ZENITH MAN-McCracken Poston Jr.

capable of murder. Alvin was a difficult client, starring evidence in a cockroach infested suitcase, unwilling to reveal key facts to his defender, Gradually post and pieced together the full story behind Virginia and Alvin's curious marriage and her cause

of death, which was completely overlooked by law enforcement. Calling on medical experts, testimony from Alvin himself, and a wealth of surprising evidence gleaned from Alvin's junk strewn house, Postin presented a groundbreaking defense that allowed Alvin to return to

his peculiar lifestyle a free man. Years after his trial, Alvin was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, a revelation that sheds light on much of his lifelong personal battle and shows how easily those who don't fit societal norms can be castigated and misunderstood. Part true crime, part courtroom drama, and full of local color, zenith Man is also the moving story of an unexpected friendship between two very different men that changed and perhaps saved the lives of both.

The book that we're featuring this evening is zenith Man, Death, Love and Redemption in a Georgia courtroom With my special guest, attorney and author McCracken, Postin junior. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. McCracken postin Junior.

town boogieman. He left his house and drove past the local fire department staff with ambulance and EMTs and drove looking for a workable payphone. Speculation as he called a funeral home to retrieve a dead body. But he did call. It was confirmed Erlanger Hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee. But he is instructed that it is a matter for the Catusa

County authorities, And so reluctantly you write. He calls nine one one and the Catusa County nine one one office is right across the street and says something to the effect his wife breathing, and he says, I don't think so. So tell us about this nine to one one call and what the public hears, and a little bit about your background and how you came to be involved in this extraordinary case.

far as I know, never set foot here. He happened to die at a time and the penny press had been developed, and so he was kind of a mass media hero with a heroic death at a battle of Palo Alto, and so Ringold. Really, over the years, and definitely since the Civil War, it kind of took a

very small town approach. It didn't grow much more. We're mainly known for the place that Dolly Parton and Carl Dean got married in nineteen sixty six, and three weeks later Alvin Ridley and young Virginia Hickey got their marriage license. Now this was in nineteen sixty six. In nineteen ninety seven, I was a somewhat down on my luck, defeated congressional candidate, found myself back home with little prospects of any political

appointment or electoral chances. I was trying to put my life back together, and I have a moribund law practice, and suddenly this thing happened on October fourth, of nineteen ninety seven. That kind of sent shockwaves through the small town one. Everybody knew who Alvin Ridley was. He was a malcontent. I think it would be a not too much of a stretch to call him that. He was

constantly suing local officials. He posted missives on the inside of his shuttered and padlocked Zenith TV dealership that was falling apart, had a giant hole in the roof. His life just seemed to have fallen apart in the early eighties, and he had a lot of people he was blaming for that, and he would post these diatribes on the inside of the glass so you couldn't move them, but you would often name people who he thought were responsible

for his ills. So when he called the nine to one one call on the morning of October four, nineteen ninety seven, which was a Saturday, everyone noticed a very flat effect of his voice. He just sounded, as matter of fact, my wife's not breathing, and there was just not a lot of emotion in his voice. And even though at the end of the paul he said please

hurry again in a somewhat non excited voice. The nine one one tape was went around the world as here's a guy calling in for nine to one one who does not sound very excited, and who is this woman? Nobody in town, or at least not a lot of people in town, knew that she even existed, much less the fact that she had been his wife for thirty two years. So Virginia's family, or what was left of them, were siblings. Her mother at the time was in a

rest home. They picked up the mantle that Virginia's parents had started back in the late nineteen sixties of saying, well, she's been kept against her will, and that evolved into being kept in the basement against her will for thirty years. So you can imagine how that went over with the investigating authorities, and so they began to ask a lot more probing questions to Alvin Ridley.

