At one point Rideau said he never thought about buying guns, and that the purchase at the pawnshop of the .22 had been done spontaneously.
Bryant picked up a white envelope and pulled a brown wallet from inside.
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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"Do you recognize this?" he asked.
It was Rideau's wallet from 1961.
Bryant opened it and revealed the contents: a Selective Service card, a Social Security card and several advertisements from gun shops, proving, to Bryant, that Rideau had thought about purchasing guns before the crime.
"We were worried about the wallet," Gupta would say after the trial.
Toward the end of the trial, Gladys Simien, Rideau's mother -- she remarried after her son's imprisonment -- took the stand and offered a narrative that harkened back to the Old South.
The diminutive woman talked about being roused from bed on the night of the crime and leaving her house quickly to go with sheriff's deputies down to the jail. She sat on a wooden bench inside the jail until 4 a.m. She never saw her son. Finally taken home, she sat alone as the phone kept ringing. She picked it up. "If he doesn't get electrocuted, he'll get the rope," one of the anonymous callers said.
The Verdict
On Saturday, the last day of the trial, Wilbert Rideau slept fitfully. "I woke up at 3 a.m.," he said.
It was shortly after 5 that afternoon when Judge David Ritchie sent the jury to deliberate. One of Rideau's lawyers, Ron Ware, kept a log of what followed.
At 6:50, the jury sent a note requesting to see more exhibits.
At 9:42, the jury sent a note asking for a clearer explanation defining murder and manslaughter.
At 10:10, the jury announced it had reached a verdict.
"My hands were wet. They weren't just sweating," Rideau would recall a day later. "They were wet. And my heart was caught in my throat."
At 10:37 the jurors returned to the courtroom and read their verdict aloud, finding Wilbert Rideau, the 19-year-old kid in the grainy TV footage, guilty of manslaughter.
"I heard it," said Rideau. "But it's like hearing something and not believing it. My knees went weak. You have to realize this jury came from Monroe, one of the most rural and conservative regions of the state. Now that jury has made Monroe my most favorite city."
Rideau was escorted back to the county jail where he signed some papers and shook some hands.
Then he climbed into a car and rode down Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to his hotel, the Holiday Inn. It sits at the intersection of Opelousas, the very road Wilbert Rideau took out of Calcasieu Parish on a dark night nearly 44 years ago.
