A Night That Will Not End

Lockup is all about time. Anybody who’s been inside can tell you that. In the canned air and fluorescent glare of the Calcasieu Parish jail, time is embedded in concrete, in a visitors’ window thick enough to smother sound.

The women come through the lush twilight for this hour; the men in orange jumpsuits march forth from the belly of the jail. With days and months stretched between them, they pick up telephones, and a soft slur of many private conversations settles over the room. Then the guards loom behind, tap shoulders and prod the inmates back to their dormitories. Their 45 minutes have run out.

Wilbert Rideau stays put. Nobody makes him move. He is well-known in these parts, a decorated prison journalist and a killer.

“Do I have regrets?” He has been pondering the question. “Yeah, I have regrets. But my life isn’t over with. I’m not ready to add it up yet.”

But isn’t there one choice? One moment? One night he looks back on now--?

“Life isn’t that cold and calculated,” he says, the telephone dangling from his fingers as if he has forgotten it’s there. “There are forces that drive it. You don’t so much choose. It’s not that clear. There’s emotion. There are things--”

He interrupts himself.

“See, I know where you’re going with this,” he says. “I’m second-guessing you. That’s the curse of being in the same business.”

He chuckles. He says good night. He waits until his visitor hangs up the phone, and then he wanders back into the jail.

Outside the darkness is rich and thick with stars. Rideau can’t see the sky, can’t smell the wilting jasmine. He can’t hear the tick and hoot of the swamp settling into sleep. He will sleep waiting and wake up waiting still.

His judgment day is coming.

*

They say his name Read-oh, and around here they say it slowly, say it in knowing voices. It refers to the man named Wilbert Rideau, but it also means a night that split the past from the present, that continues to shred a rift between blacks and whites in this decaying oil patch town. It was a night that started out mean, that drained into morning, but never quite ended.

Wilbert Rideau is a black man who killed a white woman in 1961, just as the stubborn Old South was beginning its slow slide into obscurity. Now Louisiana is preparing to try him for a fourth time, even though he has not denied his crime and despite the three death sentences he has outlived. He is due in court today for arguments on pretrial motions.

Peering through the gauze of yellowing newspaper clips, transcripts of testimony from dead witnesses and lost evidence, a modern judge and jury will have to decide whether Rideau has redeemed himself.

The trial will measure time’s work on a man--but it will also put Louisiana up for judgment. Until now, each of Rideau’s trials has been so riddled with racism and bias that all of the state’s verdicts against Wilbert Rideau were overturned. Each trial drags out Louisiana’s ugly past and lays it alongside a man’s transgressions.

The laws have changed. Louisiana has changed. Rideau has changed. But that Thursday night clings to the skin of Lake Charles like an ill-advised tattoo.

“They say, ‘Let it go, put it aside, bury it,’ but when you think you’ve laid it down, it jumps back up,” says Jan Cater. She was 12 when her aunt bled to death on a muddy roadside. She has lived in Lake Charles all her life. “You push it to the back, you don’t think about it every day. And then guess what happens: The phone rings and they say, ‘He’s trying to get out of prison again.’

“It’s just like that night happens over and over and over again.”

*

Rain, and More Rain

When they think back, they mention the rain. The sky stretched dull as metal that day, and the storm came to blur the seam between day and night. It dropped its beads on windshields, left puddles in the rice paddies. It roared and slackened, only to come back harder.

It was Feb. 16, a night preserved in print at the public library and the old courthouse, chronicled by long-gone stenographers and newspaper reporters. A teller named Dora McCain said she knew something was wrong when her boss yelled out from the back of Gulf National Bank.

“You girls close the curtains and come here,” Jay Hickman called.

McCain snatched up the telephone and dialed the bank’s main office. “I’m going to lay the phone down, but listen in,” she whispered. “Something’s funny here.” Then, frazzled, she hung up.

In the back, Rideau had a pistol trained on the 55-year-old Hickman. “Do what I say and you won’t get hurt,” he said. The women stood by while their boss stacked bundles of cash into Rideau’s suitcase.

The phone rattled. “Don’t answer it,” Rideau said.

“They’ll think something is wrong,” Hickman said.

Rideau considered this. “Go ahead,” he said, cocking his gun against Hickman’s head. “But talk right.”

