Wilbert Rideau The Real Story

           If journalism irresponsibility was a crime, National Public Radio would be indicted as a “career criminal” for the way it has promoted and glorified Wilbert Rideau, former inmate in the Louisiana prison system where he received accolades for his journalism endeavors as editor of the Angola publication The Angolite. The most recent crime of journalism irresponsibility by NPR, a government subsidized program (and a colossal waste of taxpayers’ money) occurred on May 9, 2011 when Rideau was interviewed by “Tell Me More” host Michel Martin in a segment called “Behind Closed Doors” which, according to Martin, discusses “issues people usually keep hidden.” That’s some scary stuff! Revealing “hidden” issues!

            Anyway, Martin had Rideau on “Behind Closed Doors” to discuss the hidden issue of sexual violence in the nation’s prisons. Rideau’s “expertise” on this issue is a single article that appeared in The Angolite in 1979 and garnered Rideau a George Polk Award. John Darnton, a former associate editor with The New York Times (another publication with a longstanding fascination with Rideau), orchestrated the Polk Award committee to re-bestow the 1979 award upon Rideau earlier this year. The re-presentation of the Polk award was the opening used by NPR to once again promote Rideau and glorify the memoir he released last year, “In The Place of Justice” (Random House 2010).

            The following exchange between Martin and Rideau underscores the far-left agenda of NPR and its so-called “news journalist”:

            MARTIN: I want to talk about the reporting that has brought you so much attention over the years, and to an issue that you brought so much attention to when many other people were not paying attention. But before we do, I do want to talk to people who are not aware of the full that  – why you were incarcerated.

            When you were 19, you decided rob a bank – do I have this right? – because you wanted to get out of town. You panicked; things went awry, and two employees of the bank that you attempted to rob were hurt, and the third was killed.

            RIDEAU: Killed.

            MARTIN: So you never denied that you were involved. The whole question was, was it intentional?

            RIDEAU: Right. This was before the Civil Rights Movement, when the state was being forced to integrate. And they turned it into a political issue and they fabricated – they made the case more than what it was. And you know, I didn’t have resources or attorneys in order to help me prove that I didn’t do what they said I did.

            So it wasn’t until 44 years later that I had the resources and the lawyers able to put up a defense, and show the jury that much of what they said I did was really, fabricated. The truth is that yes, I did, unfortunately take a lady’s life, and there is no excuse for that.

            This website is called “Wilbert Rideau-Real Story” for a reason. To debunk the lies and distortions the former convict editor put in his memoir. But before I once again take Rideau to the woodshed for lying about his crime, I would like to call attention to several points about the Martin/Rideau exchange. First, Martin deliberately gave Rideau an opportunity in a public forum to portray his case as a “political issue” based upon fabrications. Martin doesn’t know anything about the real facts in Rideau’s crime. Second, Rideau said his crime occurred “before the Civil Rights Movement.” The Civil Rights Movement began in 1948 and gained national impetus in 1954 with the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Rideau’s crime occurred more than a decade after the Civil Rights Movement began. I will now rehash my previous posts concerning Rideau’s crime. He made this issue timely when he told Martin his crime was based upon fabrications. This analysis of Rideau’s crime is based almost exclusively on the description he provided about the crime in his memoir.

            Rideau killed Julia Ferguson on February 16, 1961. There is no doubt about that. He has admitted to the crime as he did on Martin’s show. A Louisiana jury in January 2005 convicted Rideau of manslaughter in connection with the crime. The issue that remains in dispute is whether Rideau killed Julia Ferguson in cold blood or killed her in a state of panic. Rideau points to the 2005 jury verdict as “clear and convincing evidence” that he did not have a specific intent to kill Ferguson when he stabbed her through the heart.

            Following the robbery of the Gulf National Bank, Rideau took three of the bank employees to a remote area in Calcasieu Parish. He said he planned to release them so he could make good of his escape. In his memoir, Rideau said once he and the three hostages got into Ferguson’s four-door British-made Vauxhall, he instructed Ferguson to drive the vehicle and ordered bank employee Dora McCain to sit on the passenger side of the front seat. He then instructed the bank’s vice president, Jay Hickman, to get in the backseat behind Ferguson while he climbed into the backseat behind McCain.

