Convicted murderer, sentenced to life in prison, paroled after 29 years

Around 5:30 p.m. on Sept. 10, 1993, Toussaint Ridgeway murdered his friend Roy Lee Whitfield.

Ridgeway burned Whitfield’s body in a dog-fighting arena, dumping the ashes in a creek near the old dairy on Louisiana Tech University’s farm campus.

After the murder, Ridgeway went to another friend’s house, showered, junked his blood-spattered clothes, and borrowed clean ones.

Then he took Whitfield’s bullet-ridden, bloody car to a parking lot on the Southern University campus in Shreveport and left it there.

Later, Ridgeway attempted to destroy the handgun he borrowed to kill Whitfield, tossing the smashed pieces in the pond at what’s now Mayfield Park in southeast Ruston.

On Jan. 28, 1995, a district court jury in Lincoln Parish convicted Ridgeway of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison without benefit of parole, probation, or suspension of sentence.

But on July 22 of this year, Toussaint Ridgeway, 54, walked out of prison on parole, free to live in society so long as he obeys the conditions of his release.

His freedom, albeit conditional, came over the objections of 3rd Judicial District Attorney John Belton’s office, the Lincoln Parish Sheriff’s Office, and Whitfield’s family.

Video of the Louisiana Board of Pardons’ April 24, 2023, hearing on Ridgeway’s request for commutation of sentence shows the board was apparently swayed by corrections officials’ characterization of Ridgeway as “a pleasure to be around,” his minimal writeups while in the prison — the last one was in 1998 — and his letters of support garnered over the years, including one from Gov. John Bel Edwards.

Ridgeway spent the last 15 years of his incarceration assigned to the Governor’s Mansion. Since 2012, he managed the mansion kitchen, according to a letter written by Edwards in 2018.

The governor’s press office did not respond to a request for additional information.

Locals shocked

Former 3rd District judicial and law enforcement officers involved in the case expressed shock at the turn of events.

“How did that happen?” asked retired Lincoln Parish Sheriff’s Deputy Joey Davidson.

Davidson was with forensic investigators as they sifted through the dirt at the dog-fighting pit and eventually found two small, charred fragments of human bone that helped confirm what happened to Whitfield.

None of the former officials were contacted by the pardon board prior to Ridgeway’s successful commutation hearing. While that’s not required, it’s sometimes done as courtesy, several of the officials said.

Ridgeway is reportedly living in the East Jefferson Parish parole district.

“He’s a different person from the man who entered prison (29) years ago,” Ridgeway’s attorney, Emily Lubin, with the Southern Poverty Law Center, said in a press release issued in October.

That’s when Ridgeway’s parole became public, though the release doesn’t clearly say that, nor does it detail the process.

Lubin said Ridgeway has reconnected with his faith and is fully rehabilitated. She claims he isn’t a threat to society.

Belton’s office disagrees.

“Thirty years is not enough time to serve for these heinous acts,” 1st Assistant DA Laurie James wrote in a two-page letter opposing Ridgeway’s parole. “To grant parole would be an insult to the life of Mr. Roy Whitfield and cause a danger to our community.”

The story begins

Toussaint Kataz Ridgeway grew up in California. His parents still live there.

Court records filed in Lincoln Parish show he had a both a juvenile and adult criminal record in California.

As a juvenile he was charged with auto theft for which he received probation. As an adult, he was detained for taking a vehicle for “temporary use,” and several drug charges.

One of the drug charges was dismissed. In 1991, he received three years’ probation for cocaine possession.

In his sentence commutation hearing, Ridgeway admitted he had been involved in drug sales but denied use.

Ridgeway came to Louisiana because his brother was a student at Grambling State University.

Toussaint Ridgeway enrolled, too. He was a pre- veterinary science major who maintained a “C” average. Ridgeway had three years of college behind him when he killed Whitfield.

“I was an immature 24-year-old trying to go to college,” Ridgeway said during his hearing. “I had a young daughter. I was trying to take care of her and was kind of all over the place.”

He said he traveled back and forth between Louisiana and California.

Ridgeway lived on Cheatwood Road, east of Ruston, in a house with white vinyl siding and wrought-iron fence post on the porch.

He told the pardon board he and Whitfield knew each other in California, and Whitfield wanted him to get drugs for him — something Ridgeway had done before.

Whitfield reportedly had as much as $8,000 on him, money that Ridgeway wanted.

“I just planned to take the money from him and leave him in limbo,” Ridgeway told the pardon board. “ We met up and ended up getting into a verbal altercation which turned into a physical altercation, and I ended up shooting him and killing him.”

The shooting

The killing started in Ridgeway’s driveway on a Friday night.

Whitfield was sitting in the driver’s seat of his rented black Ford Probe. He had driven to Lincoln Parish from Dallas, via a stop to visit a girlfriend in Stamps, Arkansas.

Ridgeway, hiding a gun behind his back, walked up to Whitfield’s car and started shooting. Whitfield jumped out the passenger window to escape, but Ridgeway kept shooting at Whitfield as tried to run away.

Whitfield fell about 100 feet from the vehicle. He was still alive and tried to fight.

