WILBERT RIDEAU’S VICTIMS SPEAK
On February 16, 1961, Wilbert Rideau entered the Gulf National Bank in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He entered the bank with a fully loaded .22 caliber pistol and a hunting knife—both of which he had purchased the day before the robbery. He also carried with him a suitcase he bought and used to carry out the money stolen from the bank. There were three employees in the bank: Vice President Jay Hickman and tellers Dora McCain and Julia Ferguson. During the robbery, one of the tellers managed to alert a bank official at another location that there was something amiss at the Gulf National branch located in the Southgate Shopping Center. The police were notified and sent a unit to investigate. Realizing that something had gone awry, Rideau escorted the three employees outside the bank where they all got into one of the tellers’ vehicle. Rideau instructed Julia Ferguson to drive to a remote, isolated area where he ordered the hostages out of the vehicle.
The Calcasieu Parish District Attorney’s office charged that Rideau had the three hostages form a side-by-side line at which time he opened fire with the pistol. Hickman was wounded and either fell or jumped into a nearby bayou. Dora McCain collapsed and feigned death. Julia Ferguson tried to rise. Rideau walked over to her. He pulled out the hunting knife. “Please, Wilbert, think of my poor old daddy,” Ferguson pleaded. “Don’t worry. This will be quick and cool,” Rideau responded as he slit begging the woman’s throat. He then stabbed Ferguson in the heart several times to make sure she was dead.
Rideau’s defense at his January 2005 trial (his fourth following a federal court reversal of his conviction in 2000) was that McCain and Hickman fled as soon as they got out of the vehicle. “Stop or I’ll shoot,” Rideau reportedly hollered at them. He said he emptied the gun at the fleeing hostages. McCain fell at the point where she had been wounded. Again, Hickman jumped or fell into the bayou. Rideau said he saw Julia Ferguson trying to get up. He said he ran over to her and stabbed her “once, maybe twice” in the chest. Rideau’s defense team, led by NAACP defense attorney George Kendall, tried to minimize the wound to Ferguson’s neck by portraying it as no more than a “nick to the throat.”
The 2005 jury chose to believe Rideau’s “panic defense”—that he had not intended to kill the hostages when he took them to the remote area. Jurors returned a verdict of manslaughter. The maximum penalty for manslaughter in 1961 was 21 years. Rideau was sentenced to 21 years, and having already served 44 years, he was immediately released from custody.
Jay Hickman died in 1988 and Dora McCain was too frail to testify at the 2005 trial. The jury, therefore, did not get to see or hear the personal testimony of either surviving witness to the 1961 crime.
In the wake of the 2005 jury verdict and the release of Rideau, Gary Andrus, a nephew of Julia Ferguson, told the Washington Post: “[Julia] was my Sunday school teacher. She was a strong Christian woman, and taking care of her invalid father was her whole life. He just didn’t take her from our family, but from her invalid father.”
We all know what happened to Julia Ferguson. But there is nothing in the public record about what happened to her invalid father. Who cared for him after her brutal murder? We’ll probably never know. He was Rideau’s silent victim.
As for Jay Hickman, he rarely ever discussed the horrible events of that fateful day in February 1961—the day Rideau decided to rob a bank to get enough loot to start a “new life in California” as he said. Don Hickman, the only child of Jay, was 73 years old in 2005 when he talked to the Post. He said his father spoke only about two things concerning the robbery: “Dad said it was about $60,000 that Wilbert never saw. It was payroll 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 be do something like that?”
Dora McCain did not have any public reaction to the 2005 jury verdict that resulted in Rideau’s freedom. Her family and friends shielded her from the morbid curiosity of the media. The last, or certainly one of the last, interviews McCain gave to the media, was in March 1999. She spoke with Mail-On-Sunday, a London-based newspaper. Reporters Sharon Churcher and Peter Sheridan recounted McCain’s feelings about Rideau’s Oscar nomination for his work on the prison documentary, The Farm: Angola, USA. Normally a regular viewer of the Oscar’s award ceremony, McCain told the British reporters she would “sit with her husband and grandchildren in her bungalow near Lake Charles, Louisiana, and stare at the blank screen on her TV.”
