Released Louisiana Man Is in Seclusion After Threats

Confessed killer and civil rights figure Wilbert Rideau received what his legal team described as two credible threats on his life Monday and was in seclusion, limiting his contact with people outside a close circle of supporters.

“I am in an undisclosed location,” Rideau said in a telephone interview Monday night. “And I would appreciate you keeping it that way.”

Ron Ware, a Lake Charles, La., attorney and a member of Rideau’s defense team, said that Rideau’s website had received at least a dozen vitriolic e-mails written in response to his release from prison over the weekend.

Two of the e-mails stood out and were considered “very serious” threats on his life, said Linda LaBranche, a legal researcher from Baton Rouge who runs the website and assisted in the lengthy effort to win Rideau’s release. In one e-mail, a writer claimed that he planned to hire a “contract killer” to “bump him off,” Ware said. That note was signed, though Ware said he doubted that the writer would use his real name.

LaBranche spoke to the FBI and the Baton Rouge Police Department on Monday. Police Cpl. Don Kelly, a department spokesman, said he had no information about the threats. FBI officials in Louisiana could not be reached.

“When [the threats] come electronically, you don’t know where the person is,” LaBranche said. “It could be next door, Los Angeles, France. You just have to take it seriously.”

Rideau, 62, who is black, walked out of prison early Sunday morning after spending nearly 44 years behind bars. He has never denied kidnapping three people during a February 1961 bank robbery in Lake Charles and killing one of them, teller Julia Ferguson.

LeBranche said Rideau’s whereabouts would have to remain secret for now.

“If that means moving him from place to place, we will,” she said.

Rideau said his attorneys were more concerned about the threats than he was. He pointed out that, after all, for more than four decades he lived in prison, where inmates face a constant threat of violence.

“I’ve been in a tough place -- a very tough place,” Rideau said. “A lot of people issue threats. It is the rare individual who actually carries them out. I don’t have to worry about some lunatic out there. I’m trying to pull my life together. To be intimidated, worried about them, about every shadow in this world, I can’t live like that. You can’t let fear govern your life.”

Other e-mails received by Rideau’s website referred to him as “trash” and said that “he should have gotten ‘the chair,’ ” Ware said.

Rideau was sentenced to die three times by all-white juries -- in 1961, 1964 and 1970 -- but each conviction was thrown out. The third conviction was overturned in 2000 when the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with his attorneys that blacks had been improperly kept off the grand jury that initially indicted him. It was one of many instances when Rideau’s attorneys argued that pervasive racism kept him from receiving a fair trial.

When Rideau faced his fourth trial this month, his attorneys were armed with extensive testimony that racism had shaded the case against him. Authorities, for instance, ensured that Rideau’s expressions of remorse after the robbery were not heard by previous juries, his attorneys said.

Saturday, a jury agreed with his defense attorneys that he was not guilty of murder, but of manslaughter because the killing was not premeditated. Because the maximum sentence for manslaughter is 21 years, Rideau was credited with time already served in prison and released immediately.

Rideau said the fourth trial marked the first time that his attorneys had been able to paint an accurate picture for one of his juries about Louisiana’s racial climate in 1961.

“The authorities had taken what was already a terrible thing and made it worse,” he said. “But you’ve heard the old saying: The truth shall set you free.”

Still, he said, no one was more surprised than he was when the jury returned its verdict and the judge explained that he would be released from prison.

As a result, despite his many years behind bars, he said he had done little to prepare himself for the possibility that he would walk free. Everyone he spoke to Monday had the same romantic notions about his release -- that he would be eating big steaks, walking around with no shoes on so he could feel the grass between his toes and sleeping outdoors so he could breathe the fresh air.

“It’s not been like you think,” he said. “I know people expect dramatic reactions. They keep saying, ‘Oh, man, you just went from prison to the free world.’ But when it catches you and you aren’t expecting it, it’s just unreal.”

Rideau was once dubbed “the most rehabilitated prisoner in America.” Behind bars, he became an award-winning journalist and documentarian. Self-educated, he wrote for a magazine about criminal justice issues and co-directed “The Farm,” a documentary that was nominated for an Oscar in 1999.

He said he would like to continue work in journalism, but isn’t sure how to go about it. First, he said, he must take more basic steps -- buying clothes, getting an identification card, finding a place to live. He is currently staying with friends in Louisiana.

“I’ve got to get some health insurance, which I’m told is a must,” he said.

Eventually, when he is more stable, he said he would like to begin traveling. He is thinking about taking a parachute jump. He said he had always wanted to see the Grand Canyon and Disneyland.

“There are a lot of sights I’d like to see,” he said. “I’ve read about places, seen photographs of things. I’d just like to see it for myself, feel it up close, and just absorb.”