Zenith Man: Death, Love, and Redemption in a Georgia Courtroom

PROLOGUE

October 4, 1997

Emerging from his late parents’ run-down house on Inman Street, itself for years the target of local innuendo, Alvin Ridley, failed television repairman and the town bogeyman, abruptly turns to lock the door. Glancing around to see if his perceived tormentors are watching him, he pulls open the formidable homemade gate and then slowly drives a thirty-two-year-old Chevrolet pickup truck through it. Then he jumps back out and quickly closes and locks the gate with chains and a padlock.

Two-tenths of a mile down Evitt Street, he carefully drives the 25 mph speed limit right past the local volunteer fire department, visibly staffed with an ambulance and professional EMTs always on the ready, and turns south on U.S. Highway 41, away from town. Thinking better of it less than half a mile later, he pulls into the roadside monument for the 1863 Battle of Ringgold Gap and turns around.

Continuing to drive slowly, as if it were a usual lazy Saturday morning, he pulls into the ShopRite parking lot and tries the pay phone on the exterior wall. Unsuccessful with this attempt, he gets back into the truck and drives through two parking lots to a pay phone located along LaFayette Street, behind the Catoosa County Courthouse Annex and Jail. He puts coins in the phone and calls, if you believe the later speculation, a funeral home to retrieve a dead body from his house. He most certainly calls Erlanger Hospital in downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee, but is instructed that this is a matter for the Catoosa County authorities.

Reluctantly he dials 911. The Catoosa County 911 office is just across the street. The operators could look out the single window facing LaFayette Street and see the stooped figure making the call.

Catoosa 911. Where is your emergency?

A pause, and then he answers flatly, giving his home address.

What’s the problem?

Again, lacking emotion, he says, I think my wife’s passed out.

The operator confirmed the address.

Yeah.

Is she breathing?

I don’t think so—it’s behind the steel plant there. He adds matter-of-factly, I’m calling from a pay phone booth.

You don’t have a phone at your house?

There’s no phone there.

This is the portion of the 911 call, in the detached voice of the caller, that is instantly spread around the world upon the revelation that a dead body was found in the ramshackle house on Inman Street. The immediate problem for investigators is, who was this soul? Certainly not the alleged spouse of the infamously solitary Alvin Ridley. Ridley said it was his wife, but can produce no identification for her. The body of the woman he calls his wife—Virginia—is declared dead by the coroner Vanita Hullander, who plans to take it to the hospital across the county in Fort Oglethorpe, and the next morning, deliver it to the state crime lab in Atlanta.

The portions of the 911 call not shared with the public or played on the news stations were the parts where the caller shared that his wife was, in his words, "epi-letic, or that he ended the call with a request: Please hurry."

* * *

Later that morning, five miles to the south, an extremely hungover failed politician, failed husband, and marginally failing lawyer, rises. Too down and broken to even drive to Athens to see his beloved University of Georgia Bulldogs play, and seeking something for his blinding headache, he drives slowly into town.

1

Flashback eleven months, to November 6, 1996, past midnight

That night, as I locked up the little storefront campaign office, still wearing my suit and tie, I thought, I need to get drunk. I’d partied pretty hard in high school, in college, and in law school, a secret drunken legend to my friends and cohorts. Now that I had lost an election for the United States Congress, and just about everything else that mattered to me, I was ready. First, though, I had to make a phone call.

Reva and I hadn’t announced our separation, as I was in the middle of an election when she received the job offer, but I didn’t want to be responsible for her losing a major career opportunity in Chicago. We were still friends, and although friendly divorce seemed like an oxymoron, ours was just that. We didn’t have any business getting married was her mantra. I had become a neurotic micromanager, frozen, distant, and didn’t quite know what was wrong with me.