wasn't your stereotypical Southern drunken wife beater. He was very kind, sad man who had a serious alcohol problem, but he was very high functioning. He worked in a foundry in Chattanooga and raised six children, allowing my mother to stay at home and have a garden, and you know, raised us all very well, except for the fact of, you know,

having an alcoholic parent. My first early memory of Alvin, and I was only reminded of this during the representation, but I was about thirteen or so and was watching live wrestling on television. I had long worn off the tuner knob and we were using a pair of pliers to turn the channels between the three channels out of Chattanooga, and suddenly this strange man is in my living room. My mother had just waved him in and he has

got a new knob for our TV. But he takes the opportunity to give me a lecture of how to turn the channels on a TV. And I only remembered it because he noted that I was watching wrestling, and he mentioned that he had in Chattanooga at the venue where the wrestling happened up there, that he had met Andrea the Giant. I remember telling my friends at school, I met this strange guy who says he met Andrea

the Giant. And Andrea the Giant allegedly told him what he had for breakfast every morning, which was like a dozen eggs, or a couple of dozen eggs, you know, a couple of loaves of bread or something like that. I remember telling that story, like I've met somebody who

met Andrea the Giant. I didn't think of it again until I'm having a conversation now with a man I'm advising who is about to be charged with murder and about to be accused of holding his wife a captive for thirty years in the basement, and he mentions that he has met Andrea the Giant and what Andrea the Giant had for breakfast? And I thought, you're that guy. You're that guy that I talked to when I was thirteen, and you told me that because I went and told

it at school. And so it was interesting because early on our conversations were not that pleasant. Early on, Alvin

was extremely difficult. He would call me at night, yelling at me, insisting that I am using air quotes here knock his case out because it was, in his opinion, a wrongfully brought case, and that he really wanted me to look into ancient civil litigation that dealt with his father's car wreck, the counterclaim judgment against him that caused the county to seize a van that he owned, and all of these things that I almost I had to promise to look into them just to get him to

cooperate with me on the murder case. He would say, for example, I would say, Alvan, we can't talk about your van, this is a murder case, and he would say, well, yes we can, because I didn't kill her, but they did take my van. Yeah. So he was hell bent on kneecapping any real effort to represent him on what became a murder case.

We've given you plenty to fix it. So there was something going on with him, because I think he was very sincere, but he could come off as a con man if you weren't, if you didn't look at him deeply enough.

wife's death. But there was a kind of a drawn out process with Virginia's autopsy, and then there was a special presentment to the grand jury which none of us knew about. And then once the grand jury true build an indictment, then Alvin was a wanted man. He and I had talked for weeks and finally it just come to the conclusion of there may not be any charges brought, so let's just have this understanding that let me know if they bring charges or I'll be monitoring. If I

ever hear you're arrested, I'll come to you. And of course when I heard it that day, I went. I did go to him at the county jail.

He maintained throughout all of the questioning that she had had what he called a spell. By that he meant a seizure. She had from childhood severe epilepsy sometime well. The authorities had were under the assumption that she was not given medication, and thanks to Alvin being a pack rat and never throwing anything away, we were able to dispel that.

they want to investigate. So innocently enough they start wanting to investigate. But Alvin and his mother really took that as a government intrusion on their privacy. And there was a race to Erlanger Hospital in Chattanooga across jurisdictional state line where his mother ended up, and his mother told the doctors they need to leave us alone. I want

to be with my son. And of course nobody was mentioning Virginia, and in the back of every agency's mind when they went to the Ridley house over the years, a lot of times it was just an effort to flush out Virginia, and because she had been missing since the nineteen sixty eight, so there was a lot of years and years and years of speculation about where is she, what is she doing, and why isn't she talking to

her family. So ultimately, you know, Alvin and his mother kind of got the better of the state officials and they just kind of shrugged their shoulders and resigned from trying to find his mother now and I'm talking about his mother, Minie Ridley. So when Virginia died, it kind of stirred up those memories from just four years before

of them trying to gain access to his mother. But his mother was quite complicit in evading the Georgia authorities, as evidence by her statements to the doctors in Chattanooga.

any evidence of someone being held captive there. And I wanted to capture that, sure, and I wanted to capture photos inside the house, you know, showing Virginia's things and things like that. He just simply would not let me. He would say, I'll think about it, and this went on for over a year. Meanwhile, I reminded him that he let every law enforcement officer that ever asked him

for access, he let them in. So from starting to advise him on October verse six, nineteen ninety seven, until November of nineteen ninety eight, I was denied access to this house. At some point, I even purchased and installed a telephone for his house because since I had been in the state legislature, my cell phone has been Atlanta based, and I wanted him to be able to call me and not have to go out to a phone booth on some noisy road to call me, where he inevitably

ended up being frustrated and yelling at me. So I was purchasing a phone for his house. Now I went there with the phone installer and my camera, excited about getting in to his home, and Alvin realized that and decided, oh no, we're just going to put the phone on the porch. So he had the phone installed on the

porch and thwarting me again. So in November of nineteen ninety eight, on Thanksgiving Day, my new bride and I went to visit her family in one part of the county, and then we visited my family in Graysville in the northern part of the county, and on the way out, my parents handed me a lake of food covered up in foyle and several little margarine tubs full of other parts of the meal, and they said, my father said,