The then 67-year-old McCain told Churcher and Sheridan that she still lived in agony from the wounds Rideau inflicted upon her near English Bayou that cold February day. Her back burned when she sat too long, and her partially paralyzed neck often went into vicious spasms from the 13 bullet fragments that remained lodged in the scar tissue which encircled her throat. And while surgeons were able to reconstruct her shattered vertebrae, she still felt “as if a drill [was] being twisted into her spinal cord.” These physical pains and horrible memories had become a fixture in her life, like the time one of Rideau’s supporters struck her with a “Free Rideau” placard after she opposed one of his clemency applications.
To say McCain was upset about Rideau’s Oscar nomination would be the classic understatement. But the grievances she expressed in 1999 are still applicable today, especially since Rideau has used his memoir, In the Place of Justice (Random House 2010), to indict everyone but himself for the tragic events of February 16, 1961. The former “famed prison journalist” even went so far as to imply that Mrs. McCain was psychologically unstable by the “trauma” she suffered and, therefore, her recollection of those events was not completely reliable (here, here, here, and here). But thanks to her Mail-On-Sunday interview we now know exactly what Rideau did at that remote area next to English Bayou where he took his victims.
“Maybe good people don’t realize [sic] the gravity of this man’s offence [sic],” she told Mail-On-Sunday. “Or is it that they have become immune to violent crime? Rideau is making himself out to be the victim and somehow I have become one of the vic-timisers [sic]. But this was a deliberate crime he committed … his intention was execution-style murder. Why does no one talk about that horror? I believe he has manipulated all these people in Hollywood. They should remember it’s very hard to know what’s really going on in Rideau’s head. I knew him when I worked at the bank. He worked as a porter at a nearby fabric shop and he’d come in to get changed [sic]. I was fooled. I think it is very possible that he is fooling people again. In his handwritten confession he said he intended me to be dead. Is he going to come and get me if they release him?”
Rideau paints the self-portrait in his memoir that he was a naïve, confused, uneducated, and angry “colored kid.” He’s managed for 44 years in prison to cultivate that image among his liberal media supporters and he was always blessed with a “gift for gab” to make it sound true. But as McCain told the Mail-On-Sunday reporters Rideau had a “silver tongue” even at 19, “Wear this,” Rideau told McCain as he handed her a scarf while forcing her into the getaway vehicle. “When I let you all out of the car in a little bit so you can walk back, I don’t want your pretty hair to get wet.”
“Wilbert,” Dora and Julia pleaded, “think about our children. Don’t leave our children without mothers.”
“Cover your pretty hair, Dora,” Rideau replied. “I won’t hurt you.”
Jurors who found Rideau guilty in 2005 and who spoke to the media afterwards said it was statements like these which convinced them Rideau did not have a specific intent to kill the hostages when he took them to the English Bayou area. But McCain’s recollection about what Rideau did to her and Julia Ferguson clearly reveal his intent.
With Hickman in the snake-infested waters, and from her position slumped on the ground, McCain said she saw Ferguson: “Julia staggered back … she’d been hit. He went over to her and jerked her up from her knees. She begged him to spare her life. He said, ‘Don’t worry. This will be quick and cool.’ It was the first time I saw the knife. He slashed it across her throat until her head was nearly severed and then he stabbed her several times in the heart.”
That memory never abandoned McCain, nor did what happen to her next.
“I’d fallen to the ground,” McCain continued, “playing dead, but he yanked me to my feet, kicking me. I can remember to this day how gentle he was with my hair, he kept calling it my ‘lovely hair.’ He pushed it to one side and then he started feeling along my neck until he felt the point where the spinal cord meets the neck. I felt the cold metal of the gun there, and then he pulled the trigger. There was an explosion and white light, and then I just felt numb. He kicked me in the ribs a couple of times and said, ‘you better be dead, bitch.’”
That is what Rideau’s surviving victim said happened on February 16, 1961. You will not find these details in his memoir. At the end of the day, you will have to decide which version is correct. As for myself, the fact that Julia Ferguson had a wound to her neck, regardless of whether it was a “nick” or a near decapitation-like wound, establishes a specific intent to kill, particularly when considered with the several stab wounds to Ferguson’s heart. You don’t stab a defenseless person several times in the heart and either cut or try to cut their throat in a state of “panic,” implying you did not mean to really harm that person. Not even Rideau’s “silver tongue” can sell that theory to me.