“Do you need the police?” the bank’s vice president asked.

“It might be a good idea,” Hickman said. Then he hung up.

Rideau was suspicious. There was no time to rob the vault--he’d take what he had. He turned to teller Julia Ferguson. “Do you have your car?”

In the parking lot, Rideau herded his three hostages into Julia’s Vauxhall. He slipped into the back, fingers wrapped around the pistol. He’d let them go on the outskirts of town, he said. It would be a cold walk back, but he needed time to escape.

At 46, Julia was a stout woman in sensible pumps. She was driving too fast. “Slow down,” Rideau snapped. She did. Maybe he won’t kill us, Hickman thought.

“I guess you realize your lives are hanging on a shoestring,” Rideau said.

“One day you’ll have to stand before God,” Julia said.

They rolled slowly through the wet winter night, headed out of town along dreary streets where black families lived in old bungalows. Down Opelousas Street, over the tracks, past the big dance hall and onward into darkness. The pavement dropped off; the tires grated on gravel and sand. They crossed English Bayou.

“Stop the car,” Rideau said. “Shut up. I’m trying to think.”

He looked lost, fingering his gun in a hijacked car on a moonless night. The highway stretched before him. Darkened fields. Ditches. Mud. $14,079.

“Get out,” he said.

He opened fire.

A bullet caught Hickman in the arm. The bank manager reeled, then staggered into the flooded bayou. Julia collapsed, and Dora dropped onto the dirt in a fake faint. Rideau ran a few steps after Hickman, then paused.

Limp in the mud, Julia stirred. Rideau shot her in the shoulder and the base of the neck.

“Get up,” he told her. “Get up.”

She was still alive. “Please, Wilbert, think of my poor old daddy,” she said. Those were her last words.

“Don’t worry,” he replied. “It’ll be quick and cool.” He plunged his hunting dagger 6 inches into her left breast, piercing her heart. He slashed her throat.

He shot Dora in the neck, crashed toward the bayou and hollered Hickman’s name. Silence.

Back to Dora. He kicked her so hard he snapped her rib. She fought to keep still.

“You’d better be dead,” he said.

He drew the wet night into his lungs and bawled out Hickman’s name one last time. “I believed they were all dead,” he would say in his confession. “I intended that they be dead.” He slipped into the driver’s seat. He turned his headlights east out of Lake Charles and hit the gas.

His flight was fleeting: Police lights flashed behind him 20 miles out of town. “I thought I had it made,” he told the deputies as he climbed from behind the wheel.

They clapped handcuffs on his wrists. They drove him back to Lake Charles. In the woods and over the town, the rain kept coming down.

*

Plenty of Guilt to Go Around

Harvey Boyd has been around about as long as anybody. At 73, the longtime deputy sheriff still cruises the streets with a gun at his hip and a worn black Bible at his right hand. He manned the roadblocks the night of the Rideau robbery.

“It was a good little town back then. Ever’body did their job,” he says in his thick, slow swamp tongue. “The prosecutors, the law enforcement. Everybody did what they were supposed to do.”

He chews on the silence, remembering.

“You didn’t have to worry about lynching,” he finally says. “Because they lynched ‘em for you.”

The night he was arrested, Rideau was sneaked through the back door of the courthouse to avoid a white mob out front, according to court testimony and the memory of local blacks. Asked about the story, Boyd is uncharacteristically muddled. “I ah--I dunno. I think I remember somethin’,” he mutters. “I wasn’t there though.”

One black man sat on the grand jury that indicted Rideau. He wasn’t tapped by accident--he had a job raking leaves and cutting grass for the jury commissioner. Otherwise, the jury was white from end to end. The commission had tampered with the race cards to make sure of it.

The attempt at convicting Rideau with color rather than law sprang from the customs of the day. But like so many other aspects of this epic case, time eventually rendered it self-defeating. Years later, Rideau would use evidence of the long-forgotten maneuvers as a potent legal weapon. The race manipulations are a profound vexation to the current district attorney, who grumbles that he could have coaxed a death sentence from even the most politicized black jury.

It was Louisiana against Wilbert Rideau, and in 1961 neither man nor state could claim innocence. This was a dank, shadowy land governed by Jimmie Davis, a sharecropper’s son and folk songster. Davis swaggered through Hollywood movies, penned “You Are My Sunshine”--and lost a ferocious battle to stave off the civil rights movement.