            This seating arrangement is important—four adults sitting in a small, cramped foreign-made vehicle. McCain is in the passenger front seat while Hickman is sitting on the driver’s side backseat. The vehicle, according to Rideau, is moving slowly down a gravel road in a remote, isolated area. Rideau described what happened next:

            “Suddenly, the younger woman [Dora McCain] was bolting from the car. ‘Stop the car!’ I yelled, grabbing at the door handle and springing out. I slipped, losing my footing. The woman ran across the road. Scrambling to break my fall, I leaned against the trunk of the car. ‘Stop or I’ll shoot!’ I yelled. Hickman, now out of the car, lunged toward me and the pistol. It went off, and he ran. I continued firing—five more shots in rapid succession—until the gun emptied. Both women fell. ‘Mr. Hickman!’ I called, running a couple of steps after him, stopping as I realized I could not see him, then spinning around in time to see the older woman [Julia Ferguson] start to rise. I grabbed the knife, stabbed her, and ran to the car where I stood, shaking violently and grasping for breath. I couldn’t see anything in the pitch-black night. It was deathly quiet. Oh, God, what have I done? I got into the car and took a deep, ragged breath. ‘Oh, God,’ I murmured, ‘help me—please.’ I took off down the gravel lane. I needed to distance myself from this horrible place, this nightmare.”

            Before the 2005 jury, Rideau provided this description of what happened in the remote area:

            “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 bar. I lost my footing as I sprang out 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, intentionally or not—I didn’t know which, 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 go was to get away from there.”

            With these two varying accounts, Rideau provided a picture into his “panic defense.” But that dog won’t hunt under a scrutiny of the facts. Focus on the picture. It’s important. The car is slowly driving down the right side of the gravel road. To the left, on the driver’s side across from the incoming lane, was a clearing in a wooded area. While the vehicle was still moving, Dora McCain opened the door and leaped from the vehicle. She did not fall and was not injured by this bold move. She ran towards the back of vehicle and across the other lane of the road toward the clearing. Julia Ferguson stopped the vehicle. Rideau jumped out and leaned on the trunk of the car to brace himself. He was looking at McCain’s back as she fled into the clearing area.

            Here’s where Rideau’s description fade out of focus. He said Hickman and Ferguson also leaped from the vehicle once it stopped. It’s not really clear which one jumped first. But Rideau said Ferguson, who was at the driver’s side door, ran back toward McCain who was fleeing away from the rear of the vehicle into the clearing. Why would Ferguson run toward the rear of the vehicle in the direction of McCain where Rideau was poised to shoot? Logic says she would have run across the other lane into the clearing toward the front (not the rear) of the vehicle. She would have run out of harm’s way, not into it. 

            As for Hickman, Rideau would have us believe that Hickman jumped out of the rear of the vehicle, and either reached across the trunk or came completely around the rear of the vehicle to slap at Rideau’s hand or the gun. Not logical. Hickman would have run away from Rideau across the other lane of the road into the clearing toward the front (not rear) of the vehicle. Why would he even try to reach across the trunk of the vehicle? There is no way he could have reached Rideau. To have slapped either Rideau’s hand or the gun, Hickman would have had to run around the rear of the vehicle to get at Rideau on the other side. Again, not logical.

            Now here’s where Rideau’s descriptions insult logic. He said that after Hickman lunged toward him the pistol went off. At that point Hickman supposedly ran. Rideau said he fired “five more shots in rapid succession.” Being behind the vehicle, Hickman had two choices in where to run: either into the woods behind Rideau on the passenger side of the vehicle or back towards McCain and Ferguson into the clearing on the other side of the road. Rideau implies that Hickman ran in the direction towards the woods on the passenger side of the vehicle. He said he ran after Hickman for a “couple of steps” before spinning around towards the passenger side of the vehicle only to see Julia Ferguson trying to rise at which time he ran over and stabbed her.

            Now, Rideau said the first round in the six-shot weapon accidentally discharged when Hickman slapped at the gun. Hickman then ran at which time Rideau fired “five more shots in rapid succession, emptying the gun. By Rideau’s own account, he fired all five shots at the fleeing Hickman who was wounded in the arm (a fact Rideau left out of his crime descriptions).

            That raises the question of how Dora McCain got that bullet wound in her neck?

            She was the first person out of the vehicle. She ran toward its rear before the car came to a complete stop and continued to run across the other lane of the road into the clearing area away from the rear of the vehicle. In order for McCain to be hit by one of the five shots fired in rapid succession, Hickman must have run away from the driver’s side of vehicle in her direction towards the clearing and away from the rear of the vehicle.

