Wilbert Rideau The Real Story

Wilbert Rideau took the witness stand during his January 2005 murder trial in Lake Charles, Louisiana. It marked the fourth time the State of Louisiana had put him to trial for the murder of bank teller Julia Ferguson. At his previous three trials a consistent theory emerged as to how the crime happened. Supported by two surviving witnesses and Rideau’s own confession, the State of Louisiana charged at about 6:55 p.m. on February 16, 1961 Rideau entered the Gulf South National Bank located in the Southgate Shopping Center. Two female tellers, Julia Ferguson and Dora McCain, and vice president Jay Hickman were in the bank at the time. Rideau pulled a .22 caliber pistol and ordered Hickman to put the bank’s money in a suitcase he brought with him.

Rideau then took the three bank employees hostage. He forced them into McCain’s British-made Vauxhall vehicle. He ordered McCain to drive the vehicle to a remote, isolated section of the parish near English Bayou. He forced the hostages out of the vehicle, made them line up side by side, and opened fire on them with the gun. He continued to fire until he ran out of bullets. Wounded in the arm, Hickman ran into a nearby marshy area. Shot in the neck, McCain fell at Rideau’s feet and feign death. Rideau kicked her twice to make sure she was dead. Ferguson tried to rise from the ground. Rideau walked over to her.

“Please, Wilbert,” she pleaded as Rideau stood over her with a hunting knife, “think of my poor old daddy. What will he do without me?”

“Don’t worry, it will be quick and cool,” McCain recounted. Rideau 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.

That is deliberate murder by any legal standard. The all-white juries who heard this evidence during Rideau’s first three trials agreed. They found him guilty of first degree murder, a verdict that carried a mandatory death sentence.

Rideau bought the gun and knife the day before the robbery. At his fourth trial he told the jury he purchased the weapons because he had recently been “slapped and threatened” at a local black nightclub and he was “determined [he] wouldn’t be humiliated again.” Rideau told the jury he would have purchased the gun earlier but he had to wait until pay day which came on February 15, the day before the robbery. He said he bought the knife on “impulse” as he was about the leave the pawnshop where he bought the gun. He said he planned to carry the gun “regularly.”

One thing is certain: Rideau purchased the gun to hurt someone. A better response to buying weapon for self-protection would have been to stay out of the nightclubs. The patron who allegedly slapped him did not use a weapon. Rideau apparently couldn’t, or wouldn’t, defend himself, so he bought a deadly weapon to kill (or at the very least hurt) anyone who “humiliated” him again by slapping him. By his own inadvertent admission, he says he was a killer in the making, just waiting for someone to offend him again.

In his recently released memoir, In The Place of Justice, Rideau described his crime as follows:

“My account of what happened inside the bank was essentially the same as the prosecution’s. Julian brought out the half-baked nature of my understanding with pointed questions: ‘Help me understand this: When you walked up to the front of the bank, Mr. Hickman and the two women were right there where you could watch their every move and control them. Why didn’t you exert control right then and there, tell them you had a gun, make them close the drapes and do as you say?’

“I said I didn’t know; it was my first time trying to rob anyone.

“Julian asked me what my reaction was to the phone call and caller who said that they were either sending a car out or one was already on the way.”

“I told him it was panic. To me, that call meant someone knew the bank was being robbed and the police were on the way. In a moment, everything had spun out of control. I didn’t know what to do, I said.

“Julian stopped me. ‘You heard the DA say you took them out to the country to kill them. Why should we believe you didn’t?’

“’If I had intended to kill those people, eliminate witnesses, I would have done it right there in the bank. It never entered my mind that I was going to hurt anybody.’”

Rideau is asking the reader to believe he decided in a “panic” to take the three bank employees hostage because he did not want to “hurt anybody.”

Nonsense. You do not take three people hostage to keep from hurting them. Rideau took the employees hostage because by his own admission he believed the police were on their way to the bank. The employees would have identified him to the police. That would have made his escape from Lake Charles more unlikely.

Why didn’t he just shoot the employees in the bank?

Noise. Shooting three people inside the bank would have taken at least three or more shots. The multiple gunshot noise would have attracted attention of people still in the shopping center. They would have rushed to the bank. They would have prevented his escape. He had no getaway vehicle. He would have had to rush out and jump in McCain’s vehicle with people gathered around. The bottom line is he simply couldn’t risk the noise, especially not with a police car on the way.

Why not stab the people to death? Too messy and too long. Three people will not stand around while you repeatedly stab them until they’re all dead. There would have been screaming, hollering, and running around in terror. Stabbing, therefore, was out of the question.

Casually walking out of the bank with the three employees in tow and getting into McCain’s vehicle was the only calm, rational solution. But that kind of decision-making defies the state of “panic” Rideau said he was in. The “panic” theory simply does not mix with the mindset of a man who, by his own admission, was willing to spend a significant portion of his paycheck to buy a gun to kill anyone who “humiliated” him again. Rideau had the mind of a killer inside that bank, not the mind of a panic-stricken teenager.

