Wilbert Rideau

by In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment

  Then Bryant began calling witnesses, most of whom were dead. Judge Ritchie may well have set a precedent in the American justice system by allowing Bryant to use testimony from previous trials for thirteen of his twenty-five witnesses. It was, essentially, a trial by transcript. Surreally, Ritchie informed the jury that Lake Charles radio personality Gary Shannon “will be playing the part of Mr. Hickman,” sounding, as Adam Liptak of The New York Times put it, “as though announcing an understudy.” The female parts were played by a local out-of-work actress.

  We, of course, couldn’t cross-examine the transcripts. Moreover, the jury had no way of assessing the credibility of the characters played by stand-ins. These witnesses spoke through the filter of professional voices, and without body language, shifting of the eyes, or clearing of the throat; their testimony betrayed no hesitation, no uncomfortable pauses, no nervousness, timidity, confidence, fear, anger, or arrogance—none of the usual cues we use to judge the truthfulness of what a person is saying.

  To support the stories of the deceased witnesses, Bryant called to the stand Robert Waldmeier, Jr., then eighty, who owned the downtown pawnshop where I had bought my weapons. He said he couldn’t remember for sure when he heard about the crime or how he heard about it, and he couldn’t recall whether he contacted the sheriff or the deputies contacted him. He told Bryant he was pretty certain, though, that he didn’t speak to any deputy on the night of the crime. When asked if he would have given deputies a duplicate of the cheap, common scout’s knife he’d sold to me, he sidestepped by saying they would have had to buy it. When confronted with his prior testimony, in which he said he had talked with a deputy, he recanted and said, okay, maybe that was true. He described the knife blade as sharp on one side and dull on the other. He also admitted that deputies were in and out of his shop on a daily basis, that he was fishing buddies with deputy Harvey Boyd, who normally worked across the river in West Calcasieu but just happened to be the one to find the knife early the next morning, and that he and Boyd had been prepped together by Bryant before trial.

  The knife was important because it disappeared from the locked evidence vault right after the 1961 trial. Only an old black-and-white photo of the weapon remained, which foreclosed any testing or examination of it. At my 1964 trial the Baton Rouge judge asked the district attorney if any fingerprints or blood residue had been found to connect the knife to me. The district attorney said there was none but explained that it had rained hard all night in Lake Charles before they found it the next morning.

  After Waldmeier’s testimony, during the lunch break, Linda said, “I’ll go to my grave believing that Harvey Boyd got one of those knives from Waldmeier and planted it the next morning, especially since it was found three football fields away from the crime scene in a spot where you couldn’t have thrown it from the car. No, that knife was planted so the court could lynch you in 1961.”

  Someone working for Bryant tracked down Sheriff Ham Reid’s secretary from 1961, Anna Dahl, who had never before testified. On the stand, she said she helped count the recovered money and swore that there were no large crowds outside the jail when she and a deputy went from the jail to the courthouse to lock it up. Dahl was an excellent witness for Bryant, elderly and soft-spoken with no apparent grudge.

  Meanwhile, Judge Ritchie was nodding off to sleep.

  FBI agent James Wright testified that he and his partner, James Hamilton, interviewed me in a small room for four hours or more five days after the crime, after which Hamilton, now deceased, wrote out a confession in longhand for me to sign. Wright testified that the confession was accurate as to the facts, including my referring to McCain and Ferguson as “Dora” and “Julia.” (Interestingly, I was said to have called Hickman “Mister.”) Under cross-examination, Wright insisted that even in the segregated Jim Crow South of 1961, I might have addressed the women by their first names, since I knew them. As to the contention in the “confession” that I ate lunch at Youngblood’s Café, he told Julian that since the café was located near the shopping center where I worked, I likely could have eaten in the otherwise all-white café if the workers there knew me. Wright denied Julian’s suggestion that these details and others in Hamilton’s handiwork were embellishments inserted deliberately to inflame an all-white, all-male jury, which was the standard jury makeup in Lake Charles in 1961.

  Bryant introduced another new witness, Larry Lacouture, who worked for B. J. Oil Services in 1961. He said Hickman was wet from the heavy rain when he made his way to the shop for help, thus corroborating the testimony of a roster of dead witnesses who said it was a mean and tempestuous night. Murl Cormie, the sheriff’s radio dispatcher, whose office was in the jail, said he saw no “non-police personnel” at the jail that night. He was backed up by another new witness, Bonnie Smith, an employee of the Gulf National Bank, who said that she was called to the sheriff’s office to help count the recovered money and testified that when she arrived sometime between 9:00 and 9:30 there was no mob at the jail. She also testified that she stepped out of her car into five inches of water in the street, it was raining so hard.

