THE CRIME OF WILBERT RIDEAU
In promotion of his recently released memoir titled In The Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance (Random House 2010), Wilbert Rideau appeared on CBS’ Sunday Morning on April 25, 2010 and told the network’s leading crime reporter Erin Moriarty that he grabbed the knife and stabbed his victim Julia Ferguson, killing her.
In an April 27, 2010 interview with Roland S. Martin on The Tom Joyner Morning Show, Rideau said the killing of Julia Ferguson was manslaughter, not murder. He said that he was finally able to get “his story” out at his fourth trial in January 2005 through a defense team led by NAACP legal counsel George Kendall. At the 2005 trial Rideau testified that he did not either plan the bank robbery or the killing of Ferguson; that his actions were motivated by “sheer panic.”
“I made a mistake of feeling sorry for myself,” Rideau told the jury. “Look, I’m out in the woods with these white people. If someone finds me, they’re going to kill me. No way I could explain this.”
For nearly three decades while an award-winning journalist at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Rideau had unprecedented access to the news media and never once told the “sheer panic” attack story. To the contrary, he told reporters that he intended to kill all his victims because he “hated white people,” that he ignored their pleas for mercy, and that he should have been executed for his crime.
In March 17, 1981 with Jodie Bell, a reporter with WAFB-TV, Baton Rouge’s CBS affiliate, Rideau said he cut Julia Ferguson’s throat because “I think I ran out of bullets.” (Jodie is now my wife.)
In an April 1981 article Jodie published in Gambit, a New Orleans-based periodical, Rideau stated: “When I lived on that death row for 13 years, you know, wanting to live and my pleas for mercy falling on deaf ears, it made me realize what my victim must have felt like because I did the same thing to her. I ignored her pleas. You know, it was sort of like a role reversal, and somehow in that came an appreciation for life and the thin line that separates the living from the dead.”
Rideau is now promoting the “panic attack” defense to mitigate his crime.
A jury in 2005 bought the defense but the jurors did not hear any live testimony from the crime’s primary witnesses. They had all died. The only surviving victim was Dora McCain who was too ill to testify. The testimony of these old witnesses was read to the jury by court reporters in a monotone. Rideau’s high powered defense, however, presented a slew of live witnesses, some of whom were called “experts,” that convinced the jury to accept the “panic attack” defense.
But was Rideau’s crime really manslaughter? Or was it cold blooded murder?
You be the judge after reading the following accounts.
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“Yesterday I bought a pistol and today I was sitting down and was thinking about all that money in the bank. You see, I made change at the bank today and I saw all the money and I thought I could get it.” This is a 1961 quote attributed to Wilbert Rideau in an October 1990 edition of Details Magazine, a New York based publication.
Rideau’s crime occurred on February 16, 1961.Three days earlier; the ninth-grade dropout had celebrated his 19th birthday. He didn’t have to drop out of W.O. Boston Colored High School in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He wasn’t failing. He was an “honor” student clearly able to finish school at the top of his class. In 1986, Dennis Ware, one of Rideau’s teachers at W.O. Boston, told The Daily Reveille, a Louisiana State University campus magazine, that while Rideau slept a lot in class, he could contribute more to the class half-asleep than other students who were wide awake. This contradicts Rideau’s oft-repeated story to the press that he could barely read and write when he was arrested.
Rideau quit school to make money, either by stealing (his police rap-sheet shows an arrest for burglary and vandalizing a cemetery) or hustling in Lake Charles’ pool halls and barrooms. I learned during our jail house conversations in 1965/66 that Rideau thought money was the means to everything. He dreamed of living in Mexico where his mulatto-colored skin would blend in with the locals. Money would bring him women—none of whom would be black because he said he disliked blacks, especially black women. Years later, sitting in The Angolite Office the award-winning journalist would laughingly tell me and part-time staffer Sylvester Peters that he was really Brazilian, given his light skin, and that he wanted to “get as far away from chicken necks and red beans” as he could. He often lamented during his early clemency efforts that blacks never supported him.
“It’s like I don’t exist among black people,” he often said to us. “They won’t come near my case. They’re either afraid or embarrassed. So I have no allegiance with my so-called “brothers’.”
