Justice Fournet’s statement differs from Roden’s at several points, as it does from the accounts of Coleman and Frampton, each of which differs in one detail or another from all the others. Just as it was given, with none of the discrepancies modified, altered, or omitted, the Fournet account of what took place continues in the narrative which follows:
“... Just then, Huey came out of the door to the office of the Governor’s secretary.” (Actually, he had come out of the main double doors of the anteroom, and was merely pausing at the other point to impress on White the importance of getting in touch with certain absentee members.) “We walked toward each other, but instead of the usual air of greeting I saw a startled, terrified expression, a sort of look of shock, and simultaneously I saw this fellow who had been standing in the recess oppose Huey with a little black gun. This was right within a foot of me, so I threw my hands at him to grab him, just as he shot, and Murphy Roden—I don’t know where he came from but I presume he had followed the Senator out into the hall from the inner office—anyway, at the same instant when I threw my hands and the shot was fired, Murphy Roden lunged and seized the gun and the man’s hand in his left hand. This must have been at almost the very instant the shot was fired, for Murphy’s hand kept the shell of the little automatic from ejecting, which is why the man whose body was later identified as that of Dr. Weiss could not fire another shot.
“It is hard to describe in sequence all the things that were happening in practically one and the same instant. As Murphy grappled with Weiss, the gesture I had made to push the man away was completed, and my hands pushed the two struggling men partly to the floor. Weiss had both hands around his gun, trying to fire again, and this time at Roden; and Roden, while holding his desperate clutch about the gun which was waving wildly this way and that, was trying to get his own gun from his shoulder holster, and I was still standing there with my hands outstretched from pushing them, when Elliott Coleman from quite a ways down the hall fired the second shot I heard that night, as well as two others.
“In that same instant of general confusion that boiled up I heard Huey give just one shout, a sort of hoot, and then he ran like a wild deer. I bent over to help Roden disarm Weiss, and twisted a muscle in my back so that for a moment I could not move in any direction. It was then I saw that one of Elliott Coleman’s bullets had shot away Murphy Roden’s wrist watch, but the next two hit Weiss. At the first one his whole body jerked convulsively—like this. At the second it jerked again in a great twitch as he sank into himself and slumped forward, face down, his head in the angle of the wall and his legs extended diagonally out into the corridor.
“It was not until after Weiss was dead that other bodyguards came up and emptied their pistols into the fallen body. Meanwhile I caught a glimpse of other armed men, state police and bodyguards, charging from the [House chamber] end of the hall toward where the body was lying, and I caught one flash of my father wrestling around with some of them because he thought I was in trouble and he wanted to stop the shooting. I saw the crowd down there and I went into the other cross hall [the one in the direction of the Senate chamber] where there were stairs to the basement, and asked the girl at the telegraph desk which way Huey had gone, and she pointed down the stairs....”
There is general agreement here that of the first two shots, by whomever fired, the first one penetrated Long’s body, the second ripped Roden’s watch from his wrist, and that the next two killed Dr. Weiss. The only discrepancy between the accounts of Murphy Roden and Justice Fournet is as to who fired these shots. According to Roden, the first two were fired by Weiss, the third by himself and the fourth by someone else, presumably Coleman. According to Justice Fournet, the first one was fired by Weiss, who never fired again; while the second shot, the one which according to both versions shot away Roden’s wrist watch, was fired by Coleman, who thereafter also fired the two shots that took Dr. Weiss’s life.
How does Sheriff Coleman’s account of what took place compare with these two? There is one marked point of difference. It involves a blow with the fist which no one else describes. Here, then, is that portion of Coleman’s narrative of what took place:
“... At this point a slight young fellow in a white linen suit stepped forward and stretched out his hand with a gun in it and pressed it against Huey’s right side and fired. Everything happened very fast then, because the House had just adjourned, seemingly; anyway, people were coming out. I reached the young man about the same time Roden did, and hit him with my fist, knocking him down. He was trying to shoot and Murphy was grappling with him, so that he fell on top of Murphy when I hit him. I fired one shot. By that time Huey was gone, and I learned later he had gone down the stairs and had been taken to the hospital.
“The young man in the white linen suit, whom none of us knew at the time, was dead, and the gun was lying on the floor several inches from his hand. It was then that I saw why he had not fired again. A cartridge was jammed in the ejector. After that a lot of things happened, and there was a lot of shooting.
“They called me into the governor’s office. Some fool had run in there, and Allen said to me: ‘Coleman, I understand you hit that party. Huey isn’t much hurt, he’s just shot through the arm.’ I said: ‘The hell he is! The man couldn’t have missed him. He shot him in the belly, right here.’ Allen said: ‘But they say you hit him and deflected the bullet.’ And I said: ‘I never hit him till after he shot.’ All of this stuff about a bullet from one of the bodyguards is a lot of ——! Those boys all had .44s and .45s and if one of those bullets had gone through him it would have made a great big hole. Anybody knows that. Besides, when all the bodyguard shooting was going on, Huey was gone from that place and on his way downstairs.”