The name may ring a small bell for some of you. Others of you may be more familiar with his father…
…Dr. Carl A. Weiss, aka “The man who shot Huey Long”.
Maybe.
The junior Dr. Weiss spent much of his life trying to prove that his father did not shoot Long. Some historians agree:
The counternarrative asserts that the doctor had only punched Long, that the bodyguards had overreacted and that Long was actually killed in the fusillade of their bullets. The guards were said to have then covered up their reckless response by pinning the death on Weiss.
“In his heart he knew the allegations weren’t true,” Carl III said of his father in a telephone interview. “The one-man, one-gun, one-bullet is not what occurred.”
Professor Richard D. White Jr., dean of the E. J. Ourso College of Business at Louisiana State University and the author of a more recent biography, “Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long” (2006), shares those doubts.
“As a historian I cannot say either way, but deep in my heart I do not believe Carl shot Huey, but instead a stray bodyguard bullet hit him,” Professor White, who had met with Dr. Weiss Jr., said in an email this week.
…
Dr. Weiss ultimately cooperated with James E. Starrs, a forensic scientist at George Washington University, who tracked down Carl Sr.’s revolver (it was not unusual for Baton Rouge doctors making late-night house calls to be armed) and a single spent bullet.
They were found in a safe deposit box belonging to the daughter of Louisiana’s former top police official. Dr. Weiss joined the State Police in successfully suing to review the records and test fire the gun.
The police concluded that the bullet — if it was, indeed, the one that had killed Long — had not come from Weiss’s revolver.
Long’s clothes were also examined, and here the tearing of the material and the residue left on it indicated that Long had been shot at point-blank range. That undercut at least one theory — that Long was killed by a ricocheting bullet fired by a bodyguard.
I want to note here, for the record, that the supposed Weiss gun was not a revolver, but an FN Model 1910 pistol. As a matter of fact, it was this one.
I don’t know what to think about Long and Weiss. I’m inclined more in the direction of T. Harry Williams (who was writing close enough to the event that he could interview some first-hand witnesses, and believed that Weiss shot Long) than I am towards some of the later historians. On the other hand, the whole thing is just such a mess of botched investigations and chain of custody questions (how did the Weiss gun and the bullet end up in that guy’s safety deposit box?) that I doubt we’ll ever know anything for sure.