Ridgeway picked him up and put him in the bed of his 1991 black Silverado pickup truck.

In a covertly recorded conversation, Ridgeway admitted to Marcus Young, the man who helped the district attorney’s office break the case, that Whitfield was still alive and apparently moving around under a tarp Ridgeway had thrown over the wounded man.

That’s when several former law enforcement sources say they remember Ridgeway basically killed Whitfield again by stabbing him to make sure he was dead.

A handwritten letter from Whitfield’s wife that’s part of the case file alleges Ridgeway cut a ring from Whitfield’s finger and removed parts of his body out of concern those parts wouldn’t burn.

Whitfield’s journey

According to the case file, Whitfield’s mother told investigators her son left California going to Dallas and from there was going to Arkansas, where his family apparently had property.

On the way back to Dallas, he planned to go through Ruston to visit an unidentified friend.

Though Whitfield was married and had three children, he and his wife weren’t living together. Whitfield worked as a semi-skilled laborer at the Port of Oakland, the case file says.

He had two guns shipped to Dallas, one of which was subsequently shipped to Stamps, Arkansas.

Investigators later discovered that on the day Whitfield died, Ridgeway had telephoned a number in Stamps.

The car and the body

Around 10 p.m., roughly four-and-a-half hours after Whitfield was shot, Ridgeway drove to his friend Marcus Young’s apartment. The two men had five pit bulldogs that they kept at Young’s grandmother’s property just across the Lincoln-Jackson Parish line in Jackson Parish.

Whitfield’s body, by now “cold and stiff,” according to trial testimony, was still in the back of Ridgeway’s truck, partially covered by the tarp. Whitfield had a visible bullet wound to his lower chest.

Young testified that Ridgeway was “ scared, and he was all bloody” when he arrived at Young’s apartment.

Ridgeway showered at Young’s apartment and put on fresh, borrowed clothes.

Then the two men took Whitfield’s body to Young’s grandmother’s property and dumped it. That was around 10: 30 p.m.

Trial testimony shows Young then went and picked up his cousins at the Ruston High School dance, took them home, then helped Ridgeway take Whitfield’s car to a parking lot on the Southern University campus in Shreveport, where they left it about 1 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 11.

Ridgeway drove Whitfield’s still bloodied car; Young followed in Ridgeway’s pickup.

Before they left the parking lot, Ridgeway took a gun, a leather jacket, a couple of bags and sweatsuits out of the car. He also took, either from the car or Whitfield’s body, a diamond ring and $1,000 in cash.

It was around 2 a.m. when Ridgeway and Young got back to Lincoln Parish.

Ridgewaynextsmashed the murder weapon — a 9 mm pistol he’d borrowed from Young — and tossed the pieces in the pond at what’s now Mayfield Park in Ruston. A Ruston Fire Department diver later recovered the gun’s clip.

Southern University police found Whitfield’s abandoned car on Sept. 14, four days after the murder, but they made no arrests.

At that point there was nothing to tie Ridgeway to any crime, nor was there a body.

A foul odor

Later that Saturday morning that Ridgeway and Young ditched the car, they returned to where they had dumped Whitfield’s body on Hwy. 3061 in Jackson Parish.

Court documents say they divided Whitfield’s clothing, money, and jewelry between them.

Over a period of the next few days, Ridgeway burned Whitfield’s body amid brush and tree limbs. At trial, one witness testified to a foul odor in the vicinity.

“After realizing what I had done, I tried to cover up what happened by cleaning up the crime scene and setting his body afire,” Ridgeway recalled for the pardon board.

There was a popular barbeque restaurant nearby; but that morning the southerly wind caught a nauseous smell that reportedly sickened some customers.

Former Louisiana Supreme Court Associate Justice and 3rd District Judge Joe Bleich was the trial judge. He writes about the Ridgeway case in the manuscript of a forthcoming book about his career.

“The smell was awful,” he wrote. “Science indicates that it is not ‘easy’ to completely burn a human body. ...There was a direct effort to conceal the most critical evidence — the identity of the victim.”

After the body was burned, Ridgeway and Young raked up whatever remains there may have been among the ashes and tossed them in a creek about four miles from the dog pen.

Then they chained a dog to a stake in the pen where the burning had taken place, apparently in hopes the dog would dig up and chew up any remaining bones.

Former District Attorney Bob Levy prosecuted the case.

“At the time I was dismayed because somebody could be so callous,” he said.

“It was shocking, the brutality of what they did,” former LPSO Deputy and current Ruston Police Chief Steve Rogers said.

Rogers was one of the deputies who investigated the case.

James, in her letter from Belton’s office objecting to leniency for Ridgeway, said Ridgeway “cold-heartedly planned to kill Whitfield and calmly achieved his goal.”

The big break

In the days following the murder, law enforcement received calls stemming mostly from the action of the dog staked in the arena. That led to an investigation.

Forensic experts from the regional crime lab gridded off an area with string and started digging.

“I spent all day with the crime lab shifting through dirt, looking for bones,” Davidson said.

