Probe Reaffirms Doctor Killed Huey Long in ’35

NEW ORLEANS —  Louisiana state police have concluded that the doctor who was always blamed for the 1935 assassination of Sen. Huey P. Long was indeed the gunman that day, an officer said Friday.

State Police Lt. Donald R. Moreau testified Friday that Long, the legendary “Kingfish” of Louisiana politics, was killed by a single shot fired at close range.

‘He was shot once, the bullet passing completely through his body and exiting through his back,” Moreau testified at a hearing on the case. “There was one assassin. That assassin was Dr. Carl A. Weiss.”

Long was mortally wounded and died 30 hours after the shooting in a corridor of the state Capitol on Sept. 8, 1935. Weiss died immediately in a hail of bullets from Long’s bodyguards.

When he died, Long was a potential 1936 presidential candidate and was seen as a major political danger to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, then in his first term. Though in the Senate, the former Louisiana governor continued to rule his home state through his handpicked governor and a rubber-stamp Legislature.

The assassination has been clouded for years by speculation, contradictory witnesses, the lack of autopsies on either Long or Weiss, and the 1940 disappearance of state police records and a gun found on Weiss after he was killed. The gun and records resurfaced last year.

Forensic investigator James E. Starrs, who exhumed Weiss’ body last October, said in February that in his view, there was “significant scientific evidence to establish grave and persuasive doubts” the Baton Rouge physician was the assassin.

But he said the evidence did not prove conclusively whether Long was shot by Weiss or his own bodyguards in a corridor of the state Capitol on Sept. 8, 1935.