A Small-Town Outcast Finds Redemption
(‘Killigraphy,’ Forensic Files)
In the land of Forensic Files, when one spouse murders another, the accused is often a respected citizen (Barbara Stager, Richard Nyhuis) who community members can’t imagine being capable of such a crime — until they see the evidence.
Alvin Ridley’s case was just the opposite.
When paramedics pulled the petite body of Virginia Ridley, 49, out of his shack in Ringgold, Georgia, locals thought he had imprisoned her and then killed her.
They knew Alvin as the reclusive, hostile man who sometimes hid in his own bushes and peeped at passersby.
Batty but benign. At the time of Virginia’s death, in 1997, Alvin had shuttered his TV repair shop on Nashville Street and seemed intent on earning a living via lawsuits. Surely, he strangled Virginia to death to collect on an insurance policy or maybe just because he was a mean husband.
But after Alvin went on trial for murder, his defense team trotted out evidence that persuaded the jury and the media that he might have been a cantankerous oddball but he was no murderer.
For this week, I looked for more background information on the Ridleys and their marriage as well as an update on Alvin. So let’s get going on the recap of “Killigraphy” along with extra information from internet research.
‘Set’ for business. Alvin Eugene Ridley was an only child born on March 3, 1942 in Soddy, Tennessee to Minnie Sue and Bill Ridley, and the family later moved across the border to Georgia. The government drafted Alvin into the military, where he learned how to fix electronics. After his discharge, he moved back into his parents’ house, a small structure lying between a steel mill and railroad tracks.
Next up, Alvin worked repairing and selling TVs in his store in downtown Ringgold, the seat of Catoosa County. Sources vary as to whether Alvin’s father started the business and then passed it down to Alvin or his parents set up the shop just for their son. They owned the building.
Bill died in 1982, and it was then that Alvin started acting weird, the Atlanta Constitution reported. He would drive around in a red sports car with a plastic dummy of a woman in the passenger seat, according to the Sunday Mail. Folks started referring to him as Crazy Al.
He was not particularly adept at personal hygiene.
Fragile flower. While he was still in the military, he became pen pals with Virginia Hickey after meeting her at someone’s house circa 1964, the Sunday Mail said. So where did this mystery girl-woman come from?
Virginia Gail Hickey entered the world on April 8, 1948 in Rossville, Georgia. According to the Atlanta Constitution, she acquired epilepsy at age 9 after a head injury. With her tiny figure, blond hair, and cute facial features, she resembled a doll.
She was described as extremely shy.
Habitual no-show. At just 18 years of age, she married Alvin. In a photo of the couple celebrating her birthday with her mother, Adell, in 1966, Virginia looks like a child bride. Family members complained that Alvin bossed her around.
The Sunday Mail reported that the lovebirds originally lived in public housing but were kicked out. After that, Alvin and Virginia moved into the dilapidated house at 134 Inman Street where he grew up.
Virginia didn’t work outside the home and soon began to shun her friends and relatives, even skipping family weddings and her father’s funeral. She didn’t venture outside her and Alvin’s house. Her sister Linda Barber said that when people tried to visit, Alvin would tell them to get lost or threaten to kill them.
Rare glimpse. The Hickeys tried to reach Virginia via a newspaper ad — “Parents Seek Married Daughter” — but never got a reply.
In 1967, Virginia’s family instigated a legal action to force Alvin to “produce” her to make sure that she was alive and well. Virginia showed up to court in the flesh and explained that she liked married life with Alvin and wanted to be left alone with him.
That cemented the break between her and the other Hickeys and also marked one of the last—if not the last — time anyone saw Virginia alive in public.
Toxic visitor. But why did she like to stay hidden? Numerous sources say that Virginia feared having an epileptic seizure in the presence of anyone other than Alvin. But she stopped taking her medicine because she believed God would protect her.
In addition to friends and relatives, outsiders weren’t welcome in the Ridleys’ house. Early on in the marriage, an exterminator who entered their home made a pass at Virginia, which greatly rattled the couple, according to the Washington Post.
When people asked about Virginia, Alvin told them she had left him and moved away, according to the Associated Press.
Litigious local. Rumormongers whispered that Virginia had gone to live in a mental institution, the Washington Post story reported.
In time, some locals forgot that Alvin was once married or thought that Virginia had long ago left him. Others didn’t know he ever had a wife.
After abandoning his TV repair shop, Alvin focused more on his apparent hobby of filing lawsuits. He had already unsuccessfully sued the government over the ejection from the housing projects.
Locals would occasionally see him selling tube socks at a flea market.
Unfazed. According to the Sunday Mail, Alvin “convinced himself he was a pauper, despite the fact that he owned his house, the boarded-up TV repair shop and some valuable land in nearby Tennessee.” The land was reportedly valued at $500,000.
Aside from the litigation and sales, Alvin was not one to interact much. He made eye contact with people but didn’t say hello to them. He posted No Trespassing signs on his fence. The house had metal bars on the windows.
