, that means we have a dead candidate not on the ballot against someone who can’t take the office and is running unopposed. So Burke’s wife, Charlotte, was offered as a write-in candidate, and she won the election with a whopping 95.18% of the vote. And I guess she was popular, as she won reelection in 2002, 2006, and 2010, before she retired prior to the 2014 election. Looper, meanwhile, stayed in jail, probably amazed that an incredibly small number of people (4.82%) still voted for him in 1998 up until he died in 2013.

So, that summarizes the tale of B(LT)L. The way he tried to advance his career is an example of what not to do in elections. But, if you murder the candidate and try to act like he’s alive, like in Weekend at Bernie’s…