Rideau told me that long before February 19, 1961 he knew he would rob a bank. It would be the Gulf National Bank. He had a job as a porter at Halpern’s, a fabric shop in the same shopping center as the bank. The job gave him an opportunity to study the bank’s routine. Part of his plan was to cultivate relationships with people who worked in the bank to develop their trust. He ran errands for them and brought them coffee and sodas when they asked. Bank employees like Dora McCain and Julia Ferguson called him “Wilbur” in their southern dialect, believing that the light-skinned young “Negro” was nice, polite and very intelligent.
Behind Rideau’s smiles and his correctly enunciated “yes, mams” was a cunning, ruthless hatred for the people whose trust he was cultivating. He would later tell journalists (most of whom were white) how much he had “hated white people” in the racist culture of Lake Charles and wanted to get even with them. It was a ploy designed to mitigate his crime, a way to convince the reporters he was truly “rehabilitated” because he no longer “hated white people.” To my knowledge, not one journalist ever asked him if being a “victim” of “southern” racism somehow created a license to kill white people. Perhaps he used the same charm on them to cultivate their trust that he used to gain the trust of his crime victims. It cost Julia Ferguson her life and scarred Dora McCain forever. More than once, after an interview, Rideau would smile and talk about how gullible the reporters were.
The day before his crime, on February 15, 1961, Rideau walked into Waldmeiser’s Pawn Shop in downtown Lake Charles. He knew what he wanted: a gun, a hunting knife, and a suitcase to carry all the money he would steal from the bank. He left the pawn shop with the two weapons needed to carry out his plan. The hunting knife, which cost two dollars, and a 22 caliber pistol, which cost $14.95 (according to pawn shop owner Bob Waldmeiser in a January 2001 Dallas Morning News article).
Armed with the gun and knife, did Rideau plan to take hostages and kill them? This issue is now the subject to considerable debate. He told me—just as he told reporters—that he planned to take the employees hostage and kill them because he didn’t want to leave any witnesses alive. But that is not what he said under oath at his 2005 trial.
The “panic attack” defense spin Rideau is now trying to put on his crime convinces me even more that he has an drive to control others and takes pleasures in intimidating them just as he did with his crime victims. Peter Wilkerson, the author of the 1990 Details Magazine article, described this bizarre scene with Rideau in The Angolite office deep inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary:
It was then that Rideau glanced at the clock, and a look of surprise and bemusement crossed his face. It was almost six. He chuckled.
“You are currently in the biggest maximum-security penitentiary in the nation. The evening shift doesn’t even know you’re here, because they just changed shifts,’ he said. ‘The people who knew you’re here—they’re gone. They’ve forgotten you”
Rideau and Wikberg [Rideau’s co-editor] shared a laugh as Rideau poured more coffee. “Any convict can come through that door if he wants to,” he went on, with new animation. “You’re in an area where there are two thousand prisoners around you right now. And you’re in here. With us”
Rideau shook his head. “Anything that the prisoners want to do, they can do. And nobody can stop them. Anything we want to do to you. I mean, you’re in trouble.”
“I don’t exist, I said.
Rideau nodded, with pride. “They can bury you underneath the building, man. You’d never be missed. You’ve got better protection in here with us.”
Wikberg and Rideau finally walked me out of Angola just before seven o’clock. Guards looked on curiously but made no attempt to challenge us, as Rideau knew they wouldn’t. His grin said, this is how well I run this damn place. We shook hands at the green metal gate. Rideau’s last words were jocular but also seemed to sound a warning and a plea. “if you look up someday and see us on the Riviera, or wherever in Europe,” he said, “don’t be surprised, and don’t run from us either. Don’t make as if you don’t recognize us.”
Those were the thoughts of a man who, in 1993, would be called by Life Magazine “the nation’s most rehabilitated prisoner.” Was it really a glimpse of the 19-year-old who ignored the pleas of his victims in 1961, still reveling in his power over others.
It is this sort of behavior that makes me believe Rideau entered the Gulf National Bank with the specific intent of killing the white people who had made him “smile and fawn” to earn their trust. They had, in his eyes, exploited his powerlessness by forcing him to be deferential in order to secure their good will, but the .22 pistol and hunting knife would equalize the scales of power. He would make them pay, not only with their money but their lives as well. According to the confession he gave police immediately after his arrest, he started drinking Vodka highballs the day before he robbed the bank to celebrate the windfall that awaited him [State v. Rideau, 193 So.2d 264 (Dec. 12, 1967)].
