It was not lost on Judge Ritchie that the media seats in the courtroom were filled by journalists from New York, Chicago, Washington, Boston, Houston, Atlanta, New Orleans, and elsewhere. Even the local media realized that the eyes of the nation were on the trial. That made an enormous difference in the judge"s rulings.
Usually quick to cave in to the prosecutors, Ritchie stood firm in ruling that we had a right to use photocopies of what were clearly authentic transcripts of court hearings from 1961, even though Bryant claimed they had "disappeared" from the clerk"s office and insinuated that perhaps they had never existed or that we had somehow made them vanish. Linda found their disappearance highly suspect, since the last time she, Chris Hsu, and an investigator went to look at the files-in the presence of a deputy clerk-they had to be retrieved from the locked evidence room, to which only insiders, including Bryant, had access. In granting our request to use the transcripts, the judge noted that he had denied every one of our pretrial motions and I did, after all, have a right to present a defense.
In preliminary matters, George and Julian objected to Dora McCain"s not appearing, because we would not be able to cross-examine one of the state"s few living witnesses, but said we would waive our objection if the prosecution would agree to let us introduce into evidence comments McCain made in 1999 to a British tabloid. Wayne Frey fairly jumped out of his seat in enthusiastic agreement, as though he couldn"t believe our stupidity. Since we intended to use her own statements to undermine her credibility, my lawyers were perplexed by Frey"s exuberance. I wondered nervously what guerrilla a.s.sault our opposition had planned.
Mike Perlstein of the Times-Picayune Times-Picayune and Laura Sullivan of National Public Radio both noted in their reporting that the courtroom was divided along racial lines (the Lake Charles press didn"t), with white people sitting behind the prosecution and mostly black spectators sitting on the defense team"s side of the aisle. In opening arguments, Bryant painted me as a calculating, cold-blooded murderer who ruthlessly turned on three people I knew by name, people who were my personal friends. It was the same sensational portrait Frank Salter had painted in my three previous trials. Bryant told the jury that before I entered the bank I had decided to kill the employees because they could identify me. He said I took them to a deserted spot ten miles outside town where I "lined them up and shot them." He said I kicked Mrs. McCain like a rag doll as she feigned death and physically fought with Mrs. Ferguson, yanking her to her feet, before shooting her twice. He would prove to them, he vowed, that "Julia Ferguson, who was already shot, begged-begged-for her life," saying, "Think about my poor old daddy," before I stabbed her and slashed her throat. Turning dramatically to point at me, he said, "That man committed the murder of Julia Ferguson." and Laura Sullivan of National Public Radio both noted in their reporting that the courtroom was divided along racial lines (the Lake Charles press didn"t), with white people sitting behind the prosecution and mostly black spectators sitting on the defense team"s side of the aisle. In opening arguments, Bryant painted me as a calculating, cold-blooded murderer who ruthlessly turned on three people I knew by name, people who were my personal friends. It was the same sensational portrait Frank Salter had painted in my three previous trials. Bryant told the jury that before I entered the bank I had decided to kill the employees because they could identify me. He said I took them to a deserted spot ten miles outside town where I "lined them up and shot them." He said I kicked Mrs. McCain like a rag doll as she feigned death and physically fought with Mrs. Ferguson, yanking her to her feet, before shooting her twice. He would prove to them, he vowed, that "Julia Ferguson, who was already shot, begged-begged-for her life," saying, "Think about my poor old daddy," before I stabbed her and slashed her throat. Turning dramatically to point at me, he said, "That man committed the murder of Julia Ferguson."
George made the opening statement for our side. He told the jury that they would not have to decide whether I killed Mrs. Ferguson, because I did. The question they would have to answer was whether it was the cold-blooded murder described by Bryant, or manslaughter, defined under Louisiana law as the exact same crime as murder but committed in the heat of pa.s.sion.
George told the four blacks and eight whites who would decide whether I would live free or die in prison that the ill-conceived and spur-of-the-moment bank robbery spun out of control almost before it began when a phone call came that startled everyone and I realized I wouldn"t be able to just walk out of the bank as I had planned because police were on the way. He told them I put the employees in a car with the intention of dropping them off out in the country, where it would take them an hour or two to walk back to town, and that I panicked when the bank employees jumped from the car, began to flee, and wouldn"t stop when I told them to stop or I"d shoot.