My opponent’s team members tried to use Reva’s absence to their advantage. Late in the campaign, his staffer called my staff members and asked, Where did he hide the body? Once the word got out that Reva wasn’t around, my opponent’s very nice wife suddenly seemed to be everywhere he was, seated next to him when both he and I were scheduled to be on the same stage. Next to me, now an empty chair appeared, as if waiting for a woman who would never again appear, either on the campaign trail or in my life. It seems cruel, but I was fair game. I had played hardball politics myself over the years. Touché, Congressman.

The numbers spoke volumes. I didn’t even win Catoosa County, my home, where less than eight years before, I had won my state house seat by 70 percent. I thought I had done everything right. I had sacrificed what could have been a long, comfortable career in public service to follow the dictates of my conscience, and this is where it got me.

Although I had given my televised concession speech, emphasizing that I was conceding this one, I knew better. The red tide of the new Georgia Republicanism had washed up deeply in the northwest corner of the state. Devastated by the depth of the loss, I walked to the middle of the desolate U.S. Highway 41, the Dixie Highway, and called Reva in Chicago.

It’s over, I told her. I lost. I’ll file the divorce agreement papers tomorrow.

Walking to my truck, I was already hearing from around the state that colleagues from the state capitol were considering their own party switch from D to R, just as my opponent had done after winning his last election. I was the bellwether, apparently. Although there would be talk of great change, it’s funny that the faces wouldn’t change much.

Just then, I saw a figure in a shop doorway: Creepy Alvin Ridley, Crazy Alvin Ridley. Crap.

Alvin and I had a history, one I didn’t want to think about right then. I had once chastised him for taking a percentage for simply cashing the disability check of an impaired man, John Howard. Howard had hitchhiked to the state capitol to see his representative and governor about it. I handled it, advising him to go to the bank. Then I came home and confronted Alvin Ridley, only getting a menacing stare for my trouble.

For now, let’s just say Mr. Ridley was out there well past midnight, a guy who posted conspiracy missives on the inside of the windows of his dilapidated, padlocked shop—rants that I often secretly checked out to be sure my name wasn’t among the many listed. In fact, he’d probably been posting one of those diatribes before he caught sight of me. Or maybe he had been guarding his decaying building, which had been closed for fifteen years. Other times, he lurked around the front door. If any activity occurred downtown, he was convinced people were breaking into this ruin of a store.

The sides of the windows showcased its plight, and as I passed them, he was just inside the alcove, standing in shadows.

You got beat, didn’t you? he said.

Yeah. I did.

I kept going, not wanting to engage him, remembering the time years ago he’d appeared, the subject of ridicule and amazement at an all-candidates rally, running for sheriff of Catoosa County in 1984.

Please, God, I thought. Let my vote percentages be higher than his were.

Eleven months later, Virginia, the wife that nobody knew he had, would be dead, and he would be ultimately arrested for her murder.

His defender? That would be this once-golden boy, now failed husband and politician, walking down this nearly deserted street, headed for a destination that not even I could imagine.

* * *

I’d dreamed of a political career since childhood in Graysville, although I didn’t imagine it in those terms. I was just comfortable with it, since the age of twelve when my father’s employer had given him a copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. I took it and never gave it back. Now, Ringgold, Georgia, and Catoosa County didn’t want me, and the rejection was so devastating at a soul level that I considered leaving town.

The Alvin Ridley I remembered from my childhood was a bit on the strange side, but I never felt threatened. He was the same age as my oldest sister, and they were high school seniors when I was born. Furthermore, he was the guy who once sold and serviced televisions and took the task very seriously. He was one of the few TV repairmen with whom my dad liked doing business, because like him, Alvin liked to barter. Between my father sharpening Alvin’s lawn mower blades and purchasing or trading something for a Zenith color TV set, they got along well.

My father, McCracken King Poston Sr., or Mac, a Chattanooga foundryman by trade, was responsible for providing for my mother and us kids, which, by the time I arrived, numbered six, when he was only thirty-six years old. They fed us from a huge garden in which we all worked. Daddy never bought a new car in his life and always haggled, even when it was neither appropriate nor warranted. One of Daddy’s deals was buying our color Zenith console television from Alvin, already by then a very strange individual who seemed to be paranoid about the world around him. Alvin was somewhat of an outsider, and seemed a little slow on the uptake, but in the 1970s he was going at his new Zenith TV Sales & Service franchise with great gusto.

