The murderer who watches from his prison cell to see if he wins an Oscar

ON THE night of February 16th, 1961, a 19-year-old boy named Wilbert Rideau stood on a swampy patch of ground in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He knew the woman crouched on the road before him. Lake Charles was a small place and Willie Rideau knew all three of the bank tellers he had taken hostage and driven to this spot. He worked at a fabric shop only a few blocks from Gulf National bank, where the three tellers worked.

Julia Ferguson, the woman on the ground, also knew Willie Rideau, and she begged him, this acquaintance from the everyday life of a small town, for her life. She reminded Mr Rideau that she looked after her elderly father.

"Wilbert, think of my poor daddy. What will he do without me?"

Mr Rideau did not respond to that question. He did not even seem to ponder it. Instead, his hunting knife poised, he said: "Don't worry, this will be quick and cool."

With that, he stabbed Ms Ferguson in the heart and slit her throat. Julia Ferguson died. But the other two bank tellers in the swamp that humid evening survived. One, Dora McCain, though shot in the neck, played dead even as Mr Rideau kicked her body to be sure. The other, J.H. Hickman, stumbled through the marshes and escaped.

On March 21st, 1999, Willie Rideau will gather with his friends around a television at Angola prison in Louisiana, watching the Academy Awards in Hollywood, much like millions of other viewers around the world. But Mr Rideau will be watching with a keen interest to see if the film which he has co-directed, for which he receives that on-screen credit, will win the Oscar for which it has been nominated.

The prison warden is already wondering how to celebrate if Mr Rideau's film, The Farm, wins the award for Best Documentary Feature. It's hard to celebrate in prison, especially this one, which is among America's more infamous, but they will certainly have a party he says, with CocaColas for all the inmates.

It has been a long and eventful 38 years for Wilbert Rideau, but it will not culminate in an evening at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. A camera will not be trained on Mr Rideau to catch his reaction when the winners are announced.

Mr Rideau, who has never denied his guilt, was sentenced to death for his crimes. In 1972, the US Supreme Court abolished the death penalty and Mr Rideau's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. The Supreme Court reversed the decision a few years later, but Mr Rideau's sentence had already been commuted during that window.

Instead of meeting death, Mr Rideau has spent his life on the 18,000-acre maximum security prison known as Angola, a former plantation surrounded on three sides by the Mississippi River. He has, by all accounts, made this life of his more useful than most. He is the editor of the prison newsletter, The Angolite, a job for which he is paid 20 cents an hour.

The paper has won several prestigious journalism awards for tackling controversial subjects, such as rape in prison and hospital conditions behind bars.

But the one thing Mr Rideau wants appears to be the thing he cannot have - freedom. He bills himself as "the Most Rehabilitated Prisoner in America", but that marque has failed to move either the courts or several Louisiana governors, who have declined to free him.

Since 1975 governors have granted commutations of sentences to 458 prisoners serving life terms, including 21 first-degree murderers. Former governors promised the families of Mr Rideau's victims they would never free him as long as they objected, and they consistently did. The current governor has not commuted any prisoners' sentence in three years, and has no plans to do so, according to an aide.

Mr Rideau says it is his growing fame and accomplishments that have kept him in jail.

"You would think that in America you would reward productivity and initiative as opposed to punishing it," he told the New York Times. "Forget all that rhetoric about making amends and trying to make a contribution and all that.

"It's going to come at great cost," he says bitterly. He has never denied his guilt for his crimes.

Ted Quant, director of the Twomey Center for Peace Through Justice at Loyola University, agrees. He says 31 murderers were sent to Angola in 1962; all but Mr Rideau have been freed. Mr Rideau has become too well known. Freeing him now would gain publicity for any judge or governor, headlines that might proclaim, "Governor frees killer", the kind of headline that spells political extinction in a society giddy with the idea of justice based on retribution, not rehabilitation.

The Farm, the film which won the best documentary prize at last year's Sundance Film Festival, focuses on the lives of six prisoners at Angola, and revolves around the idea of hope and its persistence in such a hopeless place.

Mr Rideau personifies such strange optimism. He believes he will get out eventually, conceding that allegiance to such a hope is the diet of survival for life-long inmates. He is considering another film project about religion in prison, or perhaps even writing his autobiography.

Winning the Oscar, which, according to the current Hollywood rumour mill, is considered a long shot, would not really mean much. "An Oscar wouldn't alter my existence one iota," he told a newspaper. "The one thing about winning awards when you're in prison is that it keeps everything in perspective for you."

Michael Dwyer's Oscar predictions: Weekend supplement.