Scowling whites stood in the aisles of New Orleans trolleys that year to avoid sitting alongside blacks. When integration hit the schools, white supremacists ran riot in the streets, red-faced and ranting. Truant white kids stalked, pounced upon and beat up blacks in the alleys.

Rideau stood trial the year the Freedom Riders streamed south from Washington in hopes of reaching New Orleans. They were beaten in Birmingham and Montgomery and ended up jailed in Jackson. It would be awhile before the Freedom buses rolled into Louisiana.

When Rideau came to court, the state announced there would be no record of the trial--not unless he could scrape together enough money for a transcript. He couldn’t. In jury selection, Rideau’s lawyers spent their strikes eliminating people such as a would-be juror who proclaimed, “A darky killed my dad in 1931.”

A cousin of the slain teller Julia Ferguson made it onto the jury. So did a friend of her brother, two deputy sheriffs and a fellow who did printing jobs for the prosecutor. Three of the panelists had seen Rideau’s filmed confession on the evening news. A close buddy of the wounded bank manager told the judge he wasn’t too sure he could be objective--and wound up on the jury anyway. All were men, and every one white.

After a three-day trial in a thronged courtroom, Rideau was sentenced to die. His protests reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which overturned the conviction and lambasted Lake Charles for its “kangaroo court.”

He received a new trial in Baton Rouge, but it wasn’t much better. A member of the white supremacist Citizens’ Council huddled with the prosecution. Prospective jurors who admitted squeamishness over the death penalty were sent home. It took the panel 15 minutes to hand Rideau his second death sentence.

He appealed again, and a state court agreed that jurors had been improperly dismissed. So Rideau stood a third trial. It took another all-white, all-male jury eight minutes to dole out yet another death sentence. This time, his appeals were in vain. His lawyers said there was nothing to be done.

They were wrong, but Rideau didn’t know it. Months turned into years, which stretched into decades. Four times, pardon boards recommended his release. Each time, a governor ignored the suggestion, and Rideau stayed behind bars. “If I reacted solely on my personal beliefs, I would sign the pardon,” Gov. Edwin W. Edwards said at a 1986 news conference. “I believe he has been rehabilitated.”

But there was more than belief at stake. Edwards eventually acknowledged a promise: He had vowed to a traumatized, terrified Dora McCain that as long as she lived, and as long as he had any say, Rideau would be locked away.

That’s the way 1961 rolled into 2002. Yesterday is the millstone of every criminal. Awkward history is the great dilemma of the modern South. Maybe that’s why the Rideau case rankles so painfully in Lake Charles: Because every time Rideau stands to be judged, he takes Louisiana along with him.

*

A Highway Changes All

On a steamy afternoon, the aging Deputy Boyd chases the ghosts of a bank robbery down the old road to English Bayou. “He took ‘em right down here,” he says. The patrol car bumps past a Holiday Inn, gas stations and black tar parking lots, vast and empty in the heat of day. “None of this was here then,” he mutters. The old dance hall is shut down. Houses have plugged the vacant lots. There are neon signs and billboards. Only the sky is the same, full of nothing but light.

He is almost there.

“When you see it you’re not gonna know how it was,” he says, wrapping his thick fingers around the wheel. “It don’t look the way it did.”

Decades back, Boyd and his brother drove into Texas, came home with a few tallow trees and planted them in the dirt of Lake Charles. Today he tells that story like a confession, glancing into the groves of shadow and green. It is not a thing he likes to admit. The tallows have spread like dandelions, have choked the swamps. Once they got hold, nobody could chop them down fast enough. The roots were too strong. “They just took right over,” he says. “Took this country by storm.”

Out in the shadow of Interstate 10, Deputy Boyd swings his car in a loop and comes to rest alongside the bayou. “Right here he shot those people.”

Forty-one years later, there are only birds and the scream of speeding cars. Boyd shakes his jowls. In 1961, Interstate 10 was a slow tide of wet pavement, rolling along to smother fields and uproot neighborhoods. The ribbon of tar would stretch from Florida to California and would bind New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Lake Charles into a petrochemical crescent.