I want you to take this to Alvin Ridley. He doesn't have anyone and that is the last place I wanted to be on Thanksgiving. The trial had been put off the month before, and I was so thankful of that. But there was starting to be some evidence that was

coming our way, I thought. For one, the autopsy of Virginia Ridley revealed that she was covered in these tiny ruptured blood vessels called petite or particular hemorrhages, and the State of Georgia was saying, that's indicative of asphyxiation death. And so we had a great dean of our defense bar in close to my community, a man named Bobby Lee Cook, who, if you'll do some research you'll learn that the Matlock character was based on him. Well, he was just down the road and he had known me

since before I was a lawyer. And I went to him because he has this beautiful library, and I said, you know, I've got this case. I really want to see some books, some pathology books, because I've got this thing about particular hemorrhages and I want to see them. And he gives me like four forensic pathology books and I said, well, please let me copy these, and he said no, no, no, just keep them. Just keep them

as long as you need them. And I began to realize in my research that particular hemorrhaging was quite common even among the living of people after having a seizure or having a coughing fit, or in cases of asphyxiation as well, but it did happen in non manual strangulation or manual smothering deaths as well, and so I was very excited about that. But there was no real other than in these books. I really wanted another death that was clearly a seizured related death, and amazingly and sadly

and tragically one kind of landed in our Lapse. In September of nineteen ninety eight, the just heralded Olympic star Florence Griffith Joyner passed away unexpectedly. She was known as Flow Joe. She was the greatest female athlete of all time. But I didn't think anything of it until October, about the third week of October, when on the news one night I heard that her autopsy had been released and

that they determined she died of a seizure disorder. So I was on the phone with Orange County, California Medical Examiner the next business day right and talked to the doctor that actually autopsied Florence Griffith Joiner and convinced them to share that autopsy with me. And what was fascinating

was the similarities. But I knew that flo Jo the definitely the greatest female athlete in the world and one of the most known people in the world, that her autopsy was going to be first class, and I wanted to compare it to perhaps the least known woman in

the world, Virginia Ridley. So that was encouraging. So I had that going on in October, and we needed an epilepsy expert to describe that, yes, people do and can die of epilepsy, and then also to explain these particular hemorrhages and how they very often happened to people after seizures. So that was all I had. But in November I show up with the turkey plate. On late Thanksgiving Day, I had taken my then wife home and came back

and I didn't call Alvin. I just went. And one thing I was beginning to realize about Alvin was he was very transactional, and had I known that all along, it would have been a much easier representation. But I didn't. I was figuring it out and I knocked on the door and he comes to the door and I said, Alvin, my parents wanted you to have Thanksgiving meal, and he

said just a minute. He closes the door, and I think I hear him talking to somebody inside, and the TV is rightrunning and everything goes quiet, and he opens the door and he says, come in. Well. It was a fascinating and yet uncomfortable place ter just in terms of the lack of good ventilation, and of course it was late fall, and it was sealed up pretty tight and had some warming attempts to insulate windows with the blankets,

you know, tacked over them. There was a single red Christmas light bulb illuminating this main room of the house, and I recognized from the photos there's the bed, the death bed of Virginia Ridley. It was in the corner of against the wall, immediately on the left when I walked in. But he pulled a string and there was

a bigger light bulb, a regular white light bulb. And you know, as I was talking to him, I noticed I didn't have a camera, and I was not prepared, but I noticed a whole wall of paper that was tacked, taped, nailed, wedged in, pandling, just any way you could attach a piece of paper to a wall. That they just about every way they were attached. And I was having difficulty reading them because it was very dark in the house, and with this light on my head was making a

giant shadow on them. So I was trying to get up and get kind of sideways and look where I could read them. And they appeared to be all written in the same hand, and it was a very distinctive handwriting the lower reaches of letters that had the lower stems, and it had a real flourish on it. And you know, I said, there's a recipe, here's a poem, here's some discussion about events. And I said, Alvin, I knew it was not his handwriting because I had seen that scribble.

