The Long Road Out of Lake Charles

Wilbert Rideau, Convicted Three Times for a 1961 Killing, Goes Free

Wilbert Rideau, in an undated photo, was found guilty of the murder of Julia Ferguson three times, in 1961, 1964 and 1970, before becoming a free man on Saturday.

LAKE CHARLES, La. -- It ended in the night, much as it had begun nearly 44 years ago.

In 1961, a young black man named Wilbert Rideau kidnapped three whites and shot and stabbed one of them to death after a bank robbery in this town with the sweet-sounding name.

Late Saturday night, a mixed-race jury found Rideau -- who had been convicted of murder three times by all-white juries -- guilty of manslaughter. That allowed him to walk out of prison a free man because he had already served nearly twice the maximum sentence for that crime. The verdict ended a decades-long ordeal for a man who had gained fame as a prison journalist, winning the prestigious George Polk and Robert F. Kennedy awards and sharing an Academy Award nomination for a documentary film.

"I'm still soaking it in," Rideau said by telephone yesterday from an undisclosed location. He would only admit to being out of Lake Charles.

After the verdict was delivered, Rideau had to be escorted back to the county jail. Deputies handcuffed him for the ride, which he resented. "I told them I was free, they heard what the judge said. But my lawyers told me it was okay."

At the jail, he gave away some items he no longer needed and, just before midnight, strolled out into the crisp night air. Family members -- some of whom had gone into hiding at the time of the crime for fear of retribution -- waited to greet him.

"I had a chance last night to meet with my family," Rideau said. "There were a lot of tears in the room. Driving out of Lake Charles, I had to get used to the idea of being free. I have to adapt to a world that is considerably different from the one I left."

Rideau, now 62, says he hopes to write and "redeem myself in the eyes of all those who had faith in me during all these years."

"This jury," he said, "reached back and pulled a judgment out of the racial clutches I was long in."

Rideau's defense team was ecstatic. "This is a case about fairness and redemption," said Ted Shaw, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. "It's tragic it has taken Wilbert Rideau over 40 years to receive a fair trial before justice could prevail in this case."

The story began two days after Valentine's Day in 1961 when a 19-year-old Rideau pulled out a white-handled pistol inside a branch of the Gulf National Bank and watched as money was loaded into a suitcase. Then, startled by a ringing telephone, he forced two tellers and the bank manager into a car.

He now claims he was going to eventually let them walk back to town.

But on the outskirts of Lake Charles, in the dark, he shot all three -- two survived -- as he emptied his pawnshop-purchased .22. One of the tellers, Dora McCain, testified in a previous trial that she pretended to be dead. Rideau stabbed the second teller, Julia Ferguson, in the chest as she was attempting to get up, killing her.

Sentenced to death -- a sentence commuted to life in the early '70s after the U.S. Supreme Court found the death penalty to be unconstitutional -- Rideau set out on a personal odyssey of redemption, rehabilitating himself as a prison journalist, becoming co-editor of the Angolite, a magazine produced by the prisoners at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola that has frequently been a finalist for a National Magazine Award. A model prisoner, he gave speeches, drew praise from prison reformers, and as the decades rolled by -- the '70s, the '80s, the '90s -- he achieved a bewildering kind of fame behind bars. In 1993, Life magazine referred to him as "the most rehabilitated prisoner in America." In 1998 he garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary for "The Farm: Angola, USA," a film about prison life.