It would unleash white flight, destroy black neighborhoods and nourish the vast refineries with a stream of cargo trucks and out-of-state workers. But in 1961, it was just a suggestion. “They were just building it then,” Boyd says. “Funny how a little old super interstate can come through town and change everything up.”

*

A Bridge Between Eras

These days, Rideau’s arrest would be deemed unconstitutional--in 1961, police weren’t required to read suspects their Miranda rights. He was prosecuted under an outmoded legal code. Back then, it was murder or manslaughter. Now, Louisiana classifies murders by first, second and third degree. Heading into trial, prosecutor Rick Bryant didn’t know whether he was supposed to follow the antiquated court rules, or the new rules.

“I’m like a dinosaur from a different age,” Rideau likes to say. “Here I am today being judged, and really I belong to another time.”

The last of the survivors, Dora McCain, is a frail 69-year-old who underwent open-heart surgery last year. Twelve of the witnesses are dead, including Jay Hickman, the bank manager. So is tough old Frank Salter, the longtime prosecutor who became McCain’s lawyer and dedicated his career to keeping Rideau behind bars.

The crime scene photographs are lost, along with trial records. Nobody knows what happened to the car, clothing, fingerprints or blood evidence. The knife that slit Ferguson’s throat is nowhere to be found.

The state caught a lucky break when an office worker stumbled across a dusty box of defunct discs in a courthouse closet. It turned out they were stenographer’s notes from Rideau’s third trial. The box was shipped off to FBI laboratories in Virginia, and some of the 30-year-old testimony of dead witnesses was raised up from the crumbling records.

“I wish I wasn’t even fooling with a 41-year-old murder case,” the district attorney sighs today. “It’s a nightmare.”

*

A Restless Youth

Rideau was born Friday the 13th of February 1942, the oldest of five children in a Catholic family. His father, a sometime janitor and construction worker, eventually split from Rideau’s mother. “An excellent pupil but restless and inclined to be rude,” reads the script below a field of Bs on Rideau’s eighth-grade report card. “Can be probably attributed to home life.”

The next fall, he failed algebra, science, music and English. Then he stopped going to class. Rideau was 16 when he was locked up for the first time. The police had wanted to question his younger brother about a robbery, and Rideau refused to help track him down. He landed in reform school for five months. “It messed my head up for a while,” he says now. “Kids can’t cope with time.”

When he got out, Rideau stocked shelves and swept floors at Halpern’s fabric shop. Just about every day, he’d stroll two doors down to Gulf National to make change for his boss. On sticky afternoons, the tellers gave him a little money and sent him out for Cokes.

But Rideau grew uppity, Dora McCain told a jury. He started calling the white bankers by their first names. They responded with the brutal etiquette of the South. They bought a refrigerator, stocked it with soda pop and stopped asking Rideau for favors.

Rideau kept hanging around anyway, kept watching the currency being counted and stacked, tied and locked away. “I saw all that money and I thought I could get it,” he said in an affidavit. A court psychiatrist concluded Rideau was obsessed with money. The afternoon he decided to rob a bank, he was a 19-year-old dropout with a .22-caliber pistol, a $2 hunting knife and nothing to lose.

In the edgy darkness of the stolen car, Rideau told his hostages he wanted a plastic surgeon to fix up his face so he couldn’t be recognized, Dora McCain testified. He’d come home to Lake Charles, but nobody would know him.

Instead, he became Condemned No. 18. Intent on leaving something behind when he marched off to the electric chair, he penned a longhand study in criminal psychology. He read. He waited to die.

In 1972, the death penalty was abolished, and Rideau took his place among hundreds of lifers in Angola. Those were rough days in the pen--they called it the Farm, and Louisiana mothers shuddered to think of it. A squalid, segregated gangland, it was dubbed the bloodiest prison in America.

Rideau tried for a job at the Angolite, the prison magazine, but the all-white staff turned him away. So he gathered a handful of black inmates and founded the Lifer, a gritty underground newspaper. After a handful of issues, the prison stamped it out.

In 1975, Angola was ordered to desegregate, and the warden asked Rideau to take charge of the Angolite. He marched into its offices flanked by a band of blacks, “in case there was trouble,” he says now.

