Alvin Ridley

while listening to NPR's WABE I heard the story of Alvin Ridley of Ringgold, Georgia. Alvin was accused of keeping his wife Virginia in captivity for 30 or so years before strangling her to death. My mother's mother's maiden name is Ridley and she is from the same part of Georgia, about 25 miles away. I heard Alvin's story several times before. While doing family research I have came across Alvin's murdering headlines several times but I have yet to find just how he is related . It appears nobody wants to claim him. He was found innocent in the Catoosa County Court by a jury, but he was about as eccentric as one could get. Here is interesting Ridley genealogy that might help explain why Alvin Ridley family connection is hard to get information on. Alvin's and My ancestor William Ridley was a native of England. He lived in Boston where he was a cobbler and a teacher. The Revolutionary War came and he fought for America in the King's Mountain, North and South Carolinas area (the state line). There William married Kings Mountain native Jane Pulsey. They had five sons and one daughter. One of the sons was Matthew Ridley, which was my ancestor and the Ridleys of Murray County, Georgia and middle north Georgia.. Another son was William Ridley who is the ancestor of the Ridleys of Eastern Alabama and the hills of west North Georgia. Both brothers had descendents in the middle north Georgia area. Now, just to make genealogy interesting and almost a Grimm fable: The brother William married Mary Ann Smith. They had five sons and one daughter. One son died at birth, and Mary Ann did also. William remarried Margaret Maxell. William and Margaret had one son. Then William died. That left Margaret the step mother of four sons, one daughter, and real mother to one son. She sold her step sons into servitude. The step sons, who were young man ran away. They settled in eastern Northern Alabama. I think one of these Ridley brothers is the ancestor of Alvin Ridley. A couple of Google briefs: A Murder Mystery Solved By Hypergraphia IN 1997, ALVIN Ridley of Ringgold, Georgia — widely known as the village eccentric — was charged by the city of imprisoning his wife Virginia for almost 30 years and suffocating her while she slept in bed. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. The trial was filled with odd characters. For example, Dr. Frederick Hellman, “the suave and darkly handsome GBI pathologist who performed the autopsy on Virginia Ridley”, who would respond to every question by swinging his chair to face the jury and deliver a lecture usually irrelevant to the question he’d been asked. Or Ben McGaha, otherwise known as “Salesman Sam”, who was Ridley’s court adviser and claimed to have a flawless memory… but was frequently caught explaining errors with the claim that he’d forgotten some details. Or even the cockroaches that infested Ridley’s house, which he brought to trial in a jar every day. Yet, at the end of the day, Ridley was acquitted, not simply because the evidence against him murdering his wife was scanty at best, but Virginia Ridley was a hypergraphiac, and had compulsively scribbled a 10,000 page diary over the years which made clear that she was a paranoiac and an epileptic who had become a shut-in voluntarily. Ridley brought the journal with him to court every day in a garbage bag. The Village Eccentric On Trial [Jack Warner] Virginia Radley [Wikipedia] Wikipedia, Virginia Ridley: Virginia Ridley (April 18, 1948 – October 4, 1997) was a woman from Ringgold, Georgia, whose death made headlines when her husband, Alvin, was arrested and charged with imprisoning her for almost three decades, then killing her. Alvin and Virginia lived on the outskirts of Ringgold in a dilapidated, cockroach-infested house. He maintained that the reason why no one in Ringgold knew of her existence was because her family's opposition to their marriage led to her decision to live as a hermit. Virginia's family claimed that Alvin prevented all attempts by them to contact her. At trial, Ridley maintained he and Virginia were happy and that he never harmed her. He produced what he claimed was her journal, consisting of 10,000 pages. His attorney theorized that Virginia—who suffered from agoraphobia, hypergraphia and epilepsy—died of an epileptic seizure, as had Florence Griffith-Joyner, whose autopsy he submitted as evidence. The prosecution maintained that Ridley suffocated her. After the jury deliberated for 2 hours and 14 minutes, he was acquitted. Alvin Ridley was represented throughout the case by Georgia criminal defense lawyer McCracken Poston, who discovered the evidentiary treasure trove of a three decade journal by Virginia Ridley and presented parts of it at trial. The case was featured on the A&E program American Justice[1] and Forensic Files. The radio storytelling program Snap Judgmenthad Poston explaining how he defended Alvin and discovered Virginia's documents in the Nov 27, 2015 episode "Dirty Work".[2]