It’s not surprising someone in Louisiana shot Senator Huey P. Long, who had no end of enemies, but it was unexpected that his assassin would be a mild-mannered eye doctor.

Firebrand and lightning rod, “Kingfish,” as he was called, was the Bayou State’s de facto dictator, a populist who planned to run for President on the promise of ending the privations of the Great Depression with his Share Our Wealth redistribution plan. A month after he announced his intentions to face off with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, however, Long was felled by an unlikely gunman named Dr. Carl A. Weiss, a son-in-law to one of the Senator’s political enemies but not someone suspected by any relative or friend of having murder on his mind. Weiss was immediately killed by the spray of bullets sent his way as Long’s bodyguards returned fire.

In the annals of American assassinations, a sorrowfully long list, there was probably no killer who had a better attended or more solemn funeral than Weiss. A brief article in the September 10, 1935 Brooklyn Daily Eagle described the scene.