The Huey Long Murder Case

by Hermann B. Deutsch

In sum, the hotel meeting of which Long sought to make great capital was not a murder conference, and no one dreamed of bringing to book on charges of criminal conspiracy any of those who took part in it; and even had it been such a conspiracy, the name of Carl Weiss was not even remotely connected with it.

The second proposition would have it that Carl Weiss assassinated Long in reprisal for what the latter was doing to Yvonne’s father by having him gerrymandered out of office, and virtually out of public life. There are those who go so far as to say that Yvonne goaded her young husband into exacting satisfaction from the despot who was persecuting her family, who had brought about the dismissal of her uncle Paul from a school superintendency, and of her sister Marie from a position as teacher, and who was now implacably going to any lengths to close her father’s long and honorable career as judge.

The whole idea of such a reprisal motive runs directly counter to every fact known about the way the Weiss families passed that last Sunday: the young couple leaving the baby with their elders while they attended Mass, the family dinner at which the gerrymander was indeed the topic of conversation, but in a light, rather jocular vein; the young couple “sporting in the water” at the elders’ camp in the afternoon, while the latter fondled their precious grandson, the domestic routine that preceded Carl’s departure for a professional call....

As nearly as anything human can be certain, it is sure that neither Dr. Weiss nor any of the Pavy clan would ever have dreamed of taking upon their consciences the killing of a fellow being, even in the heat of passion, over such a matter as the loss of a public office, a development they had discussed almost jocularly only a few hours before.

Only two theoretical assumptions thus remain as to the motive of Dr. Weiss in committing a violent act contrary to all that was known of his nature. One is the idea advanced by Yvonne’s uncle, Dr. Pavy, that this was “an act of pure patriotism.” In 1935, when Dr. Pavy served as spokesman for the Weiss family, he felt that his niece’s husband was deeply troubled by “the suppressive type of government” that had been imposed on Louisiana; that he brooded over this until “his mind unhinged,” and he determined to put an end to the dictatorship even at the cost of his life.

Supporting this view are certain plausible factors. Carl Weiss was indeed an idealist of the type who might voluntarily have sacrificed his life in the furtherance of any noble cause, such as the liberation of his community from the thralldom imposed upon it by a ruthless authoritarian. Negating this view, however, is the fact that he took no active part in politics, though at that time Baton Rouge, his home, was the focal point of fiercely contested Long and anti-Long rivalry.

It is simply not conceivable, in the general sense of that word, that anyone so deeply and earnestly concerned with “pure patriotism” should not have been known to a single member of the press gallery at the capitol, to a single member of the State Bureau of Identification, to so well known a leader of the anti-Long movement in Baton Rouge as Dr. Tom Bird—a fellow physician—and above all, to Huey Long himself, a man whose memory for names and faces was truly phenomenal.

While Carl Weiss could well have been a crusader for any idealistic cause, it is difficult to accept unreservedly the proposition that one who had so very much to live for, whose happiness was so nearly complete, the best and most rewarding years of whose life still lay in the future, would give up all this and burden his conscience with two mortal sins—murder and what was tantamount to self-destruction—for an abstract concept of the general good.

It would seem almost self-evident that no man would voluntarily make such a sacrifice except in seeking to protect from harm those whom he held dear.

And there must have been some such motive in the haunting suspicion that, while campaigning against Judge Pavy, Huey Long would revive that long-buried, long-refuted tarbrush bugaboo which had been brought up unsuccessfully as involving one of Judge Pavy’s relatives-in-law thirty years before.