You’re watching The Verdict on News 15, brought to you by Laborde Earls Injury Lawyers.
More than a half-century after the assassination, the last will and testament of a Louisiana State Police captain and an exhumation of the presumed assassin’s body brought to light new evidence that turned history upside down.
We knew about it, but nobody in the family talked about it. It was like the hidden elephant in the room.
Oh, she gave me very evasive answers. She said he’d been killed in an accident.
He had, you know, what a lot of people thought was going to be the perfect life. You had a beautiful wife and a young son. And that—the family just felt that there was no way he could have done this. And that’s what we kind of lived with for years.
Huey was heavily armed. I mean, bodyguards. And they were all armed. So, everybody felt that if anybody would go to perform this kind of act was walking into a death sentence.
One thing that brought it very dramatically to my attention, and that was that Life magazine cover that showed my father’s body riddled with bullets. That, she couldn’t shield me from. And that probably was—in a way, it’s kind of turned me off because sometimes, when things are too gory, you don’t even want to think about them.
I was trying a case in a Gulfport, Mississippi, United States Federal Court, and the judge in the case was Lansing Mitchell. After the case, everybody was sitting down. Before he walked out of the courtroom, he pointed at me says, “Pavy, get in my office.” I said, “Well, this is unusual.” So, walked in his office and sat down, and he says, “Carl Weiss.” I said, “Well, that was my uncle. You know, that was my mother’s oldest sister’s husband.” He said, “Weiss didn’t kill Long.” And I was kind of taken aback, and I said, “How do you know?” He said, “I wrote Captain Gear’s will.” Gear was the head of the State Police at the time. And I said, “Well, what—you know, what”—he says, “In the will, he said, ‘I leave to my daughter the gun that I removed from Dr. Weiss’ car after the incident the Capitol.’”
And then, of course, kind of on a dual path, the—in addition to getting the gun back were making the preparations to exhume Dr. Weiss’ body. And they were going to send it up to the Smithsonian, see if he, you know, had any kind of narcotics drugs in him, which would have made him behave irrationally.
I was there when they did exhume my father’s body at the cemetery in Baton Rouge. It was like a rain on a tin roof when they emptied the contents of the casket out because there were so many bullets that had been left in my father’s body.
One of the things that we found was that there was a broken bone in the hand—the left hand of Dr. Weiss. There was an entry wound in the skull, which essentially, right below the left eye. And then I think there was also some broken—some fracture in the forearms, which would indicate that his hands were up when they were shooting. Or prior to the shooting starting. But anyway, that was some of the things that were—and of course, there were no drugs or anything in the body that, you know, we thought would make him behave this way or act inappropriately.
But a lot—you know, even a lot of people felt that especially in the family that it was just enough to say, “Hey, wait. Maybe you didn’t do it.” And that’s pretty much where it’s been since then.
I’m David Laborde, and I’m Digger Earls. This concludes our three-part series on the assassination of Huey Long. Tune in next time as we take a closer look at the more personal side of Huey Long.
This presentation of The Verdict on News 15 was brought to you by Laborde Earls Injury Lawyers.