Back in the day when we could get only three Chattanooga channels (3, 9, and 12), my dad purchased the television set from Alvin, and in our exuberance, my sisters and I wore off the plastic tuner knob. Pliers worked just fine for me, but Daddy had other ideas. Alvin visited our home, replaced the tuning knob, and gave me what I remember as a scolding lecture on how to turn a tuner knob on a TV. I was twelve or thirteen years old, and all I can recall now about that encounter is that I thought he smelled funny, and when he saw I was watching live wrestling, he claimed to have met Andre the Giant.

Years later, Alvin’s brief attempt at local politics branded him as even more of an outsider. In 1984, in the midst of his angst about his father’s passing and his displaced blame for it, he ran for sheriff of Catoosa County. In 1981, his father, Bill Ridley, was in a seemingly minor accident while driving Alvin’s company truck. When Bill died of pancreatic cancer within two years, Alvin created a theory of causation that would have made Rube Goldberg proud, claiming that the minor accident had killed his father, by worrying him to death. Litigation ensued, and then Alvin ran for Sheriff in 1984 after a deputy levied on Alvin’s 1977 Chevy van for one of the defendant’s counterclaims in the bizarre litigation.

* * *

I was already working in other campaigns, so the love of politics was already in my blood. I remember him very earnestly mounting the podium at the big 1984 candidate rally on the courthouse steps, carrying a tape recorder. I was actually impressed how at first he silenced his would-be hecklers by playing the national anthem, which he had recorded from WDEF-TV’s nightly sign-off. Even his detractors became silent and removed their hats. But then, as Alvin spoke and his conspiracy theories unwound, the snickers resumed. Predictably, Alvin lost. He got fewer than three hundred votes.

2

On the way to the courthouse to file the divorce papers as promised, I instinctively grabbed a copy of the Catoosa County News.

GOP SURPRISES DEMOCRATS HERE

was the headline. I scanned the article: "Poston, challenging incumbent Nathan Deal (R-Lula) for the 9th Congressional District, failed to win Catoosa County by almost 300 votes." Catoosa County, my own home.

But momentarily, another door of opportunity seemed to be opening up.

I was invited to President Clinton’s second inauguration by my good friend—the newly elected U.S. senator Max Cleland. Max and I had worked together when I was in the Georgia House of Representatives, and he was Georgia’s secretary of state. We both ran in 1996 on the issue that I sponsored and he championed, the Ethics in Government Act of 1992. It brought groundbreaking, for Georgia, new lobbying registration and reporting laws. He won running on the issue, and I lost. We met at the beautiful Northwest Washington, DC, home of Bill Stuckey, a former congressman from Georgia.

Max, a triple amputee from the Vietnam War, told me as the Democratic senator, he got to make appointment recommendations to the president. A mutual friend, his body man William Perry, witnessed our conversation in one of Congressman Stuckey’s parlors.

United States Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia is one of those appointments, he continued. And you are the best person I could think of for the job.

I told him on the spot that I would do it. I didn’t even need to think about it. I still had an Atlanta apartment. In the ten weeks since the election, I had yet to try to start up my moribund law practice.

Well, it’s a process that has to take place, Max said, but you need to put in for it.

My spirits were lifted, but not for long. While it somehow got out that Senator Max Cleland had encouraged me about the appointment, forces in Atlanta clearly didn’t want to see the young man who took on his own leadership at the state capitol for ethics reform be vested with the powers of a federal prosecutor.

I’m getting a lot of pushback, Max told me in a call later.

Although I knew that something or someone or scores of someones were pushing me out of contention, I was only halfway expecting the cold reception that I got in the meeting with the committee to recommend a short list of candidates to the senator, who then would make recommendations to the president.

Sit down, Mr. Poston, the committee chair said.