So I just said, Alvin, what is who wrote this? And he said, well, Virginia did well. I got so excited, probably too excited for his liking, and that I said, Alvin, I got to have this. This is the everyday mundane record. Many of these things are of this woman that no one has seen in thirty years, and this is I need this. And he said, well, you can't have it.

It's all I've got left of her. And so we were back to this real stalemate that he and I almost constantly maintained about the things that I wanted him to do. And so Alvin professed and seemed to be a very religious person. I found out fairly early in the representation accidentally that I could stop his crying if he thought I was praying right. And when I say crying, I mean his rage or he's yelling at me, or

his complaints about me. That if I just began a prayer, he would get very reverent, he would listen to the prayer. And I began to basically give my advice in prayer form to him. Oh Lord, please explain to Alvin why I need to get in his house. Please explain to Alvin why he needs to help me talk about his wife. And there'll be another day to talk about them taking

his van, you know, those kind of things. But it was a way to control him, and it was a way that he was too polite, too religious to fight it. It was helpful. So I went right into a prayer right in that room, and you know, said, Dear Lord, you have given me all this evidence. And I said, is there more? And Alvin goes yeah. In there, and in this other room it's just boxing boxing box of

her correspondence and her journal, her loose leaf diary. I later, after going through it all and pulling what I thought would be helpful to him, I estimated there were probably fifteen thousand plus entries, and much of it was dated, and I tried to pull all of that, and then some of it was dated by what it was talking about the moon Landings elections. Alvin and Virginia had early

on been evicted from public housing. In fact, that was the last place she had ever been seen in public was at that trial of their eviction, and she only showed up because the judge ordered her there and went back into chambers with her parents, and later emerged and she went home with Alvin and her parents went home. So she obviously convinced the judge that she was where she wanted to be. And that was September fifteenth, nineteen seventy,

the last time Virginia Ridley had ever been seen. So twenty seven years later, she's dead and I'm trying to put together this defense, and I have suddenly found all these writings that indicate that she seen to be a happy person. She was very She was watching a lot of TV. She noted different programs that she liked. She seemed to like the real wholesome stuff, like the Waltons, which was a CBS show that was all family oriented.

She was absolutely obsessed with TV's Ron Howard, who was on the Andy Griffith Show as Opie, who was on Happy Days as Richie, and who later became quite a prolific writer and director and producer. And she was obsessed with him, but in a kind of a wholesome way. She took out clippings about him from newspapers and she wrote on the edge Ron Howard and his wife Cheryl, and I actually introduced that one to show the jury

that this woman was even plugged into popular culture. And she wrote President Nixon, and that was evidenced by the person from the HUD the Housing an urban development agency who wrote her back referencing her letter to President Richard M. Nixon. So she wrote Congressman Senators Alvin and Virginia had for every ounce of suspicion they had about local government, there was a pound of hope in federal government and federal agencies.

And that later revealed itself with some of Alvin's behaviors as I've tried to represent him.

you know, it's a shocking allegation. But what he ended up indicting Alvin for was malice murder and then felony murder, meaning maybe he didn't have the intent to kill her, but he was assaulting her. So that's the third round was aggravated assault with his hands. And either way, if you didn't find malice, you could have found him guilty of felony murder by way of aggravated assault. And so I thought it interesting that the allegation of false imprisonment

did not make it in. But then my friend was who is a friend and who was very serious in his effort, and he filed a notice to put in evidence of the false imprisonment of not only Virginia Ridley, but of Alvin's mother, Many Ridley. And then there was a very disturbing allegation about Alvin's cats. There was a nineteen ninety three Apartment of Aging report where they went in looking to see Alvin's mother and they noted some conditions of the house and then they also noted there

are two cats tied to the coffee table. Well, four years later, they're going in to retrieve the body of Virginia Ridley and responding to that nine to one one call, and one of the EMT notes there are two cats tied to the coffee table. And so when I saw that, I thought, oh my god, this is weird. And I talked to Alvin. I said, what is this about cats

tied to the coffee table? He says, well, when I'm bringing stuff in and out of the house, or people are coming in and out of the house, which I understood was hardly Ever, that was the way to keep the cats from running outside the house. As Alvin said, Mama didn't want them having no babies. Well, I knew for a fact that I got one cat lover on the jury that he was gone, and so I told him, I said, we have to get these cats to the vet. Because when I saw the cats, they appeared fine, but

