One Man, One Gun, One Bullet?

Ernie Gremillion believes history convicted an innocent man. A retired criminal investigator for the U.S. Department of Treasury, Gremillion is convinced that Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, the then-28-year-old Baton Rouge physician pegged as Huey Long’s assassin, did not kill the flamboyant populist governor, U.S. senator, and likely presidential candidate. 

Gremillion’s law enforcement experience includes twenty-eight years of investigating elected officials, university administrators, bank presidents, and other white-collar crime suspects. He has studied the Long-Weiss shootings since 1982; throughout the years, he’s offered his amassed evidence for Weiss’s innocence to media outlets, LSU’s Paul M. Hebert Law Center, the attorney general, and other government offices, but has found little interest. 

“You see stories, television shows, movies, where an attorney or a reporter or investigator gets involved in a case similar to this,” said Gremillion, 83, in a recent interview at his home in the Baton Rouge’s Westdale Woods subdivision. “He sees that an incredible injustice was done, and he can’t let it go. That’s where I am.”

“Any one of these items standing alone would be enough to convince an objective person that Carl Austin Weiss did not shoot Huey Long,” Gremillion writes in [his evidentiary] summary. “All taken in total would produce that conclusion beyond any reasonable doubt.” 

On September 8, 1935, Sen. Huey Long was at the Capitol to ensure that a special session of the Louisiana legislature went his way. Though he was no longer governor, he continued to rule the state. One of the 42 bills Long was pushing through the legislature was designed to gerrymander a longtime enemy, Judge Benjamin Henry Pavy, out of his district court judgeship in St. Landry and Evangeline parishes. Pavy was Weiss’s father-in-law. 

The official version of the Long-Weiss shootings maintains that Weiss approached Long as the senator barreled through a first-floor Capitol hallway. The doctor pushed a pistol into Long and fired a single bullet. A member of Long’s party batted the gun downward before the shot, moving the weapon away from the senator’s heart to his abdomen. Later, one of Long’s bodyguards, Murphy Roden, and John Fournet, a Long ally and associate justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court, would both claim to be the man who tried to push Weiss’s pistol away from Long.

[Read this: "That Awful Man"—Demystifying the mythical Huey P. Long]

Gremillion and others before him—including the late Francis Grevemberg, superintendent of the Louisiana Department of State Police from 1952 to 1955—have believed that one or more of Long’s bodyguards accidentally shot him during the ensuing shower of bullets fired after Weiss confronted Long. Thirty-one hours later, the most powerful politician in Louisiana history died at Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium. He was 42 years old. 

Gremillion’s 2,100-word evidentiary summary in defense of Weiss spotlights eight numbered paragraphs that argue for his innocence. (The summary can be found online at grenma.com/weiss.html.) “Any one of these items standing alone would be enough to convince an objective person that Carl Austin Weiss did not shoot Huey Long,” Gremillion writes in the summary. “All taken in total would produce that conclusion beyond any reasonable doubt.” 

The evidentiary summary includes material from former state police superintendent Grevemberg’s sworn affidavit about the circumstances of Long’s death. The statement contains Grevemberg’s recollections, in remarkable detail, of a 1953 conversation he had with two state troopers who witnessed the Long shooting. 

The troopers who witnessed the events, Grevemberg states, walked behind Long in the Capitol hallway while two of the senator’s body guards, Joe Messina and Murphy Roden, walked on either side of the senator. “The group was well into the hallway when a man who was standing against the side of the wall opposite the governor’s office started shouting at the senator and tried to punch him in the face. Murphy Roden grabbed Weiss and threw him to the floor. Almost immediately, Roden began firing at the man ... [he] had fired about four shots when Joe  Messina opened fire.” 

Messina’s last two shots struck the marble wall, Grevemberg continues, ricocheted into the already dead Weiss, struck the marble floor and ricocheted again, upward into Long’s groin.  Roden and Messina emptied their .38 caliber Smith and Wesson pistols, and the other bodyguards fired as well. Sixty-one bullets were found in Weiss’s body.

Gremillion believes Grevemberg’s affidavit holds the true details of the shooting, including the planting of a gun in the bullet-riddled Weiss’s hand. The statement also alleges a coverup instigated by Gen. Louis Guerre, head of the state’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation. “Gen. Guerre was emphatic that none of the bodyguards say anything about what had happened because the two bodyguards in question, Messina and Roden, could be charged with gross misconduct,” the affidavit states.  