            Thus, in order for Rideau to have spun around in time to see Julia Ferguson trying to rise from the ground, she could not have “followed McCain” as Rideau claimed. She had to be some distance away towards the front of the vehicle in the clearing area.

            The only other logical explanation for McCain’s neck wound from the rear is that the first shot was not an errant accidental shot caused by Hickman lunging at Rideau but a deliberate shot Rideau fired at the fleeing McCain right after he jumped out of the vehicle. That would explain why she fell (before he fired the “five shots in rapid succession”).

            There’s one other factor to consider here. Rideau said it was a “pitch-black night” and he “couldn’t see anything.” That’s strange. The lights of Ferguson’s vehicle were on while she was driving because it was dark. Night darkness came early in February, even 1961. To accept the “pitch-black” statement, we have to believe Ferguson stopped the Vauxhall, turned off the engine, and pushed in the “lights” switch in (located on the dash board). All vehicles in 1961 were equipped with “lights” switches that had to be manually pushed in and pulled out to control the lights. Stopping the vehicle, putting it in a neutral gear, turning the keys to shut off its engine, and pushing in the “lights” switch to shut off its headlights would have been a lot of actions for a scared woman to take before jumping out of the vehicle to flee from a hostage taker.

            But assuming it was “pitch-black” as Rideau said, how did he manage to get off a shot that hit McCain in the back of her neck as she ran into the clearing and another that hit Hickman in the arm? And if it was so “pitch-black” that he “couldn’t see anything,” how did Rideau see Ferguson trying to rise when he spun around away from the fleeing Hickman and McCain. Bottom line: it was not “pitch-black” because Ferguson left the vehicle’s lights on when she jumped out of it and fled. She would not have wasted time pushing the “lights” switch in.

            The holes in Rideau’s “panic defense” are as gaping as the one that sunk the Titanic. His own accounts of the events which led up to the killing of Julia Ferguson actually supports the State’s theory that he ordered the three hostages out of the vehicle, placed them side by side in a line, and opened fire on them with the pistol. But even accepting Rideau’s accounts of what happened, the fact that he spun around, saw Julia Ferguson trying to rise, and ran over to her and stabbed several times in the chest is not a “panic attack.” His does not indicate whether he believed McCain or Hickman were dead or even badly wounded. So why stab Ferguson in the chest with a knife one time, much less two or three times as he indicated? A moron, regardless of how panic stricken he may be, knows that stabbing someone in the chest will more than likely kill them.

            And why slit her throat? Rideau’s defense team presented “expert” testimony that Julia Ferguson’s throat has not been “slit from ear to ear” as the State had alleged. But the defense team was forced to concede that Ferguson’s throat had been cut. It makes no difference if Rideau actually slit her throat or just nicked it in a cutting motion. His intent was to make sure she was dead. His descriptions do not mention the neck wound. Whether the neck wound was inflicted before or after the he stabbed Ferguson in the heart is immaterial. It is clear that he intended to kill Ferguson, either by cutting her throat or stabbing her through the heart.

            Rideau’s written confession is much closer to actually what happened that night than his memoir accounts—and in that confession he said he intended for all three hostages to be dead when he drove off into the night. And Dora McCain’s account of what happened that night are far more credible than Rideau’s “panic defense” presented at his 2005 trial.

           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 testimony of either surviving witness.

           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 he 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 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 to indict everyone but himself for the tragic events on 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 were 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. And you certainly will not hear them on any NPR program Rideau appears on. 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.       

            Michel Martin said Rideau tried to rob the bank to get enough money to get out of town. Rideau has said he robbed the bank on the spur of the moment because he felt marginalized by the white community in Lake Charles. I examined this issue in a previous post, and it deserves to be revisited here.

            In 1959 Rideau got a job at Halpern’s Fabrics in the Southgate Shopping Center in Lake Charles. He was seventeen at the time. He made $70 every two weeks, and, as he pointed out, that was “good pay for a colored in a non-construction job in 1959.” He said it was enough money to “help out” his mother, buy “nice clothes,” and spread the money around among friends.

            So by his own admission, Rideau had a good job and no reason to steal. In fact, the manager of the store, Martha Irby, took the time to teach Rideau everything about the fabric business, including the store’s “bookkeeping” with the advice “you never know when this might one day benefit you.” How many 17-year-olds in 1959, especially one of color, would have  embraced this as a wonderful opportunity to prepare for adult life

            Not Wilbert Rideau. He looked for every “opportunity” to see himself as a “victim,” especially of racism. This character flaw manifested itself in his reaction to the first pay raise he received at Halpern’s. Pleased with his initiative and ability to assist in all aspects of the store’s operation, Mrs. Irby recommended to the store’s owner, Alvin Halpern Jr., that young Rideau be given a fifty percent pay raise. Mr. Halpern apparently thought that was a bit extravagant but did give Rideau a raise of $2.50 a week, increasing his pay to $75 every two weeks.

