A Ringgold Murder Mystery Called "Death In a Small Town"

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• published: 23 Aug 2012
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For years people in Ringgold, Ga., wondered what secrets lay behind the boarded-up basement windows of the dilapidated clapboard house on Inman Street. Every so often its reclusive owner, former TV repairman Alvin Ridley, would emerge to take care of business—sometimes to peddle bric-a-brac at a local flea market—and just as silently retreat, without as much as a nod to his neighbors. So it came as a shock on Oct. 4, 1997, when word spread through Ringgold's three-stoplight downtown that EMTs called to the Ridley home had found the body of a tiny 49-year-old woman—the wife most townspeople didn't even know Ridley had. Compared with the discovery of Virginia Ridley, who hadn't been seen in public for nearly three decades, her husband's arrest for murder eight months later seemed almost anticlimactic. By then, rumors were rife concerning what might have transpired not only on the day of Virginia's death—when Ridley, 57, claimed he woke to discover the lifelong epileptic "just laying there" in the bed they shared—but over the course of their 31-year marriage. "There were all kinds of tales," says Stella Turner, 81, a friend of Virginia Ridley's family, the Hickeys of nearby Rossville. People speculated about just "how she might have suffered during all those years she'd lived with him," says Turner. "They tried to imagine what it would be like to be locked in a house for 31 years." Townsfolk were finally able to slake their curiosity this past January at the Catoosa County courthouse. During an eight-day trial, glimpses of the couple's hermetic existence emerged—along with a goodly number of cockroaches—from the two suitcases Ridley, free on $30,000 bond, brought with him from home every day. There, on hundreds of notes and scraps of paper squirreled away over the years, was Virginia Ridley's record of their life together. The story they told was astonishing. From her meticulously detailed accounts, it became clear that Virginia had been captive only of the paranoid worldview she shared with her husband, exacerbated by the fear, sometimes found among epileptics, of suffering a seizure in public. Theirs, it seemed, had been a love story.. During the trial, District Attorney Buzz Franklin argued that Ridley had murdered his spouse by smothering and/or "soft" strangulation, as suggested by the autopsy findings of tiny blood spots on her face. But defense witness Dr. Braxton Wannamaker, an expert on seizure disorders, countered that such spotting is not uncommon after a severe epileptic convulsion. Although some locals still believe Ridley killed his wife, the acquittal seems to have changed many minds. "It made me upset to think that just because a man didn't act like everyone else and stayed to himself, he was put on trial for murder," says homemaker Janice Howard, 55, who began leaving home-cooked meals at Ridley's door (which he gratefully accepted). Despite his relief at the verdict, Ridley—whose only companions now are his cats, 19-year-old Kitty and 8-year-old Meowy—misses Virginia terribly. "I cherished her for 31 years," he says simply. Yet he finds some solace in the fact that, as he sees it, Virginia was returned to him for the eight days of the trial. "It's like she was there," says Ridley, referring to the notes and musings his wife left behind. "It was like she testified for me and set me free."