Having robbed a bank in the small town of Lake Charles he took three bank employees hostage and drove them to a remote bayou before shooting them. The bank manager was hit in the arm but managed to flee, another woman was shot in the neck but lay still feigning death. Rideau stabbed the third, Julia Ferguson, in the heart and then slit her throat.Rideau has never denied killing Ms Ferguson but his defence lawyers argue his behaviour was the act of a rash teenager caught up in a robbery that had gone wrong rather than those of the reformed adult he is now. Rideau told The Independent on Sunday in a recent interview: “You are talking about an area that harbours a good deal of prejudice, where all the players in the judicial system, the judges and everyone else, they all know the prosecution witness and what not and are all friends. How many times must Wilbert Rideau be charged with the same crime? The 62-year-old model prisoner went on trial this week for the fourth time over the killing of a young woman more than 40 years ago.

That conflict drives the film, and, in real life, inspired acts of bravery from those who loved him.. The White House has made its sartorial choices for next week’s inauguration ceremony. Barbara’s V-cut neckline is apparently cut so low that the designer felt compelled to reassure gentle souls that there will be “no wardrobe malfunctions for the first family”.. It was judged best foreign film in the critic’s choice at Los Angeles on Monday.It also took best foreign film award at September’s Venice film festival and is tipped for awards at the Golden Globes and the Oscars. The title Mar Adentro is from one of many love poems Sampedro tapped out with a stick in his mouth.Ms Maneiro was charged with assisting a suicide in 1998, but released for lack of proof.

Sampedro, unable to die without help, ingeniously divided the necessary tasks among friends to protect them from Spain’s anti-euthanasia laws. She has spoken out now “to stop people speculating who did it”, she said on the show. “He told me something important; that when he had drunk the cyanide, I should not kiss him on the lips.”Ms Maneiro said she stayed behind the video camera, murmuring endearments as the poison took effect, staying with the plan Sampedro had devised.”I didn’t want him to go in silence. I called him ‘darling’ and things like that.” He was expected to slip into unconsciousness, but his final moments, captured on video and recreated in the emotional climax of Amenabar’s film, were less pleasant. “I had to go to the bathroom, and I felt bad afterwards,” Ms Maneiro said.Her revelations did not surprise Manuela Sampedro, the dead man’s sister-in-law who nursed him in their cottage in Galicia for 30 years before he moved to the flat where he died. But Sampedro’s quest for death, his passionate yearnings poured into essays and poems, revealed his frustrated desire to be not just a brain but a body too.”Ramon’s contradiction is that someone so vital, who engages immediately with everyone, seeks his own death,” Amenabar said. Bardem transmits these traits brilliantly, demonstrating Sam-pedro’s conviction that love springs not from the body but from the brain.

But she wasn’t the only woman who fell in love with him.”Sampedro, despite his infirmity, was flirtatious and affectionate, even charismatic. “We don’t reproach her or think she should be punished, because she did what Ramon asked. I put the straw in the glass and I put it where he could sip it I was his hands. I did what he asked.”Ramon Sampedro’s fight to end a life he considered meaningless captured the sympathy of a nation and provided the plot for Alejandro Amenabar’s hit film Mar Adentro with the Spanish heartthrob, Javier Bardem.

The person who supplied him with the lethal cyanide cocktail remained anonymous to avoid prosecution. The story caused an impassioned debate in Spain about euthanasia, and inspired an award-winning movie, The Sea Inside, strongly tipped for an Oscar.
This week, Sampedro’s accomplice revealed her identity. Protected by the statute of limitations, Sampedro’s female companion in his final months confessed that she mixed the poison draught that killed him, and set the video that recorded his dying moments.”I did it for love,” Ramona Maneiro told a television chatshow on Monday “I measured the cyanide I put it in the water. Ramon Sampedro, a sailor paralysed in a diving accident as a young man, ended his life seven years ago, after being bedridden for 30 years. She is leaving after 41 years at the Uffizi because authorities refused her request to postpone her retirement until the age of 70.. The mystery has intrigued Spain for years. There are models of Leonardo’s bicycle, his flying machine and his “car”, driven by spiral springs contained within drums beneath the wagon, similar to a wind-up toy.Academics believe the “car” was created for the entertainment of nobles at a Renaissance celebration, possibly for use as a kind of mobile stand for a theatrical prop.Excitement over the Leonardo discoveries was marred by an announcement from the director of the Uffizi, Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, that she was leaving Italy to work in the United States and at the Hermitage gallery in Russia.