Her father stopped the car some distance off, pointed to the mob, and told the children: “Look and never forget.” Jackie said that the scene she saw that night was etched in her mind forever, and those who doubted her testimony “don’t understand how fear lasts in a child’s heart or how a group of angry white people looks to a black child.”
Jackie testified that later that night and in the coming days, her father and some of his friends armed themselves and took turns standing watch over their neighborhood, which was flooded with cars of whites running through it. That night, she said, was a “major event” in her life and in Lake Charles.
Strong and eloquent on the stand, Jackie reinforced what my mother and I said about the mob. Confirming my testimony, she said that in 1961 blacks never caught a bus in south Lake Charles after dark and confirmed Weldon Rougeau’s earlier testimony that blacks were never allowed to call whites by their first names but were required to show respect to white adults by addressing or referring to them as “Miss” or “Mr.” She added that the reverse wasn’t true, and it pained her to see even small white children call her mother “Hazel” rather than the respectful “Miss Hazel.”
We now called Harvey Boyd to the stand. He was the deputy sheriff who supposedly found the knife used in the crime. In a pretrial hearing, both he and Bryant were taken aback when my lawyers grilled him about his recent remarks to the Los Angeles Times in which he said of 1961 Lake Charles: “It was a good little town back then. Ever’body did their job. The prosecutors, the law enforcement. You didn’t have to worry about lynching because they lynched ’em for you.”
Boyd on the stand denied making that statement. Like so many of the state’s witnesses before him, he swore it was raining “cats and dogs” when he got to the jail between 8:30 and 9:00 on the night of the crime. He swore there was no mob outside the jail, either at the time of his arrival or until he left at about midnight. He said there was no mob inside the jail either, that at most there were half a dozen or so deputies who had come inside the jail to dry off and get coffee, like he did. He said deputies didn’t search the crime scene until the next morning because it was raining so hard, and no one, to his knowledge, preserved the crime scene or guarded it overnight.
Julian now began to dismantle Boyd’s testimony. First, he introduced into evidence a certified copy of the February 16, 1961, National Weather Service report for Lake Charles, broken down by the hour. It showed no precipitation until after 9:00 p.m. and no significant rain until after midnight.
Next, he entered into evidence a transcript from a change-of-venue hearing held in 1961 and read into the record the testimony of Sheriff “Ham” Reid, who said there was a crowd of about three hundred people outside the jail when he brought me in.
He then read into the record the 1961 testimony of Mike Hogan, chief of detectives for the Lake Charles city police, who said the inside of the jail, including the lobby and corridors, was jammed with people. Julian read the words of Gerald Campbell, a civilian who came to the jail that night when he heard about the arrest; he put the number of men inside the jail lobby between fifty and one hundred. Chief Deputy Sheriff Sam Mazilly estimated there were still sixty-five or seventy-five men outside the jail at midnight.
As Julian continued his direct examination, Boyd said that, to his knowledge, neither he nor any of the other deputies walked across the street to the pawnshop owned by his friend Robert Waldmeir to see what kind of knife or gun they should search for.
I wondered if anyone on the jury could possibly believe that.
We called to the witness box Louisiana writer Anne Butler, whose 1989 book written with her husband, former warden C. Murray Henderson, Angola: A Century of Rage and Reform, included a chapter on me and contained the verbatim transcript of a long interview I gave her. It offered a more detailed explanation of the anger, resentment, and frustration I felt as a teenager toward white people than the brief comment on Jodie Sinclair’s tape. As soon as Julian asked her whether I’d ever discussed my feelings about race with her, Bryant called for a bench conference, after which Anne was asked to leave the stand without testifying further.