The committee chair, a man whose law firm had made untold amounts of money doing business with Max when he was our former Georgia secretary of state, led the few questions I got with one I couldn’t believe I was hearing.

Mr. Poston, I remember reading in the newspaper that at some point during the battles for the ethics bill, you had been stricken with diabetes; then he asked, So, do you think you are up for the rigors of this job?

I uttered something like a yes, but mumbled also that I found it odd that a committee appointed by a triple amputee would lead with a disability question. I left, knowing that I had nowhere to go but Ringgold, Georgia. I needed to start actually practicing law again.

I was used to jump-starting my law practice because I had done it every year at the end of each session of the Georgia General Assembly. Assessing my own situation, Catoosa County had gained ten thousand new citizens since my first election. Development was going full blast. It was becoming a different place than when I grew up. I was different now, too, with a line running from my right front pocket to a port and cannula that put synthetic insulin into my body. This gave me something I should micromanage, but of all things, I was less compliant with my health—drinking to excess, then ricocheting to avoiding alcohol, for weeks or months even. I couldn’t even be a consistent alcoholic, if that’s what I was setting out to achieve.

At some point, I met Alison Vaughn, out in Chattanooga where she was with a friend. We started dating, but as these things usually went with me, it did not last beyond a few weeks. I slowly started up my law practice, which had been dead for over a year since I ran for congress.

* * *

October 4, 1997, began as a rare lazy Saturday. My team, the University of Georgia Bulldogs were playing, but I was too hungover for the two-hour drive to Athens. An early riser by genetics, I drove into Ringgold to continue reintroducing myself to my community, starting with the coffee gang at Hardee’s on Alabama Road.

The news was already buzzing—about a dead woman found at Crazy Alvin Ridley’s house. As the news came in waves throughout the day, I heard Ridley was saying that she was his wife. I had no idea he had a wife, but I really hadn’t given it much thought. The Ringgold folks who seemed to know everything about everyone were shocked, though.

What did surprise me, however, was seeing the elusive Alvin Ridley as he walked right by me on LaFayette Street, the following Monday morning, the first time I had seen him in the light in the few years since I had confronted him about John Howard’s monthly check. Dressed in sagging, dirty clothes, he looked pitiful. We only made brief eye contact, but I nodded as he went toward the post office, and I headed to the back of the courthouse complex.

The next morning, Tuesday, I saw him again, launching from the phone stand on LaFayette Street, the one they were saying he called 911 from, the previous Saturday morning after driving right by an ambulance at the fire station one-half of a mile from his front door. This morning, he headed my way again. I let him pass in front of me, again nodding to him.

Wednesday came, and the same interception of our paths was about to happen a third time. I realized that he was leaving the phone stand at the exact time he would need to meet me. It seemed he was waiting for me. I tested this theory by stopping in my tracks, which caused him to stop and awkwardly turn around. He looked confused. I resumed, and he turned back on track. This time, at the corner of Nance Lane and LaFayette Street, I spoke.

Mr. Ridley, I’m sorry for your loss, I said, expecting no response and for him to pass by.

He stopped dead still. I can’t take it anymore. The sheriff has worried us all to death, my father, my mother, and now my wife!

Well, I’m sorry, I repeated, not knowing what else to say.

Now they’s harassing me and searching my place. Her family’s talking and getting them to harass me. People are talkin’ about my wife.

I know exactly how you feel, I said, remembering the congressional campaign.

He stopped. My inside joke seemed to change his demeanor from anger to hurt. His face screwed up like a child’s as he lamented the slights he and his wife allegedly took from untold numbers of officials, apparently in local government.

I offered to provide legal advice, pointed back toward the converted ranch home-now-law office that I shared with Kevin Silvey and Mike Giglio, and invited him to come see me. Just don’t talk to the detectives if they try to turn this thing against you. I didn’t know then that it was too late, and that he would go meet with them again today, or that his wife of thirty-one years was to be buried that afternoon.

