Buried Truth: Weiss' Body May Hold Clues Submitted by: N.O.V.A. April 2005 Source: Times Picayune 10-17-1991 ************************************************* Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ************************************************ Opelousas, La. For Dr. Carl Weiss Jr., more than a half-century of pain and damaged family pride hinges on what may be found Sunday morning as forensic scientists, by dawn's light, pry open his father's burial vault. No one in this Cajun town where Weiss' father courted and won Judge Benjamin Pavy's daughter, Yvonne, has much trouble understanding a son's desire to clear his family name, to prove Dr. Carl Weiss Sr. didn't really gun down Huey Long one hot September night in 1935. Long was already a national figure, a bigger-than-life governor who had gone on to the U.S. Senate and had eyes on the White House. "The family has always doubted that Carl Weiss could do something like this," said Leslie Schiff, Carl Weiss Jr.'s attorney in Opelousas. "I think Carl is interested in knowing as much as possible about what happened. Wouldn't you want to know that your father was innocent?" But wanting to know is one thing. Exhuming a body to find out is something else again. And most people are skeptical that there's much to be gained by rekindling the hostilities that still permeate the town. "I don't see what they could get out of that," said Harry Garland, an 83-year-old attorney who knew Weiss and the Pavys well. A member of the Pavy family agreed. "Most people think it shouldn't be done," she said. "If it could straighten anything out, but it won't." The problem in part is that Long -- the man and his Share the Wealth populism -- still summons powerful passions. He is a demagogue and a rogue, or a powerful man of the people. There seems to be no middle ground. Long's defenders still see him, moving quickly through the heat of the St. Landry Parish summer, campaigning in front of the courthouse, and they can repeat his jokes word-for-word, as though he were telling them from the bed of a wagon today instead of in 1928. His enemies remember him as a ruthless man who tried to buy the opposition and, when that didn't work, destroyed it in the political arena. Pavy was part of the opposition, and a wrathful Long destroyed him by gerrymandering the judge off the bench and out of a livelihood. It was to avenge his father-in-law that an enraged Weiss waited in the shadows of a first-floor corridor of the state capitol and then pumped a couple of slugs into the man who had built the towering marble edifice. Or so the theory goes. Another scenario has Weiss attacking to prevent Long from mongering the rumor that the Pavys were part Negro. Family members don't buy either one. Mood Didn't Foretell Action On the day of the shootings, or at gatherings of family members shortly before the assassination, nothing about Weiss suggested homicidal hostility toward Long, those present say. Harry Garland may not put much stock in the exhumation, but he can't imagine Carl Weiss as an assassin. Garland, whose father was for 40 years district attorney of St. Landry Parish and an ally of Judge Pavy, remembers a family at peace with itself. He remembers, in particular, a family gathering under the oaks at the Pavy home shortly before Long was killed. Garland, then about 35, mixed the juleps, gathering the mint from a small garden at the back of the house. Weiss, a slightly built 29-year-old, in owlish eyeglasses, was there with Yvonne, as were other members of the Pavy and Garland families. The Weisses had brought along their baby, just 3 months old, to show the family. Proud papa, prospering physician, Weiss did not look like a man who was about to kill a U.S. senator, Garland said. A member of the Pavy family is equally incredulous. "He was just wonderful. He was very attentive, He was quiet, soft spoken, very low key." The day of the killing, Carl and Yvonne Weiss spent the day at an Amite River camp near Baton Rouge, swimming and frolicking with the baby. "They got back from the camp rather late," she said. "Carl bathed, dressed and went to the hospital . . . to see his patients." He never came home. Machine Vs. Machine But not everyone has the same serene recollections of the Pavy-Weiss family. "Pavy's gang, they was ruling the parish for years and years and years," said Elton Doucet, the 90-year-old brother of the late St. Landry Parish Sheriff Daly "Cat" Doucet. There's no doubt in Elton Doucet's mind where the blame belongs for Long's death. "They murdered the poor man," said Doucet, who dismisses the exhumation as just so much "bull-- to sell a few books." Even now, Doucet's Cajun speech rankles with emotion when he talks of the assassination. Cat Doucet campaigned for Long, who stayed at the Doucet home when he was in the area. "All the farmers and all the poor people was for Huey P. Long," Elton Doucet said. "The Pavys couldn't get nothing they wanted from Huey. If he was your friend, he'd help you. If you were his enemy he'd stomp you down." Harry Garland remembers that vengefulness, but with no great affection. He recalls a surprise visit Long made one Sunday evening to his father's office in the old St. Landry courthouse. Long would be dead a few months later. Without warning, Long and two bodyguards, one of them Harry "Battling" Bozeman, burst into the district attorney's office. As always, Long was in a hurry. Long quickly got to the point. He wanted the district attorney to back him. "I'll give your boys two of the best jobs in the state of Louisiana," Long said. "I needed a good job," Garland remembers. But when Long pushed the offer, his father ended the conversation. "Huey, I have seven children," Garland told Long. "Their mother died when they were very small. I raised them as a father and a mother, and I would never sell one of them to you." "He beat you any way he could," Garland said. "He couldn't buy papa, he couldn't beat papa. So he did the only thing he could. He destroyed him." Robert Garland lost the office he'd held for 40 years, and other members of the Pavy and Garland families also suffered. Harry Garland, a schoolteacher, was fired by the St. Landry School Board. Also fired were Judge Pavy's daughter, Marie, and Harry Garland's sister, Helen Garner. Harry Garland was hired by a federal agency, but he lost that job too. "One night my boss told me, 'the politicians say you've got to go.' I couldn't hold a job in Louisiana. I had to go to Texas." Trying To End The Pain Dr. Carl Weiss Jr., 56, a physician now living on Long Island, will say almost nothing about his father's role in Huey Long's death, but he approved the exhuming of his father's remains and plans to be there Sunday when George Washington University law professor and forensic scientist James Starrs begins the exhumation. Starrs will be looking for bullet wounds that conflict with reports of the shootout, and checking for drug residues or medical abnormalities -- a brain tumor, perhaps -- that could explain his otherwise improbable role in the assassination. Yvonne Weiss went to her grave believing that her husband could not have killed Long. Judge Pavy was in shock after the killings and was ordered to bed by doctors in Opelousas. He did not attend his son-in-law's funeral. "That was a terrible tragedy, to see his daughter steeped in sorrow," a family member said. Ironically, two sons of the dead men - Carl Weiss Jr. and former U.S. Sen. Russell Long - made their peace several years ago during a meeting at a New York city hotel. "It was a very amicable meeting," said the family member. "I think they enjoyed each other. Fifty years ago I wouldn't think something like that could have taken place."