Eddie testified at Elmo’s hearing, and the brothers now claimed Eddie actually did the killings. They weren’t very convincing. Dismissing the Sonniers’ claim as a ruse and rejecting an impassioned plea for mercy from Elmo’s spiritual advisor—a naive, fresh-faced Catholic nun named Sister Helen Prejean—the board voted to let Elmo die in the electric chair on April 5.
As the board members headed for the exit, Marsellus introduced them to me. Lawrence Hand, the board’s only white, shook my hand politely, telling me he was impressed with The Angolite. Johnny Jackson, Sr., who had voted against me in the past, put his arm around my shoulder when we were alone and whispered, “We’re gonna take care of you this time around. The last time wasn’t right.” A smiling Lionel Daniels pumped my hand and told me he was from St. Landry Parish, the family home of my parents, and winked meaningfully.
A statuesque, well-dressed, light-complexioned woman—the board’s only female—offered her hand, smiling as if she knew something that I didn’t. “I’m Margery Hicks,” she said. “We’ve met before, but I’m sure you’ve forgotten.” Seeing my puzzlement, she added, “Reform school—remember Coach Hicks? I was his wife.” I remembered her husband lining us kids up and whipping our asses with a thick strap. I nodded. “He died four years ago,” she said.
“You guys didn’t do a very good job rehabilitating me back then,” I said.
“No,” she said, then laughed. “But judging from what I’ve heard, this place apparently did. I’m really proud of you.” I felt good after meeting her and instinctively knew she would vote to free me.
These pardon board members frequently came to Angola to interview inmate applicants and to attend administrative events and prisoner programs, as had their predecessors. Marsellus, in particular, became a regular at the prison, searching for “deserving” inmates to help. I also met the board members at headquarters or outside events. Like many in the criminal justice system, they sometimes called upon The Angolite for advice or help with research, which I generally provided.
Hicks stopped by The Angolite whenever she came to the prison, and I gradually got to know this strong, well-educated, brassy redhead. She had retired from the juvenile corrections system and become a member of the Scotlandville Area Advisory Council, a powerful black political group in Baton Rouge. She had been given the pardon board appointment as part of Edwards’s payoff to her political group for their support in his reelection. As time passed and our friendship grew, she took me into her confidence and provided me with a behind-the-scenes view into the workings of the board that would destroy all my remaining illusions about its fairness.
At an August 7, 1984, hearing, New Orleans lawyer Bill Quigley made a powerful presentation to the pardon board, arguing that his client Timothy Baldwin might well be innocent of the murder of an elderly Monroe woman. The board rejected the claim and denied Quigley’s plea to have Baldwin’s death sentence commuted to life imprisonment. As his September 10 execution date neared, Baldwin persisted in his claim of innocence. Then came the sensational news that Governor Edwards had flown to Angola on August 28 and met with Baldwin for an hour. The following day, Edwards flew to the women’s prison to talk with Baldwin’s codefendant, his ex-girlfriend Marilyn Hampton. The next day, the governor explained to the media that he had bent over backward “doing some unprecedented things to make certain in my own conscience that I was acting properly.” But he was not going to stop the execution. Baldwin thanked Edwards publicly for his time and consideration. Hicks, however, was infuriated. “He shouldn’t have played with Baldwin’s feelings like that,” she said to me. “He knew he wasn’t going to do anything for the man.”
I didn’t understand her objection. “Edwards went the extra mile to personally find out what happened in Baldwin’s case,” I said. “How many governors would do that? I’m impressed.”
“Everybody’s impressed,” she said. “That’s why he did it. But Edwin Edwards is the joker who told us to deny clemency to Baldwin in the first place, just as he did with Sonnier. Now, are you still impressed?”
She told me that the governor ordered their claims denied before the hearings were even held. “He didn’t care whether they were innocent or not. He doesn’t want the board to send him any recommendations for clemency on death penalty cases. We were told from day one just to go through the motions, but to deny them all.”