Investigators turned up five snaps from a piece of clothing and what proved to be 28 human bone fragments. Three of the fragments had enough marrow remaining to test for DNA.

It matched Whitfield’s.

But there wasn’t a suspect.

Eight months after Whitfield’s death, Marcus Young walked in the sheriff’s office at 12:01 a.m. on May 18, 1994. Young would become the key witness at Ridgeway’s trial.

The transcript from a preliminary investigation prior to the trial shows Young said he came forward, “because it had been worrying me.”

Young volunteered to be wired with a body microphone and try to get Ridgeway to talk about the murder. The two men met at Young’s mother’s house later in the day on May 18 and talked outside for about 40 minutes. LPSO deputies were watching from the road.

Ridgeway admitted to shooting Whitfield, robbing him, and disposing of his body.

Earlier that day, deputies had driven past Ridgeway’s house prior to executing a search warrant. They saw Ridgeway with what they thought was a metal detector.

Detectives later found the metal detector in a bedroom closet. It had been left on and apparently was resting against a coat hanger, causing the detector to emit a sound that could be heard outside the closet.

Ridgeway was reportedly using the newly purchased metal detector to sweep his yard for shell casings ejected from the murder weapon.

Toussaint Ridgeway was arrested that day and charged with first-degree murder.

Eight days later, a grand jury indicted him on a second-degree charge.

Young was never prosecuted for his involvement in concealing the evidence because prosecutors said they felt he had put his life on the line by wearing the wire.

The trial

Ridgeway’s jury trial began on Jan. 25, 1995.

“The case would be the first in front of me involving a homicide in which DNA evidence would be presented,” Bleich wrote in his manuscript. “The significant, pivotal reason was not the identity of the murderer, but the identity of the victim.”

The case was among the first in Louisiana using DNA evidence, and without the victim’s body. The lack of a body caused some observers to fear the state would be unable to prove its case against Ridgeway.

Donna Bernard was a reporter for the Ruston Leader at the time and covered the four-day trail.

“It was such an interesting case that I kept an eye on the jury’s faces,” she said. “I felt like they were very interested.”

She remembers Young as a believable witness who caught the jury’s attention.

Trial participants and trial watchers say the state was prepared.

“The jury was amazed at the testing and the mathematical precision of the evidence presented; so was I,” Bleich wrote.

He said prosecutor Bob Levy “did a phenomenal job in the presentation of the evidence.”

“The evidence produced showed beyond any reasonable doubt that the victim was the missing (Whitfield),” Bleich wrote.

It’s Levy’s closing argument that’s remembered most. He placed Whitfield’s high school picture and a saucer containing the bone fragments on a desk visible to the jury as he talked.

“They just did a fine job of organizing the facts and presenting them in a way that was very understandable,” Bernard said.

It took the jury about 15 minutes to return its unanimous verdict: guilty, second-degree murder.

Ridgeway did not testify. There were no defense witnesses.

The trial transcript reads, “closing remarks and charge to the jury not requested transcribed by the defendant.”

On May 24, 1995, Ridgeway was sentenced to life in prison without benefit of parole, probation, or suspension of sentence.

Sentence changed

In 2012, the Louisiana Legislature passed a law empowering the governor to “commute or modify a sentence of life imprisonment without benefit of parole to a lesser sentence including the possibility of parole … .”

But that can only be done with a favorable recommendation from the pardon board.

In 2016, Ridgeway appeared before the Board of Pardons; the board did not commute his sentence.

He applied for commutation again on Jan. 3, 2022.

The Southern Poverty Law Center began working with Ridgeway in March 2023. On April 24, 2023, the five-member Board of Pardons heard his case and unanimously recommended commuting Ridgeway’s life sentence to 60 years with immediate parole eligibility.

Gov. John Bel Edwards then granted clemency, commuting Ridgeway’s sentence.

Ridgeway was scheduled for a parole hearing on Oct. 17, but that didn’t happen.

“The hearing wasn’t required because he was released on what is known as ‘good time,’ credit earned during custody toward a reduction of sentence,” Emily Lubin, Ridgeway’s attorney, said.

Ridgeway told the pardon board he’d taken “a lot of church courses and classes (in prison) because I found some sort of comfort going back to my roots. I was raised in the church so I felt the most comfort in attending the classes and trying to take an honest look at what had taken place.”

He also took substance abuse, anger management and victim awareness classes and was involved in a project that sought to ensure people who died alone in prison received a proper burial.

Whitfield’s son, Courtney Sanders, opposed lessening Ridgeway’s sentence.

“I’m opposed not because my father was murdered, because the way he was murdered. This has haunted me for years and has haunted me today,” Sanders told the board.

Whitfield’s daughter objected, too. If he’s changed, let him continue to change in prison, she said through tears.

Ridgeway said he’s sorry. He wants now to either open a restaurant or get a commercial driver’s license and drive trucks.

“Taking Roy’s life should never have happened,” he said during his commutation hearing. “I’m truly sorry for my actions that led to his life being lost. … Every day I lived with what I’ve done and tried to be a better person. I’m not the same as I was almost three decades ago.”

Ridgeway will remain on parole until May 17, 2054.