Court adjourned after what felt like a very long day. Once I was back at the jail, alone, questions haunted me. Did it raise red flags with the jury that so many of the character witnesses for me were prevented from saying much? I prayed that having a federal judge, a state appellate judge, two wardens, and a corrections officer vouching for my truthfulness would mean something to those all-important ten women and two men who held my fate in their hands. Did the jury, eight of whom were white, understand what we were trying to explain about the racial climate in 1961 and how it affected the prosecutor’s handling of my case? Four of the jurors had not even been born in 1961. They had no frame of reference for the Jim Crow South. Would they get it? Could the jury ignore the irrefutable proof that there was indeed a mob at the jail that night, despite the parade of witnesses Bryant introduced who said otherwise? Could they ignore all of our proof that contradicted Bryant’s case?
I woke up at 3:00 a.m. and felt my anxiety level rise with the sun. Logic told me that we had already shown the prosecutor’s case to be full of exaggerations and outright lies. We should get a hung jury, at least, and if it hung evenly or in my favor, perhaps Bryant wouldn’t want to press for another trial but would finally settle for a manslaughter conviction. But so much of what had transpired in this case had nothing to do with logic.
I’ve always been his ticket to national attention and to votes from the whites who put him in office, I thought to myself. He’ll never give up this case.
Take a breath, Wilbert. Calm down.
Yes. Okay. Whatever comes at the end of this, I will handle it as I’ve handled every adversity for the past quarter century. I’ll summon the strength that allowed me to transcend the worst days in prison. I’ll survive. If the jury sends me back to prison for the rest of my life, I will find a way to carve out some meaning for the remainder of my days because I just can’t believe that Divine Providence has saved me so many times without some purpose. No, I’ll be fine. But Linda? What would happen to her? She’d stick by me for the rest of my life, or hers. That was her promise, years ago—that she would never leave me while I was still in prison. That was when she thought it would take six months or a year to get me out. Nearly twenty years have passed. I can’t let her throw away the rest of her life visiting me twice a month in prison, forever. Her life is as much on the line as my own.
Our last day in court was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, January 15. We needed to further chip away at the credibility of the statement the FBI agent wrote out in longhand five days after the crime for me to sign, which Bryant had always called my “handwritten confession.” George called to the stand Ronald Butters, a cultural linguistics expert from Duke University, who testified that the FBI statement did not originate from the same source, meaning me, as the one I gave the night of the crime. The sheriff’s confession, he said, used language in a way that would be expected from a young person without a high school education, speaking colloquially under stress. Its structure was chaotic in the way that spoken narratives usually are. The word choice in the FBI document, by contrast, was more educated and methodical, almost characteristic of an essay. He said that the most significant difference between the two documents was the emotional connotation given to the events in the FBI document. In conclusion, he said that my confession to the sheriff was likely my confession and the FBI statement was the work of someone else.
Julian called our final witness, Paul Carroll, who had retired after thirty-one years with the Chicago police and had authored or coauthored numerous articles in the field of criminal investigations, most significantly for us, “Crime Scene Investigation: A Guide for Law Enforcement,” published by the U.S. Department of Justice. Bryant tried to disqualify him on the grounds that he couldn’t contribute much because of the age of the case. Judge Ritchie certified him.
Carroll th
oroughly discredited the sheriff’s investigation of the crime scene and his handling of the case in 1961. As for the two “confessions,” he said that generally the one closest in time to the crime itself will be the more accurate. He added that when law enforcement has one confession, taking a second is dangerous because it opens the door for discrepancy and doubt about which one is correct. He said the old 1961 filmed “interview” with Sheriff Reid and me wasn’t a statement but a “press conference,” a public relations piece, and I should not have been a part of it.
Carroll came down hard on local law enforcement for not protecting the crime scene. He said if bad weather was expected, the scene should have been covered with a tarp, or it should have been photographed. He concluded that because the crime scene was not preserved and an arrest had already been made, law enforcement had its mind on something other than collecting evidence.
He noted that they did not keep my clothing or examine it for gunpowder, mud, or blood, which would have been an invaluable source of evidence, nor did they examine or keep the clothing of any of the victims. They did not take photos of anyone’s wounds. The victim’s shoe should not have been moved from where it was found and placed next to the body by a deputy before the crime scene was measured, documented, and photographed. Evidence, he said, should be preserved until the completion of a defendant’s sentence or until he dies.