The next time I heard from him was a series of wild phone calls at home, sometimes very late at night. He said my father had given him my number. I told him I would only meet him at the office, and that he needed to make an appointment. As the weeks went by and nothing seemed to be happening, the calls tapered off. In our last conversation, I promised I’d come see him if I learned he had been arrested.

Alison came back into my life and into my home in late October 1997. My practice was never to reveal whom I was even speaking to, professionally, so I never mentioned my talks with Alvin Ridley.

As with any new relationship, I had to broach some embarrassing family situations. I had the sister with whom I had not spoken in a while, ever since I hyper-controlled and micromanaged my congressional campaign into the ground after letting her son, my nephew, go from the campaign. And for what? I still lost, and now I had lost connection with family as well.

The second one was more apparent, even obvious.

It was nice to meet you, Melanie, my dear father said after being introduced to Alison as he reeled out of the room.

I don’t even know a Melanie! I insisted to Alison.

It was hard even in my late thirties to disclose my father’s alcoholism. It had affected all of us in different ways. I left my U.T. Chattanooga college dorm in 1979 to come home and help my mother manage him. Two years later, in my internship at the local district attorney’s office, I learned that my father was about to be indicted for commodity fraud. A child of the Great Depression, he drunkenly used my grandmother’s name and applied for and received more government cheese for her than she was allotted. Horrified and embarrassed, I worked out a deal for everyone charged with that to pay back the overage and avoid indictment.

At least the tragic issue of our father and his distressingly deteriorating condition gave my five sisters and me something to talk about. We needed to act, and act fast. And for the first time, we did an intervention. We admitted our father to a hospital just across the state line in East Ridge, Tennessee. I made up with my sister and nephew and we presented a united front.

During the hospitalization, Alison and I, now making future plans, went to Graysville to have a traditional New Year’s Day dinner with my mother. We had just sat down to dinner when the hospital called.

Oh no, said my mother, the sweetest person in the world, especially to strangers on the phone. Oh, my, yes, I will come there soon, she said, and put the phone receiver down on its cradle. It’s your father, she said. I followed her into another room. Some things are happening, she told me. They said we have to have someone with him at all times now.

I insisted that I take the first shift of babysitting my father, who was apparently having some strange acting-out issues. As much as I had ever seen him drink in my whole life, he was never an out-of-control drunk, never the Hollywood stereotype trope of a Southern alcoholic male: drunk in the white wife-beater undershirt. He was a sweet, kind, and loving man—a sad, slurred-speech, falling-asleep drunk, who never got physically or verbally abusive toward a soul. That didn’t make it any easier. In fact, it made it harder.

When I got to the hospital, the first thing I noticed was that they had him restrained in the bed. He was very disturbed.

I opened the conversation with a simple, What’s wrong, Daddy?

He winced and pulled at the restraints. I don’t know why they have me here, or what I’m doing here!

This concerned me. He knew before that he was in the hospital.

Well, your drinking had gotten bad, and—

But why am I in a bowling alley? he interrupted.

I didn’t have an immediate answer to that one.

We argued for a while, something we had been doing all of my life when he was drinking. At some point in my early teens, I decided if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, and had been swinging between extreme periods of binge drinking and strict sobriety ever since.

He finally calmed down enough for me to loosen the restraints to let him go to the bathroom.

I just want to show you one thing, son. He bolted toward the door and opened it before I jumped up. He stopped at the open door and asked, Why is there a bowling alley out here?

I looked down the long institutional hallway, halfway hoping to see a set of ten-pins to justify this nonsense.

What in the hell is he on? I asked the nurse. "He’s never acted like this before."

Well, he was given Ambien, the nurse said, He apparently doesn’t tolerate it well.

You think? I could not help the sarcasm.

By the way, what’s his wife’s name? the nurse asked.

My mother’s name is Barbara, I told her, but he calls her ‘Bobbie. ’ Has he been calling for her?

The reason we called, she said, was that he walked into another patient’s room, and started saying ‘Scoot over, Bobbie’ as he tried to squeeze into bed with her.

I felt bad for the traumatized patient, but could not suppress a laugh.

