Over the years, however, a different version of those events has been offered. According to that version of events, it was not Weiss but Huey Long's own bodyguards, perhaps goaded into hyper vigilance by Huey's morbid fear of assassination, who may have actually fired the fatal round that killed him.
Among those who insist that Long's own bodyguards killed him is Dr. Donald Pavy, a kinsman of Weiss and the nephew of the judge whom Long was set to disgrace. In an interview with Crime Library, Pavy, who has spent decades investigating the shooting, and has detailed his findings in his book, "Accident and Deception: The Huey Long Shooting," contends that Weiss was unarmed when he confronted Long in the statehouse that day. According to Pavy's account, the mild mannered doctor was enraged, but did not shoot Long. Instead, he punched the Kingfish in the mouth. While hardly deadly in itself, the attack was enough to spook Long's bodyguards, who let loose a deadly barrage. It may be, Pavy said, that one of the bodyguard's bullets passed through Weiss' body and struck Long, or a ricochet perhaps, struck the Kingfish.
In any case, Pavy believes, Long's coterie quickly realized that it would never serve the Kingfish's myth for him to have been felled accidentally, certainly not by his own men, and so, Pavy believes, state troopers searched Weiss' car, left in the parking lot outside, and retrieved the handgun that he, like most prominent Louisianans of the time, kept in the glove compartment.
It is, Pavy insists, particularly telling that in the crime scene photos, taken just moments after the shooting, the purported weapon is not seen. Pavy speculates that the pictures were taken before the troopers took their jaunt into the parking lot.
There have, of course, been others who have suggested much the same thing. In his 1986 book "Requiem for a Kingfish," Ed Reed also suggests that one of Long's guards actually shot him by accident, and at least one nurse, who was present in the emergency room when the wounded Long was brought in, has been quoted as saying that there was a mark on Long's face, and when he was asked how he got it, the Kingfish replied, "Oh, that's where he hit me."
There were, of course, only a handful of people who were ever really in a position to know the truth, those who were there at the moment the fatal round was fired, and they are gone now. Ironically, the thought that Huey Long may not have been felled by his own hubris alone, but also by his own fear and the seemingly boundless power that he wielded in Louisiana may only have burnished his legend.
The questions that now surround his death, it seem, add a layer of mystery to his myth, and no one would be more likely to understand that the master showman and populist politician himself that in the end, it's mystery that make myths immortal.
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