“ ‘I’m going to be the editor,’ ” he remembers informing the staff. “They gave it to me.”

It was the beginning of a 26-year reign.

“It just seemed like this colossal waste to sit there and do nothing. If you’ve got a shred of decency, you want to redeem yourself and redeem your station in life,” Rideau says now. “Prison is the only institution in the world dedicated to making people suffer, and if you can bring a little light to it--that’s the way I saw myself.”

He put in 14 hours a day and fell asleep thinking about his stories. He sat with condemned men in the hours before execution, and he asked them whether they’d ever been in love. He wrote about the prisoner who fed birds from his wheelchair, about Vietnam veterans behind bars and about a blind man who fumbled through the corridors.

“We’re not so much great writers as we have a unique vantage point,” Rideau says. “We don’t want it, but it’s there. You either use it or you throw it away.”

He wrote “Conversations with the Dead,” an investigation that showed inmates had been lost in the vast prison system. Men went free because of that story. In the late 1970s, Rideau collaborated with another inmate on “Prison: The Sexual Jungle,” a meditation on rape behind bars. “I got everybody,” Rideau says. “I got the people who were involved, even the guys who did it. I got them to talk about it.”

That story won a George Polk award and made Rideau a finalist in the National Magazine Awards. “The prison bosses went up to New York [for the awards ceremony], and they were really freaked out,” Rideau says. “It was a vindication that they were doing the right thing.”

His journalism is rooted in compassion, but in six months of telephone and jailhouse interviews, Rideau refuses to express remorse for the people who died or suffered at his hands. One day, this observation is put to him: There are convicts who proclaim their innocence, but still say they’re sorry, in an abstract sense, that somebody was murdered.

“Well, I--” Rideau trails off, then tries again. “Look, I--” He pauses. “I am what--” He takes a breath, then: “What you said.”

“The victim has pretty much dictated what’s happened to me,” he says another day. “Yeah, there was a victim on that side, but there’s one on this side too.”

The mechanical voice of an automated telephone operator interrupts: “This call will be terminated in one minute.”

“Oh, God,” Rideau says.

*

‘We Have to Pray’

Since Rideau’s first conviction, nearly 700 murderers have been granted clemency by Louisiana governors. None of them did as much time as Rideau. He’s been locked up longer than any criminal in Calcasieu Parish history.

Prosecutors hate that statistic. They believe it’s misleading. Some of those convicts were put to death, they point out.

But Rideau’s judicial history is so messy that even Bryant, the prosecutor fighting to keep him in prison, will admit that the longtime inmate hasn’t gotten equal treatment. “His argument has merit as far as the other people getting out,” he says. “But they shouldn’t have gotten out, either. I don’t give a damn about rehabilitation. It’s irrelevant in these types of crimes.”

In December 2000, a federal appeals court, citing the race-tainted indictment, ordered the state to give Rideau a new trial or set him free. Louisiana could have decided that enough was finally enough. It was up to Bryant--but to him, it wasn’t even a question. The district attorney flushes when he hears complaints of prejudice, vendetta or inequality. He believes confessed killers forfeit their freedom.

Rideau should count himself lucky, the district attorney says. The death penalty has been reinstated in Louisiana and elsewhere, but Bryant will not ask for Rideau’s execution. He does not think it “proper”--or that he could win the death penalty for a 60-year-old man.

This killer should stay in prison until he dies, Bryant says. “If we don’t retry him, it’s like this crime never happened.”

Until that night in 1961, Jan Cater had never seen her daddy look that way. “We have to pray,” he said, hanging up the phone with his big butcher’s hands. His sister, Julia Ferguson, had been taken hostage in a bank robbery. “They can’t find them,” he said.

The voices fell quiet in the kitchen. Rain slapped the roof. It wouldn’t be long before Julia Ferguson’s father would die. “It was just too much,” Cater says now. Ferguson’s two brothers were gone within three years--their hearts gave out young. Cater’s father was 47 when he died.

“Oh, honey,” Cater murmurs now. “Oh, honey.”

Dora McCain has carried chunks of bullet in her neck for decades. People say she never has recovered, not all the way. The prosecutors claim she is haunted by Rideau’s words: “You’d better be dead.” They say she is heavy with guilt because she couldn’t save Julia Ferguson.

