What it Takes to Be Famous

Fifty years ago, 19-year-old Wilbert Rideau robbed a bank and took three hostages to make good his escape. When they tried to flee from the moving car in the bayou he shot and wounded them, and hunted down one of the women, then stabbed her to death. He was caught, confessed, and was convicted in the robbery/murder and got the death sentence. But when Louisiana abolished the death penalty his sentence was commuted to life in prison.

Then he read a lot of books, grew up, became a writer, prison reformer, journalist, media celebrity, and eventually, a free man.

Now married, and living in a leafy suburban neighborhood, Rideau has an autobiography coming out this month, In the Place of Justice, and when he was interviewed on CBS' Sunday Morning, he admitted that he hoped this book would jump start his return to life as an important man, a status he enjoyed inside prison for many decades.

Life hasn't really been hard for Rideau: Except for the first few years when he was waiting on death row for the axe to fall, life for him became one of growth and purpose: without the distractions of being a breadwinning member of society, he spent hours reading and developed his writing skills, later championing the rights of prisoners and shining a light on abuses. A fourth trial six years ago redefined his crime as 'manslaughter' and he was released with time served (44 years). He believes his good works in prison have redeemed him, supported by the world he was absorbed into as a media darling, inspirational speaker, man in makeup and coifed hair. His post-prison wife adores him, and says he's the best human being she's ever known in this whole entire world. The man deserves to be happy.

In fact, Rideau is a modern day vampire. For 50 years he has been feeding off the dark star of a day gone wrong, a series of decisions that found him straddling a woman crawling for her life, driving a knife into her body, again and again until she died, alone, in terror, her last moment a bogeyman come calling: steel puncturing her organs, peeing and vomiting, taking her hopes, dreams, loves, a future all gone. In that moment the bright nebula of her life energy transferred to him, he fed from it and still continues to do so a half-century later.

Who was the woman who died that day? In Rideau's lengthy biography in Wikipedia, the name and the history of the bank teller he stabbed to death is never mentioned. She was absorbed unblinkingly into her murderer's story, disappearing into his image, a mere shadow figure, having served her purpose to deliver Rideau into his immortality. As the editor of The Angolite, a high profile prison newspaper, he won many journalistic awards, and then, as the memory of his crime receded beneath the accolades, the woman he murdered became no more.

The irony of being an author and knowing my novel will struggle for shelf space in the same bookstores as his, knowing that his will be displayed in the window, on the table by the door, and be talked about in interviews, reviewed by the New York Times, doesn't escape the intense scrutiny all competitors endure. Our lives have intersected, along with the lives of hundreds of other writers who will bring their work to market this year.

I cannot compete with Rideau in the bookstore. He is symptomatic of our diminished, fame-focused, peeping Tom obsessions, no different than the daily TMZ fodder, except that instead of a vapid iconic presence in the anxiety-ridden world of entertainment, we seem to have come to a place where we can forgive a human being pretty much anything if they become fascinating enough to garner our interest and the mantle of idolatry that comes with it. What is next? There seems to be no bottom.

Rideau is touted as "the most rehabilitated criminal in the prison system" and so we are to forgive him for snuffing out the life and timeless thread of humanity that was connected to the moaning woman who gave up the ghost in the dirt, husband, children, left keening into the night and reliving her terror, collecting the stones of fear and loss into their souls. The painful ripples of his act will go on infinitely in lives he will never take responsibility for; He is too absorbed in his own rising star: he walks the dog in a bucolic landscape, and makes love to a woman who admires him above all others.

While I am opposed to the death penalty due to false convictions, my opinion

on murder is this: Take a life, give a life. No parole. I listened with narrowing eyes to his guileless admission that he misses being a "big shot" in prison. I certainly will not buy his book so he can take his pound of redemption in cold hard cash. And if I do see his books in the bookstore, I will practice a random act of kindness, my own brand of justice, and hide them wherever I can.

I do it for you, Julia Ferguson. And the ones you left behind.