it was very dark. I couldn't really see them. I explained to him that you know that's something that could hurt us. Please let me get them to the vet. And of course the last day I could possibly add the vet as a witness, Alvin comes to the office wondering, why aren't we going to the vet. So the bottom line is we got the cats to the vet. They ended up being in good health. There were no markings

around their neck indicating that there was. They were not tied very often by the little wine leashes, and I even went out to a pet story and bought a cat leash just so if in case that evidence got in, I could tell a jury. While none of us really think of leashing a cat, it happens, and people take

their cats on walks sometimes. But in any event, for this really funny episode of taking these cats to the vet, the vet the vet's testimony proffered testimony was these cats are in pretty good health and one of them is twenty two years old. And so that in a pre trial hearing resulted in a ruling by the court that there should be no cat evidence coming in and there should be no mama men many ridley evidence coming in either.

So we kept that stuff out. So as long as nobody put Alvin's good character into evidence, we should be able to keep that out.

He didn't know what CPR stood for. He just had seen to the degree that any of us that have never had CPR training just seeing it on TV, I guess see, he tried doing things to her to revive her, but they were few and far between sufficient enough to revive her. So the allegation was that he had soft strangled or smothered her. Well, that's similar to epilepsy death face down in a bed where you seize and you really can't get enough oxygen in. If you're seizing face

down on a bed, your airwaves are blocked. And so that was our theory, and part of the state's allegation was, well, you know, she died because there was not enough care. Well, fortunately for Alvin, Virginia's writings explained everything, and I spent a week going through them and pagging things that were important. For example, in a Bible she wrote a date in September of nineteen seventy seven in which she declared that She's not going to take her medicine anymore. God's going

to take care of her. Well, thanks to Alvin being a pat brat, I had years of empty epilepsy medicine bottles leading up to September nineteen seventy seven when there were bottles, for a few months after where there were full medicine bottles. So the indication was that Alvin was continuing to get her medication for her. At some point,

Virginia stopped going to the doctor for some reason. The doctor started putting the epilepsy medication in Alvin's name, probably because he wasn't seeing Virginia any because of her mandate that she wasn't getting out. But she had the medicine, you know, to take, but she obviously stopped taking it and she lived twenty years in one month non medicating. But I think it set her up for the classic sudden death in epilepsy death in.

her the particular hemorrhages were around the eyes. They can be around the mouth and the soft tissue areas even you know, even on other parts to the body from the intense internal pressure and blood flow that's going on during a seizure. So her autopsy supported the notion that if she died with this first class aptopsy, if she died of a seizure disorder, then it was an easy call to say that Virginia Ridley died of a seizure disorder.

So you know, I was confident about that because and I had given the copy to the DA and he had prepped doctor Hellman. Doctor Helman was trying to split hairs and say, well, no, no, it's different. Virginia's type of petikuia happens when somebody does CPR, do too hard

or manually asphyxiate them. And the problem is that the coroner was brand new, and she is a wonderful person who later went on to be quite an effective coroner, really concentrating on stopping drug deaths, but at the time she was new, and she delivered the body to the state Crime Lab in Atlanta with a statement, and the statement was this woman has been kept captive in her basement for fifteen to twenty years. Well, in my opinion, and I argued that that put the notion in doctor

Hellman's mind that I'm sure he killed her. If anybody who would keep somebody locked up for that long, it's an easy stretch to think they could kill her. And so I think that influenced that decision with him. And we had this wonderful epilepsy expert out of South Carolina named Braxton Bryant Wannamaker. I found him online, and this is early Internet. I had to write down URLs by hand and then try to remember and try to type

them in by hand later. And I've still got those handwritten ls that I would find the journals medical journals online about sudden death and epilepsy. His name kept popping up. So I contacted him and I retained him because I wanted him to talk about particular hemorrhages in his clients. Well, what's fascinating is before I put him on because I was paying him by the hour. So I brought him down the night before, put him in a hotel, took him to dinner, and that's where my newly wed bride

