AFTE Store - The Death of Huey Long,The Enigmatic Bullet and Other New Evidence of Historic Interest

On the night of Sunday, September 8, 1935 United States Senator Huey P. Long, Jr. and former governor of the State of Louisiana was shot while in the corridor of the State Capitol building in Baton Rouge. He succumbed to his single perforating gunshot wound thirty hours later. His purported assassin, Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, was immediately shot numerous times by a number of Senator Long’s bodyguards. An FN 32 Automatic pistol, later determined to belong to Dr. Weiss, was found near his body. No autopsies were conducted on either gunshot victim nor did the subsequent inquest into Senator Long’s death specifically state that the cause of death was homicide or an assassination. The official police files on this case and any recovered physical evidence subsequently disappeared shortly after the incident. In 1991 various files, documents, photographs and some items of physical evidence were discovered in the possession of a relative of the former superintendent of the Louisiana State Bureau of Criminal Investigation and Identification. Among these materials was Dr. Weiss’ 32 Automatic pistol, a magazine with 6 live rounds of vintage ammunition and a packet containing a single, slightly damaged vintage 71-gr, 32 Automatic bullet with clear 6-right rifling engravings. This bullet was ultimately excluded as having been fired from Dr. Weiss’ FN Model 1910 pistol. One other item that was of major importance were photographs of Huey Long’s suit coat carefully mounted on a display board and showing a contact gunshot defect to the lower right front of this garment and a probable exit hole in the back, both of which corresponded to the locations and path of his fatal gunshot wound.