While wearing a public mask of understanding and compassion, Edwards would ruthlessly execute more men than any Louisiana governor in modern times. And I could do nothing about it because no one would go on the record.
Hicks told me that clemency proceedings were fraudulent only in death penalty cases. She assured me that although Edwards had personally sabotaged the board’s decision on me in 1976 and 1980, it was extremely unlikely that he would do it again. “He got busted,” she said, “and The New York Times told the world what he did. More importantly, he knows that he would not be governor if it weren’t for us blacks. The fact that he appointed the first majority-black pardon board and chairman in history is proof of that. So you’re coming out of this place. He owes us that.”
The board held a hearing on my request for clemency on December 19, 1984. It was covered by USA Today and The New York Times and on the front pages of newspapers all across Louisiana. White opponents in Lake Charles cranked up their anti-Rideau machine, while the Lake Charles black community launched a letter-writing campaign on my behalf. The pardon board received nearly three thousand letters in all, which the Times-Picayune reported ran about 4-to-1 in favor of granting mercy.
In keeping with the board’s rules, I could not attend the hearing. The board heard from both sides, and after it deliberated for fifteen minutes behind closed doors, Marsellus announced a unanimous recommendation from the four members present that the governor commute my sentence to time served. (Lawrence Hand, the only white member, was absent due to illness.)
My mother burst into tears, elated by the decision. My supporters were jubilant. Edwards had won all his elections with the solid support of the black vote—statewide, about 30 percent of the population. Given his remarks to The New York Times Magazine in 1980—that the feelings of the white Lake Charles community were the root of my inability to get clemency, and his comment that “community feelings shouldn’t be given that much weight”—everyone assumed that I would finally receive the second chance I had worked so hard to earn and which had been given to so many others.
Two days later, Jim Amoss of the Times-Picayune phoned to tell me that the governor, away on a hunting trip in Texas, had rejected the recommendation of the board. Without seeing the recommendation, Edwards cited the “nature of the crime” and said that I had already been given one commutation when I was resentenced from death to life imprisonment. What he didn’t acknowledge was that the forty-five or fifty unconstitutional death sentences replaced with life sentences were not grants of mercy but a legal maneuver by the state to preserve dozens of convictions that might not have stood if we had been retried. Nor did anyone note that Edwards, though he turned me down, had previously granted clemency to at least a dozen other formerly condemned murderers.
Members of the media immediately called me at the Angolite office. All I wanted to do was suffer my crushing defeat in private, the way other inmates did. But the reporters kept calling, and as Angolite editor with a phone on my desk, I felt I couldn’t hide.
“Naturally, I’m floored,” I told Times-Picayune reporter Jason DeParle. “I understand the governor’s position about my having been sentenced to death before. But that’s the nature of clemency—that an individual not be forever chained to misfortune, tragedy and sin… I’m going to continue to be a productive individual and continue striving to earn my place among free men. I’ve always accepted my punishment without complaint.”
Hicks was shocked at Edwards’s denial, as were Marsellus and Phelps. They concluded it was a mistake to have recommended an outright discharge from prison, that it may have been to
o much for my white opponents to swallow. Marsellus assured me that on my next clemency application the board would instead recommend a commutation to sixty years, the same that Billy had received from the previous board. The difference was that, given my almost twenty-four years of incarceration, I would be immediately eligible for parole.
In the months following, the state executed two more inmates who had been denied clemency by the board. Then board member Lionel Daniels resigned, followed by Hicks, who was replaced by Oris Williams, a member of her political group. She assured me he would vote for me when the time came.
Meanwhile, my relationship with Billy was deteriorating. Despite his choice to remain low profile and out of the news, he felt credit due him for The Angolite was being buried beneath the national tide of attention that my case had garnered. He blamed me. Tension replaced the sense of calm that had long made The Angolite office my refuge.