Outside of testimony, neither she nor her family has talked publicly about the robbery. McCain broke her lifelong silence just once, a few years ago. Rideau was up for an Oscar in documentary filmmaking for a movie he shot about life at Angola, and an enraged Dora McCain gave an interview to a British reporter.

“I believe he has manipulated all those people in Hollywood,” she told the Mail on Sunday. “They should remember it’s very hard to know what’s going on in Wilbert’s head. I thought I knew him when he worked at the fabric shop.... I was fooled.” The story ran under the headline “How the Oscars Are Making a Hero Out of This Vicious Woman-Killer.”

*

Rideau Attracts Support

After the bank robbery, black parents didn’t let their children play outside for days--that’s what Lawrence Morrow remembers. Fear gnawed at neighborhoods as far away as Vinton, where Morrow grew up. He recalls that whites cruised the streets to holler curses. He remembers that his grammar school was besieged by bomb threats, and that a year or so later somebody followed through--half the building was blown to rubble.

Morrow grew up to be a no-nonsense publisher with opinions harder than oak: He believes blacks ought to get their news from other blacks--that’s why he puts out Gumbeaux Magazine. He believes white power is intact, even if the whites have grown more subdued since the bad old days. And he believes, with a crystal outrage, that Wilbert Rideau should go free.

“The white community has a pact with the government,” Morrow says. “They’re all working together” against Rideau.

George Kendall, a New York NAACP lawyer who represents Rideau, thinks the new trial is unconstitutional. He thinks it’s spiteful. He thinks it’s the district attorney’s bid to boost his popularity. Mostly, he thinks it’s a case of Louisiana pummeling a man who already has done his time.

It’s “cavalier,” Kendall says, to “try a 40-year-old case.... The state has had three bites out of the apple already. It’s like, how many chances does the state get?”

*

‘Make This Mean Something’

When Rideau finally made it home last summer, he came as an improbable prodigal, shackled hand and foot in a prison van. He ended up right back where he began, in the Calcasieu Parish jail. He turned 60 this year. His mustache is graying; the skin of his face has lost its starch.

Outside the jail, a chain fence rings the grim box of dormitories, curling inward like a fist about to close. Rideau passes his days among gangly gangsters, street corner hustlers and unlucky drunks. These men are younger. They call him Mister, and he puzzles over their slang.

In conversations with Rideau, there are popular topics: Civil rights. The advancement of blacks in all arenas. The manifold weaknesses of the criminal justice system. The “whole unholy force” of Lake Charles.

But there also are forbidden themes.

His childhood? “I rarely think about the past.”

The crime? “They don’t want me to talk about it.”

His family? “You leave them alone. They got nothing to do with it.”

As a journalist, Rideau has a firm opinion of how he ought to come across in print. “I’m sort of a martyr,” he says one day. “I’m a wonderful person,” he says another day, “a great guy.” One afternoon, he begins, “Not to sound too egotistical--” then stops himself. “Aw, never mind, it’ll come out wrong no matter how I say it.”

When he calls collect from the jailhouse, he opens each interview with an interrogation. “I just want to know where you’re going with this,” he says. “What’s your agenda?”

During a Sunday night jailhouse visit, Rideau leans in close to the glass.

“Make this mean something,” he says. “Make it mean something for me, or make it mean something for the other side. Don’t just walk away and say, ‘Hey, another story.’ ”

He doesn’t blink.

“I don’t want to just be another story.”

*

These days, his talk runs to new themes. He talks about God and about his mother. He talks about death.

He took a hit this summer, when a black judge was removed from the case. It turned out Wilford Carter had lobbied for Rideau’s release more than a decade back, when he was in the state Legislature.

Rideau’s file was handed over to Patricia Minaldi, a conservative, white judge and former prosecutor who used to work for Bryant. “She’s part of that whole little clique,” Rideau says ominously.

“They wished evil upon me, but they don’t recognize who they’re dealing with,” he says. “These people got to understand that I got God on my side.”

He’s talking fast now, pouring the words out in a rush. Soon, the operator will break in. Rideau is running out of time.

“And you know,” he says, “I know it’s going to be all right.”

He has a judgment day coming. And Wilbert Rideau has nothing to lose.

*

Times researcher Lianne Hart contributed to this report.