"As scared as he was," George said, "he shot,...these were the acts of an impulsive, confused teenager. He was so confused he started to head right back into town." He told jurors that in order to understand what happened that night, and what subsequently led to evidence and testimony that was not true, they had to understand the racial atmosphere of Louisiana in 1961, an atmosphere in which the community response to an interracial crime was a white mob that waited at the jail for the black defendant. "We are not suggesting in any way that what Wilbert Rideau did that night could be excused by the racial inequities of that time." But, he told them, in order to understand how authorities investigated and prosecuted the crime, including holding me in isolation with no attorney for two weeks, "it"s going to be important for you to consider the mores and customs of the time."
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 The New York Times put it, "as though announcing an understudy." The female parts were played by a local out-of-work actress. 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 a.s.sessing 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 p.a.w.nshop 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 Cafe, he told Julian that since the cafe was located near the shopping center where I worked, I likely could have eaten in the otherwise all-white cafe 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 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 Life, 20/20, The Dallas Morning News, and the a.s.sociated 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 a.s.sume 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 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." 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 skysc.r.a.per 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-cla.s.s citizen. I talked about my parents" divorce, about dropping out of school, our poverty, and collecting discarded c.o.ke 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 hara.s.sment 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 p.a.w.nshop and saw it in a display case. Even the p.a.w.nshop 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 what to do, I said. 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 those 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 h.e.l.l. 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.
Julian had me on the stand all afternoon, and I was exhausted by the time court adjourned for the day and I was taken back to jail. Meanwhile, Bryant bragged to reporters that he was eager to get at me on cross-examination.
"I"m looking forward to it because he"s lying," he said. "But he"s had forty-three years to practice. He should be pretty good at it by now."
When court resumed the next morning, Bryant opened his cross-examination with heavy sarcasm: "I"ve been listening to your story and I almost feel I should apologize to you. Obviously, you"ve been wronged all these years."
It was clear he wanted me to blame society or someone else for my actions. I had never done that, and I wasn"t going to start now.
Bryant pointed to the differences in my version of the crime and the 1970 trial testimony of the eyewitnesses, particularly their account of being lined up on the side of the road and shot, and my account that I shot at them in panic as they ran.
"Either Dora McCain and Jay Hickman are lying, or you are. Which is it?" he demanded.
"I don"t want to call anybody a liar," I said. I suggested it was fair to say our versions were different.
Bryant came back at me again and again, trying to force me to call the state"s witnesses liars. He became increasingly frustrated the more I refused to do so. He cited my remark on the 1981 taped interview in which I said I hated white people in 1961. I"d already explained this remark under Julian"s direct examination as the kind of free-floating anger a person feels toward a group or ent.i.ty that oppresses him-the way some people hate the IRS, for example. In 1961 Louisiana, this kind of "hatred" was a common feeling among blacks.
Bryant whirled dramatically from me to face the jury: "Actually, you were one of the earliest perpetrators of a hate crime, were you not?"
It was a clumsy attempt to turn the underlying racial climate of the Jim Crow South on its head. I wanted to point out that the lynch mobs, the Night Riders, the Ku Klux Klan, and other groups that organized after the Civil War specifically to terrorize and kill blacks who didn"t "know their place" were the earliest perpetrators of hate crimes in America, or at least right behind the thugs and thieves who raped and murdered their way through the Native American population. But the witness stand was not the place to correct Bryant"s view of history, so I simply repeated my earlier statement: "It wasn"t hate, it was anger."
The district attorney wanted to debate me about whether my crime was murder or manslaughter, grilling me about what I thought the difference was between the two. I didn"t know what his point was, but I was amazed that the judge permitted him to keep badgering me on this point. I wanted to say that, as district attorney, he ought to know that these crimes were defined by statute and that what I thought was immaterial. But I didn"t want to sound argumentative, so I said, "Murder is premeditated, something thought out."
As I continued to refuse to argue with him, Bryant began to flush. Referring to both the ambulance driver"s testimony and Mrs. McCain"s remarks to the British tabloid, he flung one of the autopsy photos at me and demanded I "explain how her head was nearly decapitated."
