Reconstructing the Crime
Rideau's three previous trials, in 1961, 1964 and 1970, had ended in murder convictions, each overturned because higher courts found wrongdoing in those trials. The U.S. Supreme Court characterized Rideau's first trial as little but "kangaroo court proceedings." The second conviction was overturned by an appeals court that found prosecutors improperly excluded jurors who expressed reservations about the death penalty. In 2000, a federal appeals court reversed Rideau's last conviction because blacks were excluded from the grand jury.
But to Calcasieu Parish District Attorney Rick Bryant, the current case had nothing to do with the rehabilitation of an inmate. It was about the murder of bank teller Julia Ferguson, and the literal meaning of a life sentence.
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.
|
|
"He can thank the fact that there were technicalities in that first trial," Bryant said before the weeklong trial started. "He got his life back basically. For him, that was a lifesaving event."
Julian Murray, a criminal attorney based in New Orleans, amassed documentation proving that many murderers had been sentenced to life in prison and released during the time of Rideau's incarceration. "No black person has ever killed a white person in Calcasieu Parish and got out of jail," Murray said during an interview. "You have to understand that the Louisiana legislature was trying to close down its school system at the time of this crime rather than integrate. And a young black man comes along and kills a white woman and it gets ratcheted up as the most heinous crime ever -- as the crime of the century."
Rideau never testified in his previous trials. But this time he took the stand on Wednesday and Thursday, wearing a green sweater and gray slacks.
Murray asked Rideau about the night of the arrest, and Rideau recalled a conversation with Sheriff Henry "Ham" Reid -- now deceased -- about the mob he had seen around the jail.
"I said, 'Sheriff Reid, you gonna bring my mom into that?' "
Reid, who was so politically powerful that Calcasieu Parish was referred to as "Reid Parish," assured Rideau that he would protect his mother.
"I understood there was a good chance I might die," Rideau said. "I was resigned to that. I didn't want anything to happen to my mom."
Rideau went on to tell how he bought the suitcase and the handgun. Of how he walked into the bank and closed the door and pulled the drapes. Of how the phone startled him and how he felt he had no choice but to force the three bank employees -- Jay Hickman, Ferguson and McCain -- into a car. "The older woman [Ferguson] drove."
They took Opelousas Street out of town.
On the stand last week, Rideau said he intended to let the three go eventually, but McCain lunged out of the car as it slowed outside of town, setting loose, he said, the events of the night. "And [as] I told the sheriff, I said, 'Stop or I'll shoot.' I shot six shots at them."
He said the two women fell, and Ferguson got back up. "I had a hunting knife in my hand. I stabbed her once, maybe twice."
(At this point in Rideau's testimony, a man who had been standing alongside a wall in the courtroom fainted. He would be taken out by ambulance.)