and I treated him to dinner. And it was a very difficult conversation just because he was so smart and I didn't know anything about his subject matter. But I was learning as much as I could. But just as an aside on the as we were finishing dinner, he said, is there anything else unusual about this person? This woman? And I laughed and I said she could not even burp or anything without writing it down. And he said, oh, that's hypergraphia. And you could have picked me up off

the floor. I had a reason now for this obsessive writing that she did, because quite frankly, it worried me a little bit. I'm just thinking, you know, why would somebody write all the time unless they, you know, just constantly. He said he had patients that would bring him journals thinking that he would want to read them, and he said they're just mundane reports of things that are going on in their lives. And that was a huge break because it explained it. It's often adjacent with it's often

adjacent to epilepsy, particularly temporal lobe epilepsy. And he and I need to tell you too, that Virginia had trouble over the years with having bad reactions to her epilepsy medicine, and I think that could have very well influenced her decision to stop taking them. And as to her agoraphobia. It was obvious, but she seemed pretty happy in her existence with first Alvin's mother and father and Alvin and

then slowly just Alvin. She was quite a reporter of things that are going on from their perspective, and I suspect that she was the brains behind some of Alvin's litigation. I found glossaries that she would write to explain legal terms, I think explaining to Alvin. It was fascinating because she was definitely the more religious of the two, and she filled five Bibles in the margins with her writings, and

it was just fascinating. I had one known writing of hers, and a handwriting analyst will want a government certified example at least one, so that they could say, this is a known writing of her. It happened in a government office, sir. It happened then on a sworn affidavit or something like that,

and then they compare it to the question documents. Well, I couldn't afford to get all of them checked out, but I just took sent a bunch of samples to Brian Carney in Atlanta, who was a handwriting analyst that I knew of, and he came back with a conclusion that they were clearly the writing of Virginia Ridley and Alvin due exemplars to exclude him. Also had known writing examples of Bill and Minnie Ridley, Alvin's parents to eliminate them as well.

an admission that this woman that's reasonable doubt. And so Renzo Wiggins, who gave me my first job out of law school in his family firm, he also had a case where doctor Hellman was going to be a witness, so he was taking very close notes, and he offered his notes to me and I thanked him, and he said, you know, I think you've got this thing one as long as you keep Alvin off the stand. And that was kind of a joke between us, because we both

knew of Alvin. We both knew that he would want to talk about the county taking his van and not his not his dad wife. So I was confident at that point, but that was before the next day. The most engaged I ever saw Alvin about this case was when I would go online and look looking up forensic pathologists, and Alvin was suddenly engaged in the case. He was interested in a forensic pathologist, and I had to spell

it every time I brought it up. He would pull out a folded up piece of paper out of his pocket and he would dutifully write down fr nsiic pathologist, and it was getting really old. But Alvin seemed interested, and he said, I want to get one. I want him to see the house. And I thought, well, you know, if I can keep Alvin this engaged, it'll be well worth the brief expense of a forensic pathologist. So this

is nineteen ninety eight. Damn. The Internet. Now, I think people would be a lot more skeptical of things that they just find on the Internet. But I was green and wet behind the ears still of newborn to the Internet. And I found this person in Georgia who had a fantastic website for nineteen ninety eight. It had some music, it had some sixteen bit animation, it had you know, it was a forensic pathologist. And I thought, hey, this

is great there in Georgia. Alvin's engaged, he's excited. Alvin kept saying I want him to come to my house and didn't realize why, but I went ahead and hired this guy. He and I went to the crime lab and looked at was preserved of Virginia Ridley, which is mostly tongue in throat, where there was nothing remarkable. The hyoid bone was indicated as intact, which very often in strangulation cases. It's a very delicate bone, and not all but I would say most serious strangulation cases it's broken.

And so that just I wasn't impressed with compared having seen Larrence Griffith Joiner's autopsy, which was extensive. You know, they didn't even preserve a lot of the brain of Virginia Bridley to although there was clear indications in the written autopsy, the dictated autopsy of issues of seizure disorder. So in any event, you know, this guy went with me to the handwriting analyst house as well, and he was grilling my handwriting analyst, Brian Carney, and I thought

this is very odd. And then we get in the car and he offers to be a handwriting analyst too, right, And I said, it's okay. I got that covered well. By the time he comes up to testify the next day, I learned what Alvin's plans are. Alvin has has retrieved an ancient mannequin from his basement, and he's created a non crime scene if you well where he's showing how Virginia was in the bed. And this is a very