            “Mrs. Irby was embarrassed,” Rideau wrote. “I seethed.”

            Rideau expects everyone to “seethe” with him—to casually and blindly accept that the $2.50 raise was just another example of how “white people” screwed him over. A $2.50 pay raise in 1959 or 1960 at any job was nothing to sneeze at.

            “I was fed up with a white society that marginalized me,” he explained “I brooded about that, and about the fact that I had no real friends, only some people who would become chummy when they hit me up for cash. I felt my life was empty, and I despaired of things ever being different.”

            Let’s try to wade through these victimized feelings. Rideau’s had a good job, made excellent pay. He was an “intelligent” kid by his own admission. But somehow “white society” had marginalized him, and “black society” liked him only when he had money. Damn, what a terrible, horrible hand to be dealt in life—the fate of virtually every teenager in America in the 1950s.

            Rideau’s memoir then described the events leading up to the bank robbery It was February 15, 1961—the day before that infamous bank robbery. It was payday for him. He went to the bank and cashed his check. He then took a bus to Waldmeier’s Pawn Shop located in downtown Lake Charles. He went to the pawn shop, he said, because he had been “thinking off and on about getting a gun.” He described himself as a “puny nineteen-year-old” who had been “picked on, bullied, and harassed” throughout his life. The final straw that “broke the camel’s back” came after he was “slapped and threatened in front of others at nightclub by a guy with a knife.” He walked away from that incident ‘fuming” and vowing it “would never happen again.” He decided he had to have a gun for self-protection and to prevent any future humiliation.

            A recurring problem in Rideau’s memoir is the contradictions he expresses throughout it. For example, at one point he wrote that he had “no real friends” but on the very next page he said “many of my buddies had knives.” Friends and buddies generally denote the same kind of relationship. So did he have friends or did he not have friends?

            Let’s assume Rideau did get “slapped” and he decided he needed a gun for self-protection because he was “puny.” Although he’s seething because of the embarrassment at having been at being slapped in front of others, he took pains to say he did not purchase the gun “to hurt anyone;” only to “deter” anyone from trying to push him around again. It just so happened that on the way out of the pawn shop he saw a “hunting knife in a scabbard” which caught his eye so he bought it “on impulse.”

            As soon as he left the pawn shop, Rideau took a bus back the Southgate mall area where he bought a “box of .22 caliber cartridges at an army surplus store.” Another contradiction. An empty gun can “deter;” a loaded gun only has the potential to “hurt” someone or something.

            On the morning of the robbery, February 16, Rideau reported to work carrying the loaded .22 pistol and knife in his coat pocket. The question that immediately arises is why he needed so much weaponry for self-protection at work. Going to Halpern’s was not like going to some seedy “nightclub” where he might encounter a brute ready to smack him in the face.

            While he offered no logical explanation for carrying the weapons to work with him, Rideau made a point to lament that working at Halpern’s “was my future—a dead-end job.” He said that realization made him “restless” and consumed him with a “gnawing need for things to change.”

            Perhaps a good-paying job, with trust and responsibilities and an opportunity for advancement, was a “dead-end” future for a 19-year-old “colored” kid in Lake Charles in 1961. I don’t know. I was not a “colored” kid in Lake Charles in 1961. But I do know Wilbert Rideau, and I understand the true source of his personal discontent. He expressed it in the book. He had just heard that “California was a good place for colored people, with plenty of opportunities for good jobs and a chance to be somebody.”

            In his memoir and media interviews about the memoir, Rideau lamented the fact that he’s been unable to secure and maintain steady employment since his release from prison. He got a $75,000 grant from the Soros Foundation in 2007 (and his wife got a $75,000 grant the year before) to subsidize the writing of his memoir. He told Erin Moriarty on CBS’ Sunday Morning that he missed being a “big shot” in prison; that in free society he is a “nobody.”

