Wilbert Rideau

by In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment

  Reid turned first to trooper Sonny Dupin, then to trooper George Byon for a summary of how they apprehended me. “Sonny, would you mind relating the facts leading up to you spotting this car?” The sheriff slid the microphone down the table to his left for Dupin, who consulted his notes as he spoke.

  The bright lights trained on the table belonged to KPLC-TV, the local Lake Charles television station, whose crew was, unbeknownst to me, capturing the event on film with a sound track.

  To my surprise, and immense relief, I was returned to my cell unharmed. I sat on the bunk, shaking, until I was taken down the elevator again and led into a small barred enclosure. Frank Salter, the young district attorney who had taken office the previous month, was waiting for a photo opportunity. I recalled seeing him on the couch the previous night when the sheriff was questioning me. He pointed to Lake Charles American Press photographer Charles Murphy and said he should take a photo of us together. He showed me a document and explained that he was filing formal charges against me for “the murder of Julia Ferguson and …” That shocking information obliterated whatever else he said. The photo taken, I was returned to my cell. I lay on the thin, dirty mattress atop the steel bunk, staring unseeing at the ceiling, in shock.

  In the days that followed, a parade of white men, some well dressed, some not, some cops, entered the hallway periodically to stand in front of the cell and stare at me, sometimes silently, sometimes talking to each other about me, other times cursing and telling me how many different ways they wanted to kill me. I stared back, saying nothing. What could I say?

  The only non-white person I saw was my father. He stood in front of my cell, accompanied by several white men. He stared silently at me for a long time. “Dad…,” I said, breaking the silence.

  “You sonuvabitch!” he erupted, his body shaking. “You no son of mine. I raised my children to do right. You nothing to me. You an animal, a mad dog. They say they gonna electrocute you, and I hope they do, ’cuz you a beast. If I had a gun right now, I’d shoot you myself.” I was speechless. Even the white deputies seemed surprised at the venom he hurled at me. My father suddenly turned to them, his face contorted with rage: “Can I go? I can’t stand the sight of him.” They left.

  All I had ever wanted was to fit in, to belong. Now I sat in a cell, removed from society, isolated from life. I was utterly alone, a rejection that would be complete when they executed me. Despite what I had done, I felt like a victim.

  After I’d spent two weeks in isolation, the Calcasieu Parish grand jury indicted me for murder on March I. The next day I was taken before Judge Cecil Cutrer, who arraigned me and, learning I was indigent, appointed two white attorneys, Fred H. Sievert, Jr., and James A. Leithead, to represent me. Neither had ever tried a capital case. They weren’t even criminal lawyers. Plucked from different law firms, each was engaged in the practice of civil law, mostly real estate.

  The first thing they said to me was, “Why did you confess on television?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “We saw you,” they said. “Everybody did.”

  That’s how I learned that my mumbled answers to Sheriff Reid under the bright lights the morning after the crime had been filmed and repeatedly broadcast throughout southwest Louisiana. The local daily newspapers had likewise saturated the community with coverage of the sensational interracial crime.

  Judge Cutrer set the trial for April 10 and gave my lawyers ten days to file any motions in my case. They had less than six weeks to prepare a defense, an enormous challenge, especially since they had to fund it out of their own pockets. No money was provided for investigators, independent tests, expert witnesses. Leithead met with my mother, whom he knew because she had sometimes babysat his children.

  “Gladys,” he said, “if you could come up with some money to hire investigators, I think we could get to the bottom of this.” He, among others, suspected that Hickman, the nephew of the city’s mayor, had a hand in the robbery. I had been grilled by interrogators, especially the FBI, about that; they made the suggestion that it would go easier on me if I said Hickman was the person behind it all. I insisted he was a victim.

  My mother learned she could raise some money by taking a loan against the little two-bedroom house where she lived with her four other children. She asked my father if he could come up with the rest. He told her he wasn’t interested. I told her not to mortgage the house. I knew the money, contrary to Leithead’s assertions, would make no difference.