difficult house. And I think we really frightened this guy. Sure, this guy at this doctor, So we didn't get to spend a lot of quality time with him, but I put him up the next day because the state had made a big deal over the fact that one side of the bed seemed to have a depression in it and the other did not, indicating that only one person was sleeping in that bed and that Virginia likely was locked in the basement. Well, Virginia was a very small

like person. But at the same time, this bed was up against a corner of the room and it also served us a sofa, if you will, So people sat on the edge of the bed to watch TV. And it was clear it was clear that was the case. So I wanted this and amusing air quotes forensic pathologist to just note that for when I put him on the stand the next day. Well, turns out my friend Buzz the DA was ready for this guy, the witness that I put on the stand as a forensic pathologist,

I did not vet very closely. As it turned out, he was not licensed anywhere in the United States to do what he claimed he did. He was educated in the Dominican Republic. Nothing against that, but that's the only place that he was licensed at the time. He just kind of was coming off as a bit of a fraud,

although I think he was very sincere. He belonged to a group out of I think Philadelphia called the Viduk Society, right, which seems very exclusive, and they only let like eighty two people in it at a time, and it explained that there it's kind of a crowdsourcing, if you will, of experts and they and that's one of the reasons he was asking the handwriting analysis so many questions because they he kind of assumed knowledge of several different disciplines.

And so it was a disaster. Buzz destroyed him and it was just a low point in the case. Well, we went to lunch and I put Alvin in this other character in this book that you read about, named salesman Sam. I put them in one booth. Alvin had some church of his latest church, some followers that were with him, so I thought, I'm just going to let them eat there. I'm going to eat over here. I'll get the bill. Well, somehow during lunch I missed Jesus

appearing and telling Alvin that he had to testify. And Alvin breaks this to me on the way back to the courthouse, and I was horrified because, as far as I knew, all Alvin wanted to talk about was the county taking his van in nineteen eighty four, and not his wife. I realized that Alvin was very literal. I had found that he was very transactional. At some point I was paying him to let me use her evidence.

I was paying him for cooperation. I bought tombstones for his mother, father, wife, and him because they didn't have them, and I was doing it to get his cooperation. So you know, it's his right as a defendant to testify, but I wanted to prepare him for it. And by the way, when he brought he insisted on controlling all of the writings, and he brought them every day to

court in these two giant, old, ancient suitcases. And your listeners who have seen this case on forensic files will remember the juror commenting about all the cockroaches we were releasing into that courtroom from these suitcases, and it was a total station. Well, the judge mid trial decided this was too close to his office, so he ordered us to change courtrooms and go into the brand old nineteen

thirty nine era courtroom in the adjacent building, the old courthouse. Well, I was ecstatic because this was the room, the last place Virginia Ardly had been seen September fifteen, nineteen seventy And here we are now twenty nine years almost twenty eight and some change years later, in that courtroom with her writings I'm not a real ghost, guy. But it was eerie. It was eerie as hell I was feeling. I was feeling a lot of power and electricity in

that room. And of course Jesus had just shown up to lunch, so I had to I tried to prep Alvin. I took him into the immigated roach room and put him on the stand and showed him the different perspective, how close he would be to the jury, and he'd be looking in a different direction that he'd been looking the entire trial. And I told him, I explained to him, I said, you know, I've kept some stuff out, like

the stuff about your mama, stuff about the cats. If you open the door to your own character, they're going to get that in. And so just please don't say I would never do that. I'm not that kind of person or anything like that. That's kind of just self serving, right, And would open up the door, and you know what, an he listened. He realized. I realized that I had not respected Alvin and his abilities most of my life. And I realized that while I was representing them, he

was a pretty smart man. His formal education ended after high school. He and my sister graduated. She went on to become a doctor of education, and he went on to be a TV repairman and partially trained by the US Army. He got on the stand and he was incredible. The juror saw the emotions that he had been accused of never having, but still they were kind of misaligned to what we would expect them to be. But he

was charming. But at the same time I would forget how literal he was, and so I would get ahead of myself and I would say, you know, mister Ridley, will you please tell the jury what you've lost? And I was hoping he'd say the love of my life, my best friend, and being very literal, he said, oh, I guess the funeral bill well that the DA just went to town on that, and of course broke that

one off and us in his closing argument. But it was just Alvin was fascinating, yes, And I guess I'll explain now viewers have read it in the book notes. Only three years ago, at the request of a juror from our case twenty five years ago, I took Alvin for testing. He is deeply on the autism spectrum right, and that explains everything. And even I was now more familiar with autism but I still didn't patch it. Twenty five years ago, nobody was talking about autism and adults.