At that moment I was grateful that Linda had brought the autopsy photos into the jail and made me look at them as we were preparing for trial. I didn"t want to see them, but she insisted. The sight of what I had done, the life I had taken, unnerved me and made me want to retch. I turned away, but she was not to be deterred. She had had all the photos in the evidence vault rephotographed so she could blow them up digitally and scrutinize them. She wanted to point out certain things to me, certain things in them. I told her I couldn"t bear to look at them.
"You can look at them here, or you can let Rick Bryant shove them in your face in front of the jury," she said. I took her advice. Now, as Bryant shoved them in my face, I was able to keep my composure and respond to him about the throat slashing, which had become part of the myth surrounding my crime, thanks to a succession of Calcasieu Parish prosecutors and the local media.
When I said to him, "Mr. Bryant, you and I both know that didn"t happen," I thought the vein standing out in his neck would burst. "Her head was not nearly decapitated. I"ve seen the photos. That"s another exaggeration."
He asked me why I had gone after Mrs. Ferguson when I saw her trying to rise.
"It all happened so fast. I was scared," I told him. "You"re asking me to rationalize what I did as a nineteen-year-old. There was no rhyme or reason for what I did. It was uncalled-for. But I was scared to death."
He wanted to prove I was lying when I said I did not call the two female bank tellers by their first names and, in fact, did not even know their names in 1961, contrary to the "confession" written up by the FBI agent. He went over my duties at the fabric shop, including the fact that for a couple of months before the crime I took the shop"s daily deposit to the bank. Then he produced another of the evidence photos, which showed a placard on top of the ledge in front of the tellers" stations, and asked how I could fail to know their names, since each teller"s name was clearly displayed on one of these nameplates. I said truthfully that I did not recall ever seeing their names, but my answer didn"t sound convincing even to me. What would the jury think?
Bryant accused me of never having expressed remorse for my actions. What this had to do with the question of my guilt, I don"t know. In criminal justice circles, taking responsibility for your actions and expressing remorse are considered primary evidence of rehabilitation. Although I had publicly expressed remorse in a number of media interviews, we didn"t have them at hand because of the judge"s order prohibiting any mention of rehabilitation and confining us to the facts of the crime.
I said that I had written a letter of apology to the victims a quarter century earlier. At my mention of this, the relatives of all three in the audience gasped audibly and shook their heads. I explained that because I didn"t think they would want to open their mailboxes one day and find a letter from me, I gave the letter to Ginger Berrigan, who was my lawyer at the time. It was my understanding that she sent it to the original district attorney, Frank Salter-who, though out of office, had continued to represent the victims of this case in his private practice-for him to pa.s.s along to them. She also gave a copy to Reverend James Stovall, who was Mrs. McCain"s minister at the time of the crime and who tried to mediate with her on my behalf.
"I guess Frank Salter never gave it to them, because they say I never expressed any remorse," I said.
Bryant sarcastically noted that those who could corroborate my story-Frank Salter and Reverend Stovall-were conveniently dead.
I realized that, as with the nameplates, it was again my word against Bryant"s. I felt my heart beat faster. No one needed to tell me who had more credibility, a convict or a district attorney. I shut my eyes for an instant. Your call, G.o.d Your call, G.o.d.
I opened my eyes and through the windows at the back of the courtroom, I saw Ginger Berrigan-now Chief Federal Judge Berrigan of the Eastern District of New Orleans-in the foyer, waving at me. Here was Johnnie Cochran"s miracle. She was the one person in the world who could corroborate my testimony. Afraid she would leave the courthouse before I could let Julian and George know she was there, I tried jerking my head slightly and shifting my eyes toward the windows in the hope of alerting my legal team to her presence, but I was afraid to do too much for fear the jury would think I was acting weirdly.
I shouldn"t have worried. Ginger and a colleague were in Lake Charles to talk to the female federal judge there (ironically, Patricia Minaldi) about gender issues in the judiciary, and she decided to drop in on my trial.
After Bryant was done with me, there was a short recess. Then Julian put Judge Berrigan on the stand and she confirmed my decades-old letter of apology to the victims. Bryant slumped down in his seat, his swagger gone. He declined the opportunity for cross-examination.