With the Ambien out of his system, the next day and night were wonderful with my dad. I shared with him that I’d been meeting with Alvin Ridley: Not like in the office, just on the street.

Alvin is a good man, my father said. He’s odd now, very odd, but I don’t think he would ever hurt a fly. He added, He just thinks differently.

I’m not even sure anything will come of it, I shared. I haven’t heard any word on the street about him in weeks.

He was more clearheaded than he had been in a long while, particularly for this hour of the day. We had some honest conversations together.

I had probably the first long adult conversations that I ever had about my father’s drinking with him when he wasn’t already drunk or getting there. He was amenable to treatment, and Dr. William Findley was going to try a new drug on him, one that would hopefully curb his addiction.

3

Alison and I married in the first week of May 1998, a second marriage for each of us. We both wanted to make having a family our priority. Suddenly it seemed all her close friends were popping up pregnant. With every month passing, our frustration grew. But we enjoyed travel, and, settling into the house that I had owned for seven years, we hosted lots of pool parties, and bought a new light green Ford Explorer, primarily for my wife’s use, which was brand new from the factory, with good-looking Firestone Wilderness AT tires.

These were, of course, the very tires that were eventually recalled by Bridgestone, the owner of Firestone, after scores of fatal tread separation accidents, but not before one blew out on us in Atlanta on the way to a Braves game. Considering ourselves fortunate, on Monday, June 29, 1998, we limped the car on its spare to Ken Abney’s tire place in Ringgold.

An old truck was being towed away as we pulled in.

We started talking about tires, but Ken Abney couldn’t contain himself. Do you know whose truck that is?

I said I did not.

It’s Alvin Ridley’s truck! He was just arrested out there for locking up and killing his wife!

I felt a sudden queasiness.

I’ve got to go into the office, I told Alison. I took her home, explaining I wanted to shop around for the tires. I hadn’t told her about my earlier encounters with Alvin Ridley. I drove to the Catoosa County Jail.

When I pressed the intercom button at the metal door, it was answered by someone in the control room. It’s Poston from across the street. I’m here to see Mr. Alvin Ridley, I said over the intercom. I waited for the buzzing that indicated the electronic door bolt was opening.

Instead of the irate man whom I saw on the street several times, Alvin was quiet.

I promised I would come, and here I am, I told him. He still said nothing.

I got out of him that while he had assets, none of them, unfortunately, were in his actual name, never having been transferred from his deceased parents.

My shop is in my name, he suddenly seemed to remember. That building was a mere shell, with a giant hole in the roof that you could see looking in the windows. It was a disaster.

What’s its tax value? I asked.

I don’t know, he said.

Are the taxes paid up?

This clearly offended him. I pay my taxes!

I told him if the district attorney didn’t agree to a bond, it could take up to a month to get a superior court judge to hear a motion for one. I also told him I would have to get a court order that allowed him to post his own property bond, which is usually not allowed unless ordered.

I’ve got my cats inside, he said.

Okay, maybe you could sign your keys out to me, and I’ll make sure they’re fed.

Naw. He shook his head. Just get me a bond and get me out.

Now I felt real pressure, knowing he had cats that were stuck in his house.

I called our district attorney, Herbert E. Buzz Franklin. I had known Buzz from before I was a lawyer, as he was an assistant district attorney here when I was a college intern, both of us working under the then–district attorney David L. Red Lomenick. I was even closer friends with Buzz’s younger brother, Jim, from our time together in Athens at the University of Georgia School of Law.

Buzz agreed to a conference call with Judge Ralph Hill. On it, I managed to convince them both that Mr. Ridley should get a bond he could afford, and that he needed to use his building to make it. But I had to wait until the morning to get proof he paid his property taxes.

The next morning, I delivered a filed copy of the signed bond order to the jail. Alvin Ridley was given his few belongings, in a clear plastic bag. He said little as we walked out.

I’m taking you to get your truck, I said. He said nothing on the short drive to the impound lot at Sexton’s service station.

I went