            That was the same psychological problem he had in 1961. He could not stand being a “marginalized” nobody—a “colored” kid working in a fabric store in Lake Charles. California offered him a chance to be “somebody” just as prison gave him the opportunity to be a “big shot.” Rideau could have found work after his release from prison, but it would have been the kind of anonymous labor suited only for a “nobody.” He was not going back there. Just the Gulf South National Bank offered him a chance to be “somebody” in California, his memoir offered him a chance to be a “big shot” in the free world

            Rideau claims that taking the pistol and knife to work did not mean he had pre-planned the bank robbery. He said the bank robbery idea just evolved out of the day’s mundane events. He said he was not feeling well at work, so he knocked off “about two o’clock.” He walked to a nearby men’s store “to visit with the janitor there.” He said the janitor, who must have been a “friend” of sorts, asked Rideau to help him move some things around. Apparently Rideau had begun to feel better, at least enough to help the janitor with his work He worked so long in fact that he missed the bus to take him home. So he decided to wait for the next bus in his cousin’s car which was parked at the rear of the shopping center. He fell asleep “until almost 5:30.” He had missed yet another bus.

            Rideau then “meandered to Weingarten’s Supermarket, where I talked to the bag boys and porters I knew and arranged for a ride home with one of them who was leaving at 7:30.”  As with the janitor, it can reasonably be assumed that these “bag boys and porters” were friends of his because at least one of them was willing to give him a ride home. This certainly does not comport with the image of a “puny” kid with no friends as he tried to portray himself. He was strong enough to move heavy rolls of fabric around at Halpern’s, strong enough to help his janitor friend “move some things around,” and friendly enough with the bag boys and porters at Weingarten’s to catch a ride home.

            Still, Rideau said the plan to rob the bank suddenly popped into head while sitting on a bench outside Weingarten’s zipping a soft drink and waiting for his ride home. It was about 6:15 or so. The overcast sky caused by smoke “belching from the city’s chemical plants” suddenly made him “feel totally alone, miserable, frustrated, and desperate.” He decided right then and there that he needed a “new life away from Lake Charles” and the only way to accomplish that was to rob the bank which “was stuffed with money.” With all that money he could “buy a new life someplace else.”

            There you have it: the decision to rob the bank was spontaneously made outside Weingarten while sipping a soda and having a difficult time with the “overcast sky.” But in the very next breath he added that “three people worked at the bank, but on Thursday evenings only the manager, Jay Hickman, and one teller worked.”

Now, how would “puny” little Rideau know that operational detail unless he had been monitoring the work schedules of the bank employees?

            While sitting on the bench of Weingarten’s, Rideau theorized he could tie up the bank employees and leave them in either a coffee room or the bank’s vault. “It shouldn’t take but a few minutes,” Rideau wrote, “after which I’d return to Weingarten’s to catch my 7:30 ride home, pack some clothes, leave my family some money, and tell them I was going on a vacation and not to worry about me.”

            And he added:  “When would an opportunity like this occur again?”

            He made his decision. He went to the bank. “What do I have to lose?” he asked himself.

            But the best laid plans always have flaws. About midway through the robbery attempt one of the female bank tellers managed to make a telephone call to the bank’s main branch and inform them that something was going on at the Southgate location. The police were alerted. Rideau said “everything … suddenly spun out of control.” But not so much so that he was about to leave the money behind. “I told Hickman to fill the suitcase, and hurry,” Rideau wrote.

            Suitcase!

            What the hell is a suitcase doing in a bank—unless the robber brought it to stuff all that money in.

            Rideau wrote about taking the gun and knife with him to work that morning but there was no mention of the suitcase. The “suitcase” appeared suddenly in the middle of the robbery. The news media had long reported that, along with the gun and knife, Rideau bought a Samsonite suitcase and carried it with him into the bank.

            Rideau did not explain the origins of the suitcase—and for good reason. The idea to rob the bank could not have spontaneously sprung into his head sitting at Weingarten’s if he had bought a Samsonite suitcase and took it with him into the bank. He may have explained taking the gun and knife to work as self-protection, but not the suitcase.

            The presence of the suitcase in the bank destroys the spontaneous, non-planned decision to rob the bank.

            And if Rideau lied, even by omission, about the suitcase because it undermined the spontaneous decision made at Weingarten’s to rob the bank then what can be believed in the memoir?

            These are not fabrications. They are facts presented in Rideau’s own memoir. Michel Martin should have read the memoir before she made foolish ass of herself. But, again, like other NPR “journalists,”she had his head so far up Rideau’s rear end that she could not see the facts.

            The fact is that Wilbert Rideau is a liar. His memoir is a literary fraud. And NPR has repeatedly engaged in unethical, irresponsible journalism by supporting both.