  Bryant’s biggest surprise witness was John Holston, the ambulance driver who picked up Mrs. Ferguson from the crime scene. We had tracked him down ourselves because we wanted to ask him about what kind of equipment he had in his ambulance in 1961, and what kind of training, if any, he may have had in emergency medical services. We knew from deputies’ testimony in the old transcripts that Ferguson was alive when she was picked up, and the old testimony also revealed that Holston had stopped the ambulance shortly after picking her up when he met one of the deputies returning to the scene. We wanted to know how long Holston delayed getting Mrs. Ferguson to the hospital, what route he took, and whether he was sounding his siren. Holston refused to speak to our investigator; he said only that he was already a witness for the prosecution and that we wouldn’t like what he had to say. Holston surprised us by testifying that no one else was at the crime scene with him, since testimony from earlier trials showed that both a sheriff’s deputy and a local farmer helped him load Mrs. Ferguson into the ambulance and left the scene in his vehicle. We were shocked when Holston said that although his ambulance was equipped with oxygen, he didn’t use it. “She didn’t need oxygen,” he said. “She was dead.” We were shocked even more when, with great emotion, he said that Ferguson’s throat was so badly slashed he had to cradle her head in his arms to prevent it from falling off when he loaded her onto a stretcher. His contribution to the prosecution—besides adding to the chorus that it was “pouring down rain like I’d never seen before”—was to take what in previous trials had been a slashed throat and ratchet it up into a near decapitation.

  Upon hearing Holston’s testimony, I understood Wayne Frey’s delight at our wanting to use Dora McCain’s 1999 comments to a British tabloid, where she described the crime with embellishments we had never heard in four decades. “He slashed [the knife] across [Ferguson’s] throat until her head was nearly severed,” McCain told The Mail.

  Jodie Sinclair was the last on Bryant’s list of live witnesses. He played part of that unaired 1981 interview. Though Billy and I were both told we would be discussing the death penalty on tape, Jodie began asking me questions about my crime. I had been advised, as I’ve said, never to publicly dispute the facts of my crime as they were established at trial, even if they were not accurate; clemency is about rehabilitation and asking for mercy, and you don’t want to fight about what happened. I had followed that advice in responding to Jodie.

  Bryant seemed to value the tape not for my admission that I had killed Ferguson, but for my retrospective analysis that bridged Jodie’s question about my crime to the purported subject of the interview—the death penalty—“the fact that I hated white people added an extra dimension to the whole affair. I mean, you’re not that concerned about the humanity of people you hate, which is why it is so easy for [society] to execute people.” Although the comment was an attempt to explain the
kind of anger and oppression I felt as a teenager growing up in the Jim Crow South, where my humanity was unrecognized and abused on a daily basis, Bryant tried to make it appear as though I had been a black militant just looking for an opportunity to kill white people.

  On cross-examination, George got Jodie to admit that she disliked me and had worked for years to poison my reputation with the media, both in Louisiana—where she’d lambasted me on radio and in an interview with the Lake Charles newspaper as “the nation’s best con artist”—and nationally. She and Billy had been trying to smear my reputation for nearly two decades, demeaning me to, among others, Life, 20/20, The Dallas Morning News, and the Associated Press.

  George questioned Jodie’s journalistic ethics, eliciting from her an admission that she had repeatedly used her status as a TV reporter to enter Angola for personal visits with Billy. She was reluctant to admit that using her professional credentials to gain access to a private room in a maximum-security prison to carry on a secret love affair with a prisoner was unethical. She finally conceded not that she did anything wrong, but that “some people might call it a lapse of judgment, which I assume is the purpose of your line of questioning.”

  Bryant rested his case and court recessed.

  The night before, Julian and George had told me that I was going to be the lead witness for the defense. “Are you crazy?” I asked. “Bryant is going to have a field day with me if I go first. Why don’t we put on some of our other witnesses first so that the jury will know when I come along that I’m telling the truth? You throw me out there first and I’m like red meat for a pit bull.”

  “That’s exactly what we want,” said Julian, smiling. “That’s our strategy.”

  “Look,” said George, “Bryant has no idea who most of our fact witnesses are because we aren’t bringing them under subpoena. We put you on the stand first, and he’s going to think—just as he’s been thinking all along—that you’re basically all we’ve got. Since they’ve boxed us in by not letting us bring up rehabilitation, they’ll think we’re just trying to throw ourselves on the mercy of the jury based on your personality.”

  “So Bryant will go after you like a pit bull,” Julian interjected. “He’s going to try to make you mad, get you off-kilter, confuse you. He’ll argue with you, and the judge will let him. All you have to do, no matter what Bryant does, is stay calm and tell the truth. Don’t let him rattle you.”

  “But I still don’t see why I have to go first,” I said.

  George smiled at me. “We’ve got a good case and, I think, a better than even chance of getting a hung jury. But that doesn’t get us where we want to go, which is home. We need some drama to go with our facts, and since we can’t get it by cross-examining dead or incapacitated witnesses, we need Bryant to supply it. He’ll go so far overboard with you that it’ll boomerang on him. It’s a trap he was born to walk into.”

  I looked at George and Julian. I didn’t think they were nearly as confident as they wanted me to believe. But they had gotten me this far. “You know you’re asking me to jump off a skyscraper here, huh?”

  Julian leaned back in his chair and smiled broadly. “Don’t worry, I’ll catch you. That’s what I’m here for.”