On cross-examination, Bryant suggested that the technology and methods used in a big city like Chicago might have been more sophisticated than what was known in a small town like Lake Charles in 1961. Carroll said that the basic techniques used in investigating crimes, preserving evidence, and interrogating suspects were the same everywhere. In response to one of Bryant’s questions, Carroll said that the FBI had jurisdiction only in the bank robbery, not the homicide, so there was no reason for them to question me about Julia Ferguson’s death five days after the crime. He said he’d never seen a case in which the FBI took a statement in a bank robbery case after a confession had already been obtained by police. He said this, too, would be bad procedure.
And with that, we rested our case.
Bryant’s closing argument held no surprises. The same old story, four decades old: I planned the robbery, took the hostages because they could identify me, lined them up, and killed them execution-style. He told the jury that this was a hate crime, that I killed Ferguson because I hated white people.
He said I picked a very convenient time to tell my story since so many witnesses were now dead. Sarcasm rolled off his tongue when he said, “I thought the most interesting part of his story was, ‘I didn’t murder her, I killed her,’” which he called “a distinction without a distinction.”
Frustration leaching into his voice, Bryant told the jury, “Race permeated this trial.” Though acknowledging that the social and racial injustices of the early 1960s were reprehensible, he scoffed at the idea that they played any role in the way this interracial crime had been handled. “The only decision you must make in this case,” he argued, “is whether Wilbert Rideau murdered Julia Ferguson.”
It was Julian’s turn, and now he was fully in his element, like a veteran warhorse coming alive at the smell of gunpowder. Looking every bit the Southern gentleman he is, with his stately bearing and full silver mane, he commanded the rapt attention of every person in the room the moment he rose from the defense table.
Provocation sufficient to deprive a person of his cool reflection was the defining factor in manslaughter under Louisiana law, he told the jurors, and the provocation did not have to be instigated by the victim. He reminded them of the phone call that threw me into a panic and prompted me to take the bank employees out of the bank. He reminded them that if I had wanted to kill the employees, I could have killed them right there and simply walked away. He reminded them that I told Jay Hickman to take his coat because it would be cold walking back to town. He reminded them that I was lost and confused—according to the victims’ own testimony—while meandering through white Lake Charles trying to figure out where to drop off the bank employees, and that I myself was terrified, riding around with a car full of whites in a place where I could never explain being after dark in 1961. He reminded them that I panicked when Dora McCain bolted from the car and began running, and that it was in this panic—this loss of cool reflection—that I fired at the employees and killed Ferguson.
He explained that we were not using the racial climate of the Jim Crow South to mitigate in any way the crime I committed. Nothing, he said, justified the crime. Race, however, did affect the way both law enforcement and the district attorney handled the case, including holding me in isolation with no access to an attorney and coercing statements from me. The times being what they were, Julian said, the prosecutor could count on having an all-white, all-male jury hear the case against a black teen accused of murdering a white woman. The crime was distorted, witnesses lied, and evidence was inflated to inflame that jury.
“They were never satisfied. They wanted to ratchet this up, ratchet this up,” Julian said as he swept an open arm toward me. “They were making it as bad for this man as they could.”
Julian approached the jury and looked each person in the face. “This case,” he said, “is about a one-inch cut, a tracheotomy,” not a decapitation. “For forty-four years,” he said, people had been led to believe “that Wilbert Rideau slashed Mrs. Ferguson’s throat from ear to ear.” He reminded them that they had seen the autopsy photos themselves.
He turned to look at Rick Bryant and reminded the jury that a prosecutor’s job is to get to the truth, not to convict. “Why did he bring in the ambulance driver to convince us of what really didn’t happen?” Why had the prosecutor insinuated that the mob Jackie Lewis saw outside the jail wasn’t real but merely a story that cropped up in the black community? Why indeed, when the truth, in the sheriff’s own testimony, was right there in the old record?