April brought bad news as our supervisor, Peggi Gresham, transferred to the Louisiana Training Institute for Girls as its deputy superintendent so she could be closer to her ailing parents, for whom she had to care. Gresham and I had started on The Angolite a decade earlier with a shared vision. We had developed an abiding respect, trust, and fondness for each other. Like Phelps, she trusted me without reservation, as I did her. Prison power rests in personalities and in relationships. When Gresham left, she was the most powerful individual in the Angola administration. After her demotion during Maggio’s second reign, she had become Warden Blackburn’s right hand and confidante. In her absence, I no longer had an official I was close to in the Angola administration on whom I could count to protect my interests in conflicts.
As summer 1985 approached, Billy had lost virtually all interest in The Angolite and had pretty much stopped going anywhere inside or outside the prison to cover events. Since there were only three full-time writers on the staff—Billy, Tommy, and me—his withdrawal seriously affected production of the magazine, forcing me to rely more on stringers. Billy’s contributions increasingly were limited to items that were essentially rewrites of published stories in the commercial media.
He became a progressively more negative force in the office. He maintained running conflicts with our new supervisor, Richard Peabody, and his assistants, whom he disliked and made no effort to work with. It made putting out a magazine even more difficult, so I asked Phelps if he could assign us a different supervisor, and assistant warden Roger Thomas was placed over us in November 1985.
One day Billy told me he was hearing rumors that pardons could be bought. “The word is that Marsellus can be gotten to,” he said, “and that guys are sending their people in to him.” He told me he had heard that the wife of inmate Gary Martin, a smooth-talking born-again religious con artist, had been seen on a number of occasions in the streets with Marsellus, who was said to be sleeping with her in return for getting her husband out of prison. Billy hated Marsellus, so his remarks were suspect. He suggested that I be careful about being too closely associated with Marsellus or even talking with him on the telephone, because he felt it was only a question of time before the chairman got investigated. Since we were no longer chummy, I wondered why he was telling me this.
“Billy, I don’t do anything wrong,” I said. “If Marsellus or any other official is doing something wrong, that’s their problem, not mine. You should know me well enough by now to know that I’m always clean.” I paused, then added, “If you know something specific that I should be aware of, tell me. If not, I don’t have time for this.”
I was now preparing for another pardon board hearing, which was scheduled for May 7. I had high hopes for receiving a recommendation that the governor would sign this time.
The hearing was a repeat of the previous one, attracting national media attention. Both my supporters and opponents had conducted letter-writing campaigns to the pardon board. As before, the rules barred me from attending. It was standing room only in the hearing room, which was packed with my supporters, mostly white, with the overflow outside. Margery Hicks, among others, carried picket signs advocating my release. After two hours of deliberation, the board recommended my sentence be reduced to sixty years, making me eligible not for outright discharge but for immediate parole, as our strategy dictated. The confidence of my supporters was contagious. In the privacy of my office, I planned my new life. I dreamed modestly, about walking down a street or eating in a diner, maybe going to a movie. I knew there would be enormous challenges, and I steeled myself for them. I felt that whatever life could throw at me on the outside, I was equal to it, having survived so much in Angola. I let myself drift on a tide of hope.
The media caught up with Governor Edwards the next day as he was entering the federal courthouse in New Orleans to stand trial on racketeering and conspiracy charges. He told the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, “I’ll take a look at [Rideau’s] file when it gets to me. I’ll not prejudge it.”
The following day, thanks to Jim Amoss, now an editor, the conservative Times-Picayune did something it had never done before: It editorially called for the governor to commute the sentence of a prisoner—me. It said: “If ever a man was rehabilitated, it seems that Wilbert Rideau has been. That conclusion is not ours alone. It is shared by the professional corrections officers who have supervised him for the past 25 years.”
