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Killer freed after 44 years, four juries

The first three all-white juries called Wilbert Rideau a murderer. Aracially mixed jury rules he has served long enough.

BATON ROUGE, La. - In the nation's bloodiest prison, Wilbert Rideau became a thinking man, an award-winning journalist who has been called "the most rehabilitated inmate in America." Now, after more than 40 years behind bars, he is a free man.

Rideau, a black man convicted three times by all-white juries, walked free Saturday when a racially mixed jury found him guilty of a lesser charge of manslaughter.

A quietly jubilant Rideau savored his new freedom Sunday in Baton Rouge, relaxing at a friend's house and blinking in a world he left behind when John Kennedy was the new president and "whites only" signs still hung across the South.

"I'm still trying to wrap my mind around it," Rideau told the Associated Press in one of his first interviews since the verdict in his native Lake Charles. "Jail is so far distant. It's distant."

Rideau, 62, never denied that he killed Julia Ferguson on Feb. 16, 1961, and shot two others after a botched bank robbery. Testifying for the first time in this trial, he said it was an act of panic.

Prosecutors, seeking a murder conviction and a life sentence, scoffed at Rideau's contention that although he killed Ferguson, he didn't murder her. But after deliberating for nearly six hours, the jury of eight whites and four blacks agreed with him that the crime was not planned or premeditated.

Since he has spent nearly 44 years in prison - more than double the 21-year maximum for manslaughter when the crime occurred - he was immediately released.

"It offers hope to the black community. It's a new day," said the Rev. J.L. Franklin of Lake Charles, who has led a minister's group that has pushed for years for Rideau's release.

After a celebration with his attorneys, he spent the night with his mother and sisters. Elsewhere in Lake Charles, a spontaneous celebration broke out at a crowded zydeco ball when news of Rideau's release emerged.

"Wilbert was just so elated," Franklin said. "We were all just extremely excited. And amazed that he is free."

Rideau was a janitor and eighth-grade dropout when he entered the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. Behind bars, he became a self-educated writer and helped expose the violence behind prison walls, elevating the prison magazine, the Angolite, to national acclaim.

He gained fame and numerous awards, co-directing the Oscar-nominated prison documentary The Farm and co-writing and narrating an award-winning National Public Radio documentary. Life magazine once called him "the most rehabilitated prisoner in America."

Jurors were barred from hearing about Rideau's accomplishments in prison.

Prosecutors "figured they would convict me on the case. The stuff that would get me the sympathy, they kept out," Rideau said Sunday. "Ironically, I got freed on the case. A lot of the "facts' turned out to be myths."

Rideau's fame also brought tension in Lake Charles, near the Texas state line. His supporters said they were worried for his safety because the racially divided oil town remains fiercely split about whether he has paid his debt for the killing or whether he should have been executed long ago. Rideau left for Baton Rouge Sunday.

Don Hickman, whose father, bank branch manager Jay Hickman, was one of two people whom Rideau shot and left for dead, attended every day of the trial. He was disappointed in the verdict and that prosecutors "were just out-lawyered."

In his fourth trial, Rideau's defense sought a manslaughter verdict. Prosecutors wanted the jury to find him guilty of murder to ensure Rideau would end his days in jail, barring a pardon.

"The passage of time has made him older and hopefully wiser, but it certainly has not made him less guilty," Calcasieu Parish District Attorney Rick Bryant told the jury Saturday. "Time and age do not give you innocence."

Shortly before the jury was handed the case, Rideau's attorney Julian Murray suggested that racism had distorted the crime, keeping local passions inflamed.

Testimony in the weeklong trial ended Saturday morning with two defense experts who attacked some of the foundations of the 44-year-old case.

A linguistics professor at Duke called into question a statement Rideau allegedly gave the FBI days after the killing. A police crime scene expert suggested the local police investigation was rudimentary.

One detail had cemented prosecution portrayals of Rideau as a cold-blooded killer, echoed in numerous newspaper accounts since: that he lined up his three victims, including Ferguson, before shooting them. Two survived; Ferguson was stabbed to death.

That detail is in a statement taken by the FBI five days after the crime. However, it is not in a typewritten account given by Rideau the night it took place. There, the 19-year-old dropout tells the local sheriff he shot the three bank employees as they tried to run away - a portrayal that fit the defense story of a panicky amateur acting impulsively.

The language in the FBI statement is formal and composed, typical of someone with far more education than Rideau, linguistics expert Ronald Butters said Saturday. The typewritten statement - where Rideau says nothing about lining up his victims - "is what one would expect of a young man who did not have a high school education," Butters said.

Prosecutors did not deviate from their account of Rideau as a murderer methodically planning his crime, then cruelly turning aside Ferguson's plea for mercy before stabbing her in the heart. Two others, bank employees like Ferguson, were kidnapped along with her, but survived after being shot by Rideau.

The defense countered the prosecution head-on, presenting Rideau himself to tell the story of a confused teenager lashing out, fatally, in a small Southern city governed by the segregationists' mores of the early 1960s.

Those same racial biases have echoed into the present, the lawyers suggest, in a systematic exaggeration of Rideau's crime - notably in the contention that Ferguson's throat was slashed, her neck nearly severed. That was refuted by a forensics expert, Dr. Werner Spitz, in defense testimony Friday. He described the cut on her throat as 1 inch long and "superficial." Based on photographs taken the night she died, the injury appeared to be from a medical tracheotomy, Spitz said.

"I've been saying for 44 years that, yes, I'm responsible," Rideau said Sunday. "But it didn't happen the way they said it.

Theodore M. Shaw, the director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which also represented Rideau, said he found it hard to reconcile Rideau's crime with the thoughtful, accomplished man he has become.

"I've never lost sight of the fact that when Wilbert was 19 he did something incredibly stupid and tragic," Shaw said. "On the other hand, he's not the man he was then. It's a story of redemption."

Bryant, the prosecutor, said Rideau's achievements were irrelevant. "Rideau's actions were driven by greed," Bryant said, referring to the robbery. "It's not like he's been some sort off civil rights pioneer. He's a crook."

Rideau said Sunday that he had not dared make plans for what he would do as a free man. Then he started to collect his thoughts.

"I'll be 63 in about three more weeks," he said. "I'm walking around in sweat pants. Most people my age are retired, and I have no health insurance, no pension, no Social Security. I've got to start producing. I've got to get a job. I'd like to write. I've got so much to say. I'm going to continue, to the extent that I can, to be a journalist."

--Information from the New York Times was used in this report.

[Last modified January 17, 2005, 01:06:09]