Q&A With McCracken Poston, Who Solved the Virginia Ridley Case
(Forensic Files, ‘Killigraphy’)
The strange and ultimately beautiful story of Virginia Ridley’s life with her oddball husband has captivated Forensic Files viewers since it first aired 25 years ago. A recent survey ranked “Killigraphy” in the top three favorites of all 400 episodes of the series.
But the narrative would have had a much different conclusion if not for McCracken Poston, the lawyer tasked with proving Alvin Ridley’s innocence in the 1997 death of the reclusive Virginia.
Alvin owned a television repair business in the town of Ringgold, Georgia. Everyone agreed that he did a great job of replacing cathode ray tubes, but few had anything else good to say about him.
He threatened people who came to the door of his house, hid in his own bushes to spy on passersby, and motored around town with a fake woman in his front seat.
Most troubling of all, he had a real wife at home who almost never appeared in public — and she cut off contact with her family members despite their attempts to reach her. When Virginia Ridley turned up dead with petechial hemorrhages at the age of 49, law enforcement concluded that Alvin had held her hostage for decades and then strangled her.
Fortunately, inside Alvin’s sloppy hovel of a house, Poston discovered evidence that Alvin and Virginia were just two unusual people who suited each other.
Virginia had hypergraphia — an affinity for constantly writing down the minutiae of everyday life.
Pieces of paper with her handwriting described a contented home life with Alvin. The topics included what she and Alvin ate for dinner and which TV shows they watched; one of the papers listed the cast of The Waltons.
At the trial, Poston argued that Virginia stayed inside the house because she wanted to — she had epilepsy and feared having seizures in front of anyone but Alvin — and that she died of natural causes.
In his 2024 book, Zenith Man: Death, Love, and Redemption in a Georgia Courtroom, Poston describes how Alvin Ridley, who died at age 82 on July 2, 2024, turned into a sympathetic character and how his own relationship with Alvin evolved into a friendship.
“Alvin was neurodivergent. That’s modern parlance for autistic,” said Poston. “I think Virginia was on the spectrum too. Alvin was her perfect partner.”
Poston, who is a former Georgia state legislator and a onetime candidate for U.S. Congress and now has a solo law office in Ringgold, indulged some of my curiosity about the case. Here are excerpts from our Zoom interview on July 22:
according to his former lawyer. Photo by Thomas England
Did you know Alvin Ridley before the murder accusations? When I was growing up, he was our TV repairman.
Did he really hide in his bushes? I wouldn’t be surprised because he didn’t trust people and wanted to see who was there. He was hiding in his own bushes in his own yard.
Sorry, but I have to ask about the blowup doll of a woman Alvin reportedly drove around in his car. It was a mannequin from the late 1950s, a chalky broken mannequin, but because of the way people in town think, it became a blowup sex doll. When Alvin was in high school, people saw him with this mannequin in the passenger seat. He used it to make a woman he was interested in jealous. The mannequin made an appearance again after someone talked about it during jury selection and it reminded Alvin it was in his basement because he never threw anything away, and he broke it out again. I just thought, this guy cannot catch a break. People are talking about things that happened decades ago.
The Forensic Files episode prompted negative reader-comments about Virginia’s relatives, the Hickeys. Were they really the enemy for repeatedly trying to reach her? I don’t blame the Hickeys. It was a very unusual situation. I would have been as aggressive trying to contact my sisters. But Virginia quoted the Bible about being married, being one, and said she wished her parents would leave her and her husband alone. She persuaded a judge and courtroom officers that she was where she wanted to be. Virginia’s cousin showed up at one of my book signings and said that Virginia told her she wanted to stay away from her parents. The Hickeys were probably responsible for getting Virginia and Alvin evicted from public housing in the 1970s.
Reports describe the Ridleys’ house as cockroach-infested. It’s hard to believe a woman would live that way by choice. What’s your take? Virginia kept a neat home. The pictures of the house were taken after she died. Alvin was the one who ate and left half-eaten food around the house. He had a vehicle that he ate in, and a rat came in it. After the trial, I was in the house very briefly when we were doing media, and the house had gotten worse with hoarder-packrat stuff.
The house turned out to be a gold mine when you noticed that Alvin had covered the walls with papers with Virginia’s handwriting — describing a happy home life. Had you heard about hypergraphia before then? No. Shortly before I put the epilepsy expert on the witness stand, he asked if there was anything else strange about Virginia. I said, yes, she wrote down everything she’d ever done. He said, I’ve heard of that. A lot of my patients have hypergraphia.
[Poston also learned that epileptic seizures sometimes cause petechial hemorrhages — enabling him to counter the prosecution’s contentions that the marks came from manual strangulation; Virginia died from having an epileptic seizure during sleep, he argued.]
Did Virginia’s hypergraphia extend to the outside world? Yes, she corresponded with elected officials. She wrote to President Richard Nixon about being evicted from public housing, because the law is under HUD. U.S. Senator David Henry Gambrell wrote her back, noting her letter to President Nixon.
How did you end up getting so close to Alvin? He felt comfortable in my law office. We began meeting for lunch regularly after the trial.
I knew he had a kidney problem and tried to get him help. When he went into the hospital, I said that they’d better keep him there for a few days. They got his kidney function up and he moved to a step-down facility, and then he allowed me to put him in another rehab-nursing home, so that Medicaid would kick in once his funds were exhausted. Then, he had a heart attack.
In the hospital, I said, did you ever think that Virginia and your parents are calling to you? He said, no, I want to stay here with you. He said he was going to live to 110. I said, you just want 30 more years of free lunches from me. I didn’t ever think he would die so soon.
The last time I saw him, he was in great distress. It looked like another coronary issue. I said, Alvin, I’m looking forward to meeting Virginia, and he said when we get up there, I’ll show you where you can fish and catch 30 fish an hour. Then he said, ‘Oh Lordy.’ I was holding his hand when died.♠
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
P.S. Read Part 1, Alvin Ridley: Hide Your Love Away
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