Whatever else can be said about his motives, Rideau was certainly an angry young man when he approached the back door of the Gulf National Bank on February 16, 1961 at 6:55 p.m. and convinced bank vice president Jay Hickman to let him inside. He was all smiles until he got past Hickman into the bank where Dora McCain and Julia Ferguson had just finished tallying the day’s deposits and withdrawals.
The trio in the bank was completely flabbergasted when the trusted porter pulled out his pistol and ordered them to fill the suitcase with money. Hickman put $14,079 in it but did not tell the young robber that there was more than one hundred thousand dollars hidden in the bank vault.
Rideau then ordered the three bank employees to accompany him to McCain’s black-and-white British-made Vauxhall automobile. He made McCain drive. He knew she could best handle the foreign made car. These are not the actions of a panic-stricken individual.
“You better do everything I tell you to do, because your life hangs on a string,” Rideau told the hostages once they got into the vehicle. This statement was taken from Rideau’s trial transcript and read before the Louisiana Board of Pardons on May 7, 1986 by former Lake Charles District Attorney Frank Salter (as reported in the LSU Daily Reveille in May 1986).
The statement does not reflect the kind of “sheer panic” Rideau described at his January 2005 trial. The question that Salter asked members of the Louisiana Pardon Board in 1986 is still relevant – “Does that appear to be the testimony of a man who is anything but cold-blooded, unemotional—with a lack of understanding? A man who is ready to kill?”
Another indication of Rideau’s methodical mindset was revealed in the previously quoted article in Details Magazine. Wilkerson quoted Rideau telling the hostages he would have plastic surgery after he made his escape and would never be caught. An individual sitting in a stolen vehicle with three cowering hostages, boasting about having plastic surgery and never being caught, is not a panic-stricken kid looking for a way out. It is the statement of a self-confident killer in complete control of terrified victims.
Julia Ferguson was the oldest of the trio of bank employees Rideau took hostage. Perhaps that’s why she was the most frightened. She probably sensed Rideau did not plan to let them live. Another Rideau quote from the 1990 Details Magazine article is particularly revealing.
“What’s the matter, Mrs. Ferguson, You scared?”
He was toying with her like a cat playing with a mouse before killing it.
After driving around for about twenty minutes, while Rideau searched for a secluded place to kill the hostages, Dora McCain was ordered to stop the Vauxhall near English Bayou, an uninhabited area northeast of Lake Charles. According to court records, Rideau ordered all the hostages out of the vehicle and told them to line up side by side. Julia Ferguson tried to stand in front of Hickman and McCain. Rideau ordered the terrified woman to get in a straight line. He then opened fire at them, emptying his gun. Wounded in the arm, Hickman bolted and ran across the marsh near the bayou. Dora McCain fell directly in front of Rideau with a bullet wound to the neck. She feigned death. Rideau kicked her motionless body twice to make sure she was dead.
He then turned his attention to Julia Ferguson who was trying to rise from the place where she had fallen near McCain.
“Please, Wilbert,” she pleaded as Rideau stood over her with the hunting knife, “think of my poor old daddy. What will he do without me?”
“Don’t worry, it will be quick and cool,” Dora McCain would later recount Rideau saying as he pulled Ferguson’s head back and drew the knife across her exposed throat. He then stabbed her through the heart, at least once, to make sure that she was dead.
Another brutally frank Rideau quote from Details Magazine about the murderous scene deals directly with his intent to kill all his hostages:
“I heard Hickman fall into the Bayou near the bridge, and I figured he would drown. Dora fell on the shoulder of the road. I believed I had killed her … Julia tried to get to her feet. I stabbed her once, twice, or maybe three times. I thought they were all dead. I intended that they be dead.”
Thus, on two occasions, two decades apart, Rideau told at least two reporters (Jodie and Wilkerson) that he intended to kill Ferguson. He believed both Hickman and McCain were already dead. He did not want to leave any witness alive.
Feigning death until Rideau left the scene in her car, Dora McCain, struggled to her feet and made her way to the nearby home of Earl Bias. She told the farmer she had been shot.
“She was standing there with a head scarf pressed against the left side of her neck,” Bias was quoted as saying in Details Magazine. “Her hand was full of blood, and also the head scarf.”