On October 4, 1997, the man the town considered an isolated bachelor used a payphone to report the death of his wife. His voice seemed solemn enough but a little too calm considering the circumstances. “My wife’s not breathing,” he said, according to the Atlanta Constitution. “Y’all hurry up.”
Choking suspicion. First responder Blake Hodges smelled cat urine upon entering the house and noted it was the first time he’d met Alvin in person — he only knew of him as a scary loner, according to Blake’s interview on “The Alvin and Virginia Ridley Story,” an episode of Death in a Small Town, narrated by Bill Kurtis.
Hodges found Virginia lying still and looking underfed and unkempt. According to Forensic Files, her hair hadn’t been combed in years.
The house was a cockroach-infested hovel.
Quite a sensation. Alvin said that Virginia died of a seizure during her sleep. But the coroner found a classic sign of strangulation that Forensic Files watchers know well. Virginia had petechial hemorrhages in her eyes (Stefanie Rabinowitz, Jenna Verhaalen).
Alvin was arrested and charged with murder in May 1997.
The runup to the trial of the man who allegedly held his wife hostage for 30 years was big news around the country and beyond. England’s Yorkshire Post ran an item about it. Court TV wanted to film the 1999 trial, but the judge said no.
Chance at absolution. The prosecution suggested that Alvin considered Virginia a liability, a drain on his finances. Medical examiner Vanita Hullander testified that Alvin didn’t give a consistent narrative regarding her death. And the petechial hemorrhages spoke for themselves as proof of deliberately inflicted suffocation, the prosecution contended.
But defense lawyer McCracken Poston, who later acknowledged Alvin as the most difficult client he ever defended, rolled out a wealth of forensic and circumstantial evidence that wore away at what many had considered the county’s slam-dunk case against Alvin.
First off, although Vanita Hullander — who in the early 1980s worked in a space adjacent to Alvin’s store — denied any bias against Alvin, she acknowledged that she was afraid of him.
Voice from the grave. And the reports about the petechial hemorrhages from autopsies conducted by the county as well as the Georgia Bureau of Investigation didn’t necessarily point to guilt on Alvin’s part. Medical experts testified that seizures could cause such hemorrhages in a phenomenon known as sudden unexpected death in epilepsy — of which failure to take prescribed medication is a risk factor.
And according to the Washington Post, Virginia didn’t die looking unkempt. She had polished toenails and hair done up with pretty pins.
Finally, Virginia herself had left a record of her existence with Alvin that contradicted allegations that she was the prisoner of a tyrannical husband.
Pet peeve. Virginia had hypergraphia, a condition that compels people to extensively write about their own lives. The walls of the shack were covered with notes revealing a simple and contented life with her husband. She wrote about what she and Alvin ate for dinner, that they watched Elvis Presley on TV, and that she and her husband cleaned the basement. One note listed the cast of The Waltons. Virginia penned love letters to Alvin that attested to a good marriage. She also wrote of her feeling that the world was against her and Alvin.
A forensic document examiner verified that Virginia, not Alvin or anyone else, had written the notes.
(And fortunately for Alvin, his lawyer had done some preemptive work to make sure accusations of animal neglect didn’t come up. Before the trial, Poston made Alvin take his and Virginia’s two cats — that they kept as pets on string leashes attached to their coffee table — to the veterinarian. “I said, ‘By the way, when these cats come out of the house, they better have some names,'” he later recalled. Alvin declared them “Meow-y” and “Kitty,” the vet gave them a decent bill of health, and Alvin started giving them free range of the house, according to an interview with Poston on the University of Georgia library website.)
Emotion comes to surface. Against his team’s advice, Alvin took the witness stand. He spoke of his reluctance to trust people and his love for his wife. Alvin said they rarely argued and there was no violence in the marriage.
“The reason I testified then was because I didn’t have nothing to hide,” Alvin told the Walker County Register/Chattanooga County News in 2017. “The main thing was just telling the truth about everything … and I even cried, and the jury saw me crying.”
Within just hours of listening to prosecutors call him a captor and killer, Alvin got to hear the jurors declare him not guilty. Suddenly, he was a free man smiling on the courthouse steps.
Logical explanation. So what happened to Alvin after his legal problems went away?
He moved back into the shack on Inman Street. Poston took him for mental health testing, which yielded a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.
It explained “the way he and Virginia lived, very seldom leaving their home, the flat emotionless monotone voice when he called for help after Virginia’s seizure, his ‘eccentricities,’ as those were called at the time,” Poston told the Chattanooga Times Free Press.
He referred to Alvin as the Boo Radley of the town.
More than 20 years after the acquittal, the two men meet regularly for lunch, and Alvin, 81, reportedly snagged at least one girlfriend post-trial.
The space that the TV shop occupied now houses an eatery offering white chocolate lattes and tomato basil wraps. Poston owns the entire structure today and has named it the Ridley Building after the ornery but harmless widower of Ringgold, Georgia.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. – RR
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