  After the recess, I took the witness stand. I was wearing a light shirt under a dark green sweater and gray slacks that Linda had bought for me at a thrift store in Baton Rouge. My trial wardrobe had been a matter of great discussion among my defense team. Both George and Julian flatly ruled out a suit as inappropriate and artificial. “You will not be comfortable in a suit,” George said, and Julian added, “Plus, you never want to outdress the jurors.” The clothes were good-looking and clean, and I was comfortable in them, which was important.

  Once news circulated that I was taking the witness stand to speak publicly in court for the first time about the forty-four-year-old crime, every seat in the courtroom was taken and spectators lined the walls. The judge declared that no one else would be allowed to enter unless someone left.

  Julian began by asking me about my life growing up in Lake Charles in the 1940s and 1950s. I talked about the racial divide back then, and how it was drilled into me early in life to “learn my place” in a world in which I was conditioned to feel like a second-class citizen. I talked about my parents’ divorce, about dropping out of school, our poverty, and collecting discarded Coke bottles on the white side of Broad Street to get money so my mother could buy us food. I recalled my resentment over being paid less than the white employees at Tramonte’s grocery, one of my first direct experiences of a common complaint in my world—that whites took advantage of blacks just because they had the power to do it.

  I recounted for Julian my experiences working with Mrs. Irby at the fabric shop in Southgate Shopping Center, how she tried to help me, how I felt cheated by the owner when I received only half the small raise I expected. I talked about white harassment at the bus stop coming and going from work and being barred from the whites-only restaurants there.

  Julian interrupted me to ask if I maintained that any of this, or anything else that might have happened to me, justified what took place on February 16, 1961.

  “No,” I said. “Nothing justifies that.”

  I explained that at five feet, seven inches and 115 pounds soaking wet, I was a magnet for bullies not only at the bus stop in white Lake Charles but also in the black pool halls and nightclubs where I spent a lot of my time and most of my disposable income, and how this led me to think about buying a gun to protect myself, something that would make anyone wanting to mess with me back off. I recounted that incident at a black nightclub where I was slapped and threatened, and how I was determined I wouldn’t be humiliated again.

  Julian stopped me again to ask if I realized that most people would conclude that since I bought the gun and a knife the day before the crime, I bought them because I planned to rob the bank. I said I did realize that, and that I would have bought the gun earlier except I had to wait until payday, February 15. The knife, I said, I bought on impulse as I was setting out to leave the pawnshop and saw it in a display case. Even the pawnshop owner had testified to that. I said I fired the gun that night to see what it sounded like and took it with me to the nightclub. I intended to carry it regularly.

  I explained that on the day of the crime, after leaving work early, I had fallen asleep in my cousin’s car for several hours and, dreading the prospect of waiting for the bus in the dark, I had lined up a ride home at 7:30 with one of the porters from the supermarket. I recounted how, while waiting for my ride, all the problems of my life crowded into my mind, and I began to feel sorry for myself, trapped in what seemed to me to be a dead-end life. I said I was thinking then that if I could just go somewhere else I could start my life fresh in a place where I could be somebody, a place where I could matter. But that required money, and I didn’t have any. That’s when I thought about the bank, I said, and decided I would rob it.

  My account of what happened inside the bank was essentially the same as the prosecution’s. Julian brought out the half-baked nature of my undertaking with pointed questions: “Help me to understand this. When you walked up to the front of the bank, Mr. Hickman and the two women were right there where you could watch their every move and control them. Why didn’t you exert control right then and there, tell them you had a gun, make them close the drapes and do as you say?”

  I said I didn’t know; it was my first time trying to rob anyone.

  Julian asked me what my reaction was to the phone call and the caller who said that they were either sending a car out or one was already on the way.

  I told him it was panic. To me, that call meant that someone knew the bank was being robbed and the police were on the way. In a moment, everything had spun out of control. I didn’t know what to do, I said.

  Julian stopped me. “You heard the DA say you took them out to the country to kill them. Why should we believe you didn’t?”

  “If I had intended to kill t
hose people, eliminate witnesses, I would have done it right there in the bank. It never entered my mind that I was going to hurt anybody.”

  Julian asked me to recount the crime as I remembered it.

  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 car. I lost my footing as I sprang out of the car 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, unintentionally or not—I didn’t know which. Everything happened very fast, I said, like a blur. Hickman ran, 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 do was to get away from there.

  Now Julian resumed his questioning. He wanted to know how much time transpired from the moment Mrs. McCain jumped out of the car to the time I got back into the car.

  I told him that my recollection of the crime, from the time the shooting started until I was back in the car, was like a series of disjointed snapshots rather than a streaming video, discrete moments frozen in my mind within a larger blur that seemed to me to last perhaps twenty seconds.

  Julian asked me to tell about my capture, and I recalled for him the mob that quickly formed at the site of my arrest as well as the trip back to the jail in Lake Charles and the mob there, both inside and out. I talked about the confession I gave that night in the face of an overriding fear for my mother’s safety once I had been told she had been brought to the jail. We went over the events of the next several days—the sheriff’s “interview” that KPLC-TV secretly filmed and broadcast, the FBI statement five days later, and my belief that I was going to be executed every time they took me out of my cell.