  Sievert and Leithead knew that a trial in Lake Charles would be a mockery. They tried to get it transferred to anywhere outside Calcasieu Parish. They presented evidence showing that seating an impartial jury would not be possible in the parish, given the nature of the crime and the amount of pretrial publicity. District Attorney Salter argued for keeping the trial in Calcasieu Parish and Judge Cutrer agreed with him.

  On April 10, 1961, I went on trial for my life. Judge Cutrer warned the packed courtroom that “no laughter, no outcries, no remarks” would be tolerated. The proceeding, of course, was merely a formality. Everyone knew what the verdict would be.

  On the second day of jury selection, the proceedings hit a snag when one of my attorneys noticed that the court reporter—who had recorded and transcribed all the pretrial proceedings—was not taking down the questions and answers of prospective jurors, or even the court’s rulings. He made a motion that the complete trial proceedings be recorded and transcribed, but the district attorney argued that the state was not required to provide a verbatim transcript to me unless I could pay for it. The judge sided with the district attorney.

  A verbatim transcript is the official record of everything that happens in the trial courtroom. Without one, a defendant cannot construct an appeal of an unfavorable verdict. We had to improvise. Every time Sievert and Leithead objected to anything during the weeklong trial, they would try to reconstruct, with agreement from the court and the prosecutor, what was said, when it was said, and, generally, what led up to the objectionable statements or testimony or ruling. Then one of my lawyers had to write down the reconstructed proceedings in longhand. It was a farce.

  As the jury selection continued in the emotionally charged, crowded courtroom, my attorneys kept asking Judge Cutrer not to seat particular jurors for cause. Each time the judge refused, they were forced to use one of twelve peremptory challenges. Sievert and Leithead moved five times for a mistrial because of emotional outbursts and inflammatory or prejudicial comments made either by the prosecutor or by prospective jurors within the earshot of jurors already chosen to serve. The judge refused every request. My attorneys exhausted their peremptory challenges, and jury selection was completed on Friday morning, April 14.

  Among the jurors—all white men, of course—were two special deputy sheriffs; a cousin of victim Julia Ferguson; a vice president of the largest bank in the area, who had known bank manager Jay Hickman for twenty-five years; and three persons who had seen the sheriff’s televised “interview” with me.

  Salter focused his presentation on making a case for premeditation and heinous, cold-blooded murder.

  Sievert and Leithead tried to keep out of evidence the confession the sheriff had obtained from me the night of the crime. They argued that I confessed before anyone advised me I did not have to say anything or that I had a right to have an attorney. They objected even more strenuously to a second confession, written by FBI agent James W. Hamilton five days after the crime and based upon a session he and another agent had with me. Besides expressing a high degree of intentionality—necessary to prove premeditation and win a death penalty conviction—the FBI’s version of the crime differed from my initial confession mainly in that it said I ordered the three bank employees out of the car after it had come to a stop and before I fired at them. The judge allowed the prosecutor to read both confessions to the packed courtroom.

  Friday afternoon and evening were taken up with prosecution witnesses, mostly law enforcement, testifying to a pouring r
ain the evening of the crime, their capture of me, evidence at the scene of the crime, and the state of the bank when officers arrived after the robbery and found some $30,000 spilling from the gaping cashiers’ drawers while the back door of the bank was standing wide open.

  The gun used in the crime was never recovered. Salter introduced into evidence a common hunting knife a Deputy Harvey Boyd claimed to have found in a field more than a thousand feet away from the scene of the crime. Nothing tied that particular knife to the crime. The owner of the pawnshop where I bought the weapon, Robert Waldmeier, Jr., was so nervous on the stand that even the prosecutor felt obliged to remark on it. Waldmeier testified that the knife Salter asked him to identify was either the one he sold to me or one identical to it.

