This is an adapted excerpt from McCracken Poston, Jr.’s upcoming book, “Zenith Man: Death, Love, and Redemption in a Georgia Courtroom” (Citadel; hardcover; Feb. 20, 2024).
It was Friday, Dec. 4, 1998 – four short weeks before Alvin Ridley’s murder trial – and my client and I were on our second day of copying the voluminous writings I’d recently found in his modest home – writings purportedly by Virginia Ridley, his wife of 31 years and (if you believe the state of Georgia) his captive for the last 27 of those years before he killed her on Oct. 4, 1997.
I needed to make copies for the forensic handwriting analyst; I also needed a set for the district attorney, or I’d be prohibited from using any of them. However, my client did not want to give them up for me to use.
We finally reached a compromise, brokered by “Salesman Sam,” Alvin’s friend and itinerant businessman, who sold promotional materials and shoes from catalogs in his bicycle basket: I’d pay Alvin for the “right” to copy them.
I’d agree to anything because deadlines were approaching to share our evidence with the prosecution.
My client didn’t trust me, and hovered over me as I laid each critical piece of evidence on the machine, carefully watching the original and then grabbing it after the scan and stuffing it back into one of the ancient suitcases he’d repurposed as a mobile filing system.
I saw again one of the most important of Virginia’s writings I’d found in their house – the one in which Virginia mentioned not only the troubles they were having with her family but also included a reference to a 1970 conversation she had with then-Sheriff Lee Roy Brown.
I thought Alvin had held that one back, as it seemed the ones I was most interested in suddenly had become unavailable or had simply disappeared.
I had to make sure that at least this one made it to court, above all the others, but there was no guarantee Alvin Ridley would ever let me use the very evidence that could free him.
“Alvin,” I called to him, “Do you want a Coca-Cola?” He nodded that he did.
“Well, grab me a Diet Coke while you’re in there,” I said as I pointed to the small kitchen in our law office. The moment his back was turned, I let the prized document drop behind the copying machine, to be recovered later, to ensure I had at least this one original writing to defend him with.
I continued making additional excuses to get him out of the room whenever an especially important writing of Virginia’s came to the top of the pile. “Alvin, go outside and see if the sheriff has someone out there watching us.” I played to his infamous paranoia.
As soon as he turned, I dropped another document behind the copier, to be recovered and reproduced later.
I cut the Friday copying session short. My wife and I were looking forward to that night’s annual Ringgold “Down Home Christmas,” when the shops stay open late and a holiday parade goes down Nashville Street toward the Old Depot.
The giant electric star on White Oak Mountain would be lit, symbolizing that the holidays were upon us. I was spending so much time on the case, and I felt I needed to do something “normal.”
Alvin seemed to understand, and we planned to get together again the next morning to continue the copying.
“And I need those documents you’ve held back, Alvin,” I chided him. This was a constant battle.
***
The darkened main street of Ringgold – U.S. Highway 41, or Nashville Street – was usually buttoned up tight at 5:45 p.m. this time of year. We gleefully enjoyed the campy aspects of much of the small town parade, including seeing who Little Miss Range of Motion would be – sponsored, of course, by a chiropractic clinic – and how long the Volkswagen Club or the International Harvester Tractor Club was going to make the parade this year.
An actual taxidermized deer head came by, mounted on the front of a truck like a giant hood ornament. It was akin to a nautical figurehead on an old ship. Bizarrely, a nostril had been drilled out, allowing a bright red light bulb to stick out of it, giving the unfortunate impression that the real Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer had been bagged in a buck hunt this season.
A couple of younger children standing near looked traumatized, with one lamenting, “Rudolph’s head is cut off!”
At some point, a Santa Claus passed by, not as part of the parade, but on the sidewalk. This wasn’t unusual. But I caught a whiff of him as he quickly passed after handing me a piece of cheap hard candy wrapped in clear cellophane.
When I saw his hands – the same rugged hands I’d recently held on to while trying to pray some common sense into the man attached to them – I knew who it was: Alvin Ridley, dressed in full moth-eaten Santa regalia – beard, cap, the works – four weeks before his murder trial.
I followed him with my eyes as he walked up the street. People would get excited by the fact that another Santa was walking around, but after they’d been around him a bit or got too close, they’d move away.
Alvin made a critical mistake, stopping in front of the darkened, chained and padlocked door of Ridley’s Zenith TV Sales & Service – his shuttered store – and lingering a moment too long under the giant Zenith sign that extended over the sidewalk from the roof.
People started realizing who he was, and children were being snatched away from him, their candy ripped away by panicked parents and grandparents.
I walked up to Alvin and whispered, “Please go home before we have an issue.”
He sadly walked away, around the corner of the Georgia Power Company building, and down Depot Street toward Inman. Apparently, he’d been doing this for years in relative anonymity. There were always plenty of Santas walking around, as well as Grinches. He blended in.
Now I felt like a Grinch for sending him home. I wanted more than ever to win this case, if for nothing else than to vindicate old, smelly Santa.
(Author’s note: Virginia Ridley’s voluminous loose-leaf journal would later be explained as hypergraphia, which is sometimes present in temporal lobe epilepsy. It would be almost 20 years after this scene – and after a jury acquitted Alvin of the murder charge – before I learned of his diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, which explained the difficulties we had as attorney and client. His expeditions as Santa continued in other years, often with the same reaction by the locals. As news of Alvin’s 2021 diagnosis has spread, the community has warmed up to him.)