Lest he be viewed as too sympathetic to a confessed killer, Franklin crossed aisles midweek and sat for a morning session with family members and relatives of the victims. (Hickman died in 1988; McCain is still alive but was too frail to testify.)
Of the Rideau family members in attendance, only one, Robert Rideau, 52, a cousin, agreed to talk with a reporter. He used to play football with Wilbert.
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.
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"Back then we didn't think he'd make it out of the jailhouse," he says of the 1961 arrest. Robert says the crime stunned the family. "Wilbert was the quarterback on the sandlot team. Very low-key. Very quiet. A lot of people respected him."
Some Rideau family members changed their last names in the aftermath of the crime, Robert Rideau said.
Julia Ferguson, the murdered woman, lived with her father. Her nephew, Gary Andrus, attended the trial last week. "She was my Sunday school teacher," he said during a break in the proceedings. "She was a strong Christian woman, and taking care of her invalid father was her whole life. He didn't just take her from our family, but her invalid father."
Andrus was a little boy when the crime happened. "We were all sitting around the radio. Didn't have a TV. We heard that there had been a robbery at the bank."
Don Hickman, now 73, is Jay Hickman's only child. The elder Hickman rarely talked about the ordeal, says his son. There were two exceptions. "Dad said it was about $60,000 that Wilbert never saw. It was payroll night for Chennault Air Force Base. And something else: They all [the bank employees] knew Wilbert. Thought he was a pretty nice young man. That's what Dad couldn't understand. Why would he do something like that?"
Hate v. Anger
Rideau's new defense strategy walked a tightrope between portraying race relations in Louisiana of 1961 and the reality of a murder confession. "He was involved in a crime that occurred at a difficult time for the state of Louisiana," said Vanita Gupta, a Legal Defense Fund lawyer. "The race climate isn't being used to justify the death of Julia Ferguson, but in trying to understand how the police dealt with this case -- airing his comments as they did. Law enforcement played a significant role because of the racial mores of the time."
District Attorney Bryant, in an effort to counter the defense's racial arguments, asked Rideau about allegations that he hated whites.
"Actually, you were one of the earliest perpetrators of a hate crime, were you not?" Bryant asked.
"It wasn't hate, it was anger," Rideau answered.
At another point Rideau said he didn't believe he had murdered Ferguson, choosing to admit to having "killed" Ferguson.
"What's the difference?" Bryant said.
"Murder is premeditated, something thought out," Rideau answered.