  Sievert and Leithead asked very few questions. But on Monday they asked that a photograph be taken of the courtroom to show the incredibly crowded conditions under which the trial was occurring. The courtroom, which normally seated 300 people, was crammed with 430 spectators, by Judge Cutrer’s official estimate. There were people occupying every available seat, standing against three walls, lined up in the aisles. Those who couldn’t get inside the courtroom looked in from the corridors. I was the only black in sight, a fly in a bowl of milk.

  My lawyers argued that the atmosphere created by the crowd was intimidating to jurors and witnesses alike. Under the weight of such community pressure, no one could be presumed to be acting or speaking freely and truthfully. Salter objected to a photograph being taken of the courtroom, saying it was irrelevant and immaterial. He brushed off the notion that there was any community pressure at work: “It is perfectly obvious that everybody in the courtroom is practicing perfect decorum.”

  Judge Cutrer denied the request to take a photo.

  It was during the trial that I learned about the phone call that had derailed my robbery of the bank and precipitated the events that ended so tragically.

  When Hickman had called from the coffee room to tell the tellers to shut the drapes and lock up, Dora McCain, the young blonde, got suspicious. She signaled to Julia Ferguson to close up, as the manager had said. Then she picked up the phone and dialed the direct extension to the bank’s main office, downtown. When switchboard operator Nettie Hoffpauir answered, McCain identified herself and said, “I’m afraid there’s something crooked going on.… Yes, I’m afraid there is.”

  The phone call that had panicked me had been made by Burt Kyle, a vice president from the bank’s main office, phoning back after Hoffpauir told him about McCain’s call.

  “What’s going on there, Jay?” asked Kyle.

  Hickman responded as he did—“Okay, I’ll be down in a few minutes”—hoping Kyle would realize his answer meant something was amiss, since Hickman never went down to the main branch after hours.

  “Do you need a cop there?” Kyle asked. “I’ll send a car.”

  “Well, maybe. I don’t know. I’ll call you right back,” Hickman replied, hanging up the telephone.

  Kyle immediately called the Calcasieu Parish sheriff’s office and the Lake Charles City Police and asked them to investigate “goings-on” at the bank. A minute or two later, Murl Cormie, a radio dispatcher for the sheriff’s department, sent to the bank one deputy from the station and one in a car nearby. At the same time, Mike Hogan, chief of detectives for the city police in Lake Charles, was called at home and told to go investigate a possible problem at the bank. Hogan lived about four or five minutes from Southgate Shopping Center, but he testified that because it was raining so hard, it took him maybe seven, eight minutes to get there. We were gone by then.

  On the witness stand, Hickman’s version of what happened on the night of the crime was essentially the same as mine—until we reached the bridge at English Bayou.

  Both he and Dora McCain testified—in virtually identical language and phrasing—that I ordered them out of the car, lined them up facing me on the shoulder of the road, and, as they stood still with their hands at their sides at point-blank range, I opened fire. The bullet that struck Hickman traveled upward in his right arm, a trajectory one would find if his arm were extended outward, parallel to the ground, not at his side, when the bullet entered. Hickman, supposedly standing directly in front of me at point-blank range, suffered only a superficial flesh wound. After being shot, he ran to his left and fell into the bayou about twenty-five feet away, they said.

  McCain testified that after I fired a single shot at Hickman and he ran, I ran after him. She said this after saying she had dropped face-first to the ground and pretended that she had fainted. Still, she said she was able to see Julia Ferguson about ten feet away, in the opposite direction from the bayou. McCain said that I returned from the bayou, struggled physically with Julia Ferguson, shot Ferguson twice during the struggle, then knifed her as we continued to struggle and as the older woman begged for her life. My response, she testified, was, “It’ll be quick and cool.”

  McCain said that after I finished off Ferguson, I literally stumbled into McCain as I ran toward the car. Then, she said, I put the gun up against the back of her neck and shot her. She testified that, having just been shot at point-blank range right below her ear, she heard my footsteps on the wet grass and could detect from their direction that I had gone back toward the bayou. She said she then heard me call out to Hickman.