Why, he asked the jury, had all of the state’s witnesses testified for four decades that it rained, and rained, and rained “cats and dogs” the night of the crime, when the National Weather Service showed otherwise? Because the rain was needed to explain why evidence was destroyed and the crime scene was not preserved, he said.
Again referring to the Jim Crow South, Julian said, “You have to understand that time, and then it comes together. You think they would hesitate to exaggerate the facts of the case to get the result they wanted?”
And that nameplate in the photo, the one Bryant said proved I knew the ladies in the bank by their names? Julian pulled a jeweler’s round magnifying glass from his pocket. “Our public defender, Ron Ware, blew this photo up last night on his computer,” Julian said. Then he bent dramatically over the table in front of the jury box to eyeball the photo. “You want to know what this sign really says?” He turned to the twelve men and women and lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “It says, ‘Pay Electric Bills Here.’”
He faced the jury squarely to admit that my killing Ferguson was “a terrible act, a criminal act, one for which he deserves great punishment, but not one for which he deserves to be locked up for the rest of his life.” Waving his arm toward me, he said, “He did a terrible thing, but it wasn’t murder.”
Julian paused and in a quiet voice made his final plea: “It’s time to put this case to rest. Not just for Wilbert Rideau but for the whole community. It’s been going on too long. He’s been punished. Bring back a verdict of manslaughter.”
Bryant’s rebuttal was short, his arrogance gone. He told the jury that even if they believed my version of events rather than his, it was still murder.
After the jury left to begin its deliberations at about 5:15 p.m., Bryant crossed the aisle and shook hands with both George and Julian, telling each he was a helluva good lawyer. It was the first civil word he had spoken to either of them, and it would be the last.
In the movies, the defendant and his lawyers usually sweat out the jury’s deliberations in a comfortable attorney’s room around a s
umptuous, highly polished conference table with a big clock ticking off the tense minutes until a verdict is in.
In my case, defense team members took turns rotating into the small cinder-block holding cell in the basement of the courthouse where I was put to wait. Two wooden benches affixed to the walls and standing room accommodated only three people besides Linda and me. Two deputies sat watch in the corridor outside. We laughed some. Various of us offered a measured dose of optimism about the trial’s outcome—at least a hung jury. We all felt relieved that it was over and that, come what may, we had given it our best shot.
One of the young lawyers had brought in food for our dinner, and I had just taken my first bite when a deputy came to tell us to get back into the courtroom. My chest tightened. Something’s wrong. They haven’t been out long enough. They had been deliberating only about an hour and a half, not enough time to be deadlocked in a hung jury.
We stood behind the defense table as the jurors filed in past us. None of them looked at me. That’s a bad sign. They never look at the defendant when they vote to convict. As we sat down, I asked God to give me the strength to handle what I thought surely must be the end of all hope.
Judge Ritchie announced that the jury had him sent a note. They wanted to see the old “interview” in which Sheriff Reid asked me leading questions for the TV cameras the day after the crime. They asked for the magnifying glasses. (We had bought twelve magnifying glasses for them to examine photos with.) And they wanted a copy of the murder and manslaughter statutes to take into the jury room. The judge said they couldn’t have in the deliberation room any of the things they asked for, but he read the statutes to them again. They filed out, stony-faced, looking neither at me nor at Bryant.
Back in the holding cell we speculated as to what their requests might mean. The magnifying glasses were definitely a good sign for us because the jurors wanted to see for themselves that Bryant had lied. The 1961 “interview” wasn’t bad because it showed that I told the same story forty-four years before as I did on the stand. Inquiring about the statutes indicated that the jurors were at least considering manslaughter. Still, we were all less jovial now. As the hours passed, speech gave way to silence. At about 9:45, we were again called to the courtroom. The jury filed in once more, still stony-faced, looking straight ahead. Judge Ritchie announced that the jury wanted to have the murder and manslaughter statutes read to them again. Afterward, only Linda came back into the holding cell with me.
Wilbert Rideau Page 42