The late one of the evening in 1980, a couple of Murray County deputies were on patrol,

driving along an empty stretch of mountain highway, not far from Fort Mountain.

It's pretty country up there, not far from Tennessee border, but much of it is sparsely

populated in remote, and nearly half the county is barely inhabited at all, taken up by

Fort Mountain State Park and Chattahoochee National Forest.

Which is why the deputies were surprised when the headlights of the patrol car suddenly

hit upon a figure of a young man, limping alongside the highway, miles from anything that

you might call civilization or any place you might want to go on foot, even if it hadn't

been the middle of the night.

The patrol man pulled over and asked the young man if he needed to ride, and the man,

more kid-rely, barely out of his teens, hopped in.

He was battered and bruised and cinched from recent fire.

As someone would later describe him, he looked just about more dead than alive.

The young man introduced himself as Henry Ridley Jr.

And when asked what had happened, he told them that he'd wrecked his car on the mountain.

Well, he'd wrecked someone's car anyway, somewhere on the mountain.

He must have fallen asleep at the wheel or crashed the car somehow and knocked himself

out, or something.

At any rate, when he'd come to you again, the car was on the side of the mountain and

started becoming gulped and flames.

He couldn't get any of the doors open, but luckily the electronic windows still worked.

He was able to roll the windows down enough to scramble out the car and barely escape

...