Guerre, Gremillion said, “committed a crime to protect his people, who didn’t commit a crime. He falsified state records to frame an innocent man and protect his people, who could not have been charged with a crime because it was an accident. No one would have testified that it was anything but accidental.” 

The following year, Guerre became the first superintendent of the newly combined Bureau of Criminal Investigation and State Highway Patrol—the Louisiana State Police. In that same year after the shooting, Roden, the bodyguard who shot the first bullets into Weiss, became the assistant superintendent of the state police. 

Grevemberg’s affidavit maintains that Weiss didn’t carry a gun to the Capitol. It also says that after the shooting, police located Weiss’s car, removed his .32 caliber pistol from the glove compartment, and fired a single shot from it into the ground. After the troopers brought the gun to Guerre at state police headquarters, it remained missing for fifty years. The gun didn’t reappear until a long court battle revealed the contents of a safe deposit box rented by Guerre’s daughter in New Orleans. The box’s contents included Weiss’s pistol and photos that, presumably, are of clothing Long wore when he was shot. 

Gremillion’s evidentiary summary also mentions two nurses at Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium who saw a cut on the wounded Long’s lip. David Zinman’s book, The Day Huey Long Was Shot, reports that Jewel O’Neal, a twenty-year-old student nurse, noted the cut after she overheard Dr. Arthur Vidrine ask Long, “How about this place on your lip?” “That’s where he hit me,” O’Neal quoted Long’s answer.    

“It would be inconceivable,” Gremillion writes in his summary, “to believe that Weiss struck Long and five body guards standing very close would allow Weiss time to draw a gun and shoot Long after he[’d] hit him.”

Gremillion’s quest to prove Weiss’s innocence began when he assisted local author Ed Reed with research for the 1986 book, Requiem for a Kingfish: The Strange and Unexplained Death of Huey Long. Gremillion helped Reed with ballistics and firearms tests. 

In Requiem for a Kingfish, Reed concludes that the Long shooting was not the work of “one man, one gun, one bullet.” Zinman surmises in his book that “there is at least as much reason to believe that Weiss and Long engaged in an altercation that precipitated the shooting as there is to believe that Weiss murdered Huey in cold blood without a word and without provocation.” 

The late Dr. Carl Austin Weiss Jr., who was three months old when Long’s bodyguards killed his father, was among the many who believed his father didn’t shoot the senator.

“The Weiss family has been dealt a deliberate injustice by the state police, who knew they were doing wrong,” said Gremillion. “Frankly, it’s been a black eye on the state of Louisiana for years. We know that Weiss didn’t shoot Huey Long. The state police shot him. But nobody wants to do anything."

“I don’t believe that he fired a fatal shot or indeed that he carried a gun into the state Capitol that night,” Weiss Jr. said in 2010 during a symposium in Baton Rouge about the shooting.

Weiss Jr.—like Gremillion, Reed, Grevemberg and K.B. Ponder, an inspector for the insurance company that paid a $20,000 claim after Long’s death—believed the senator’s bodyguards accidentally shot him. 

Gremillion’s ultimate goal is an official proclamation of Weiss’s innocence. “The remedy would be for the governor to make an official declaration that the evidence is clear, and the official state position is that Huey Long was accidentally shot by his bodyguards,” he said. 

Gremillion hoped such an announcement would come during Carl Weiss Jr.’s lifetime, but when the 84-year-old Weiss died August 1 in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, the specter of being the son of an assassin still hung over him. “In his heart he knew the allegations weren’t true,” The New York Times quoted Carl Weiss III in his father’s obituary. 

For Gremillion, the matter of clearing Weiss Sr.’s name remains unfinished business. “The Weiss family has been dealt a deliberate injustice by the state police, who knew they were doing wrong,” he said. “Frankly, it’s been a black eye on the state of Louisiana for years. We know that Weiss didn’t shoot Huey Long. The state police shot him. But nobody wants to do anything. 

“It looks like Louisiana officials would rather keep the mystique going than see justice done. It would take the governor to do it.”  

Read Ernie Gremillion’s full evidentiary summary at grenma.com/weiss.html.

And here, find historian Charles King's equally energetic defense of the official account.