crimgirl

On this day in 1961, Wilbert Rideau, age 19, robbed a Louisiana bank of $14,000 and kidnapped bank manager Jay Hickman and tellers Julia Ferguson and Dora McCain. Rideau forced them into Ferguson’s car and drove to a remote area where he shot all three. Julia Ferguson had the audacity to beg for her life, so Rideau walked over to her and repeatedly stabbed her in the heart. Hickman and McCain survived.

It’s the south in the early 1960s: Racism is rampant, segregation is widespread. A media-happy sheriff conducted his interrogation in front of television cameras, and Rideau’s video confession was played on the local news. Last year Rideau explained he only confessed because, “I had never seen a television camera before. All I saw were bright lights and shadowy figures… I thought this must be the electric chair I’d heard about. I thought they were going to execute me.” Uh huh.

Anyhoo, after the confession, Rideau was found guilty by a southern all-white, all-male jury. It’s probable the jurors were racist, corn-fed Klanners; however, this doesn’t negate the fact that Rideau committed the crimes. The verdict was eventually overturned because the confession’s broadcast had tainted the jury pool. In the years to come, two more trials and two more guilty verdicts were overturned on the grounds of racial bias and other jury selection violations. In 2005, a fourth trial took place. The prosecution said he murdered a woman in cold blood, and should spend life in prison. Rideau argued that he killed her, but he didn’t murder her.

A racially mixed jury was selected in Lake Charles, LA. To ensure jury nullification, Johnny “Chewbacca” Cochran was hired to lead the defense team. Cochran played up the strengths of their case:

• In prison Wilbert Rideau had published an award-winning prison-bashing magazine, co-authored a Criminal Justice textbook, shared an Academy Award nomination for an anti-prison documentary, become a sought-after lecturer, and gained many high-profile supporters who fought for his freedom.
• Racist officials were racist.
• Thirteen prosecution witnesses were now dead.
• In a major victory for the defense, the judge only allowed the jury to consider verdicts that would have been available in 1961: Premeditated murder (life without parole) or manslaughter (21 years). If they had gone by 2005 law, he would have almost certainly been sentenced to life without parole, the sentence for killing someone in the commission of a felony.
• Why would a Wookiee, an eight-foot tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks?

Well, Johnny straightened us out, and Rideau walked out with time served. It seems we were all turned around about who the victim was in this case. If you thought it was Julia Ferguson, the Sunday school teacher who cared for her invalid father and was stabbed as she begged for her life, you were waaaaaaaaay off.

The victim is poor Wilbert Rideau, who stated he would have been released from prison years ago, but the man kept him locked up just because he was a black man who killed a white woman. So, he’s a victim of his victim’s race. Not only that; he was the unwitting victim of a nefarious telephone that rang and startled him during the armed robbery, forcing him to take hostages.

Today, Rideau is a media darling happily steeping in victimhood. NPR refers to him not as a murderer or ex-con, but as an “embattled journalist.” When the taped confession was played at the 2005 trial, the Washington Post describes young Wilbert as a “skinny and frightened man, his voice barely audible.” Rideau watched his recorded confession from the defense table”with his hands folded beneath his chin, prayerlike.” The same man who left Julia Ferguson bleeding on the road, deadlike.

“Everything I became, everything I have achieved, has been in spite of this unholy force from Lake Charles dedicated to destroying me and denying me the ability to be anything more than the criminal they wanted me to be.” ~Wilbert Rideau