Rideau’s then testified about what happened once he got the hostages to English Bayou. His memoir account continues:

“I explained that after we wound our way around Lake Charles for a quarter hour, I got lost on a gravel road looking for the Old Spanish Trail. Disoriented and lost, I’d told Mrs. Ferguson to slow down so I could think, get my bearings. I was looking through the rear window when suddenly Mrs. McCain bolted from the car. I lost my footing as I sprang out of the car behind her. As I regained my footing, leaning on the side of the trunk, yelling for her to stop or I would shoot, Mrs. Ferguson jumped out and followed McCain. Everything was going to hell. Mr. Hickman had come out of the car and tried to either hit my hand or grab the gun. The gun went off, unintentionally or not—I didn’t know which. Everything happened so fast, I said, like a blur. Hickman ran, and I started firing until the gun wouldn’t shoot anymore. Both women fell. Mrs. Ferguson got up. I ran to her and stabbed her. I was acting on panic and impulse. Then I ran to the car, turned it around, and headed back to Opelousas Street. All I wanted to do was to get away from there.”

Rideau wants the reader to believe that McCain’s bolting from the vehicle sent him into yet another state of panic and he started “recklessly” shooting at the hostages. It certainly convinced New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner who said in his May 4, 2010 review of In The Place of Justice that Rideau “recklessly shot” his victims.

Nonsense, again. If Rideau truly had no intention to hurt the hostages, why even shoot at all. They were in a remote, isolated area. Where were the victims going to run? Who would hear their screams? If he had truly planned to turn them loose, he would have just let them run free. There was no need to shoot at all.

More to the point, why run to Julia Ferguson and stab her? She was defenseless, helpless. What kind of threat did she pose at that moment?

Once again Rideau inadvertently answered the questions himself. He said he acted “on panic and impulse.” Impulse, not panic, is the operative word. He was possessed with an impulse to kill. He said he bought the gun to kill. Killing was very much on his mind in February 1961. He said he was “angry” and had a host of grievances against a lot of people. He often described himself in media interviews during his prison years as being “dangerous” and filled with “hatred” for white people during that time.

It is noteworthy that Rideau did not mention the wound to Julia Ferguson’s throat. He defense team played it down as a superficial cut across the neck, not enough to kill. As for the infamous line he reportedly told Ferguson before inflicting the neck wound: “Don’t worry. It’ll be quick and cool.” That quote was attributed to Rideau by Dora McCain.

“I don’t know how many nightmares Mrs. McCain had,” Rideau told the jury. “I don’t know if she could separate dreams from reality. I’m not trying to be critical – I’m just tell you it didn’t happen.”

Rideau admits he inflicted “nightmares” on McCain’s life only to add she did not have either the emotional or psychological ability to distinguish those nightmares from reality. In every day vernacular, she was “too crazy” to really know what happened.

Rideau’s lame denial defies all reliable studies of human psychology which says people remember exactly what is said in moments of terror. They remember for as long as they live.

But whether or not he made the comment is immaterial, just as it is also immaterial whether the wound to Ferguson’s throat was flesh wound or an “ear-to-ear” deep cut. The only material point is the undeniable fact that Wilbert Rideau tried to cut Julia Ferguson’s throat to kill her, and to make certain she was dead, he stabbed her through the heart.

As for firing the gun in “panic,” panic might have caused him to fire the weapon once, maybe twice. But six times? The very fact that he fired the gun six times (emptied the gun in fact) before running over to stab Mrs. Ferguson is undeniable evidence that he intended to kill all the victims at that moment.

Thus, no one can reasonably argue that Rideau did not possess a specific intent to kill all three victims. The question is whether or not someone wants to mitigate that intent with a “panic” defense. The problem with that defense, however, is that Rideau was the “cause” of his own panic—temporary insanity, if you will. First, he didn’t have to take the bank employees hostage. Second, there was absolutely no need to shoot the victims once they tried to flee unless he already had a premeditated intent to kill them. Their flight triggered the “panic” because it interrupted his plan to murder them all.

So it really makes no difference which version of the events you chose to believe: the State of Louisiana’s or Wilbert Rideau’s. Both support the only reasonable conclusion one can drawn from either version: Rideau deliberately tried to murder all three of his victims. He managed to murder one and wounded the other two.

The 2005 jury found Rideau guilty of manslaughter. He had been locked up 44 years at the time. A reasonable argument can be made the jury felt he had served enough time. Fair enough. The jury had a right to make that determination. But Rideau does not have the “right” to use half his memoir and the media access the memoir will bring him in an effort to convince the American public that he committed manslaughter, not murder on February 16, 1961.