In quick succession, George called former Angola warden John Whitley, former a.s.sistant warden Dwayne McFatter, and corrections officer Sherman Bell as witnesses. After long bench conferences in which my lawyers were again warned not to mention rehabilitation, each testified that he had known me for decades and that I had a reputation for truthfulness at the prison. Since it was my truthfulness while testifying that was at stake, we could call "character witnesses" only to establish that single point.
Eventually, retired Louisiana Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Miriam Waltzer took the stand and testified that she"d known me since 1982 and that I had a reputation for truthfulness among her colleagues on the bench as well as educators, church people, law students, sociologists, law professors, and lawyers. "All the prestigious people in New Orleans know Wilbert to be an honest person," she said. Asked if she knew me in a setting outside of prison, she replied that she came to know me through a program she was involved with to help young first offenders change their lives. Bryant declined to cross-examine her.
I wondered what the jurors thought of all the bench conferences that were taking place. We"d call a witness, Bryant would ask for a bench conference, and the lawyers from both sides would cl.u.s.ter around the judge for as long as half an hour, arguing, after which a witness testified for perhaps three or five minutes. I thought that if I were a member of the jury, it would be clear to me that the prosecutor was trying to keep information from me.
Having established for the jury that I was a truthful and honest person, our next task was to begin showing how the state"s case against me had been ratcheted up beginning forty years ago and continuing to the present. We began with the most gruesome element of the case, the mythical near decapitation.
George called Dr. Werner Spitz to the stand. One of the foremost forensic pathologists in the country, he served on the House Committee on a.s.sa.s.sinations investigating the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and had testified against O. J. Simpson in his murder trial. He testified, first, that the coroner in 1961, Harry Snatic, failed to do his job in several important ways: He didn"t visit the crime scene or examine the body there to form an independent opinion, which could differ from that of the police; he didn"t examine the victim"s clothing, which could carry trace evidence such as gunpowder and show weapons" entrance and exit points; most important, he didn"t do a complete external exam of the surface of the body before beginning the autopsy, which he conducted with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He didn"t take photos of the body or of the wounds. He stuck his finger in the wounds, which altered the evidence. He never explored the path of the bullet and never photographed the bullet he retrieved. He made an a.s.sumption that there were two bullets but never looked for the second one. Dr. Spitz concluded from his own examination that there was only one bullet and that Dr. Snatic mistook the bullet"s exit point for a second entry point.
Using the coroner"s autopsy report and his testimony from 1970 as well as two photos of the victim taken by a sheriff"s deputy-one in the emergency room and one while the autopsy was in progress-Dr. Spitz said he believed the wound to Mrs. Ferguson"s neck was a tracheotomy performed in the emergency room. He noted that the incision was only one inch long and ran parallel to the elastic fibers in the neck, typical of incisions made by surgeons. The wound, he said, was superficial, made by an object with two sharp sides, such as a scalpel, rather than a knife, which has one blunt side and one sharp side. Moreover, he said that if the neck wound were a stab wound, there would have been blood in both the stomach and the lungs, neither of which was reported by the coroner in his autopsy report. Dr. Spitz pointed to the photo of Mrs. Ferguson in the emergency room and noted that one side of her mouth was open and rounded, which indicated to him that a breathing tube had been inserted in an effort to save her.
Bryant began his cross-examination by suggesting that today"s technology wasn"t available to the coroner in 1961, but Dr. Spitz said the basic procedures for conducting an autopsy were in place by the mid-1950s: Examine the whole body first, examine the clothing, photograph everything as evidence, don"t stick your finger in the wounds. While today"s methods and labs are more refined, he said, even the 1961 standards were adequate to preserve an objective record. Bryant asked how long it would have taken Mrs. Ferguson to die from the wound in her chest. Dr. Spitz said it would have taken at least twenty minutes.
When Bryant realized that Dr. Spitz had used numerous blowups of the autopsy photos that we had reshot and digitized, he stopped the proceedings and ordered his staff to obtain a huge screen so he could show the photos more graphically to the jury to shock and repulse them.