On June 18, 1986, Edwards held a press conference where he announced that he was denying me clemency again: “If I reacted solely on my personal beliefs, I would sign the pardon,” he said. “I agree with those who say he has been rehabilitated.” I found it ironic that, given his previous comments to The New York Times that mass sentiment shouldn’t overrule the ends of justice, he now justified denying me clemency because, he said, he had a responsibility to be concerned with “mass sentiment,” and noted that “community feeling in the Lake Charles area” remained severely against clemency. I got the news when Warden Blackburn walked into my office and interrupted an NBC-TV news crew that was interviewing me. “Rideau, the governor just turned down the pardon board’s recommendation,” he said. I was devastated. The crew turned off the cameras, expressed their regrets, and left me to my disappointment.
The next day, Jane Bankston, the wife of a state senator and the director of mental health for the corrections department, came to see me. I had met her when she was working with a prerelease program several years before. She had become a good friend and, with Ginger Roberts, had coordinated my recent clemency effort. Jane had driven to Lake Charles and picked up mailbags of letters to the governor from black churches there and made sure the hearing room was filled to capacity with supporters. She asked how I was doing and requested that I accompany her to the prison hospital. There she took me into a room where there was a black inmate with whom she cheerfully began chatting. Gradually, it dawned on me that he was blind. I was intrigued. Jane introduced us. His name was Alvin Anderson. As I listened to them I became offended at a system that would keep a blind man in the biggest maximum-security prison in the nation. His blindness made him the most vulnerable person in the place. How was he to fend for himself, to survive? By the end of the visit, I was resolute, my disappointment pushed aside. “The governor may keep me in prison,” I said to Anderson, “but I will make that sonuvabitch turn you loose. I promise you that.”
As we left the hospital, I told Jane that I wanted all the information the department had on Anderson and other prisoners who were blind, paralyzed, or otherwise severely disabled. Then I asked her what she had come to the prison to see me about. “I wanted you to meet Alvin.” She smiled. “Now I know you’ll be all right.” Ever the social worker, she had engineered the meeting to refocus my attention. I channeled my emotions and anger into an investigative exposé, “The Edge of Madness.” The story, published in the July/August 1986 Angolite, was picked up by the commercial media and prompted the pardon board to initiate efforts that would ultimately free Anderson and about twenty more needlessly confined Angola inmates.
I noticed that
Billy had become calmer, less negative, and much more cordial. He volunteered to do a story on Wade Correctional Institute, a prison located near the Arkansas border that was the state’s only facility with a protective custody unit designated for former cops and sensitive, high-profile individuals. For someone who had shown little inclination to do any real journalism of late, this was a surprise.
During the summer, on one of my trips to Baton Rouge, Phelps expressed concern to me about Billy. Without going into details, he suggested I keep an eye on him. “Tell me,” he said, “in the course of his everyday life, have you seen him behave strangely or do things that cause you to wonder about him?”
“Billy was withdrawn for a while, which we attributed to his frustration over not being able to get out, but lately he’s changed. He’s become more alive, more sociable, curious—always wanting to know about what’s going on,” I said. “Tommy believes he’s up to something.”
“What does he think he’s up to?”
“We haven’t the foggiest idea,” I replied, “but if you feel he can no longer be trusted and presents a potential problem to The Angolite, maybe you should consider moving him into a different position.”
“We’ll see how things go,” he said.
In August, Billy told me that Jodie heard through a source in the Baton Rouge federal district attorney’s office that the FBI was now investigating pardon selling and Marsellus. He seemed quite buoyed by this fact, which I attributed to his dislike of the man. On September 4 came the news that state police had arrested Marsellus and House Speaker pro tempore Joe Delpit, one of the governor’s closest political allies, on charges of public bribery and conspiracy to get convicted murderer Juan Serato out of prison for $100,000. Federal district attorney Ray Lamonica revealed he had also been conducting an investigation independent of the state police’s but refused to divulge any information.
Wilbert Rideau Page 23