They were talking about it in children. The idea of a spectrum had just been introduced, it being a spectrum of developmental disorders and developmental disorders. But it explained so much. It explained the flat effect of his voice, which you know, his autistic mannerisms were literally being used against him at trial, his mismatched or his emotions not always meeting the moment

of expectation of emotions. And it made me realize, and I've learned that there are five and a half million adults walking around out there that have never been diagnosed with autism, that it is estimated that there are that many undiagnosed autistic adults. Now, they are interacting with people every day, and they're interacting with law enforcement and courts

every day. And you know, I've seen judges go off on somebody that they thought was just not engaging or interested in enough in what was going on in court. And so I could see a person with autism getting really bad treatment by the criminal justice system, and with the participants just thinking that they're being difficult or being purposefully evasive or and what happens. It's a processing issue, and Alvin's processing is just different. It's not better or

worse than mine, it's just different than mine. So we're like almost speaking two different languages to each other. So I really the call to action for the book is for better testing, better recognition, better training for of police and inquisitors, and then of course of courts. I can't say that I'm certainly glad that we won the case.

Alvin was acquitted of all charges. The jury was fascinated with Virginia's writing and now that it could be explained to them that it was the hypergraphia that compelled her to write, but it didn't affect what she wrote. The minute we walked out of the Kadusa County Courthouse, I thought, this is a hell of a story. But I did not know of the autism component. And I didn't know that until just three years ago, twenty twenty one, And that finally made it in my head as a book.

I had taken runs at it, I had engaged co authors because I didn't I lacked confidence in my own ability to tell the story. The last person I approached was a writer in California who gave me the confidence to write it myself. She was my developmental editor. Without her, this book wouldn't be here. Because she found a curated list of agents. She showed me what a book proposal needed to look like. Her name is Bonnie hearn Hill. She lives in Fresno, California, and I absolutely owe her

the world. She found this curated list of agents. Linda Connor of the Linda Connor Agency in New York City, who had faith in my story, and she found me. Michael Hamilton of Kensington or Citadel with Citadel as an imprint of Kensington, who got excited about the story. And now we are upon on publication day. I think on

the day this airs. Publication day is tomorrow, And twice in the last week and a half I've been notified by Michael Hamilton that not only has there been a second printing ordered and this is all pre pre orders that, but just today learned at the day of the day of taping, learned that they have upped the number of

the second printing. So I really think between the true crime fans of forensic files, of American Justice, of snap judgment on NPR, people are relating to this story They liked the story when they heard it in these other forms, and that was before we even knew about Alvin's autism. Now, Dan Alvin is just about to turn eighty two years old. For the last twenty five years, he and I have been lunch companions, very free, equent lunch companions. Now it's

up to two days a week. My secretary and I of my secretary of the last fifteen years, used to work with developmentally disabled adults, and she is perfect for Alvin. She helps schedule his Veterans Administration clinic visits. We both make sure he gets there. We got him through cataract surgery. I got him a big ramp built onto his house, which they said was the most difficult ramp build they had ever done at a house because of its topography.

And Alvin is having his best life right now. He's a lot calmer he actually probably because the community is a lot warmer to him. With his permission, we revealed his autism diagnosis. A lot of people know and love people with autism in their own families, and they see now that in Alvin. And so it's really a story of redemption of a number of people, including a community. And so I'm so appreciative of you having me on to tell about my book, and and I would love

for your viewers to get it. It's uh, it's there's more than one zenith Man book out there. This is the one with the kissing couple on the cover, and that's Alvin and Virginia. That is a photo booth at an amusement park in our community called Lake winnipe Sooca. And that's a nineteen sixty five photo booth a square that and there's another photo of them smiling for the camera from the same strip inside the book. So it's just you know, it's a it's a love letter to

my hometown. It's a love letter to my late father. This writing this was was catharctic. I'm I feel like a load has been lifted off of me. You know. Maya Angelo said there's no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you. I know exactly how that feels, because I've been wanting to tell this story for twenty five years.