  Hickman was no more than thirty-five feet away from the crime scene when he was in the bayou, he said, holding on to branches, treading water, and listening for every sound. Thirty-five feet is less than twice the distance of an average living room. When asked what he heard after he ran and fell into the water, Hickman said he heard two more gunshots and thought “one was for Julia and one for Dora.” He also said he heard a rustling in the weeds fifteen or twenty feet away from him, which he said he thought might have been a woodland creature or me, looking for him. He testified that he heard the Vauxhall’s engine start and, after a moment, heard it accelerate as the car pulled away; he heard no struggling, no begging, no talking or calling out.

  McCain, however, testified that after she heard me run to the bayou and call out to Hickman, I came back to her and kicked her twice in her side, so hard that I lifted her up like a rag doll with my foot. She said that I told her, “Woman, you had better be dead because I’ll run you over if you’re not.” McCain said that she waited a bit after I drove off and then moved toward Julia Ferguson, calling to her. Hickman heard none of that, either.

  McCain testified that after I fled the scene she took off her shoes and ran barefoot down the gravel road until she found a house, and help, about half a mile away. Hickman, too, headed away from the crime scene, looking for help. He found it about three-quarters of a mile away, at the B & J Oil Well Service. He, like McCain, ended up at Memorial Hospital for treatment. Julia Ferguson reportedly died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

  McCain’s graphic details of what she said she saw and heard, if allowed to stand, closed the door on the possibility that the crime might have been manslaughter—that is, a homicide committed in the heat of passion or a state of panic rather than a premeditated murder. Her testimony was a sensational finale to the state’s case, and when she finished, Salter immediately rested his case. It was Monday morning, April 17, 1961. My lawyers did not cross-examine Dora McCain. Nor had they cross-examined Jay Hickman. They made no attempt to point out even the obvious faults and inconsistencies in their testimony or even to suggest that it might not all be true, although I told them it wasn’t. I don’t think they ever believed me.

  The court adjourned for lunch. When the trial resumed at 1:30, it was time for my attorneys to present my defense. In a move that probably surprised everyone, and certainly surprised me, they immediately rested without calling a single witness. The prosecution’s case against me had not been challenged.

  Both sides gave closing arguments. Salter told the jury the bank employees had been lined up, shot execution-style, and that I had slashed Julia Ferguson’s throat. He said
the crime was heinous and calculated and demanded the death penalty. Sievert and Leithead each spoke to the jury, arguing that there was no evidence I deliberately planned to harm the three bank employees when I robbed the bank and fled with them. They reminded the jury that Dora McCain testified that I told Jay Hickman he would be cold walking back to town without a coat.

  Less than an hour after the jurors retired, they returned a verdict of guilty, which carried a sentence of death.

  I was to be sent to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, well-known as a house of horrors. I was terrified.

  2

  Tribulation

  1962—1970

  As soon as the verdict was read, three white deputies grabbed me. They took me back to the Calcasieu Parish jail, where I was moved from total isolation on the second floor to the third floor, where the colored male prisoners were housed, and put in one of four small maximum-security cells sandwiched in the center of the building by “bullpens”—large, open rooms where sizable groups of inmates spent their days—on each side. The only other prisoner in maximum security was Ora Lee Rogers, a soft-spoken, twenty-five-year-old giant of a man sentenced to die for the rape and murder of a white woman in Evangeline Parish during an early-morning robbery in May 1959. White hostility ran high against Rogers. The Evangeline Parish coroner told newspaper reporters he didn’t believe Rogers would have lived through the day at the parish jail in Ville Platte, so he was sent to Calcasieu to evade homespun justice. The day after the crime, the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate speculated that the attempt to hide Rogers from the public “apparently was spurred by last week’s lynch-mob kidnapping from jail of Mack Charles Parker at Poplarville, Mississippi. Parker, a 23-year-old Negro, was accused of raping a white woman.” The FBI found his corpse floating in the Pearl River, which divides Poplarville from Bogalusa, Louisiana.