Eula Virginia Riddle (née Long) was born on April 10, 1885 in North Carolina. Riddle completed four years of graduate coursework at Cooper Union Art School in New York City, at which place she also taught. In 1912, she left Cooper Union to take the position of director of the art department of Elon College. Eula married Alexander A. Riddle in November 1914 and seems to have left her job at Elon around May 1917.

On the night of July 17, 1920, Riddle was sexually assaulted by a masked and armed man. A bloodhound unit out of Raleigh was led by the dogs to Rainey Hospital where authorities arrested three young Black men: George Troxler, Arthur Lee Vesie, and Will Lee. Mrs. Riddle did not identify any of the three as her attacker. Due the fact that the assailant was masked, Mrs. Riddle could not even provide the race of her attacker.

Despite Riddle's determination that none of the three apprehended men had been her attacker, they were lodged in the local jail. A lynch mob soon formed and attempted to jailbreak the three with the intention of murdering them. Governor Thomas W. Bickett deployed a national guard unit out of Durham to protect the lives of the prisoners and put down the mob. During one attempt on the jail, machine gunners exchanged fire with members of the mob, resulting in the shooting of three onlookers. One of the three, a local citizen named James A. Ray, was killed.

A lengthy review of the shooting resulted, and the ensuing media frenzy completely neglected the fact that Mrs. Riddle's attacker remained free. The last of the wrongly accused men, George Troxler, was released from prison in September, the judge citing a lack of evidence in the case.

The Riddle family moved to Durham sometime before August 1922. They left Durham for Raleigh sometime in 1923, where Mr. Riddle took a position as chief engineer of the power plant at N.C. State University.

Mrs. Riddle died in Raleigh on August 23, 1965.