A massive law enforcement hunt was launched to find Rideau, but the State Police had the wrong information about the kind of vehicle he was driving. The initial alert said he was driving a Volkswagen not a Vauxhall. He was stopped by two troopers who let him go but eventually caught up with him again before he could escape once they received the correct information about the car. “Why in the – did you have to stop me a second time, I thought I had it made,” Rideau told the troopers.
Rideau was not panic stricken. He talked his way through one police stop and his only concern during the second was why the troopers had stopped him.
What Rideau testified to under oath during his January 2005 retrial about taking hostages and killing them in a “sheer panic” attack is simply not true. His own words on the record show that he took Jay Hickman, Dora McCain, and Julia Ferguson hostage because he intended to kill them. That was always part of Rideau’s plan. He told me so on more than one occasion. He said so in media interviews. The testimony at his first three trials of McCain and Hickman, the two hostages who survived his attempts to kill them, corroborates statements he made to the press over a period of two decades about his intentions in 1961.
His testimony in the January 2005 retrial that resulted in the manslaughter verdict and his freedom was perjury.
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But before you judge let me say this for the record:
I met Wilbert Rideau in 1965 in the East Baton Rouge Parish jail. We were each charged with murder for separate crimes, his in Lake Charles, Louisiana in 1961 and mine in Baton Rouge in 1965.
Rideau and I were both in solitary confinement. We became friends, two criminals linked by a common cause: an intense desire to escape the jail where we were being held. We shared many conversations about our crimes through the air conditioning vents in our adjoining cells and the small openings in the cell doors through which we received our meals. I was a 20-year old white boy from Rayville, a small north Louisiana town in Klan country. Rideau was a 23-year old black kid from Lake Charles.
That was the beginning of our relationship. It would blossom into one of the most successful prison journalism partnerships in penal history. When I was taken from the jail in Baton Rouge after my murder conviction, I was transferred to Angola’s death row. Rideau stayed in the jail after a brief stint on “the row” because he received a new trial, the first of three retrials over his 44 years of confinement.
We resumed our friendship on death row between 1967 and 1968 after Rideau’s second conviction. On death row I learned of his ambition to be a “writer.” And I began my first literary efforts, penning a piece for a religious publication, The Power of Living, and studying to become a “jail house” lawyer.
In 1977, five years after death sentences nationwide were struck down by a U.S. Supreme Court decision, Rideau asked me to join The Angolite, the official inmate newsmagazine at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. He was its editor. By then, I was housed on Angola’s maximum security “Big Yard” with some of the prison’s most dangerous inmates. Rideau was in a medium security area of the prison where less dangerous convicts lived.
We worked together on The Angolite for nine years, from August 1977 through November 1986, a period in which we became known as the best prison journalists in America after winning a series of national awards for articles we each wrote.
During my years on the magazine, Rideau talked to me in detail about his crime. Our discussions began with a series of practice sessions in which he answered questions in private about his crime so he could better respond to questions by tough reporters. The sessions started after a hard-hitting national television interview in the early 1980s. The questions rattled him. He asked me and another inmate to “rehearse” him so he could better deal with questions about why he cut one of his victim’s throat.
A potentially damaging “ambush” interview with former NBC reporter Sandy Gilmour, who pounded him with questions about the brutal nature of his crime, started the sessions. Sylvester Peters, another inmate who often helped us gather information from other inmates for our stories, and I were asked to take turns. Rideau wanted us to grill him about the crime so he could practice his responses. It was during these straight-from-the-shoulder, de-sensitizing sessions that Rideau talked about the careful planning and execution of his crime.
It must be said that over the last 16 years I have had an adversarial relationship with Wilbert Rideau. My break with him occurred when I was taken into protective custody by the federal government and put into a secure prison environment at State Police headquarters after working undercover with the FBI to expose a corrupt “pardons-selling” operation at Angola in 1986. Two public officials were convicted in the scam. After federal marshals whisked me out of Angola, Rideau charged in media interviews (including The New York Times and the Columbia Journalism Review) that I had jeopardized the freedom of the penal press by becoming a snitch. In these interviews he said I had damaged the magazine because inmates would never trust it again given my work on behalf of law enforcement. The history of this conflict will be dealt with in a future post.
Rideau’s supporters will no doubt vehemently say I have a conflict of interest because of the “bad blood” between us. But I say it is the public record that counts.