Bryant was making our case for us. The jurors were completely enthralled by what Dr. Spitz was telling them, and I saw at least two mouths drop open in stunned disbelief when they saw that the "decapitation" was a one-inch incision.
Dr. Spitz was on the stand most of the morning. We had just enough time before the lunch break to start making our argument about the role race and race relations in the Jim Crow South played in the way my case was handled.
George called Weldon Rougeau to the stand. A few months earlier he"d been on the front page of the Lake Charles newspaper as a homegrown boy who"d made good. He was now a settled pillar of the Washington, D.C., community, where he practiced in a huge law firm. He looked for all the world like a banker: tall, erect, distinguished, dignified. He testified that the Lake Charles he knew in the 1960s was rigidly segregated: "We were not allowed to talk about the schools being all black, and the teachers were prohibited from discussing desegregation in the cla.s.sroom." He played in a rock-and-roll band at both white clubs and black, and told how at the white clubs he had to come in through the back door and couldn"t mingle with the patrons. In high school, he worked at a car wash in south Lake Charles and testified that he never would have referred to white customers by their first name. When George asked him why, he replied, "We were taught to respect our elders, black or white, and to say "Yes, ma"am," and "No, sir."" He noted that while he could shop in Woolworth"s, he could not have eaten at the lunch counter there because of his color. He had no white friends and was called "boy" or sometimes "n.i.g.g.e.r" by whites. Like so many African Americans of that era, he was deeply bitter as a youngster about a world in which blacks were raised "not expecting to be respected but were expected to respect whites." He testified that it was this bitterness that drove him to become active in civil rights.
Weldon was an effective counter to the white FBI agent who claimed that back then a black teenager might call white grown-ups by their first names. I thought we were doing okay. Linda ate lunch with me and said the defense team felt good about how the morning went.
After lunch, Ron put my mother on the stand, where she "offered a narrative that harkened back to the Old South," according to one reporter. Her soft voice barely audible, she told how three white deputies came to our house the night of the crime and woke her by pounding on both the front and back doors. Hustled into the night, she was forced to leave her other three children, one only three months old, asleep and unattended. When they reached the jail, she said, deputies led her into the building through a mob of about two hundred white men, some of whom were saying things like "Hang that n.i.g.g.e.r" and "Shoot him." She said the deputies put her on a wooden bench in a corridor where a large number of men both in uniform and in street clothes were drinking, cursing, pushing each other, and saying they were "gonna get that n.i.g.g.e.r." Although she asked to see me, she was left sitting on the bench, afraid, with no explanation of why she was there or where I was. It was nearly 3:00 a.m. before deputies took her back to our house. She found out what happened the next day from a neighbor. She testified that in the days that followed, whites in cars would come and sit in front of our house next to the cemetery and sometimes make loud and rude remarks. She told how a white man came to our house and asked my terrified younger brother through the screen door whether he didn"t agree that something should be done about me. She testified about phone calls she received, one from a woman who said: "If he doesn"t get electrocuted, he"ll get the rope."
Ron introduced a photo published by the local press in 1961 showing her sitting on the bench at the jail the night of the crime. Nonetheless, Bryant succeeded in confusing the frail eighty-one-year-old by repeatedly asking her what she wore that night and if the clothing in the photo matched her description.
"You love your son, and you"d do anything to help him, wouldn"t you?" he asked, more accusation than question. In trying to discredit her testimony about the mob, Bryant disrespected her, badgered her, and confused her. I had always protected my mother from public attention, so this. .h.i.t me hard.
Ron called Jackie Lewis to the stand. She had been fourteen in 1961, when her mother worked five to midnight as a maid in the Pioneer Building across the street from the courthouse. Jackie said her father became upset after he heard the bulletins on TV about the robbery and Mrs. Ferguson"s death, and about my ident.i.ty. He got his gun and told Jackie and her sister to stay in the back of the house, away from the windows. After her father received a call from her mom, she said, he "had a look on his face I never saw before." He put the girls in his truck and went down Broad Street, the main thoroughfare leading downtown and the street that severed black from white in Lake Charles. A block away from the courthouse and jail, they saw a mob of at least a hundred white men, Jackie said, walking around and shouting.
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 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." 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.