Who Killed Huey Long?

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The most significant evidence presented for this theory is a story related by Merle Welsh, the funeral director who served as mortician for both Weiss and Long. In an interview with Reed 50 years after the incident, Welsh said one of the operating room doctors came to the funeral home late at night, reopened Long's sutures and probed the corpse until he pulled out a bullet. Reed tracked down the funeral home assistant who claimed to have the bullet on a key ring as a memento. Soon after the release of Reed's book, the writer Zinman also interviewed Welsh and heard essentially the same story but said the mortician, then in his 80s, was clearly losing his memory. Reed backed up his two-shots theory with several references. If true, his version of events suggests that someone other than Weiss may have fired a shot or two into Long. A bodyguard? An unidentified assassin? Reed couldn't say for sure, but he concluded that the official theory of the shooting "must now be relegated to that graveyard of hoaxes, frauds and fairy tales."

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The Guerre box contained three things of great interest: a .32 caliber automatic pistol of the type Weiss owned; a .32 caliber bullet that had been fired and had a blunt tip from an impact; and photos identified as Long's coat and clothing showing bullet holes.

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The gun was identified as the one owned by Weiss. The court ruled the gun belonged to his son, who has allowed the pistol to sit on display in the Old State Capitol Museum in Baton Rouge.

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State Police investigators fired a test bullet from the Weiss pistol and compared it under a microscope with the blunt-nosed bullet. The conclusion: The spent .32-caliber bullet found in Guerre's collection was not fired by the Weiss gun. It probably was not fired by one of the bodyguards, who carried larger caliber automatic handguns. No one has ever produced a bullet as evidence of the one that killed Long.

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State Police investigators determined that the photos supported the official one-shot version of events. The hole in the front of Long's coat was consistent with a very close-range shot from a .32 caliber handgun. The hole in the back of the clothing was consistent with a bullet exit wound.

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